At midnight

this long-awaited book was delivered to my Kindle - hmmm, might be I will read it right now....

In a good cause

The YA for NJ fundraiser is raising money post-Sandy for the New Jersey Community Food Bank. Lots of good stuff on their auction site, including a 50-page manuscript critique from my lovely Invisible Things editor Zareen Jaffery. I think they are not the plum prizes on the list, but you could bid on my two YA novels here!

Things you love

A great writing exercise from Laini Taylor, via Sara Ryan (whose lovely YA novel Empress of the World has just been reissued):

Do this exercise where you freewrite about the book you would write. (“Writing about” is so much easier than “writing”.) Don’t just describe the plot. Try to get at the feeling of it too, the mood and atmosphere. Be fanciful. You won’t have to abide by this, it’s just an exercise. Think about this too: imagine you are browsing in a bookstore or library, reading flap copy. You’ve had this happen before, you read flap copy that makes your heartbeat speed up, your mind brightens. This book is what you want, it is full of things you love, that fascinate you. You can’t wait to read it. What are those things? Come up with your own ideas that will speed up your heart and brighten your mind.

Only one novel of mine was written at all under this sort of sign - The Explosionist. My first novel was the book I felt compelled to write rather than the book I felt huge desire to read, and it was a strange and exciting feeling when I realized - after perusing the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore to see whether anything else had come out that could reproduce the thrill for me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth Nix's Abhorsen books - that if the book I most wanted to read didn't yet exist, I had to write it!

The new novel has not been written under exactly that sign - it was more a compulsion to tell a story that would capture some of the intellectual charisma of the theory and practice of role-playing games, plus longterm desire to write something that reimagines The Bacchae. Then when I was revising, I kept on saying to myself, "I just need to make this world as much a one that readers want to enter as I feel about the world of Fringe...."

Writer as corporation

Interesting interview here with YA writer Cassandra Clare about the business of writing.  I have none of the gifts she clearly possesses in abundance - for all sorts of reasons, I am very lucky to be a professor rather than a writer trying to make a decent living off publishing fiction! - but I like reading about the truly entrepreneurial...

Light reading update

My review of Ellen Ullman's new novel By Blood is up at Slate.  Very happy to be writing for a new 'venue,' as they say!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of a busy week: Delia Sherman's lovely young-adult novel The Freedom Maze, which both is and is not like the time-travel books I devoured in my childhood, and Alan Glynn's excellent thriller Bloodland.  Just started on Edward St. Aubyn's At Last, which seemed to me as I read it last night to have what is possibly one of the best opening chapters I have ever seen.

Light reading catch-up

Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours was so very much the perfect novel of suspense that I felt ready for another installment of Powell: At Lady Molly's.

I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl quite a bit; it is not exactly my favorite type of book, and I felt that the opening stretch is overly complex in a way that might have made me put the book down and not pick it up again had I not been reading it on my Kindle (where I am as yet reluctant to start something and leave it unfinished, for reasons of digital tidiness), but he is an incredibly good sentence-writer, especially in this world of steampunk fantasy (Mieville!) where sentence-writing is not always a priority, and I'll certainly look out for his other books.

Barry Eisler's Fault Line was fine, but it is not perhaps quite as appealing as his Rain books (I think I enjoyed the Andrew Grant books a bit more than this too - the voice seemed more straightforwardly what I like - I guess I just prefer thrillers written in the first person, all other things being equal).

I enjoyed Catherine Fisher's Incarceron very much indeed, only with the proviso that I do miss in YA fantasy the richness and variety and complexity that can be found in the best adult fantasy (N. K. Jemisin being my best recent discovery in this regard). It is very good, though, and I am pleased to see the sequel is out - arghhhh, not yet available on Kindle, though - I was about to download it and start reading it right now!

Light reading catch-up (travel edition)

All Kindle, all the time: Steve Hamilton's The Lock Artist and Peter Dickinson's Tears of the Salamander (both excellent - Hamilton and Dickinson are consistently very good, these books are no exception), four highly implausible but fairly literately written thrillers by Michelle Gagnon, Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel, Holly Black's White Cat (I particularly enjoyed this one - the world it's set in is quite reminiscent of Robin McKinley's Sunshine, a book I love), Liza Marklund's The Bomber (interesting and appealing if not up to the standard of Indridason, Nesbo and a couple other of my recent favorites).

Monday grumbling

I rouse myself from illness and lethargy to share a lovely little bit from WWD (!) about a power luncheon at La Grenouille in support of the International AIDS Vaccine Initative, sent to me by Dave Lull because he knows of my interest in Oliver Sacks:

To raise funds to secure more L-dopa, the mild-mannered Sacks said lightly, “I did what I never did before in my life. I went to a luncheon.” Though he’s likely been to several such gatherings since, Sacks’ tie let on that he’s never going to be the conventional party-goer. It was blue with yellow banana slugs on it, a tribute to UC Santa Cruz, where Sacks once taught. “I have a thing for mollusks,” he explained

My enjoyment of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy was not augmented by the shared highlighted comments that the Kindle showed me, which invariably hinged upon the most banal and aphoristic pronouncements, so I have now turned that function off. The books themselves are grippingly readable, in spite of an occasional lack of subtlety in the psychology (individual and political) and flatness in the prose - I ordered books 2 and 3 for instant delivery as soon as I had read the first few chapters of the first one, and really I read them straight through pretty much without putting them down except when absolutely necessary.

I had lunch with my agent today (I felt so sick I almost canceled, but I knew it would be a great disappointment to me if I missed seeing her while I am in New York). She had wise advice, and once I'm back in Cayman I'll buckle down to do a good rewrite on the style book (a number of the editors who passed this time will look at a 'next' version, and it really will depend on where the revisions take me whether it will be better suited to be a university press or a trade book) and also to try something (is this top secret, should I be embargoing it?!?) that seemed to me a very interesting suggestion: to combine the manuscripts of The Explosionist and Invisible Things into one long novel so that she can pursue some possible European interest. That is definitely a long book, but it is truly one continuous story; I was very careful to make the second book self-sufficient, it should work well for readers who didn't read the first one, so some of those explanations may need to be taken out again, but I will be interested to see how it looks.

I would love it if the books could have a single-volume afterlife - really I wish Tor would publish the story as a fat mass-market paperback with a lurid fantasy cover!