Going dark

I absolutely must finish packing up my dorm room in the next three days, so the blog will [probably] go dark until Sunday. Adios!

Fall employment

With any luck, I'll be spending nine hours per week next semester gainfully employed as a Student Manager in the Grinnell College Writing Lab. I have an unfortunate suspicion that this really means signing people up for appointments and the pay is lousy, but I'd rather work there than in the Dining Hall. At least it's vaguely writing-related.

Also, what's up with the bizarre differences in minimum wage? Here in Iowa it's supposedly $6.20. At the moment, the two states with the highest minimum wage are Washington ($7.93) and Oregon ($7.80). Minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act is only $5.15, which is patently ridiculous. The lesson here? Everyone working for minimum wage should immediately migrate to Washington. This country definitely needs to raise the federal minimum wage.

Er. Not that that's really writing-related, which was the purpose of this blog. I just think it's a little outrageous.

story from Fantasy Lit class

Oops. Didn't mean to take quite that long of a break from posting. Got my final project for Fantasy Lit back - some interesting comments. My teacher pointed out that I started to pour in loads of mythology without much background. I think my problem was that the more research I did, the more I wanted to include. My main regret when it comes to this project is the fact that I didn't start earlier and therefore didn't give myself enough time to get fully immersed in the world and figure out all the rules. There are no lapses of internal logic or anything glaring like that, just a little too much info that doesn't always make sense.

In a nice twist of fate, I think I may continue working on this project. The heroine, Elisha, has got a certain hold of me. She's a security guard at a bank and her older brother's a postal worker. That right there, that's my favorite thing about her. Urban fantasy lets people have ordinary jobs!

This post is a bit incoherent due to just having woken up. I'll come back and clean it up later.

Okay, what's up with the weather here? From whenever I first woke up until 1 PM (when I got up), we had crazy rain and a whole lot of thunder. For a girl from Oregon who's used to drizzle and almost zero thunder, it was just plain weird. And now we've got thunder again. Only a week ago it was 90 degrees out.

On the topic of writing: I was talking to a friend, a little while back, about the different types of fantasy literature. There is, of course, the ever-popular "sword & sorcery", also known as "high fantasy". It can be easily identified if it fails the Fantasy Novelist's Exam. After briefly touching on "feminist" fantasy, which spans a wide range of books, we talked mostly about urban fantasy. The problem with most urban fantasy, according to her, is that it never seems very realistic. A lot of authors don't quite pull off the (admittedly difficult) task of making it believable that fantastic creatures are coexisting with humans.

A really good example of this: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, I realize Buffy was TV, not a book. But the idea that an entire town would be thick enough to continue living on a Hellmouth and not notice that people constantly went missing and turned up with their blood drained just seems ridiculous. I bought Angel a little more, just because in a big city it would be easier for fantasy creatures to hide. Supernatural does it pretty well, but that's because the main characters travel around the entire country to hunt evil things, rather than staying in one place.

As for books - well, then it comes down to what you define as "urban fantasy". Is it just magic in our world? Because in that case, my vote for absolute best integration of magic into reality goes to the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane. The books do an excellent job of explaining how magic interacts with our world, far better (in my opinion) than Harry Potter. I certainly wouldn't consider, say, Magic Kingdom for Sale an urban fantasy, simply because most of the book doesn't take place in our world.

I think vampire novels, in general, require a larger suspension of disbelief (once you get past the vampire part, I mean). You have to assume that the police just don't notice patterns of deaths. Once you're past that, books like Twilight start to seem more plausible. Amelia Atwater-Rhodes' first four books (the four set in our world, featuring vampires) require you to assume that most humans are simply oblivious, but I suppose that's likely enough.

This post on the nature of fantasy is brought to you by my final project for Fantasy Lit, which remains unedited with less than 10 hours until its due date.

Well, my critiqued pages have been posted here. The formatting got fouled up on LiveJournal (surprise, surprise), but otherwise it's all there.

The judge offered a lot of helpful suggestions - things that I skipped over in my hurry to have something exciting happen in my first five pages. Mostly, it's stuff like letting the reader know how my main character feels about everything (writing from 3rd person close rather than 3rd person omniscient), fixing the setting up, that sort of thing.

I think this has been an incredibly helpful contest, and a nice boost to my enthusiasm for the story (hey, someone else thinks it has potential!). I don't think I'll win. Looking at it objectively, I have to admit that the timing for all of this wouldn't be great if I did win - I'm not even going to have a computer for the month of June.

By the time the summer's over, though, I want to have begun the submissions process to various agents. I feel like maybe there's something here in this novel, something I haven't quite achieved in my other writing, and I think this might be the one.

iTunes Party Shuffle:
1. Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me - The Smiths
2. Hallelujah - Rufus Wainwright
3. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly
4. Livin' La Vida Loca - Ricky Martin
5. Luck of the Draw - Bonnie Raitt
6. Store Bought Bones - The Raconteurs
7. Kiss the Devil - Eagles of Death Metal
8. Career of Evil - Blue Öyster Cult
9. Rotting - Green Day
10. Clark Gable - The Postal Service

11 of 26 hooks have now been posted, with judges' commentary, on Fangs, Fur & Fey. I'm not going out of my mind waiting, or anything...

I'm actually trying to decide whether or not to rewrite the opening of my final story for Fantasy Children's Lit. Right now, my main character is a security guard at a bank. However, as I was researching for the story, I happened to run across a Wikipedia article that said tattoos were sometimes caused by gunpowder. Suddenly, I'd really like to make my main character a tattoo artist, who does lots of regular tattoos for the ordinary people but also specializes in awesome gunpowder tattoos of protective runes for the not-so-ordinary people. There's some connection in there about how gunpowder used to be made with iron. Iron facts are according to Nature's Building Blocks, by John Emsley, which is possibly the coolest and most fascinating science book I've ever read.

Unfortunately, I only have until Monday at 8 AM to have the first 10 pages of this story ready, and I'm just about to completely rewrite it. Ah, crap.

iTunes Party Shuffle:
1. Next Exit - Interpol
2. Dancing Queen - ABBA
3. Edge of the Ocean - Ivy
4. 7 Screaming Diz-Busters - Blue Öyster Cult
5. I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs
6. Flavor of the Weak - American Hi-Fi
7. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away - Beatles
8. The Wrong Girl - Belle & Sebastian
9. Do What I Have To Do - Phil Ochs
10. 40' - Franz Ferdinand

Oh dear lord.

They've begun posting page critiques over at Fangs, Fur & Fey. I'm trying very hard not to have a heart attack, but it's tough - I'm definitely over-analyzing each judge's comments and comparing the writing to my own.

Of course, that doesn't even matter that much - each post only has one judge's comments, and all of the judges will vote on a winner. Still...major freak-out in progress over here.

Next year

I've pre-registered for my first semester classes next year: Intro to European History, Intro to Biology, Traditions of English Literature I, and Craft of Poetry. However, as I look ahead to the second semester of my sophomore year, I'm afraid there may be a slight problem.

I want to take five courses in the Humanities department next semester. They are:
LIN 114 - Introduction to Linguistics
ENG 224 - Traditions of English Literature II
ENG 230 - English Historical Linguistics
ENG 303 - Chaucer
ENG 386 - Writing Seminar: Poetry

There's no way I can do this. For one thing, I can't take 20 credits' worth of courses - that would be suicide. For another, my adviser (whoever he/she turns out to be) will never let me take more than two English courses at one time, even if I am a major - meaning I'll probably end up in ENG 386 and ENG 224/303. I might be able to sneak LIN 114 in, but that still leaves me with a fourth course - one that would have to be science, according to my current adviser.

Plus, I'm planning to study in London during the fall of my junior year, which will mean taking all Humanities courses then. Oy vey.

Thoughts on workshops

I find the way workshops are presented to be very interesting. Generally, when a young writer is introduced to the idea of workshopping a piece of writing, she's taught to assume that the majority opinion is generally correct. I think there's something seriously wrong with this approach. A workshop is only as good as the other writers in it, and (especially for young writers) it can be very damaging to take everything people say without considering it.

I'm not trying to cut down workshops. With the right group of people, a workshop/critique group can be incredibly useful. The important part, though, is to make sure that they enjoy the type of writing that you're presenting AND that they're people who you feel can provide good advice.

That means listening to what they say when they talk about writing. It's perfectly okay, in my opinion, to trust a fellow student over a teacher. Sometimes the student understands what you're trying to achieve in a story better than the teacher does, and so their suggestions will be much more in line with your ideas than the teacher's will.

This is, of course, just my opinion.