The Killing Moon

At the beginning of the year I decided that I needed to read more books by non-white authors. I looked at my shelves and saw a shameful lack of representation. Reading N.K Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for Vaginal Fantasy book club was a start... only trouble being I liked those books so much I have moved on to her other books and I am in danger of Nora being my token non-white author.

I am really enjoying The Killing Moon. The world-building is intricate and original and the characters are both flawed and sympathetic. Definitely one for lovers of epic fantasy.

What I'm reading now

I've been bouncing around a bit. As I mentioned in my last post, I'm now a member of three different online book clubs (Felicia Day's Vaginal Fantasy, which is genre romances, the GFY book club which arose from the comments section on gofugyourself.com and the Cook Your Books food bloggers book club). GFY & CYB have a book every other month, while VF has a main and an alt (sometimes two) every month. Which is quite a lot of books on top of other books I want to read!

So at the moment I am reading Kate Atkinson's Life After Life for GFY (review from The Observer here, which contains spoilers) and N.K Jemisin's The Killing Moon just because I want to. Next up is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I have been wanting to read for ages. That should see me through a couple of weeks!

Writers on social media

I was at an event a couple of weeks ago - a food thing, nothing to do with books - and one of the PRs blithely said "oh of course you know about SEO, 250 word posts, links back to important sites, lots of good-quality pictures". I smiled and nodded and then scurried home to find out what it is I am supposed to know about 250 word posts.

Well, turns out shorter posts are less likely to turn up in search rankings. So I need to write longer pieces about books if I want people to read these posts. Well, maybe I do, maybe I don't! And as for pictures... I mean, they do make a post prettier, but I don't take a lot of pictures of books...

So here is Urchin catching up on some bedtime reading.

There must be a lot of lists of things you must know and do, as a blogger, as an author, as a whatever. Based on the people who follow me on twitter, quite a bit of it seems to be a painting-by-numbers thing. There was an author who I followed, and whose blog I read, who insisted that the more followers on twitter the better and that it was just a numbers game. He followed vast numbers of people, and if they didn't follow him back within a certain period, he unfollowed them. His act of following me seems to have got me on some sort of list, because every day now I am followed by a bunch of people whose profiles read "author".

Now, I have a fairly flexible attitude towards following people on twitter. As long as nothing about your profile or recent tweets suggest you are a dickhead with views that will outrage me, I will follow back. But. I am a big believer in the "social" side of social media, and if you ONLY tweet praise for yourself, or ads for your book, I will unfollow you pretty damn quick. And I probably won't be buying your book.

You know what makes me buy a book? Interest and gratitude. I'm in 3 different bookclubs, which all introduce me to books I probably wouldn't have read before but which fall into line with my interests. I also buy books out of gratitude for the entertainment that writers have provided me with on social media. Chuck Wendig: great blogger, great tweeter. Jim C Hines: great blogger, great facebooker. It's not just a numbers game - there has to be some give and take.

400+ words. Take THAT SEO!

Code Name Verity 2

I ended up staying up late to finish it last night. Thoroughly enjoyed! My feeling about what Verity was doing was mostly accurate, but I didn't at all expect the denouement.

It's books like this that make me annoyed when people criticise Young Adult fiction, or say people shouldn't read it. It's a good book! Accessible to teenagers, but not infantilised or preachy or overly romanticised. Why shouldn't adults read that sort of book?

Code Name Verity

I assume everyone had an English teacher who tried to get them to engage with a book by reading a page and then making you guess what was going to happen next?

I've found myself doing that quite a lot with Code Name Verity. I've been reading it for a Goodreads book club, and finding it engrossing, but I keep thinking it is going to go a bit Sarah Waters. Of course, as it is a young adult novel, the chances of it involving explicit lesbian sex are fairly remote.  The Scheherazade aspect, of a young woman spinning a story to save her life - or at least postpone her death - is well done.

I won't say how I think it'll be resolved, but my guess is that the name, Verity, is quite important.

ETA I just got up to a bit where Queenie gets called Scheherazade, so apparently that was a deliberate motif, not just my interpretation. 

A Song of Ice and Fire - A Feast For Crows

I am now, for the first time, ahead of the Game of Thrones TV series in my reading. I don't mind the elision of characters and events - the different medium does require different story-telling techniques. What I am finding interesting is the way some characters are portrayed quite differently between the books and the series. It's hard to know if they are sometimes being written more sympathetically for the screen because the actors are popular, or if the showrunners have a plan for the character that isn't quite the same as the author's plan.

Another theory I have is that the difference in portrayal is the difference of perspective. Jaime Lannister appears much more chivalrous and heroic in the series than he does in the books. My feeling is that it is because he is a point of view character - his actions appear heroic from the outside, but some of his self-talk is decidedly not. Arya Stark appears quite confident and assured from the outside, but her self-talk is convincing herself not to be afraid. It reminds me, in a way, of the Bridget Jones books. The problem I had with that on screen was that I never really felt she was supposed to be quite as useless and pathetic as she told her diary she was, but of course that was what they had to show to convey some of the humour of the books.

I can't believe I just compared Game of Thrones to Bridget Jones. Good thing it rhymes. 

The Dresden Files

I'm on a re-read of Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files, ahead of the release of Skin Game at the end of the month. It's not the first time I have re-read them, I tend to take a run at the last couple of books at least before the next comes out, but it's the most concentrated burst of re-reading I have done. Over the course of the series his writing becomes much more fluid and engaging, but even in the first couple of chapters we are introduced to characters and ideas that are vital throughout the series. I don't know if he had an overarching plan when he started, but Butcher weaves the threads beautifully. It really stands out how much control he has over his plotting. I like that.

I also like the sense Butcher conveys that Dresden has a life outside the books. You feel that time is passing in between episodes, that things happen that we have no knowledge of. Dresden is not the only character who develops. Even little things like Murphy's haircut changing, or the Alphas aging and leaving college - they all make a three dimensional world.

In fantasy/sci-fi, you hear a lot about world building. World-building isn't just understanding the geography of a fictional world, it's creating a believable physical, mystical and emotional landscape in your world. I think some contemporary or urban fantasy writers skimp on that a little bit, with a "heck, it's New York, everyone knows New York" attitude, but Dresden shows how well it can be done even in a familiar real-world environment.

I've been thinking about maybe attending my first con, and Jim Butcher is going to be over here for Easter Con next year, so that may be a good first visit!