Filling the Well

When I was in the fifth grade, I read Dolphin Island by Arthur C. Clarke. Then I read it like 10 more times. I loved that book. It’s the story of a kid who gets shipwrecked in the Pacific, is rescued by dolphins and brought to an island where scientists are doing far-out research — and where we learn that there’s a complicated dolphin culture. I went on to read a ton of other stuff by Clarke. A defining moment of my childhood came in sixth grade, during silent reading period, when I noticed that all the other girls were reading Sweet Valley High books (skinny, with pink covers), and I was reading Clarke’s “2010″ — a four hundred page book with a floating fetus on the cover. I realized for the first time that I might not be like everyone one else.

Arthur C. Clarke has died. I may not list him as one of my writerly influences, but he was my first favorite science fiction writer. I always appreciated his optimism.

The Kitty and the Silver Bullet e-mails are starting to come in, and a lot of them look like this: I finished it in a day! A friend of mine read Midnight Hour in an hour and half. I know. I watched.

You fast readers and your fast reading. I’m insanely jealous. The only way I could read a book in a day, even a skinny paperback, is if I did nothing else, including eating. I am a slow reader. It is my curse. I will never, ever read enough. I know lots of smart people, and in conversations with them it quickly becomes clear that they’ve read a lot more than I have and that I’ll never catch up.

Being a slow reader has always been my excuse for not reading all the new latest current and cool stuff that everyone else is talking about. Well, this year I decided to be a little more empirical about this slow reader business. So, I wrote down the title of every book I read this year, so I could count. The final number: 53. About one book a week, which is what I always estimated I could read. So the experiment is a success in that it confirmed my hypothesis. Some other stats: 18 of those were non-fiction, 3 of them were re-reads, 10 of them were new this year. And 4 were by Steven Erikson (and those should count for like 3 books each, right?).

It also made me realize that slow reading is purely subjective. I’m comparing myself to people who claim to read 100-200 books a year. I find this outrageous. Me trying to read that much would kill me (Literally. Because I wouldn’t have time to eat). Me trying to read that much would make me hate reading.

However, there are people out there who don’t read at all. In one installment of Oprah’s Book Club, a woman in the audience said she had not read a book in 20 years until Oprah started her club. And since Oprah told her to read a book, she did. (I was simultaneously impressed and appalled. Yay Oprah for getting people to read. Boo, that this woman needs a TV celebrity to tell her to read.) Compared to them, I’m like a super-speed reader. Or maybe, falling between the fast readers and the non-readers, I’m exactly average. Somehow unsatisfying, that.

Working in the bookstore, surrounded by thousands and thousands of books, I realized I would never read all the books I wanted to or ought to. This was kind of liberating, and helped me establish my rules.

• I do not finish books that do not please me. (That 53 doesn’t include the dozen or so books I started and didn’t finish. I have very little patience these days for un-entertaining and unskilled books.)
• I read what I want to. Not what I think I ought to. Because I only have 52 (plus or minus) slots a year and I don’t want to waste them. I’ll just have to sit to the side and listen to the smart people and their smart conversations.

I’m very fond of the end of the year and new year celebrations because it gives me an excuse to assess the year, review my goals, and set up my goals for the next year. It’s also a great excuse for a party.

So, however you like to say farewell to the old year and greet the new one, I hope you have a wonderful time. Stay safe, and I’ll see you next year.

Kitty 6 hit 70 k words yesterday, and I’m heading into the homestretch. This part’s a lot of fun. All the threads are coming together, the gaps are starting to fill in, and I can’t wait to get to the keyboard (versus the last couple of weeks where I’ve been dragging myself to the keyboard). It’s now a mad plunge to the end. I’m hoping to have a working draft by Thanksgiving. Then I’ll feel really good about celebrating.

I’ve got a pretty cool weekend planned (a birthday party for a friend, another friend’s photo show opening, critique group meeting — I’ll have to write about my critique group at some point). The good writing days mean I’ll be in a good mood for it all.

In other news, I’m reading Moby Dick for the very first time. It’s a controversial book, not for any of the content (well, except for the killing whales part), but because people either love it or hate it, passionately. I had to find out once and for all which category I fall into. (That, and I got sick of people saying “How can you have a Masters in English Lit and not have read Moby Dick? It’s because it’s English lit, not American lit. Duh!)

I’m about three quarters of the way through. And (drum roll…) I LOVE it. Here’s the thing: Melville writes like Charles Dickens, and I love Dickens. He does that thing Dickens does with pages and pages of character sketches that are pitch perfect, hilarious, and vivid. Here’s the other thing: Melville loves what he’s writing about, and it shows. Yes, the rumors about this book are true, there are pages and pages and pages of endless information about whaling. But it’s interesting. Melville makes it interesting. And it really does serve a purpose: when he spends an entire chapter talking about sperm whale physiology, and how the sperm whale’s head makes a perfect battering ram, then ends the chapter by saying, remember this — it’s going to be important later on, that creates a huge amount of suspense. You just have to be paying attention.

The other thing it does is completely immerse you in the world of whaling. I know what’s going to happen: by the big climactic end (everyone knows the story of Moby Dick, right?), I’m going to know exactly what’s going on, why things are happening, why the boats are doing what they’re doing, why the whale is doing what it’s doing, because I’ve spent the last 400 pages living in that world. The action won’t have to be interrupted to explain any of it.

At least, that’s what I’m expecting will happen.

I just discovered yesterday that my favorite writer has started a blog. Robin McKinley, author of The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown, Outlaws of Sherwood, Deerskin, Sunshine, and sundry others, was the second author I read who made me think, “How does she do that? How can I learn to do that?” (The first was Ray Bradbury — though he, not she…) So, she’s one of the writers who made me want to be a writer. She does this amazing thing with characters, where you feel like they could be your best friends. They’re so clearly drawn, sympathetic, flawed yet noble. I still reread The Blue Sword every year or so because it feels like talking to an old friend. That’s one of the things I try to do with my books, and McKinley is the writer who teaches me how to do that. She has a new book out, Dragonhaven. I’m doing a happy dance because she only has a book out every 4-5 years.

The other thing about McKinley’s books, especially The Blue Sword and Hero, is they were custom made for slightly misfit, horse-crazy fifteen year old girls, which is exactly what I was when I discovered her. When I finally got a horse of my very own (Rosie), those books helped me realize why I’d always wanted a horse in the first place. It wasn’t to jump the biggest fences or win all the ribbons, like I thought I wanted when I was younger. It was to have this 1000 pound creature whinney when she saw me, come when I called, and call me her best friend in horse language, when she rested her nose on my shoulder and sighed. Basically, I wanted my very own Sungold or Talat (the horses in Blue Sword and Hero). And wonder of wonders I got her (at least for 10 years). And I wouldn’t have known that without McKinley’s books. (She writes the BEST horse characters.)

I’ve been reading two biographies of Janis Joplin. One was written a year or so after her death, the other in the late nineties. In the earlier one, there are quite a few interviews where people say things like “Groovy!” and “Far out, man!”

In the 90’s bio, those same people are interviewed, and they say things like, “We were stoned out of our minds, and it was really bad.”

One of the things I love about writing: I get to read and learn so much stuff about so many different things. It’s all the good parts of school without any tests or homework. I could never specialize, which probably means writing was the only real option for me. What else would I do with all this arcane lore? Play Jeopardy?

A couple of days ago I spent some time figuring out what oil fields, oil wells, and pumping stations look like. You’ll just have to wait and see where that ends up.

Right now, I’m reading a rather intense biography of Janis Joplin. It’s amazing and depressing at the same time.

Now I want to talk to my Dad about the time he spent in San Francisco in the summer of ‘67. He was a twenty year old Air Force cadet, in uniform, walking around Haight-Ashbury. What I wouldn’t give for a time machine to go back and see what that looked like.

See, it’s not all about shameless self promotion. It’s also about shamelessly promoting my friends.

Daniel Abraham’s first novel, A Shadow in Summer, is now out in paperback. Woohoo! This is the first in his four-book fantasy series. Lucky girl that I am, I’ve read through the third book. It broke my head. In a good way. Now I have to wait to see what happens next because he’s still writing it. Grr!

I’ve known Daniel for almost 10 years now. He’s the guy who got me into Wild Cards. (Or got me to where I could meet the folks who could get me into Wild Cards.) And you know, it’s pretty cool getting books published and in stores and having some amount of success in this business. But it’s even more cool watching it happen to your friends, too.

In the past, it’s taken me a month or so after the release of a new Harry Potter book to actually get ahold of a copy and get it read. I wonder how long I can possibly go without hearing any details about this one?

Trivia about me: I once worked as a buyer at an independent bookstore, and Scholastic was one of the publishers I worked with. The very last catalog I bought from them before leaving the store included a little book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which the publisher’s rep assured me was going to be the next big thing. I didn’t believe her, because she said this for every single lead title in the two years I worked with her. Oops. To this day, I still don’t know if I bought enough inital copies for the store because I left before they actually went on sale.

But the rep did give me an ARC of the book, which I still have. It’s probably worth more than any other book in my collection.

Book review time. Just finished two of the finds from my last library trip, and was amazed at how they complemented each other. At the same time, I liked one significantly better than the other.

Spook, by Mary Roach, had lots of interesting stuff in it (like ectoplasm, one of the more ludicrous chapters in 19th century spiritualism, which resulted in mediums undergoing full body cavity searches before seances…. But I kept thinking about Slimer from Ghostbusters.) Ultimately, though, it felt kind of shallow, and Roach seemed condescending rather than engaged. Like a Victorian tourist watching native basket weavers, who has no intention squatting in the dirt and trying her hand at basket weaving herself. I got the feeling she thought these scientists were rather quaint for spending their time looking for proof of an afterlife.

Then there’s Will Storr vs. the Supernatural, by British journalist Will Storr. I loved this one. I started out not liking it because in the first few chapters he’s completely histrionic, like “OMG THESE AMAZING THINGS ARE REALLY HAPPENING AND IT’S UPSETTING MY WHOLE WORLD VIEW OMG!” Then he has a lightbulb moment. Like, “Hang on. Those rods are moving because your fingers are canted slightly. That’s not paranormal.” And he completely swings the other way, toward skepticism, but that launches him on almost the same investigative journey that Roach went on. The difference is, Storr is completely engaged, and he’s using the information he gathers to help define his own worldview. He gets into meaty stuff like discussions of Cartesian dualism that must necessarily result from believing in any kind of life after death, a bit of quantum mechanics, psychology, etc. And he has another lightbulb moment: that to be a completely devoted skeptic requires as much faith as being a devoted believer. While the believer has absolute faith that there is life after death, the skeptic has absolute faith that there isn’t. And neither stance is completely satisfactory to Storr, who comes to his own indepenent conclusions, which resonated very much with my own feelings about the whole issue, which may be why I loved his book so much. (I also have a weakness for cute scruffy Brits, but never mind that)

Interestingly, both Roach and Storr talk about Allison Dubois, the psychic that the TV show Medium is based on, and I love Medium. Not because it’s about a psychic or the paranormal. It’s really well written and is doing some amazing things in the horror genre. And Joe Dubois is played by a cute scruffy Brit.