Regarding rules and the following thereof: I had a bit of an epiphany while working on this latest story. (Ask any writer: you learn more stuff by writing a story, including stuff about yourself.) I was one of those rules-obeying kids who worried a lot about conciliating figures of authority so they would like me. And when I started trying to create Jordy, who is not like me, one of the things I knew about him was that he has no doubt about whether the important people in his life love him. But the thing is, I kept expressing that in my mind as, his parents love him in spite of his various flaws and the fact he doesn't live the type of life they do. And at a certain point I looked at the character, and I looked at the source material for the character, and I realized that the character's loved ones do not love him in spite of his flaws--they love him because of his virtues. Which led me to think harder about his good points and how they are expressed. Because it turns out that it is entirely possible to be a person who doesn't live the way your parents did, or think the way they do, and still have respect and affection for them. The difference between being a rebel and just being your own person may be at least partly a matter of attitude, and also possibly courage. Which was an interesting thing to discover about the source material for Jordy, and it's kind of cool to try to get that across in the character.

So. Twilight.

Half the people I know on the Internets are reading this series, and I think I have to get in on the fun. The copy at my public library is checked out and I am like eightieth on the holds list, and I have technical issues with the ebook...

So it looks like I might actually purchase this sucker. Dang.

I can tell myself it is an exercise in learning how not to write a spine-chillingly creepy relationship between two young characters. This is useful because Jordy, the main character in the Kowalski story, is not supposed to be creepy about his girlfriend Vanessa. It's not a big problem in this story because she's at home and he's in Texas, so she participates mostly via telephone calls. And Jordy is too worried about, you know, people getting killed all around him to have much time for creepy thoughts.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure I can avoid creepiness without such research. Jordy is not by nature inclined to try to control Vanessa's behaviour, and she is not by nature inclined to put up with that shit.

But hell. Even the excerpts people are posting all over the Internet makes this look like a creepy, creepy book. The author has said the no-sex-no-drugs story is an attempt to represent "the good kids who play by the rules." Based on the excerpts I really wonder whether her definition of "good kids" means ill-humoured and self-centred ones like her female lead, or controlling stalkers like her male lead.

I should add here that I have never really gotten the bad-boy thing. No, really. Heathcliff gives me hives and Wuthering Heights is not romantic in that way. Yes, I know--I am all about the dirty rock stars. Thing is, my initial interest in dirty rock stars began when I fell for Bruce Springsteen, who had the dual benefits of being attractively scruffy but also, inarguably, a fundamentally decent person.

[Oh, okay. I had the misfortune of seeing the movie Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band when I was eleven or so. And yeah, the villain band (revealed at the end of the movie) were represented as Aerosmith playing "Come Together" at the height of their filthy, drugged-out period. And I immediately sat up straighter and thought, "Wait, what's this?" and promptly rooted for the Future Villain Band, who were so much cooler than the good guys. But that was an abberation. And also, you know, Aerosmith. I don't agree that the devil has all the best music--hello, U2 and the aforementioned Bruce Springsteen!--but he certainly has a lot of it!]

So my thing is, I have nothing against "good kids who play by the rules," but the the kid in the excerpts I am reading doesn't strike me as a particularly shining example of being a "good kid." (We'll let the vampire off the "good kid" hook because--vampire!) She's uncharitable, unkind, and mentally inert.

I suppose the question is, whose "rules" do the kid characters play by? By my standards a sexually active dope-smoker who is actively kind to other people is a better example of a good kid than someone who stays within all the lines prescribed by adults but resents the hell out of everyone around her. (Yeah, I know--a lot of adolescents do go through a period of generalized angst... but this kid doesn't seem to care about or be interested in anything. Almost diagnostic for pain-in-the-arse kid rather than good kid, at least in my book!)

And, in an outburst of common sense rarely seen on the Internet, the major gripe people seem to have about this book is the way it makes it okay for the girl to be controlled by the boy. A whole lot of people have addressed this much better than I can (and cleolinda's is really damned funny) but I also appreciated the Amazon citizen reviewer who remarked that she has no fear of her daughter getting mixed up with a vampire, but she doesn't want her getting into a relationship with one of the zillions of selfish controlling abusive bastards that populate the world. When you think about the messages books send to "good kids"--well, that's a real fucking doozy.

To get back to my initial point, I could say I'm reading this for the how-not-to points. That's a lie. I want to read it for the snark.

But I have a feeling some of the things I'll get out of it won't be strictly amusing...

This is probably further to the rant post from a couple of days ago, but this morning I found myself thinking of something that's occurred to me before: this business of blogging, while certainly a significant time-waster in some cases, is really a very good thing for a writer. This journal, and an email list I'm on for mystery writers, represent the major way I talk about writing. And it's certainly not a bad thing for a writer to express herself in writing.

What I hadn't thought about clearly until this morning, though, is this: most of you folks don't know me. I mean, of the people on my friends-list, less than half a dozen of them have ever met me in person. To everyone else, I am the sum of my words and how I use them.

I am, in fact, the protagonist of my own blog. My own main character, if you will. And the comments I get in reaction to my post give me an idea of how well I'm doing, in terms of creating this character--her personality, motivations, wishes.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not creating a fiction here. The me I present on my blog is, as far as I am concerned, me. It's just that the character whose voice you are reading is created entirely by the interaction between my words and your reality.

I know I've thought about this before, because on the infrequent occasions when I post a picture of myself I sometimes think, "I bet that's not how some of my friends-list pictures me!"

So I guess, if I want to know whether I can create a character, what I need to do is review comments here and see what proportion of commenters seemed to understand the intent of the post they were commenting on.

I am either onto something that will prove really valuable to me as a writer, or I have taken too many pain pills this week.

Back during NaNoWriMo 2005 I decided I was finally going to write a story with a band in it. I had a plot, I had some characters, I figured it was time to try it. I liked the results enough that I eventually decided to turn it into a "real story" and have been at it ever since.

I've written, since then, a few posts about the decisions I made in creating the central band, Kowalski. An important and early decision was that the band would be more interesting and relatable if they were young, broke, and basically nice people. Most of the rock band stories I have ever read are about characters so rich and glamourous that I have a hard time giving a crap about them.

Since nobody but me has read the whole story (except for the original NaNo draft in the Memories section--a couple of people read that one for me faithfully) I haven't yet gotten any stick over whether rock musicians are, by their very nature, prone to be assholes. Since writing the first draft I have done enough shall we say field research among young Haligonian musicians to be confident that Kowalski is plausible.

But I was still amused when I visited a local message board yesterday and spotted a thread about Matt Mays, who regular readers of this journal will know is a local musician of some renown. The thread, apparently started by someone who was drunk at the time, is titled "Matt Mays is a nice fuckin' guy." I checked it a minute ago and it was six pages long. And nobody has yet challenged the basic premise--there's been some off-topic activity but for the most part the thread consists of people agreeing that Matt (along with various other musicians of local renown) is a nice fuckin' guy.

It's heartwarming, really.

And fuckin' nice to know.

A theory of protagonists, on editorrent2--it's interesting stuff, and includes this gem:

All of the ideas on the page spring, in some way or another, from the writer's individual psyche. We may think we've modeled the character of the waitress on a girl we knew in high school, but in fact, what we've done is model the waitress on our interpretation, our understanding, our memory and sensory impressions filtered through our own unique consciousness, of that same girl. The character has more to do with how we interpret people in our world than with who those people actually are.

When I talk about "character kidnapping," what I mean is that I am modeling a character on the impression I have formed of some real person (not someone I actually know, but have seen interviewed or watched onstage or something like that--someone whose personality has made an impact on me and caused me to think "that person is like this". Eventually it won't matter if I do meet and get to know the model, because the character develops an independent reality.)

In other words, when I talk about "character kidnapping," I am talking about exactly what the quote above says.

Cool.

I know I said I was all through with the Tudors, but as my last post makes clear, I seem to have lied. I'll finish The Sunne In Splendour and then it's ho for the Ives book on Anne Boleyn, which appears to be the biography of Henry VIII's second queen.

Over the weekend, however, I had two vampire novels by Barbara Hambly out of the public library. Over the past few weeks I have done considerable giggling and a little ranting about this one inept vampire novel, and in passing I commented that I really don't do vampires in the first place. Hambly's books, especially Those Who Hunt the Night (classed as young adult in my public library) were recommended to me as excellent examples of the genre. Subgenre. Whatever. I also signed out Traveling With the Dead (containing absolutely no references to Jerry Garcia) which is about the same characters (James Asher, Oxford don and former spy, his intellectual wife Lydia, and Don Simon Ysidro, 350-year-old vampire who "danced with both of Henry VIII's remarkable daughters"--a nice turn of phrase for sure.) The books take place in 1907-08.

( And my verdict is... )

So. Apparently I'm not into vampires, and apparently I know why.

Good. Now I don't have any scruples about dropping the subject and moving on to other things that interest me more. Whew!

Oh my God, I'm quoting Saving Private Ryan (I'll spare you my thoughts on Saving Private Ryan--suffice it to say there are some movies that live up to relentless hype--The Changeling really is the scariest fucking movie in existence--and some that don't.)

Anyways.

Why do I keep harping on that inept vampire fiction when I am neither into vampires nor, despite evidence to the contrary, completely heartless?

I'll tell you why. There's a lesson in there for us. And it's a lesson so clear that you don't need the brains of a Belgian sheepdog to find it, either, which makes it useful even to those of us so zooed on cold meds that we can't tell Richard the Third from Richard Simmons.

Okay, forget I said that last part.

My point, and I swear I do have one, is this: over the past couple of weeks I have gone on and on about my main problem with this piece of crap, and the problem is not so much that it's distractingly badly written, as that the problem is serious enough that even the distractingly bad writing cannot distract you from it:

The author apparently sees her vampire as an attractive and desirable character.

She apparently expects us to share this opinion. Indeed, her whole story hinges on this assumption, since he is in fact the main character. And it's an assumption we all make as writers: we assume other people, readers, will want to spend time in the company of the characters we create.

However, she has not done a single thing to make us like or care about him. So when the female lead lays eyes on him and immediately starts thinking romantic/horny/whatever thoughts, the reaction of the reader is "so what?"

The reaction of the reader would probably be "oh HELL no!" if the female lead wasn't such a waste of pixels herself, so really, it could be worse.

But that's a problem I encounter relatively often in mysteries, which are what I write: the author clearly positions the main character as someone I am supposed to identify with and relate to and cheer for and admire... and does not do a single thing to earn those reactions from me.

And there we are, right back to the basics: Show, don't tell. And be careful what you show me, at that. Because if your "spunky, feisty" female protagonist (who had better be a fucking Schipperke if you're giving her those adjectives) demonstrates her feisty spunk simply by being rude to all her cross her path, whether they deserve it or not, well then I will probably see her as a noun that is only polite if she is, in fact, canine. I won't like her and I won't root for her to save the day and win the man.

If your darkly handsome vampire lead goes around killing the innocent without mercy, do not expect me to boomerang around with him when he runs into his One!True!Love! and gets all sentimental. Because I am not she, and I am wary about my throat.

It's a matter of being aware of what you're doing as much as anything. In showing us how downtrodden the heroine is, are you making her whiny and uncharitable? It's surprising how often I find myself not liking the view I get through the character's eyes. Which is cool if that's what you intend, but... is it?

I posted a week or two ago about trying to create a small-scale likable protagonist, and some of the decisions I made in attempting to create a perspective character readers might like, despite the fact he's a scattered thinker and maybe not terribly smart and has a tendency to break "dumb" laws regarding drinking ages and some controlled substances.

The vampire story that's about to earn its own tag? Is a great example of what happens when you put no thought into how the reader is going to experience your character, and just assume everyone else loves/lusts after your character as much as you do.

Because: bad writing.

And also: ew!!

Over the past few days I have spent a lot of time and many pixels thinking about characters (for purposes of this journal, Richard III is a character, because obviously I can only deal with the impression I get by reading.) I've described a character that doesn't work for me, and why. (I'm not patting myself on the back for my perceptiveness here--I would be extremely surprised if the inept vampire hero I was talking about appealed to anyone other than his creator.)

And obviously, since I write and have no plans to stop, I must think myself capable of creating characters who might potentially appeal to readers other than myself. So I'm going to take a post to specifically describe my thinking, and the choices I've been making, in developing my current protagonist.

Before I go any further let me state for the record that the character may not appeal to everyone--or indeed anyone except me--but I have hopes.

I'd also like to invite anyone who reads this thing, whether you're on the friends-list or not, to share specifics of what you've done to create your own would-be-likable characters. Or perhaps qualities that make characters appealing when you read. The more specific the better, okay?

( So: Jordy. What's he all about? )

And this is probably enough for now, but what I find interesting is this: in many ways this is not a complicated character. And it turns out that writing someone like that can actually be kind of complicated.

Okay. When I was a mere undergraduate, second year I think it was, I took a Shakespeare course. And to my astonishment--after extensive exposure to The Bard in both high school and via my dad, who is a maniac on Shakespeare--by the end of the first day of class I had a revelation: Shakespeare really was the greatest writer who ever lived!

Which is clearly subjective and open for argument, but I'll never forget the revelation: Shakespeare was a guy. And he wrote that stuff. Like, someone was responsible for it. It didn't just... happen.

(Full disclosure: I kind of feel the same way about "Me and Bobby McGee." What do you mean, somebody sat down and wrote that? Didn't it just appear?)

The first play we studied, with an enthusiastic prof who knew when to stop belabouring a point, was in fact Richard III.

( Two different versions of the opening scene behind the cut--thanks, YouTube! )

And I thought Gimme Shelter was dark...

I mentioned a few posts ago that I've started reading about Richard III again (I do that periodically.) It occurred to me last night that, after all the fuss I made over The Other Boleyn Girl and its historical/personality inaccuracies, it's a little strange that I don't get all worked up over that play by Shakespeare.

I mean, it's completely inaccurate. Character assassination, even. And yet I think it's just dandy, and can recite the opening soliloquoy by heart. Richard in that play is the best black-hearted villain EVAR!

Which may say something about my own inconsistency as a critic.

But it probably says a lot more about that old adage that if you're a good enough writer, you can get away with damn near anything.

Just don't tell the Ricardians I said so. Because in real life I am mostly on their side.

I remarked last week that Dexter, the TV show based on Darkly Dreaming Dexter and its sequel, about the serial killer who works for the cops, is on CTV. I watched the premiere but wasn't sure I'd stick with the show. The premise is interesting (serial killer uses his Awesum!SerialKillerSkillz! to rid the world of people who are... pretty much just like him.) I squicked out pretty badly over the books because, while in fiction I can sometimes subscribe to the notion that a particular bad guy just flat "needed killin'," I can never seem to get behind the idea that anyone needed torturin' to death. I'm afraid I always end up siding with whoever is doing the screaming.

( More on the cuts behind the cut, so to speak. )

I am part of an online writer's community, and some of the more serious (and by "serious" I mean "published") writers there are a bit snarky about the sort of writing group that consists of cheerleading and back-patting.

I say this simply as an introduction to my in-person writers' group, which pretty much consists of cheerleading and backpatting. Oh, and eating tasty snacks.

The thing is: we're all serious about our writing, although all of us have other stuff going on, and most of us (except for me, inflicting myself on you) have very little outlet for talking about our writing. So at our sorta-monthly meetings we talk about writing, read excerpts, and kind of encourage each other along with offering suggestions or little bits of critique or whatever.

I actually had a bit of a breakthrough last night, in a way: I accept that there are too many characters in my story, but I certainly can't be bothered to go back to scenes I wrote months ago and prune out characters just yet. It's much too easy to get bogged down in a first draft. And I've been mostly reading the early parts so far for chronological reasons, so whenever I read I get "you know, you have too many characters in that scene." Point long since taken, and I'll do something about it when I go back to do something about it. Honest. Also, my characters are all really young, so one member keeps telling me it's probably a YA novel and I keep telling her that it's fine with me if it is.

However, last night I read the first half of the scene in which Jordy meets Mrs. Goodnight, after which one member remarked that she still thinks there are too many names floating around. (I finally pointed out that at least a little bit of the problem is that the group is hearing about two pages worth every couple of months--there are too many characters, but more context would help.)

However, after we agreed that I'll look after editing that sort of thing once I get this draft done, pretty well everyone remarked that they like the perspective character, and that he feels like a real person.

Which is the only reason I can see why any reader would want to carry on with this thing--you pretty much have to like the main character. If you don't, why would you worry about how worried he is?

So that was something.

Quite probably my last post about the vampire thing, at least until the next post on that poor hapless reviewer's journal:

Of course he is stunningly gorgeous. Naturally.

And that? Bores me all by itself.

I've already had someone describe Jordy, in the Kowalski story, as looking sort of like a lost baby werewolf. If necessary, I might have another character at some later date comment that really, his features are such that he ought to look sort of ratty, but he doesn't because he has such a well-meaning expression. (Ratty isn't so bad, really. Bob Dylan is kind of ratty looking. Jordy looks more like a mouse.)

On the other hand, Jordy does have the traditional gorgeous girlfriend. At least, he thinks so.

I haven't abandoned all hope on the Kowalski mystery--I've been making slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

I think--and I may have mentioned this here or in a comment on someone else's journal--that part of the complexity of this story is, I had that fairly complete draft from the NaNo experiment of a couple of years ago. I've made some major changes to the story since then but many of the original incidents and plot points were still included.

The only thing is, the NaNo draft did not have to hang together, it just had to be finished. Which means that the typescript draft I have been using as a very general guide reflects the sequence I wrote at a hundred miles an hour, not necessarily the best sequence for this (supposedly intended-for-publication-someday) version.

So I've been having to reconsider where everything fits together, and even if it really does.

The sequence in which Kowalski visit the bootlegger with Mrs. Goodnight? Is probably going to have to go. And I have to figure out how many days I'm logically working with here, so I can jam as much logically-sequenced mayhem into every one as I need.

I have, however, given Jordy and his friends a reasonable, yet faulty, assumption to work on: that Caleb's killer could not have avoided getting blood on himself, which means that they've discarded one potential suspect who was seen after the murder wearing the same not-bloody clothes Jordy had seen him in earlier. The cops, in a cops-perspective scene that may or may not work, have already noted that Alan was drugged before his fatal accident, and since there was so little mess where Caleb was killed they suspect he was drugged, too.

(Jordy is the person who found Caleb's body, but he understandably didn't spend any time looking around, so all he remembers is a big pool of blood and he assumes there was more of it all over the place.)

My thought is that, if they clear this suspect now, he will by the Law Of the Cozy look like a better suspect than he is to the reader.

It's occurred to me, and will shortly occur to Jordy, that Anabeth is plenty big enough to have strangled clueless Stu. At the moment he's worried about her mostly because she's been hanging around with the two boys from Indiana, who may have known one of the kids who died in the accident Jordy thinks is behind the current murders. But when he begins to get suspicious of the convenient kilt and t-shirt she was wearing when they all met, he also starts to think that she could easily be the killer.

Before that, however, there will be the scene in which learns that Button Constituency--the whole band--was in on getting them to this festival so the Indiana boys could have a look at Erica and her friends. Which is a nice touch of solidarity but freaks Kowalski right the hell out.

I don't know whether he should have gotten the Anabeth clue before then, though. Because all of them were in on this together, although they all swear they didn't kill anybody. In fact, they come out to the campground to swear it.

And right after they leave, the shooting breaks out...

Oh, I have plans, all right!

Okay, just in case any regular readers of this journal are out there thinking, "Wait for it, the next post is going to be all about character-kidnapping with reference to various members of the Trews"...

Done! Already done! And let me just tell you, I now feel a dozen times worse about killing off Caleb, although this being a murder mystery I really, really have to leave him dead.

I may, however, go back and give him startlingly blue eyes...

Yes, I know--the way I persevere on things you'd think I have OCD. We all have these tendencies. I admit I have a bunch of them--I prefer to think of it as a long attention span.

(And in case you're wondering, I'm not through with the Grateful Dead yet, either!)

Anyway, I had some problems with the book. Obviously. But since I am not a historian, and not especially attached to the period, my problems were not the ones I have with, say, horsey books in which stupid stuff that would never happen in real life happens. I don't know a lot about this stuff and have gradually learned to stay calm over things that don't really concern me.

So I'm not all that concerned by the business of making Mary the youngest of the siblings, even though the one historical source I've read has her the eldest. I'm not super-concerned with the fact the novel lops about eight years off her age, and I'm therefore willing to go along with the resulting impression of blushing virginal innocence surrounding Mary in the early pages of the novel. (The one thing we seem to know for sure about Mary's early life is that she left the French court with a very naughty reputation--hardly the chaste innocent of the novel.)

I'm even pretty much okay with the way the novel expands the affair with Henry to extend over years and years, and to assume a much greater importance to Henry than seems plausible. I mean, I can sort of picture him having a continued soft spot for a discarded mistress who didn't cause him any trouble, but I jib at the notion she was important to him.

I'll even go along with the picture of the psychotically ambitious Anne, and the way the novel seems to accept every scurrilous rumour thrown around during her disgrace as true (incest with her brother, witchcraft, repeated adultery.)

So, having accepted all this for purposes of the story (it's an alternate-universe story), the stuff that bothered me about the novel was strictly novel-world stuff.

It was mostly Mary, sometimes a milquetoast and sometimes an anachronistic feminist warrior. And on second thoughts, I am unsure how much of my "oh for fuck's sake" reaction is exactly what the novelist wanted. I initially read the book as if the writer wanted us to take Mary as given, but maybe that's my failing as the reader. Maybe I'm not supposed to like Mary very much.

I'm not concerned with the business of Mary's affair with Henry, because it's not like she had a lot of choice (even absent the prodding of her ambitious family.) But she keeps whining that she can't betray Queen Catherine... and then she does so at every turn, not only tattling in matters where her family would have known she'd have something to tell, but also dutifully turning in her information even when there was no way for any of her handlers to have known she had any. When the queen stands up for herself, Mary is presented as rooting for her, but it rings more than hollow.

There is, however, a scene between Mary and Queen Catherine in which Mary protests that if it hadn't been for the family, she'd have been loyal, and the queen contemptuously retorts that "had you not been tempted, you would not have fallen, and if you'd stood to gain nothing you would have been loyal" or words to that effect. Which makes me think, well, yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about Mary myself: easy to say she sympathizes with the queen, but she never shows it. I'm thinking of the incident with the oranges, where Mary stumbles over a tiny piece of information that nobody would ever have known she had, and she trots it along to her hated family at once. That incident goes beyond her understandable ambivalence about the whole social climbing atmosphere--she's participating actively there.

I just don't know if what I'm getting out of that scene was put there on purpose.

I mean, I know this character is ambivalent. It's just there are moments when I think we are led to expect one thing of the character, and she does something else that seems out of character for the person we're shown.

The whole business of being at court and wanting to flee is another thing. Obviously, that makes sense. And the story goes on and on and on about Mary's delight in living simply in the country and spending all this time with her children, right? (Those scenes are the most Mary Sueish, frankly. At least to me.) (Although the big romance with the second husband... that was tiresome as well.) I can see this character dragging herself back to court when Anne calls her--the sisterly rivalry that seems so over the top doesn't quite negate that instinct to go to a sibling who needs you. What I object to is the part when she's safely in the country, and her discarded husband arrives to claim her and the kids, and take them off to his quiet estate far from court. Okay, Mary is nervous of him (although she later sets to work to charm him, so why didn't she think of that right away?) but I didn't buy that her immediate reaction was to send Anne a panicky letter asking to be called back to the court she so fervently wished to get away from. She wanted to live peacefully in the country with her children. Her husband showed up and wanted to take her to live peacefully in the country with her children. I don't get why Mary didn't see the obvious potential benefits right away.

It's a truism that people are inconsistent. However, they are generally inconsistent in fairly consistent ways, if you see what I mean. To some extent, that's Mary in this novel. But in other ways, her behaviour is more suited to the convenience of the plot than consistent for the character I'm reading. So I'm left thinking that the romance-novel-Mary is the one the writer planned for and intended us to experience, and the scenes that bothered me were ones that just didn't read as intended.

I could be wrong, of course, but what I'll be taking from this experience is yet another warning about tweaking a character to serve the plot: the tweaking is best done well in advance, or readers may be left saying, "I don't understand why she did that."

Which is not exactly revolutionary, but I learn slowly.

So last week I was angsting a little about my whole character-kidnapping thing and whether it made me a big freak. (Not that I had any plans to stop.) However, I am no longer one bit stressed about it, and that is because yesterday I got The Other Boleyn Girl out of the public library, and if Antonia Fraser's history The Wives Of Henry VIII has any basis whatsoever in fact, then Boleyn Girl is a wonderful exercise in character kidnapping, featuring a po-faced Mary Sue in the place of Mary Boleyn. I am quite sure the novel does extreme violence to the historical facts--compared to the Fraser book the novel reverses the birth order of the Boleyns, knocks eight to ten years off their ages, turns Mary's fling with Henry into something much longer-lasting and more significant that there's any reason to believe it was, and includes every scandal about Anne from the deformed "devil's child" of rumour to the ones about incest with her brother (all together now--"Ewwww!!!!") But you may remember that last week I commented that a character based on the real guy I was reading about would probably have to be a kid for readers to take to him? I can see why the novelist did the same here: the only way to sympathize with the characters she's created is if they're young and over their heads. (Cue execution joke here, I guess.)

The novel is well-written and fairly annoying, especially the chaste "whore," Mary, who is our narrator. I have the urge to mutter "come off it!" every two pages or so.

It definitely makes me feel better about creating actual fictitious characters from real historical figures.

And I'm still going to see the movie. I expect I'll roll my eyes a fair bit, but--Eric Bana! With his shirt off!

It would take more than a prissy Mary Sue to spoil that, I'll tell you!

The mystery writing group had a meeting last night, which was pleasant. We normally just read bits of what we're working on and shoot the breeze a little--it's not a critique group by any means. Last night one of the members asked for some input on a new and improved opening scene (verdict: it is indeed new and improved) and the hostess gave us a writing exercise that turned out to be quite a lark. She made up a series of lines that must be included in the piece of writing (we all used them as our opening lines) and then we had ten minutes to write something. If you didn't like your first pick you could take another, but since mine featured the detective's sister-in-law, a stuffy Anglican bishop, coming into the agency to ask for help with... [sentence ends]

Well, I kept it. By the end of my excerpt the stuffy sister-in-law was drinking vodka (it really should have been gin) with the detective and telling her in fits and starts about a long-lost out-of-wedlock son. If I was going to do anything with it, the detective would be a smartass and the early part of the story would be sort of irreverent and light-hearted, and then the whole thing would get progressively more serious. I figured the kid's father, a career petty criminal the sister-in-law should have been smart enough to stay away from, is threatening to sabotage her career by Revealing All about the kid.

I'm almost certainly not going to do anything about this but it interested me, given that I have never really decided who Jordy's biological parents are, or anything much about them. So it was kind of an interesting exercise, if only in spotting how I can twist almost anything to serve the story I am currently working on.

Likewise those books about the Grateful Dead. I'm afraid the post over the weekend may have been a dead (heh) loss for any fans of the band who wanted to know whether the books are worth checking out. They are. A Long Strange Trip tries to be more of a history, while Living With the Dead reads like the writers are still high. The second book kind of reminds me of Up and Down With the Rolling Stones, only less muck-raking and a great deal more affectionate. And pretty damn funny. Although really, Long Strange Trip is also hilarious because it researches the same stories Living does, and presents them in far greater detail.

Although no matter how you slice it, even for someone with no particular attachment to the band, reading about Jerry Garcia slowly killing himself is pretty hard sledding.

( And then I just go on and on about character kidnapping, so nothing to see here. )

I actually have a pretty good grip on reality, honest. I know the difference between real people and the ones in my head. It's just always a cause for some rejoicing when the two collide a little bit. Which, I guess, may well happen here. I mean, the material is too good not to use!

I got a couple of books about the Grateful Dead out of the library this week--I'm not a big Dead fan or anything but I have to admit, Festival Express is enough to make anyone fond of them. (Seriously: check out that movie.)

Anyway, Long Strange Trip is wonderfully detailed, and in the course of reading through it I've discovered the cop-defending Bob Weir of Festival Express would make an ideal story character, if I was in need of a perpetual innocent who couldn't seem to stay out of trouble. I have no time to get into it right now, but I'm familiar with the complimentary term "old soul." Which is a cool image and everything, but I have to confess that, as someone who was much too mature and in fact uptight for my own good as a kid (I have begun to loosen up in recent years, thank God) I have a pronounced soft spot for those who see the world as perpetually new and surprising. It's endearing, and it makes me look at things differently as well.

My personal experience with this type of person is pretty much limited to actual children, mind you, and I think a character of this sort (Jordy, really, has a touch of it) would almost have to be young or he'd be very difficult to write. But if you pulled it off it'd be worth it.

Anyway. To the barn, and then I'll do some of my own writing and see what happens.