Recent readings

[go_team]

Ok, so right now I'm reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and it's eating my brain. Considering that I've been up for an hour and a half, it's amazing I haven't read more yet today, but I've been being all communicative, writing email to beanworks, only to get distracted by IM with joyquality and siobhan1. Also I've been drinking tea (mmm, Earl Grey) and forgetting to have breakfast, but I'll fix that last problem soon, really I will. In fact...

Tracy wanders off to get herself a bowl of granola and yogurt

Ok, now that that's taken care of, where was I? Oh yes: reading. The last book I finished was springbok1's sister's first novel, Fires of the Faithful, which I enjoyed quite a bit, and I'm not just saying that because I know springbok1 will read this. Since National Novel Writing Month last year, I've been reluctant to say anything bad about other people's fiction, and especially first novels, because there's a voice in my head that says, "Oh yeah? Where's your book?" that shuts me up pretty right quick in the literary criticism department. Sigh. I really don't know if I'm ever going to finish The Witchworld, let alone how. Mostly I think the problem is I'm sick of my viewpoint character and kind of dread writing the chapters and scenes I haven't written yet from her perspective, but on the other hand I don't want to switch viewpoint characters too much because that's a recipe for disaster (and I've got enough problems with characters knowing things they shouldn't as it is). So I'm not sure what to do. Also there's a few characters I really don't know well enough to write more about them, and blah blah blah...

But speaking of fantasies with strong female characters and other worlds where imagination reigns supreme, I got Alan Moore's Promethea out of the library a while back and I've been rereading it every few days ever since. I love it. In case it wasn't clear from the first sentence of this paragraph, this comic panders to me in every way, and I love it. (It also makes me a little embarrassed that I tried to write a novel pandering to myself when surprise! Alan freaking Moore already did it, and he's ever so much more the master of story... on the one hand it makes me wonder why I even try, and on the other hand it makes me feel like hey, my story idea must be pretty okay, even if I centered it around a setting rather than a whole host of interesting characters that give everything layers and depth and whatnot...) Anyway, I recommend Promethea a lot. (I also liked that pants_of_doom mentioned her in one of her "5 question interview" entries.)

Ok, time to read now. I have a student at 3:30, and I don't think I can finish Pattern Recognition by then, but we'll see.

Comments

[bellwethr.livejournal.com]

Alan is definitely awesome! I recommend his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics highly as well--although they are not to be confused with the movie of a similar title coming up this summer. :( To quote a very funny actor, "Alan Moore is rolling over in his-not-quite-dead-yet grave."

I've got a couple issues of Promethea that I haven't touched yet, but I will get around to reading someday soon. One of my friends (7th_son) is a huge Alan Moore fan, and turned me on to him in the last few months.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Have you read From Hell and Watchmen? Those are both the best Alan Moore comics I've read, as well as quite possibly the best comics I've ever read. (Fighting with the Sandman series for top spot)

[bellwethr.livejournal.com]

Yes on Watchmen--it's sitting in the corner of my peripheral vision as I type; I haven't read From Hell though I've heard it's quite good!

I'm currently on vol. 2 of Sandman, and loving it! :)

[goteam.livejournal.com]

Alan Moore is a freakin' genius. He makes me rant about stuff I don't understand --- stuff like Story, Myth, and Magic, all capitalized because they're Big and Meaningful, I tells you. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is big fun, but Watchmen is absolutely brilliant, even for someone as relatively ignorant of superhero comics as myself, and Promethea --- well, I've ranted quite a bit about that already. Another really nifty piece of Alan Moore work is The Birth Caul, which is a spoken-word piece he performed once and only once, shortly after his mother's death, but an illustrated version of the text is available and it's amazing. (And now that I've described it in that way I want to compare it to Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, because I'm a dork like that, but I digress....) I found the illustrated comic version of The Birth Caul at the Eugene Public Library and it's definitely on my list of things I need a copy around to keep studying on.

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

Hooray for Capitalized Essences!

[sillygoosegirl.livejournal.com]

Dealing with point of view can be really annoying. I've got a story I'm working on which is all from the point of view of one person, but then I got to about chapter 11 and realized that I really wanted to have a scene that would only work if it was from the point of view of somebody else. That was annoying, but I did it anyway because I really felt like I had to. I think the most useful (possibly the only useful) thing we were told in Fiction Writing last semester was not to let ourselves be stopped by the fact that whatever we want to write has already been done. I think that's good advice, and really, I'm going to get around to doing more writing one of these days...

[goteam.livejournal.com]

"I think the most useful (possibly the only useful) thing we were told in Fiction Writing last semester was not to let ourselves be stopped by the fact that whatever we want to write has already been done. I think that's good advice..."

Me too. The problem is not that the story's already been told, it's that it's been told so well that I wonder what I can do to put an interesting (and, when I'm feeling really ambitious, meaningful) spin on it. Something I meant to mention above in my rantings about Alan Moore's genius is the quote (attributed to Moore), "All stories are true." Part of the magic (for lack of a better word) of storytelling is that it doesn't matter if a story's been told a million times before, if you tell it again and you do so well, that somehow makes it okay. Ugh. That doesn't express it very well, but I lost the thought before I could get it down. Oh well.