I recently heard a re-broadcast series of radio-articles from NPR's Radio Lab that explored the question of what makes us ourselves. Not just what makes us human, but what makes us have the personalities that we do and, essentially, how we understand our own personal histories and use those histories to create identity.
But what struck me as the most memorable moment of the show -- and the whole thing was fascinating to me as a writer and creator of fictional people, and I think most writers would agree with me that the discussion is fascinating in a philosophical sort of way -- was when they boiled down what creates the "self":
The "self" is the ability to experience, then abstract those experiences into story.
They were talking mainly about the ability to tell people stories about your day, and dig up your war stories to rehash around the fire. But they also touched on the ability to fictionalize. And to imagine that which we've never seen. No one's every seen a man with wings, but we are able to abstract the experience of man and the experience of bird and then imagine an angel.
I think these radio articles are fascinating for any writer and a must-hear for fantasy writers out there.
The other afternoon, I gathered materials to start working on a post-lunch writing project. I brought my journal, calendar/planner, and Nook with me and stacked them nicely beside my computer keyboard. I was going to move the keyboard and make a bit of space then journal/plan/read. But almost as soon as I had done that, the fluffy, needy cat sat square on my stack of supplies. I'd been completely and totally cock-blocked ... in a feline/literary sort of way.
It's hard to think about April with its post-thaw mud, tender green tree buds and the unspoken promise of light jacket weather when each morning I open the blinds each wondering how many inches of snow will be on my car today. But it appears that many people already are. Maybe it's just, you know, planning ahead on their parts. I hear some people have been known to do that though I can't say I ever plan much beyond that night's dinner if I can help it. Or maybe it's that we all desperately need something to look forward to in order to get through this bleak time of year. Whatever the case, there are some interesting writerly things coming your way this spring.
Angry Robot is throwing open its doors to unagented novel queries for two weeks in late April. They did this last year and signed three new authors. They're only interested in epic fantasy and YA sf/f. More information is on their website.
April is also the month of Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo's dramatically inclined little cousin.
Of these three, I'll probably only get involved in the A to Z challenge. I tried it last year and it went well ... for a while. But since people and their online chatter have me thinking about it ahead of time this year, I've started generating a list of topics (and, gasp, even a theme!) and hope to succeed in making all 26 posts this time around.
As I mentioned in my previous post, all non-essential activity in my life has stopped while I've been on my book-reading bender. I'm currently ensconced in book eleven of the Stephanie Plum series. (I skipped Visions of Sugar Plums but am considering the other "between the plums" as the library has copies of them.) What I've discovered in reading these books back to back to back is that there is a strange suspension of disbelief that is asked of the reader.
The first book in the series was written in 1994, with the first ten books coming out one per year. In the first novel, the main character is thirty years old, one of the characters has a car phone, no one has a cell phone. Slowly, over the course of the books, the technology upgrades. First some of the characters get cell phones and pagers. Then everyone has a cell phone. The car phones fade away to be replaced by GPS tracking and onboard navigation. The "seasons" pass. It's summer, it's winter. There's pumpkins on the Plum front porch. It's spring and the paint job looks sickly in the drizzle. It's summer and the smog is heavy on the freeway. Secondary characters get pregnant and give birth. The main character gets a computer ... but she's still thirty.
O! to be Stephanie Plum! Stuck in a type of suspended animation where life marches on but you need never fear turning thirty-one, or thirty-two or any other age!
I'm completely on board with the technology upgrading faster than "time" is passing in the novels. So what if it's only been ten seasons in the course of the story instead of the ten years that passed in the real world? But where my desire to believe snags is when the character never ages.
But the novels are laugh-out-loud funny -- I daily scare the cats from sudden bursts of laughter when they thought I was just sitting calmly -- I'll continue to suspend disbelief. But it's weird. A bit like knowing you've stepped Underhill and into Faerie
For the past week or so, I've been fully consumed by a book bender. Which is a lot like any other bender. You overdo it. You spend all of your waking hours that aren't at work, working on your bender progress. And some of your non-waking hours become waking hours all in the pursuit of finishing another page, another chapter, another book. More. More. More of a good thing can't be bad? you ask yourself. And the bender replies, Of course not.
Th book bender even has the same hangover feeling as a regular bender. Although with fewer lasting effects on your liver probably. The same woozy head and need for water that you forgot to drink. The same stack of crud in your apartment that didn't get taken care of. Laundry. Dishes. Overflowing trash bin.
You took care of the basics. Mostly. The cats are fed, their litter box is clean. You showered daily. Or at least every other day. Or at least on the days you went to work.
First thing book I hit on my bender was Frozen by Robin Wasserman. I chose this book because I knew if I read Shadow, book four in Allie's War by JC Andrijeski, I would start on a bender. I love this series and knew I would read the entire 220,000 word novel in as close to one stint as I possibly could. (220,000 words, btw, would make this ebook almost 900 pages if it was published as a mass market paperback.)
And I wanted to avoid the bender.
So I resisted diving into the next book in what I knew was an all-consuming series. I picked up a YA dystopia that I thought I could put down after the first volume.
Unfortunately, I got kind of interested. There was some interestingly unresolved interpersonal stuff at the end of Frozen. So I checked Shatteredand Torn out of the library's YA section and finished what's called the "Cold Awakening Trilogy" in a weekend.
These books have a scarily possibly future. We've screwed the world over with pollution, nuclear bombs and "accidents," as well as religious wars. Society has stratified itself to the uber-rich, the poor who live in work camps, and the even poorer who are too mutated or unfortunate to live in work camps and are therefore living in the nasty shells of former cities. The uber-rich pretty much live their lives on the network. Oh there's interpersonal interaction, but you don't define yourself in reality as much as you do in your "zone." Of course, all of this is background. The novel opens with the teenage main character's death and her subsequent rival into a mechanical body. True to form for a spoiled, rich, bitchy teenager, she spends the first 50 pages whining about being dead and/or a machine. It took me a couple of months of picking up the book and putting it down to get past those opening pages. But the premise was intriguing enough that I didn't give up on the book.
But I find my problem with YA dystopia -- YA fiction in general -- is that the endings do not make me happy. How do you plan to resolve all the juicy love triangles if [skip to below the three the icy book covers if you don't want to hear any hint of spoilers] one or all of your love triangle participants is dead, reprogrammed, some sort of zen ball of energy, or an all-seeing eye in the sky, a beneficent Big Brother?
This, people, is why I read books that are clearly labeled romance. At least that way you know that one of the interpersonal relationships will have some feel of finality by the end of the book.
These books were previously released as Skinned, Crashed, and Wired with unpretty covers. They were recently renamed, rebranded, and rereleased. They have really pretty covers in this edition, no?
I was so pissed off that I knew I needed to start reading another book immediately to take my mind off how annoyed I was with the ending that was, albeit, the logical inevitable conclusion based on the world/characters/situation.
I needed to cleanse my palate. And in the process I pushed myself into an even larger reading bender than I ever could have done with one 900 page novel.
I'd requested a copy of One for the Money by Janet Evanovich from my local library after seeing a trailer for the forthcoming movie with Katherine Heigl. The book is hilarious! Absolutely amazingly funny and such an easy, engaging read.
I'm not normally a fan of crime fiction or mysteries, but I'm totally sold on the New Jersey bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum. She's not one of the many kickass crime fighting chicks of fiction. Oh no, she's working the gossip tree of Italian mommas and busybodies. Not to say that there aren't fight scenes, explosions, and gun play. Actually, the gun play is very, very dangerous if you're a roast chicken in this novel.
That may make the book sound more lighthearted than it is. But the end effect is that the gritty parts balance out the humor.
My copy of One for the Money said there was a sequel. Great!
I got it. Read it in a day.
Got the next one. Read it in two days.
I'm on Four to Score right now. If I finish it in the next day I'll have read seven books in eight days.
Definitely on a book bender.
Damn.
I keep thinking about stopping, but then Joe Morelli does something interesting and I want to read more. And then I get a hint that someone happens (maybe) with Ranger in book five, so of course I want to get to book five.
I've redefined what "laying in supplies" for what will likely be a long, snowy weekend means: a fridge full of chinese takeout and books four, five and six checked out from the library, on my coffee table and ready to go.
I looked to the series itself for some relief. I mean, even if I didn't have the willpower to stop this madness, the series had to end sometime. Right? There can't be an endless supply of Stephanie Plum novels waiting to suck me into a never-ending book bender. Right? There can only be a few more novels in this series, surely.
Eighteen.
Janet Evanovich has at least eighteen Stephanie Plum novels out.
I realized today that I am a collector. This would not come as a surprise to my mother who threw out many of my prized collections of rocks, sticks, buttons, and happymeal toys over the years, but it came as a surprise to me.
It's been years since I collected anything, really collected anything. The last time when I wanted to have the whole set was most likely in the Beanie Baby era. I've said flippantly that I "collect shoes" but really what I mean by that is that I have more pairs than are strictly necessary. I have none of the collector's zeal for researching, coveting, finding, buying, displaying, and discussing my shoe "collection."
I collect old computers ... but that's a bit more like a graveyard waiting to be recycled.
I definitely collect coffee mugs. Actually ... I don't. Once people know you're a coffee addict, they give you mugs. I landed a nifty set of four this Christmas. One has a penguin on it. Very cute. But I haven't purchased a coffee mug for myself in five years. Four years if you count the travel mug I purchased while at a week-long workshop after realizing I'd forgotten to bring the travel mug I had at home (a gift).
And then I realized, I'm a book collector. I collect books.
I know -- not shocking -- but it was to me.
I had never seen the hodgepodge of paperbacks lining overstuffed shelves as a collection. Really I'd just seen it as a way of life. (Which probably should have been my first clue.) Every year I get more books. I weed out some to give away, but I always buy more. Ones I want. Ones I've researched. Ones I've coveted. But I thought of it not as an activity, but as evidence of time passing.
Days turn into weeks and books accumulate. It's a fact of life, isn't it?
I was always weirded out in the heyday of of home renovation TV when the homeowners would cite the floor-to-ceiling built in bookcases as having no function and needing to go.
"I just don't know what to do with them!" the wife would squeal.
The husband would state longingly to the TV host, "I'm gonna be happy to take a sledgehammer to those."
And I felt a little faint.
Sledgehammer? Don't know what to do?They're bookshelves! Fill them with books! Surely you have books, oodles and oodles of books overgrowing their very modest bookshelves every year and you need those gorgeous built in shelves! Surely! Right?
Even with my Nook tablet I'm still buying paper books. Sometimes because if the paper book is the same price as the ebook I say, what the hell, and I go and buy it from my local retailer. If I'm not actively saving money I might as well be spending that extra cash locally. And sometimes I want the paper book because I intend to keep the book. Display it on my shelf. Reread it one day. If I'm marginally impressed by book one of a series, I'll buy book two for my Nook. But if I'm desperate for the sequel, then I know I need the paper product. ... because I'm a collector.
Thanks to theLiz for pointing me to this wonderful video. The blurb about it in YouTube says that a couple in Toronto spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking and animating the books at Type bookstore in Toronto -- and you buy everything you see in the video at Type! The same couple also shot the "Organizing the Bookcase" video earlier in the post. I can't take credit for any of these videos, but their marvelous little pieces of ingenuity.
January arrived quietly here, and in its wake 5-7" of snow. It was as if mother nature -- who, like the rest of us, had been weary and distracted by the holidays -- suddenly remembered that it was winter and she should really get on that snow-thing she had promised us.
Safely tucked indoors, listening to the scrape and beep of the snow plow clearing the parking lot, I watched the tabby cat sit by the window and try to tap every snowflake that stuck to the outside of the glass.
I'm still in the process of wrapping up the old year, and thus I'm beginning the new one slowly. I have almost 30 more books from my 2011 reading list that I'd like to blog about. I have goals and plans to make, but it doesn't bother me that they've not been made before the first seconds of 2012 ticked away.
I already know that my biggest goals for 2012 are ones which clarified themselves in 2011 -- I know what I need to do to live that life and be the person I want to be, the writer I want to be, the entrepreneur I want to be, and everyday I am taking small steps toward that that person. In this respect, I've not wanted to change anything about my attitude or habits in 2012.
And -- for the first time since I laid out all the money months ago -- I'm seriously glad I invested in two new pairs of boots. I anticipate a long white winter to come.
I invite everyone to leave a comment and tell me your hopes, goals, and plans for the new year -- or leave me the link if you've already blogged it.
For the past week or so, I've been fully consumed by a book bender. Which is a lot like any other bender. You overdo it. You spend all of your waking hours that aren't at work, working on your bender progress. And some of your non-waking hours become waking hours all in the pursuit of finishing another page, another chapter, another book. More. More. More of a good thing can't be bad? you ask yourself. And the bender replies, Of course not.
First thing book I hit on my bender was 
