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The mutterings of a half-mad Canuck who writes stuff

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (a review)

November 20, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I was looking forward to this book tremendously as soon as I looked it up. It’s got an unusual (possibly unique) story structure, it’s loosely centered around the world of punk rock and the music industry, and it’s relatively (by comparison to some of the books on my reading list) new. I suspect it was partly my anticipation for this book that made The Death of the Heart such a disappointment.

Spoiler alert: I absolutely loved this book.

There are two things I mostly want to mention about it – the story structure, and the 12th (chapter or story, depending on who you ask) “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake”. I suspect both of these things are what other reviews also tend to focus on, but I’ve made an effort not to read any one else’s reviews before writing my own, so who knows.

The structure of this story is, as I mentioned, is unusual. To the point that some people apparently don’t consider it to be a novel at all. It’s a collection of standalone-able stories with no continuous main character. Instead the main character of each story has some connection, whether profound or profoundly casual, with a main character in a previous story. A few of the characters appear in multiple stories, some only in one. What interested me about this structure is that, off the bat it sounded similar to the structure of the first draft of a novel I just finished writing. In mine, there are three loosely connected stories where the throughline is a shared set of events.

It turns out the shape of this story is nothing like mine. Oh, and in my opinion Egan’s story actually does have a main character. Time.

Over the course of the book, a couple of characters (I think it’s a couple, it may have only been the one) refer to Time as a Goon. The book is called A Visit From the Goon Squad. The one consistent theme that appears throughout the book in various guises is that of the effects of time, in particular as relates to memory. I would argue that there is a main character after all.

Interestingly enough, I was recently involved in a workplace chat that found its way to the topic of memory – specifically childhood memories. I made the point that all memory is constructed (as is all experience of the world) and that while we have to act as though our memories are accurate in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we shouldn’t necessarily trust that they are accurate. Someone else pointed out that people who stay in their hometown and hang out with the same people from high school tend to reinforce (a version of) their remembered experience through reminiscing whereas those of us who moved away (in this case to China) don’t – and when we do go back (for reunions and the like) our memories of high school can vary greatly from those of the people who stayed.

And yes, I work with some pretty unusual people.

Egan treats memory in much the same way. Characters remember different elements of their shared experience, remember the same things differently, and in some cases don’t remember anything much at all. Time really is a goon.

The stories in this book vary quite widely in style, suiting themselves to the point of view character, but none quite so much as the 12th story. It’s written not in prose, but in presentation slides (no, actually presentation slides, like in a business meeting), and it’s brilliantly done. I don’t really know how to describe it any better than that. You should just read it. It’s amazing and I stand in awe of Egan’s talent in pulling this off. It seems like it should be too gimmicky to fly, but it not only flies, it soars.

It’s called Great Rock and Roll Pauses and, just as the songs mentioned in it are defined in large part by their pauses, so too is this story defined by the gaps caused by the way in which it’s presented (pardon the pun). It also ties back into the fragmented nature of memory depicted elsewhere, and to the idea that we build full stories about the past based on the bits and pieces we hold on to. In this story we are given only the smallest pieces of information, and yet it is a full and satisfying story. The whole book is enjoyable, but this story by itself is worth the price of admission. It even makes up for having read (some of) The Death of the Heart.

Go and read it.

The next book(s) in my reading challenge are C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, which I will hopefully be able to finish this week. From what I recall of Lewis, his prose is a fairly easy read.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield – a review

November 18, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Having just finished Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, I really wish I hadn’t bothered.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a terrible book, it just that, much like Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, it isn’t a particularly good one either. And I had such high hopes for it, as well. Everything I’ve ever read about this book has been overwhelmingly positive. Also, I found Sun Tzu’s Art of War to be incredibly thought provoking and valuable and logically, and a book whose title is a play on that books title should be chock-full of wisdom. Right?

Well, there are some good ideas in The War of Art, but they are, all of them, other people’s ideas collected and presented by Mr. Pressfield. There are no original ideas, no world changing revelations, no fresh ways of seeing the world that are staggering in both their power and simplicity. Hmm, maybe I was expecting too much. Most of the ideas are useful, after a fashion. I will list them here to save you the time and trouble of reading the thing (which isn’t much, as it’s effectively a long blog post worth of text).

  • everything that pushes you away from doing a creative thing is called “resistance”
  • the more resistance you feel, the more important the thing is to do
  • focus on the work, not the result
  • show up every day and do the work
  • angels are real
  • all of the creative things exist already (in potentia) and we don’t actually create them but rather discover them
  • Do or do not, there is no try

And that’s the book in a nutshell.

I mean, maybe the thing that bothered me the most about it was the way he spent the final third of the book raw-dogging a sort of watered-down new age mysticism. Maybe it was the relative lack of substance in the other things he was saying. Overall it’s a fairly well-written and at times amusing rehash of standard writing advice, I suppose. I just resented the loss of the time I spent reading it. I was hoping to learn something new.

Next up for writing books to review is Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. The subtitle says it’s the last book on novel writing I’ll ever need. Hope so.

Creating Strong, Memorable Characters (and why you should)

November 17, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This hasn’t always been the case, but when it comes to modern fiction it’s an inviolable truth that its your characters who make or break your story. Readers are happy to forgive any number of unforgivable plot sins and will cheerfully overlook absurd consistency errors and even *gasp* second rate prose – just so long as you can get them to care about your characters.

If you can create characters that feel real and complex, characters that drive the story rather than characters that are driven, characters that resonate with your readers and allow them to form an emotional connection (be it love or hate), you are most of the way to a successful story.

To that end, here are 7 tips to help ensure that your characters jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of your readers.

1. Understand Your Character’s Core

There are three foundational elements to any character and, before you start faffing about deciding what sort of socks they wear, how they style their hair, or what their favorite hot dog toppings are, it’s pretty important that you figure these three elements out. They are, of course, what the character wants, what the character needs, and what stands in the way of the character achieving either or both of those things.

If you’ve read any of the approximately 1.7 buh-jillion books out there on character development you’ll likely be familiar with these things already, but that’s because they are so fundamental to the topic that you can’t discuss it without talking about them.

These three elements are so foundational in fact, that the very first thing you should do when starting a new story is to jot something down for each of them. For both your protagonist and your antagonist. You can change things later if necessary (i.e. if the story requires it) but just having something in mind for your main characters’ wants, needs, and obstacles will really help you hone in on what the story is about (and what it isn’t about).

2. Create a Multi-dimensional Personality

The goal in any story is to have characters who feel like real people, and real people are usually defined not by their consistencies but rather by their contradictions. A kind old man putting out food for the neighborhood cats doesn’t stand out. He’s a kind old man, of course he feeds the cats. Meh. A grumpy old man who seems to hate everyone but is seen putting out food for stray animals, though… now that is interesting.

A three dimensional character’s personality doesn’t point in one single direction. In the real world, personality is less compass needle and more tangled ball of yarn. By simply making sure that some of your character’s traits are inconsistent, bent back on themselves, or even tangled up a bit, you’ll be much more likely to write interesting and memorable characters.

I wanted to provide a counterexample – a story where the writer didn’t follow this advice and wrote about boring, one-dimensional characters – but I can’t. I’m certain that I’ve read hundreds such stories, but I can’t for the life of me remember any of them. Funny that.

3. Develop Their Backstory and History

In many ways, people are the sum of all their experiences. Who we are today is the direct result of all of the things that we have done and that have happened to us. Who your characters are and what they say and do in response to the events in your story is largely dependent on what they’ve already been through, so it’s important to understand what pivotal moments in their lives have shaped them into the people they are today.

Keep in mind that these events don’t have to be of cosmic importance to the world at large. They just have to have been important to your character at the time – positively or negatively. Being rejected by a romantic prospect, working hard towards a goal and achieving it (or failing to achieve it), being too afraid to take a chance and try something new, or being brave enough to try – all of these are good examples of the sorts of events that can really shape who a person (or a character) becomes.

One other thing to remember when it comes to character backstory… it’s important that you know what has shaped your characters, it isn’t necessarily important that your readers know. If it is important that they know, then it is almost always the case that this information should be provided naturally through dialogue or (maybe) a flashback. Avoid the temptation to info-dump on your readers with a whole bunch of exposition about where your characters have come from and what they’ve gone through. You want to tell a story, not explain a story.

4. Build Emotional Depth and Complexity

A character’s strengths should be aspirational for your readers – the sorts of things that most people want to be themselves. Their weaknesses should be relatable – the sorts of things that we all fall prey to from time to time. A good character has both strengths and weaknesses. That means that a strong character should stumble from time to time and screw things up. A weak character needs to have moments of strength, moments when they stop being a punching bag and start punching back. Or at least try to.

Not only that, but their strengths and weaknesses should change somewhat over the course of the story. That’s not to say then need to be completely different people at the end of the story than they were at the start, but they do need to grow and change (more on that in tip 7) or at least have their strengths and weaknesses re-contextualized in light of the events of the story. What initially seemed to be a weakness turns out to be a strength in the right situation, for example.

One of the best ways to show the complexity of your character’s personality is to make sure that they face a combination of internal and external conflicts. An example of this in action would be a character who finds that the man she loves is exactly what is standing in the way of her biggest goal. Having the characters want (from tip 1) interfere with their need (also from tip 1) is a great way to set up a very natural sort of complexity. What we want in life (chocolate cake) is frequently not what we need (to lose weight). What we want, more often than not, gets in the way of what we need (stupid cake). These are the kinds of conflicts that most readers can relate to and sympathize with and they make your characters feel more real.

5. Make Their Relationships Matter

So far we’ve discussed characters in isolation, but isolation is not a character’s natural habitat. When we present our characters to our readers it’s in the context of a story, where they are bumping into and interacting with all sorts of other characters. The way your characters interact with other people is the most powerful way of showing your readers who those characters are and what they value. What does your character want out of their relationships? How do they go about getting it? How successful or unsuccessful are they?

It’s also worth pointing out that relationships aren’t always smooth and uncomplicated. In fact, in a story they should really not be. A story without conflict isn’t a story at all. Story is conflict. This should be reflected (to a certain extent) in your characters relationships with the people around them.

6. Give Them a Distinct Voice and Mannerisms

Your characters should have their own unique voices. The way they express themselves, from word choice to pronunciation to when they do and don’t say something at all is a big part of who they are and should derive naturally from their personality, their background, and their emotional state in the moment. Do they speak formally, casually, or colloquially? Are they terse or long-winded? Do they have any little quirks, mannerisms, or particular phrases they use that are noteworthy? Do they have an accent?

All of these elements can help your character to stand out and feel more real, but use them judiciously and go light on the gas when depicting them to your reader – especially with accents. The more you lean into a dialect or accent in your text, the harder it will be for your reader to actually read your story. Think of it like seasoning for a dish you’re cooking. You should use as little as you can in order to get the effect you want.

One very important aspect to this that I don’t see written about nearly enough is that your character’s voice should be distinct not just from the other characters in the story, but also from your own. It is very common for beginning writers to treat their characters as mouthpieces for their own views and ideas. The things your characters say and do should be true to who they are, not to who you are.

7. Allow for Growth and Change

As mentioned briefly before, compelling characters (with some notable exceptions**) need to change in some meaningful way from the beginning of the story to the end. If the events of the story are important than they should have some impact on the people who experienced them. If there’s no impact then how meaningful can the events really be? If nothing else, the climax of the story should involve some resolution, either positive or negative, of the character’s quest to achieve their want and/or need (tip 1). If they achieve or permanently fail to achieve that goal, they can’t help but be changed, if only in that they must now have a new goal.

More interesting, though, is to have your characters confront their flaws, fears, and desires more consciously. If you re-contextualize their strengths or weaknesses, how does that change how they see and interact with the world around them? If they have some trait that holds them back (internal conflict), do they manage to overcome it or does it cause their downfall in the end? As readers we find meaning in a story by how it changes the people who live the story. Characters who never change render a story meaningless.

** the exceptions to this are almost exclusively recurring characters in episodic stories – Sherlock Holmes for example. Sherlock never really changes as a result of his adventures, but the people around him do (Watson, for example). Detective fiction is one of the few examples of a modern story form that is largely plot driven rather than character driven and what works there is unlikely to work elsewhere.

Conclusion

Strong, memorable characters are multi-dimensional, emotionally complex, and have a clear arc that drives the story forward. Don’t be afraid to experiment and revise. Character development is an ongoing process that can, and should evolve as you write. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and compelling, three-dimensional characters are seldom born in the first draft.

As with everything else in your story, try things out and don’t be afraid to try something else if the first thing isn’t working. The tips above should give you a good start towards finding something that works for you.

If you found this useful or interesting, don’t forget to subscribe. You’ll get a weekly email digest of whatever I’ve posted that week so you don’t miss any other entertainingly useful stuff. In the meantime, happy writing, may the words flow freely, and may some of them be the right ones.

A note on Worldbuilding

October 28, 2024 / / 0 Comments

So I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately building a world, and it turns out building a whole world is a pretty ginormous job. Who knew?

I entered into this project, as I always do, bright-eyed and bushy-faced, and full of grand and grandiose ideas, and almost immediately (as I also always do) got bogged down by the reality of it all. Progress has been slow. Steady, but slow. At the moment I’ve got the shape of the thing sketched in, but I’m still nowhere near where I thought I needed to be to start actually writing stories in the thing.

Which brings me to the big thing I’ve learned about worldbuilding – I can’t do it in a vaccuum.

You see, my idea was that I would build out this world, flesh out all the details of the people and the neighborhoods and the commerce and the culture and the everything and then, when I had a fully realized and vibrant world ready to go, I could begin with the stories.

Turns out that’s not how it works. Or at least, that’s not how I work.

What I’ve come to, through some trial and error, is what I think is a more workable process. I’ve sketched in the bones of the world, and will set up placeholders for where all the details will be( when there are details), and then I will write my stories – fleshing out the world as I go and filling in those details as my stories require them. Because it’s the stories that make the world and not the world that makes the stories. At least for me, anyway.

So expect to see some stories in the not so distant future, and a more organic approach to the building of my world (which you can see being built here). I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to it.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (an almost review)

October 4, 2024 / / 1 Comment

You know, for the past week or two I’ve been walking around thinking I’d fallen at the first hurdle with this reading project. In a way I have – in that it’s taken me three weeks or so and I still haven’t finished the first book on the list – but the truth is, I don’t intend to finish it. So there.

I take this as a sign of growth, actually.

I really struggled with this book. I couldn’t force myself to be interested in any of the characters. None of them seem to actually do anything, and it felt very much like work to make myself pick the thing up and read it. Every time I did pick it up, half of my mind was occupied with thinking of things I’d rather be reading.

So I stopped.

I read about a third of the book before I put it down permanently. I’m sure I was probably only a few pages away from something interesting – some fascinating little character quirk or wrinkle of conversation – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of forcing myself past any more boring to get there.

And that’s a real step forward for me.

I used to be of the mind that if I started reading a book, no matter how much I disliked it, I would finish the damned thing. In fact, this is only the second novel in my life that I’ve started and not finished. The first was the fourth book in Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series which was so poorly written that I have to suspect it was published as a practical joke (on readers) or that Ms. Auel had some sort of ‘leverage’ on someone high up over at Random House.

The Death of the Heart is not nearly as bad as that. Bowen’s prose is competent if not terribly interesting and the book isn’t bad per se, it’s just that it isn’t very good, and I have a whole list of very good books ahead of me. So many of them, in fact, that it really accentuates my lack of interest in this one.

And life’s too short to spend it reading books you don’t like.

If you are interested in unsympathetic characters that talk in vague circles about uninteresting things and where nothing much happens, this book is very much for you. As for me, I’m moving on to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad which I’ve already started, and which I’m very excited to continue.

My Dirty Little Reading Habit (book reviews incoming)

August 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A while back I had begun working on a series of non-fiction books I called the Book Club Companion series. The idea was to read and review current popular fiction, and then write some pop-literary analysis with an eye towards helping folks who might want to discuss said books with others, but who don’t have the literary background to feel comfortable doing so.

The secondary goal, of course, was to give me an excuse to read more, and in particular read outside of my normal wheelhouse (Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy mostly).

That project has been mothballed indefinitely, mostly because Amazon doesn’t seem to understand what literary analysis is. They allowed me to publish and to offer the books for sale, but then disabled them in all of the stores and made it impossible to actually buy it. They say “our customers generally find this type of book to be unsatisfying”. Oh, well. I only wasted a couple of weeks in writing the first book, designing the cover templates and covers, editing, formatting, and publishing. We’ll just add this to the pile of reasons why Amazon makes me hope Hell is a real place.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a clever plan to fill the gap. I’m just going to read a shitload of books and then review them here.

But what books to read?

Well, to get the ball rolling, I Googled up a few of those “Top 100 Novels of All Time”-style lists and consolidated a handful of them into one ginormous list. I included a couple of lists from Goodreads that looked interesting, as well as the Reader’s Digest Best Books of All Time list, a list of newer books, and a Sci-Fi and Fantasy themed one from NPR. Then I made a combined ranking to generate a list from best to least-best. Now that I have the master list, I can read them in least-best to best order.

Make sense?

Here’s the list:

  1. The Death of the Heart – Bowen, Elizabeth
  2. A Visit From the Goon Squad – Egan, Jennifer
  3. The Space Trilogy – Lewis, C.S.
  4. The Xanth Series – Anthony, Piers
  5. Falconer – Cheever, John
  6. The Kite Runner – Hosseini, Khaled
  7. An American Tragedy – Dreiser, Theodore
  8. Perdido Street Station – Mieville, China
  9. A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement – Powell, Anthony
  10. Doomsday Book – Willis, Connie
  11. Americanah – Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
  12. Under the Net – Murdoch, Iris
  13. Lucifer’s Hammer – Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry
  14. Loving – Green, Henry
  15. The Mars Trilogy – Robinson, Kim Stanley
  16. The Caves of Steel – Asimov, Isaac
  17. Wuthering Heights – Bronte, Emily
  18. The Assistant – Malamud, Bernard
  19. The Sportswriter – Ford, Richard
  20. A Fire Upon the Deep – Vinge, Vernor
  21. Sunshine – McKinley, Robin
  22. Dog Soldiers – Stone, Robert
  23. The Color Purple – Walker, Alice
  24. The Illustrated Man – Bradbury, Ray
  25. The Recognitions – Gaddis, William
  26. A Death in the Family – Agee, James
  27. Little Women – Alcott, Louisa May
  28. The Elric Saga – Moorcock, Michael
  29. The Outlander Series – Gabaldan, Diana
  30. The Berlin Stories – Isherwood, Christopher
  31. A Handful fo Dust – Waugh, Evelyn
  32. The Thrawn triogy – Zahn, Timothy
  33. The Sheltering Sky – Bowles, Paul
  34. The Year of Magical Thinking – Didion, Joan
  35. The Book of the New Sun – Wolfe, Gene
  36. The Codex Alera series – Butcher, Jim
  37. Call It Sleep – Roth, Henry
  38. Hamlet – Shakespeare, William
  39. The World According to Garp – Irving, John
  40. At Swim-Two-Birds – O’Brien, Flann
  41. Anathem – Stephenson, Neal
  42. Herzog – Bellow, Saul
  43. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Murakami, Haruki
  44. The Crystal Cave – Stewart, Mary
  45. The Culture Series – Banks, Iian M.
  46. The Adventures of Augie March – Bellow, Saul
  47. The Sot-Weed Factor – Barth, John
  48. Between the World and Me – Coates, Ta-Nehisi
  49. The Eyre Affair – Fforde, Jasper
  50. The Malazan Book of the Fallen series – Erikson, Steven
  51. The Man Who Loved Children – Stead, Christina
  52. The Stranger – Camus, Albert
  53. Wicked – Maguire, Gregory
  54. Housekeeping – Robinson, Marilynne
  55. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Bradbury, Ray
  56. The Day of the Locust – West, Nathaniel
  57. Deliverance – Dickey, James
  58. The Dispossessed – LeGuin, Ursula K.
  59. Money – Amis, Martin
  60. The Kushiel’s Legacy series – Carey, Jacqueline
  61. The Right Stuff – Wolfe, Tom
  62. Rendezvous With Rama – Clarke, Arthur C.
  63. Appointment in Samarra – O’Hara, John
  64. Tropic of Cancer – Miller, Henry
  65. The Diamond Age – Stephenson, Neal
  66. Old Man’s War – Scalzi, John
  67. The Confessions of Nat Turner – Styron, William
  68. The Moviegoer – Percy, Walker
  69. The Legend of Drizzt Series – Salvatore, R.A.
  70. Pale Fire – Nabokov, Vladimir
  71. A Journey to the Center of the Earth – Verne, Jules
  72. The Heart of the Matter – Greene, Graham
  73. The Way of Kings – Sanderson, Brandon
  74. The Golden Notebook – Lessing, Doris
  75. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Niffenegger, Audrey
  76. The Farseer Trilogy – Hobb, Robin
  77. The Conan The Barbarian Series – Howard, R.E.
  78. Rabbit, Run – Updike, John
  79. The Shannara Trilogy – Brooks, Terry
  80. Ubik – Dick, Philip K.
  81. The Golden Compass – Pullman, Philip
  82. Lucky Jim – Amis, Kingsley
  83. The Night Watchmen – Erdrich, Louise
  84. The Riftwar Saga – Feist, Raymond E.
  85. Play It As It Lays – Didion, Joan
  86. The Giver – Lowry, Lois
  87. I Am Legend – Matheson, Richard
  88. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Clarke, Susanna
  89. A House for Mr Biswas – Naipaul, V.S.
  90. The Sword of Truth – Goodkind, Terry
  91. The Painted Bird – Kosinski, Jerry
  92. The Joy Luck Club – Tan, Amy
  93. Under the Volcano – Lowry, Malcolm
  94. The Mote in God’s Eye – Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry
  95. Going Postal – Pratchett, Terry
  96. Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon, Thomas
  97. The Vorkosigan Saga – Bujold, Lois McMaster
  98. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao – Diaz, Junot
  99. White Teeth – Smith, Zadie
  100. Rubyfruit Jungle – Brown, Rita Mae
  101. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever – Donaldson, Stephen R.
  102. Red Harvest – Hammett, Dashiell
  103. Small Gods – Pratchett, Terry
  104. The Book Thief – Zusak, Markus
  105. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Chabon, Michael
  106. The Forever War – Haldeman, Joe
  107. Wide Sargasso Sea – Rhys, Jean
  108. The Last Unicorn – Beagle, Peter S.
  109. The Age of Innocence – Warton, Edith
  110. World War Z – Brooks, Max
  111. Homegoing – Gyasi, Yaa
  112. The Crying of Lot 49 – Pynchon, Thomas
  113. The Power and the Glory – Greene, Graham
  114. Cryptonomicon – Stephenson, Neal
  115. Stardust – Gaimen, Neil
  116. American Pastoral – Roth, Philip
  117. The Hyperion Cantos – Simmons, Dan
  118. The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Wilder, Thornton
  119. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Cather, Willa
  120. And Then There Were None – Christie, Agatha
  121. Contact – Sagan, Carl
  122. Childhood’s End – Clarke, Arthur C.
  123. Out of Africa – Dinesen, Isak
  124. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Spark, Muriel
  125. Neverwhere – Gaimen, Neil
  126. Of Human Bondage – Maugham, W. Somerset
  127. The Once and Future King – White, T.H.
  128. The Silmarillion – Tolkien, J.R.R.
  129. Revolutionary Road – Yates, Richard
  130. The Left Hand of Darkness – LeGuin, Ursula K.
  131. East of Eden – Steinbeck, John
  132. Infinite Jest – Wallace, David Foster
  133. White Noise – DeLillo, Don
  134. Ringworld – Niven, Larry
  135. Middlesex – Eugenides, Jeffrey
  136. The Mistborn Series – Sanderson, Brandon
  137. Brideshead Revisited – Waugh, Evelyn
  138. The Mists of Avalon – Bradley, Marion Zimmer
  139. Naked Lunch – Burroughs, William S.
  140. The Belgariad – Eddings, David
  141. Love Medicine – Erdrich, Louise
  142. The Road – McCarth, Cormac
  143. Blood Meridian – McCarthy, Cormac
  144. Go Tell It on the Mountain – Baldwin, James
  145. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – McCullers, Carson
  146. The Chronicles of Amber – Zelazny, Roger
  147. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – le Carre, John
  148. The War of the Worlds – Wells, H.G.
  149. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – Fowles, John
  150. Flowers for Algernon – Keys, Daniel
  151. Interpreter of Maladies – Lahiri, Jhumpa
  152. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Thompson, Hunter S.
  153. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Verne, Jules
  154. To the Lighthouse – Woolf, Virginia
  155. Light in August – Faulkner, William
  156. The Time Machine – Wells, H.G.
  157. Ragtime – Doctorow, E.L.
  158. A Canticle for Leibowitz – Miller, Walter M.
  159. Cutting For Stone – Verghese, Abraham
  160. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Heinlein, Robert
  161. Native Son – Wright, Richard
  162. The Blind Assassin – Atwood, Margaret
  163. Dragonflight – McCaffrey, Anne
  164. Charlotte’s Web – White, E.B.
  165. Watership Down – Adams, Richard
  166. All the King’s Men – Warren, Robert Penn
  167. The Sound and the Fury – Faulkner, William
  168. Starship Troopers – Heinlein, Robert
  169. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
  170. The Sandman Series – Gaimen, Neil
  171. I, Claudius – Graves, Robert
  172. A Passage to India – Forster, E.M.
  173. Cat’s Cradle – Vonnegut, Kurt
  174. The Martian Chronicles – Bradbury, Ray
  175. Possession – Byatt, A.S.
  176. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass – Carroll, Lewis
  177. The Fault in Our Stars – Green, John
  178. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Hurston, Zora Neale
  179. The Stand – King, Stephen
  180. Selected Stories – Munro, Alice
  181. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Clarke, Arthur C.
  182. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – Rowling, J.K.
  183. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Eggers, Dave
  184. The Dark Tower Series – King, Stephen
  185. Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf, Virginia
  186. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Dick, Philip K.
  187. The Corrections – Franzen, Jonathan
  188. Angela’s Ashes – McCourt, Frank
  189. Frankenstein – Shelley, Mary
  190. The Kingkiller Chronicles – Rothfuss, Patrick
  191. Great Expectations – Dickens, Charles
  192. Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein, Robert
  193. I, Robot – Asimov, Isaac
  194. In Cold Blood – Capote, Truman
  195. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Kesey, Ken
  196. The Wheel of Time Series – Jordan, Robert & Sanderson, Brandon
  197. The Princess Bride – Goldman, William
  198. Gone With the Wind – Mitchell, Margaret
  199. Pride and Prejudice – Austen, Jane
  200. American Gods – Gaimen, Neil
  201. Atonement – McEwan, Ian
  202. The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck, John
  203. A Wrinkle in Time – L’Engle, Madeleine
  204. The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov, Isaac
  205. Lord of the Flies – Golding, William
  206. Things Fall Apart – Achebe, Chinua
  207. Brave New World – Huxley, Aldous
  208. The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway, Ernest
  209. The Shining – King, Stephen
  210. A Song of Ice and Fire – Martin, George R.R.
  211. Portnoy’s Complaint – Roth, Philip
  212. Valley of the Dolls – Susann, Jacqueline
  213. Ender’s Game – Card, Orson Scott
  214. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adams, Douglas
  215. Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, Leo
  216. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – Lewis, C.S.
  217. The Big Sleep/The Long Goodbye – Chandler, Raymond
  218. Midnight’s Children – Rushdie, Salman
  219. Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro, Kazuo
  220. The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald, F. Scott
  221. Snow Crash – Stephenson, Neal
  222. On the Road – Kerouac, Jack
  223. Neuromancer – Gibson, William
  224. The Catcher in the Rye – Salinger, J.D.
  225. Lolita – Nabokov, Vladimir
  226. Invisible Man – Ellison, Ralph
  227. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. – Blume, Judy
  228. A Clockwork Orange – Burgess, Anthony
  229. Catch-22 – Heller, Joseph
  230. Beloved – Morrison, Toni
  231. The Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood, Margaret
  232. Farenheit 451 – Bradbury, Ray
  233. Animal Farm – Orwell, George
  234. Dune – Herbert, Frank
  235. To Kill A Mockingbird – Lee, Harper
  236. Slaughterhouse Five – Vonnegut, Kurt
  237. 1984 – Orwell, George
  238. The Lord of the Rings – Tolkien, J.R.R.

I’m looking forward to reading quite a few of these – some for the first time, more than a few for the second or third. In many cases I’ve read other books by an author on this list, but not the specific book listed. There are a few of these books I am very much *not* looking forward to reading. I remember loving A Wrinkle in Time when I read it as a child (I was probably 5 or 6 years old at the time). I tried reading it again a few years ago and found it unreadable. I’ll do my best to give it another shot. I have never liked The Giver. I taught it once to an ESL class of teenagers. They seemed to like it. Every page was like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Again, I’ll see what I can do.

There are a few books on the list that I haven’t read, and that I suspect I will not enjoy. I will do my best to finish all of the books on this list, but I’m not going to punish myself by forcing myself to read a book I actively hate. I may bail on one or two of the books on the list. Maybe even three.

As always, you are cordially invited to read alongside me as I make my way through the list. I will be going through in the order listed above, so you’ll be able to figure out what I’m working on at any given time. Hopefully, there will be some lively discussion in the comments of each review. And speaking of comments, let me know what you think of my list in the comments below.

Happy reading!

Map News

August 7, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Just a quick update today on the progress of my little world building adventure – the one I mentioned in this post.

I have just finished setting up the initial structure of my world’s map, a job which I suspect will feel the most like work of all the worldbuilding things I have to do, and now all that’s left is to put all the things that go on the map on the map, and to start writing all the articles that will explain all those things.

Initially I’d decided to use a fairly basic (but pretty) map of London published in about 1815. This was, of course, 70 years before my world is set, but I was willing to accept the inaccuracies this caused. I couldn’t find a better map that I could use legally, and I felt I could explain it away with the idea that my world is an alternate version of the real one and is under no obligation to be historically accurate in any but the most passing of ways.

So that was the map I was using, and I’d gotten quite a ways along in the process. I’d laid out the Metropolitan Police districts, located and pinned most of the police stations, marked out several of the neighborhoods and gang territories (some authentically, and some.. creatively), and I had each section of the main map linked to a more detailed, higher resolution map of just that part of it.

It was pretty nifty.

And then I discovered that there actually were downloadable images of Charles Booth’s Poverty maps of London (1898-9) which were both far more detailed and informative than the map I’d been using, and also within a few years of when Lunden is set.

You see, dear reader, early on I’d found on online version of the poverty maps overlaid upon the very shiny Google map of the same area that allows one to phase back and forth between antiquity and modernity. It is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anywhere on the site to download the original map images. Not until, on a whim, I decided to Google for a downloadable version and found myself in a very odd section of the LSE website, behind a sign that read “Beware of Leopard”, where the original images were just sitting there, waiting for me to grab them. And grab them I did.

That’s where I encountered an even bigger problem with using the Booth maps. It’s maps. Plural.

So I spent the next three solid days in Krita, cropping, stretching, layering, adjusting, and attempting to get all 12 separate pieces of what I hoped I could turn into one map to line up nicely. I almost succeeded, and in the end I decided that almost was probably good enough. There are a few places on the map where you can see (if you zoom in closely enough) that things don’t quite line up, but on World Anvil I’ve used a lower resolution version of the whole map (the full res version is more than 360MB) where you can’t really zoom in that far anyway, and clicking on that map links you to the appropriate panel which, of course, looks perfectly fine.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, head to https://www.worldanvil.com/w/lunden-ophania/map/349848d9-cda8-49e4-8f71-fce2ad4957d1 and see what all the fuss is about. It’s been an enormous amount of work so far, but entirely worth it in my opinion. Oh, and if you want access to all the material this map represents for roleplaying , writing, or just reading purposes, pop by my Patreon and sign up. You’ll be supporting my work, and getting early (or exclusive) access to a whole plethora of awesome stuff.

I Think I’ve Finally Set Up Subscriptions Properly

August 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The title says it all, really.

Some of you might be aware that once upon a time I was using Feedburner to run an RSS feed so that people could subscribe to the blog. Google, of course, has now yeeted their support for Feedburner (several years ago, actually, but I haven’t exactly been maintaining the blog properly these past few years so it took me a while to catch on) which left me not only with no way to let people subscribe to the blog, but also with no one who was previously subscribed to the blog still subscribed to the blog.

Annoying!

So then I did some Google-fu and discovered that WordPress includes a built-in email subscription thinger, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I hadn’t just used that in the first place. So I set that up. And then I found out why I hadn’t used it in the first place (and why no one uses it, as it happens).

It doesn’t work.

Oh sure, you can set up the form. You can put it in a widget on the sidebar of every page. You can enter an email address in it. It will even send you a confirmation email asking if you meant to subscribe. That’s as far as it goes, unfortunately. It doesn’t record your email in a list anywhere, and it never sends you another email to let you know I’ve posted a new post. Which is sort of its only job.

I also didn’t realise it wasn’t working until a few people told me they’d subscribed to the blog but weren’t getting any posts delivered to them.

Now, if you’re reading this, you’ll notice that there’s a form in the top right of the page that lets you enter your email and subscribe. It looks different to how it used to look. That’s because it is different. This one works. (I think)

In order to get this new subscription thing up and running I had to sign up for a service, edit the DNS information on my web host, create forms, create lists, create email templates… it was an awful lot of work for what you’d think should be a pretty simple thing. It wasn’t at all a simple thing, and so I hope you’ll consider making use of it and subscribing to the blog.

I’ve set it up to send out one email a week (on Thursday) with all the new posts from that week. The way I see it, more often might get annoying and less often won’t give me the attention I so desperately crave.

What’s In My Toolbox?

July 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

If anyone ever asks me a question about my writing process, I like to think they will probably ask me what tools I use to get things done (or fail to get things done, as is more often the case). No one has ever asked me this question, or really any question about my writing, but nonetheless in this post I’ll go through a quick list an exhaustive list of the things I use in my writing, with a brief description of why and how I use them.

Just in case anyone ever wants to know.

Pen and Paper

Yes, that’s right. I’m old school.

I have an A4-sized (8.5×11 for the North Americans in the room) clipboard with a small stack of copy paper (80gsm for those keeping score) on my desk at all times. My pen of choice is the Uniball Eye (or the Snowhite Galaxy which is a clone of the Unball) 0.5 roller pen. The part number is Mitsubishi UB-150 if you’re interested in picking some up.

I find I plan a lot better on paper than I do on a screen. Ideas flow more freely and are of a generally higher quality when I’m handwriting. Oh, and yes – I write in cursive.

Software

ClickUp

I’m an idiot who can’t seem to focus on fewer than 5 projects at a time, so I need something to keep track of all the bits and bobs I’m working on. This is where ClickUp comes in.

The free version is honestly more than enough for a single person operation such as myself, but I pay for the first paid tier just so I can have Gantt charts. I love me a Gantt chart. It’s a pretty straightforward project management platform, and it keeps my tasks available to me on all of my devices. I’d be lost without it.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a fairly straightforward markdown editor. It is also one of the most flexible and powerful note-taking and knowledge management systems ever created by mortal man. I have to admit I’ve drunk of the Obsidian kool-aid.

I have no regrets.

I use Obsidian to keep track of story ideas, plot structures, stuff for my day job, information for online classes I’m taking, information for online classes I’m creating… Basically, anything I don’t want to have to keep in my brain all the time, but that I’ll need to have in my brain at some later time goes into Obsidian. I don’t want to take the time to go into details on its use here, but it is so very well worth the Google if you are at all interested in learning things and keeping track of information.

Scrivener

I mean, of course I do.

I’ve thoroughly tested played around with other options: Wavemaker Cards, Obsidian (for drafting of prose rather than just for knowledge management), yWriter, iA Writer (for writing on my e-Ink Android tablet), and even some online services, though I am fundamentally opposed to storing my work only in someone else’s cloud. Basically, if it comes up as an alternative to Scrivener in a Google search, and it isn’t Apple only, I’ve tried it. I keep coming back to Scrivener. Even though it doesn’t run on Android (more on that later)

Aeon Timeline

This is a recent addition to my process (like, yesterday recent) and is largely the impetus for this blog post because it forced me to reconsider my entire writing process from start to finish.

Aeon Timeline has been around for a while, and I actually bought version 2 back in 2016, but didn’t find it useful enough to bother with it much. Enter two of my current flock of projects: “Tomorrow”, and my Interactive Fiction Lunden novel.

Tomorrow is a set of three concurrent novellas whose characters never directly interact (much) but whose storylines affect each other a great deal. I will need to make sure that all of the various things happen in a logical timeframe relative to each other.

The Interactive Fiction novel is, as the name suggests, interactive. I’m also planning to write four different stories, with four different protagonists, where all four interact with each other and the reader can choose which of the protagonists to inhabit. That means it’s going to be rife with complicated interactions that are dependent on reader choices. It’s a total mindfuck to plan. Aeon Timeline should help tremendously in keeping all the details sensibly organized.

Twine

Speaking of the Interactive Fiction novel(s) – I’ll be writing them in Twine. Twine is a piece of software designed for the creation of interactive fiction. I haven’t done any more than install it and poke around randomly a bit, but it looks like it’s exactly what I need in order to do what I want to do. I’ll keep you updated as things develop.

Hardware

Keyboard

I take my keyboard very seriously. About two years ago I took a deep dive into the world of custom mechanical keyboards. I tried just about every style and variety of case, switch, keycap, and layout you can think of to find out what exactly works best for me.

My overall favourite is the Keydous NJ80-AP with Keychron kPro Mint 65g switches and my Autumn Fog clone OEM keycaps. I own three of this keyboard, though I built one of them out with Outemu silent whites for when I’m working in an environment that wouldn’t appreciate my clackitty-clacking away.

This will all make perfect sense to any other keyboard nerds out there, and absolutely none to anyone else.

For when I need to be portable (though I almost never need to be portable, I have Keychron K7 Pro (reds, of course) which is surprisingly useable stock. It’s tiny and smol and I like it more than I thought I would.

Computers (traditional)

I have a desktop computer with very beefy (for three years ago) specs and dual 27″ monitors on swivel arms (and a third 13″ monitor in my vocal booth) because I do video content creation as well as writing.

My laptop is a Acer Swift 5, which was one or two versions behind current when I bought it. I chose the older one because it had a less powerful graphics card which means an hour or two more battery life in real-world use cases. It also does video out via usb-c, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s a tiny little thing and replaces my old Dell XPS 15 which now lives in the music room and is used for music production almost exclusively.

Computers (non-traditional)

Display

In combination with my tiny little laptop, I use a pair of XREAL Air 2 Pro AR glasses, generally with the Beam accessory. This is why it was important for my laptop to output video via usb-c. The glasses project a very large, reasonably crisp screen in front of me, and with the beam I can anchor it in space wherever I choose. The pro 2 version (which replaced my old version 1s) also have electrochromic dimming, so when I’m writing I can darken them completely and focus on my main screen and when I’m doing admin work I can clear them up and go dual monitor with my laptop screen.

If I’m gonna write science fiction I should go full cyborg, right?

Tablet

I have two Boox e-ink android tablets. The 10″ Note Air lives in my vocal booth now, and I use it for scripts and books I’m narrating. My 13″ Max 3 is my workhorse. It’s A4 sized, so I can read most pdf files at native resolution. I can also split the screen and put something I’m editing on one side and take notes on the other. The handwriting recognition is almost flawless, so I can actually do a lot of planning and that type of work on it and then export my work as copy/paste-able text which I can then throw into scrivener or obsidian. Hell, it’s a full-fledged android tablet. I have Obsidian installed on it. I can write stuff directly into Obsidian.

This device, by the way, is the reason I’m annoyed that Scrivener doesn’t have even a bare-bones Android version. The e-ink screen on this thing is a joy to use. I can connect my keyboard to it via Bluetooth and type away on a screen that doesn’t hurt my eyes (even over the course of an entire day). If Scrivener had a useable Android app, I’d have my end-game writing setup immediately sorted.

Phone

When I replaced my phone last time, I made a move from my OnePlus 7tPro, which was my third OnePlus phone in a row (and I don’t upgrade my phone more than once every 4 years or so ) to the Samsung Galaxy S22+. I did this for one simple reason: Dex.

Dex is a feature of (some, most… I’m not sure) Samsung phones that provides the user with a full desktop computing experience when the phone is connected to an external display. My XREAL glasses are an external display. It is a beautifully functional pairing.

If I’m on the go and I have my phone and my glasses (almost always the case) I can connect them and have instant productivity. I don’t have Scrivener on my phone, of course, but I do have google docs. I also have the microphone built in to the glasses and I can set the phone to work as a trackpad when using Dex. This means I can open up a google doc, and dictate through my Google keyboard’s speech to text option using the microphone next to my face. If I have a scene I want to draft, or some ideas I want to flesh out while I’m on the go (something more involved than just a list of things, which I can do more easily with just the phone), this works exceptionally well.

As a bit of an aside, once I had the phone I decided to replace my fitbit with the Galaxy watch 5 and got a pair of the Buds 2 pro because I wanted to see what an Apple level of device integration felt like and I will never willingly use an Apple product. Reader, it changed my life. I highly recommend it. It almost makes me understand Apple users.

Okay guys, it’s time to wrap it up…

So that’s all of the tools that I use regularly to get my writing work done.

This kind of blog post is what I do when I’m avoiding actually doing any of that writing work.

If you are interested in more information on any of the individual things I mentioned here, drop me a comment and let me know. I’d be happy to go into more detail. Also make sure to subscribe

to get my future posts delivered right to the burner email address of your choice.

Oh, also, if you want to gain unlimited access to all of my world building resources (for a writing project of your own, perhaps) and a minimum of two new short stories a month from yours truly, head over to my Patreon and sign up for one of my reasonably priced tiers. You’ll be helping to support my work and helping me to entertain you all at the same time and all for the price of a coffee or two a month.

Cheers!

Something Nifty This Way Waddles

June 30, 2024 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been chipping away lately at several aspects of a number of inter-related projects that, collectively, make up one doozy of a major endeavor and I thought it might be fun to update both of you on what those projects are and how they inter-relate. Or something to that effect.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here previously or not, but I’m taking a deep dive in to world building. At the moment I’m building out the world for my Bloodlines novel – 1885 alternate-timeline Victorian London with monsters and magic. It’s called Lunden, and I’m having a glorious time fleshing out my map and deciding which things should be historically accurate, which things totally unique, and which things somewhere in the middle.

This worldbuilding project is happening on World Anvil, and will include a bunch of tools to help other writers write stories in my world, as well as materials for TTRPG players and DMs to run campaigns in good ol’ Lunden. I’ll eventually have stuff for Pathfinder (d20), Open d6, and FATE role-playing systems.

The reason I’m doing all this world-building work is partly to help me with my writing, but also so that I can offer access to it via my Patreon, which I’m currently in the process of setting up. In an ideal world, I’ll get enough financial support from my patrons that I can really focus on writing and other creative things.

In order to promote the Patreon (and my work in general), I’ve also started streaming again (or will have done by the time you read this). I’ll be on Kick and on Twitch, as well as on YouTube live (I think – I haven’t gotten that working yet).

I tried streaming some world building sessions here and there over the past few weeks, but I wasn’t happy with how that worked out. I really need deep concentration for world building in a way that I don’t need as much for writing. When I’m writing I can dip in and out without losing too much momentum, but for world building I really can’t work that way. I’m also (and this is probably a more important issue) bouncing around between multiple windows and so forth much more when world building than when I’m writing, and that makes it awkward to live stream. So I think I’ll stick to writing live streams and leave the world building stuff to when I’m all by my lonesome.

And on the topic of writing, I have a new writing project that I’ve just started actively working on (plotting and story structure stuff) today.

I had initially planned to write a series of more-or-less unconnected short stories set in Lunden as a way of exploring the world and establishing the look and feel of the place. I have forty or so loosey-goosey plot outlines locked and loaded, ready to go. I spent weeks organizing and tidying them up. So naturally I’ve decided to do something completely sideways to all of that and I’ll be writing an interactive novel (or novella – I’m still not at all sure how long it’s going to be) that has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned short story plot outlines.

The plan at the moment is to write four separate versions of the story, each allowing the reader to “play” a different main character who is navigating the same general set of events. My plan is to publish each of the versions separately, and then to combine them into one mahooosive omnibus version where the reader can choose which character to play at the beginning. I’ll be using Twine to write and publish the stories, and hopefully will be able to publish them in a few places. I’m even going to look at how I might package them up for the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

So yeah, that’s what I’m up to these days. Big things are starting to happen and I can only hope that I’ll be able to keep a good head of steam going on all of these moving parts. I’ll try to keep you all up to date on my progress as I progress.

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