Category: books

Good Reads

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

So I’m setting myself up on Good Reads, which is proving more difficult than it should be. ‘Cause there are books

(1) I own, but read so long ago, I don’t remember if I liked them or not,

(2) I think I remember reading, but that was so long ago, I am not sure if I read them, or maybe it was my sister that read them, or my best friend in junior high….

(3) I read during that period of time when I was poor and living in San Francisco and got all my new reads from the library, so I didn’t keep a record of them,

(4) I own, but for the life of me, can’t remember if I read, or if I just bought them intending to read them but haven’t,

(5) I own them, read them, maybe even liked them, but don’t want to admit it,

(6) I’m pretty sure I only saw the movie. But maybe I read the book. Or maybe not. If it’s the former, it’s tough to judge a book by its movie.

(7) I read, I hated… do I dare list it to let everyone know of the hate, or risk giving it the attention it doesn’t deserve?

Write, write, write

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

Okay, so I am doing this:

2012 Clarion West Write-a-thon

2012 Clarion West Write-a-thon

to push myself through the final five chapters of the first draft of my novel. My participant page is here: http://clarionwest.org/writeathon/nancyeshaffer

From http://clarionwest.org/about:

Clarion West brings new writers to the field of speculative fiction by providing a venue for a transformative experience in the form of a lengthy and intensive workshop focusing on literary quality, diversity of viewpoints, range of material, and other essential qualities.

The write-a-thon is to raise money for scholarship support for the Clarion West writer’s workshop: http://clarionwest.org/support, which has an in-person six-week version in Seattle. Go here to sponsor me:

http://clarionwest.org/writeathon/nancyeshaffer

Tell me a story

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 14 Comments

I complained the other day about Hollywood’s trend of remaking current foreign films and TV shows and doing remakes of (slightly) older American films and TV shows (especially annoying when you are any age of adult and can remember the original like it was yesterday because it was).

This seemed to contradict a stray thought I had later that day in which I was remembering mourning the passing of television shows and film series I had loved (esp. Deep Space Nine, Angel, and Harry Potter) and how I comforted myself with the knowledge that “something new will come along I will love, it always does.”

“New”, of course, is relative. It can be argued there are no truly “new” stories to tell, but I think it depends on what you mean by “new.” If stories are stripped down to their archetypal bones, then no, there probably aren’t any new stories out there, but there are plenty of new ways to tell the same archetypal story. Make your Odysseus a female character in the modern day instead of a male. Pile this culture/era/sub-culture’s baggage atop the archetype instead of that culture/era/sub-culture’s baggage–no one will recognize the story archetype without a lot of wincing, and it becomes fresh again.

Likewise, easily recognizable tropes or characters can be made fresh again with a fresh angle to them. Set the (yet another) vampire story in the American south, or have the vampire share a flat with a werewolf and a ghost. Give your formerly-Victorian characters cell phones and sophisticated 21st-century adversaries to test their skills against.

That said, there IS such a thing as trope-fatigue. And making your “adaptations” too thinly-disguised by your “variations” to be fresh enough.

Sometimes, what I really want is to curl up and revisit the same story told the same way I remember it. Sometimes, what I really want is a story trope/archetype/kink that’s deep in my bones told in a way so different from what I’ve heard before I don’t recognize it at first. Sometimes I want a film/show that was done forty years ago, and not too well, to be given a decent (and fresh) treatment.

But I rarely want to see the same story told in just a slightly tweaked way ten years or one year after I saw it before.web statistics

NaNoWriMo Day 23

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 12 Comments

New words: 1,670
Total words: 38,730
Goal: 50,000

38730 / 50000
(77.46%)

As my story fleshes itself out, I see myself taking an approach that I can only call the fantasy equivalent of “hard science fiction.” Hard science fiction attempts to bring scientific accuracy to the speculative elements of a story, either by basing them in actual contemporary scientific fact, or extrapolating from that fact to theoretical ideas that are likely to be confirmed in the near future based on what we know now.

The “fantasy equivalent” of this, for me, is to have the fantasy elements in my story–whether it is strange beings, their powers, or the “magic” humans do to interact with/effect these beings–be, not supernatural, but natural phenomena. I am only straying from the “hard” line by saying these fantastical elements are natural phenomenon that scientists at present just don’t have the theoretical concepts or observational techniques to deal with yet.

I sort of can’t help this naturalistic approach. Although I am perfectly comfortable with the supernatural in fiction, there is something I want to say with this story that makes taking this approach important to me.

But as a result, it is feeling a bit like I’ve sucked all the sense of wonder out of my novel. I did a Harry Potter marathon this past week since I got the final movie on DVD/Blu ray, and the thing that makes HP appeal to so many people, I think, is you can see and do so many fascinating things in his world, whether it is turning a loathed relative into a human balloon, or riding over a lake on the back of a half-bird, half-horse, or visiting someone else’s memories inside a sink full of mist. Magic is afoot in his world, and there is so much more to his world than an ordinary muggle ever suspects.

Similar case with Buffy, or the Dresden Files, or Star Trek, or anything like that. There is an element of each of these story worlds that is beyond escapist and actually transcendent, because, for a short time, these stories allow you feel as if you are touching something beyond the mundane. They do this by starting very much in the mundane, and taking you on a gradual journey to fantastical places where you can do and see these amazing things.

I have to figure out how to do that, to make my world more interesting, without turning it into a cartoon version of itself.

I don’t want to write “just another fantasy novel” with elves and magic and evil sorcerers and whatnot. I need to find a way to take my more “serious/rationalistic” approach and imbue it with a sense of magic.

Original fiction project – week of 9/25/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

Dis/inhibition: I decided I just wanted this final proofreading over, so I set a goal of doing one chapter a day (and twice on Sundays!), and today I’m on chapter 40 out of 43. So go, me. Still on the fifth character illustration, though. Those I just get picky about, lol.

New story: I started to make good progress on chapter 7 after spending some extra time on figuring out mythology and backstory, then I hit another snag. My old novel, Dis/inhibition took place in a fictional town quite a bit like my home town, but not actually my home town. I prefer fictional settings, because if you need a particular location, you just invent it. My new story takes place in San Francisco, and while there’s a bit of play possible, if you go naming actual streets and intersections and then claim there’s a building/bridge/park there, or that a building/bridge/park was there a century ago, you can’t do anything too wildly untrue.

Well, I suppose you could, but the further from reality you are, the more you are writing about alterno!San Francisco rather than real San Francisco. And I always had the impression that one of the tools of urban fantasy was to use the accuracy about the real world settings to make the fantasy elements seem more compelling, more as if they could be true as well. And I don’t want to veer from that, not if I don’t have to. So I am having to step back once again and think through every setting I use–do I need it in the story? Really need it? Do I need it to be there?

I want to get this chapter done by mid-month so NaNo prep can start. Back to it.

Pottermore

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

I’ve only dipped my toe into Pottermore, which I finally got access to this morning. Actually, I didn’t find out about it until I got to work this morning. So there I am, overwhelmed with stuff to do and looking at a busy week ahead of me, and now they decide to give me access? Murphy (of Law fame) is obviously their head membership bigwig.

Anyway, the website is down for the moment, so I thought I’d record a few initial impressions. The main one which is, the “new content”? LOL, I will bet all my sickles and knuts the “new content” is coming straight out of Rowling’s old story notes and discarded word count. Any writer (even me of overwriting fame) has a ton of content they wrote way back when that didn’t make it into the final draft, not because it wasn’t good, or relevant, or “the wrong direction for the story”, but just because it was tangential, or background information. Or became tangential/background info as the plot of the story developed.

So how much of this “new” content is new from Rowling’s POV? Probably none of it. But as someone who enjoys deleted scenes on DVD extras, and writer/director voice-over versions of movies/episodes explaining their creative process, I vote this “pretty darned cool.”

ETA: And now that the site’s back up and I’ve read along a little further, I have found the page where she admits to all this. ; )

Bridge over troubled waters

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 21 Comments

So I finally, finally finished the latest Dresden Files novel, Ghost Story. I think I am the last one on my flist to do so. Some folks gave it enthusiastic reviews, others were less than impressed. I have to admit to slogging through some tedium at times, which is part of the reason I took so long to finish it. The other part is, I only read non-interweb stuff for a short while before bed each night.

But see, there is a reason this book wasn’t the Best!DresdenFilesNovel!Ever! It was a bridge story. And bridge stories are traditionally kind of mediocre. Thar be spoilers beyond here!