What I read, Part 3

I have a roster of webcomics I go through regularly.

On Mondays and Thursdays, I check out The Seraph Inn to see if Sara Ellerton has posted another few pages of The Phoenix Requiem.

Monday through Friday, I hop on over to Wapsi Square for the webcomic equivalent of paranormal chick lit.

Then I pop over to Real Life, which is still funny after many years. I've since abandoned all of its video game webcomicy cohorts from years ago since they started to read like newspaper funnies - i.e. not funny at all.

Well, except for Penny Arcade, which isn't a daily. It's there MWF for me. However, the real treat isn't necessarily the comic there, it's the commentary. Tycho never ceases to provide pithy verbiage relevant to the topic of the day.

MWF also brings a new page of Candi, which is probably the most accurate "college slice of life" comic for undergrads. Its graduate school partner is PhD. Although I haven't gone to graduate school yet, I'm married to a doctor (and dated him during the 8 years he was in his doctorate program), and he can vouch for the authenticity of the latter.

Fey Winds only updates on occasional Tuesdays. It provides "farcical fantasy" to match the more serious fantasy of The Dreamland Chronicles, which is there most Mondays-Fridays. However, the Scott Christian Sava has managed to get his project turned into a movie (an amazing feat, even if he already was in the industry) and the updates have occasionally drizzled down to MWF in the last few months.

Rounding it off is the Monday-Sunday - yes, seven days a week - heretical viewpoint on religion that is Sinfest. Its polar opposite in art (aside from being in black and white) but its kindred spirit, XKCD, is there MWF.

The webcomics I read range from stick figures to beautiful CGI renders in full color. Some of the art is great, like Sara Ellerton's beautiful paintings (if I ever have any spare cash, I'm commissioning artwork from her). Some of it is cartoony, some of it doesn't even try.

What do they all have in common?

Superb writing. Of course. The best webcomics endure because of the writing, not because of the art.

What I read, Part 2

Another large staple of my literary diet is manga and Japanese light novels. (I watch anime too, but reading subtitles doesn't count.) The sources range from beautifully polished translations put out by Tokyopop and other publishing companies, to very rough, raw translations of unlicensed works put out on places like Baka Tsuki. Nothing gives me a happier thrill than learning my favorite light novels have been licensed for release in the US, because it means I'll 1. get a better story out of it 2. have a nice copy to keep on my bookshelf forever and ever and 2. have an excuse to reread the story.

Two good examples are The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and The Twelve Kingdoms. (Oh heck yeah, the fourth book was just released, time to go snag that!)

Light novels have no exact equivalent in Western publishing. I supposed they could be described as YA, but there is a length restriction to them (around 40,000 words a book), and a serialized expectation, that doesn't quite fit that category. Imagine all the depth and breadth of Harry Potter, but broken down into 200 page chunks, and released in 20 volumes. Zero no Tsukaima (unlicensed in the US, unfortunately) is approaching its 20th volume in Japan.

Manga, or Japanese comic books, tend to find more distributors in the US than their novel counterparts. I couldn't possibly list all the series I read, but the three I'm collecting these days are the shoujo (girls comic) series Ouran High School Host Club, Gakuen Alice, and Skip Beat. No mere comics for children, shoujo series deal with some very adult issues that would earn a serious R rating in the US - sex, drugs, sometimes rock and roll, but more likely teen pregnancy, homosexuality, incest, rape, death - the list goes on.

Sailor Moon was the classic shoujo introduced in the US during the late eighties and nineties, but even that show had to be severely stripped, chopped, and edited (even going so far as to change a lesbian couple over to "cousins" to avoid offending the tender English speaking girl's parent's sensibilities.)

But! The Sailor Moon manga was not censored at all, and you can still pick up some copies from bookstores if you know where to look.

What I read, Part 1

I was a bookworm growing up. There was no more favorite place for me than curled up on a beanbag chair in the library, or sneakily reading with a flashlight in my bedroom late at night.

I've gotten pickier over the years - when I was a teenager I'd read anything that had a science fiction or fantasy tag on it - but I still voraciously consume books, either ones I buy myself or ones I borrow off friends (who buy different authors from me.)

My best friend, having moved back in with us for her senior year in vet school, brought along three fresh book cases. I discovered a handful of my books on there, which I have taken back, but a treasure trove of books from authors I hadn't heard of as well.

I used to have a set book budget of $50 every month. When I quit my job, my book budget went away (this is why you do not quit your day job!) but I'll still pinch and scrounge and save up for books from the following authors:

• Terry Pratchett
• Teresa Medeiros
• Mary Balogh

I'm never disappointed with anything they write, so it's a good investment for me. And I can reread and reread and reread and still enjoy it.

I still try to make a little time to read books on a daily basis, although I make sure to space it out from my writing to avoid losing my own voice by trying to imitate the author of whatever it was I just read.

So today's read, borrowed from my best friend's bookshelf, is Lynn Kirkland's Dreams of Stardust.

I read other things besides books. I follow a ton of blogs, read webcomics, and read and post frantically on several forums. But those are topics for another day.

Return of the Room Mates

My husband and I purchased our first house last January. We've lived alone in happy, post-first-house bliss for about six months. We walked around in our underwear without worrying, we did unmentionable things in the living room and the kitchen, and we generally acted like we owned the place. Which we did.

My best friend, who is a vet student at the local university, reached the breaking point at her fraternity and desperately wanted to move out. She is claiming one of our bedrooms. Additionally, a dear friend (and previous room mate of ours) is moving back from a study abroad in Japan. She is claiming the other empty room, and they'll be sharing a bathroom.

It's going to be a shock going from having our own home all the time to having people around again. We've lived with both our room mates before, and love them both dearly like sisters, but this will be their first time sharing a space, and I'm hoping that all goes well.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, not much. I continue to plug along on Book #2 - it's at about 30,000 words now and many plot elements that were hazy have solidified - but now I'm grateful that this "career change" will allow me to stay home most of the day, and act as a sort of mother to my friends. Both will be under very stressful senior years, and they need someone to help take care of them. It's not much harder to cook for 3-4 people than it is for two, once you account for volume.

On the upside, my best friend has a far more extensive collection of books than I do (three tall bookshelves of romance novels alone!) and I'll be pillaging it for the next year for sure. Maybe someday, one of my books will grace her shelves as well.

The dying screams of an aging computer

A few weeks ago, my fuzzy little cat-child Weaver decided to leap onto my desk, directly onto a freshly made giant mug of hot tea. The tea spilled all over the computer desk, the computer, the wall behind the computer, a video game controller, and my external hard drive. Fortunately, the only permanently destroyed piece of electronics was the controller, but the computer itself has been on the fritz on and off ever since.

What started with some skips and freezes eventually cascaded into blue screens of death. I'm no slouch when it comes to computers (having worked in IT for several years), and while I managed to stem the flow of blood from the motherboard by doing a clean installation of Windows 7, I've been having a hard time with the card readers.

I keep all my writing on an 8 gig SDHC card. This allows me to transfer it back and forth from my desktop computer to my laptop (a tiny little Acer Aspire netbook) instantly.

When the tea spilled, several events happened in a rapid sequence. I yanked out the external hard drive, ran to the kitchen for paper towels, and tried to keep the mess from getting into the inner workings of the computer case. The latter effort succeeded, but the act of tearing out the USB external caused me to actually pull out the little black plastic stub that is enclosed in the USB port itself. This means that port is now completely dead and has a tendency to short out the rest of the ports on the front of the PC.

I believe I've got everything working, and under control again. I hope so. The netbook is unable to handle anything that requires more memory than Open Office or Google Chrome!

The time has perhaps come for me to replace the desktop. I will probably build my own to save money, but it's a pity - this computer is only two and a half years old.

Nothing lasts forever.

A thousand words a day

An easy, manageable goal.

That's a thousand words of new fiction text; not including any revisions, queries, or any of the other business that comes along with writing books and short stories. And of course, not including any blog or forum posts!

It doesn't sound like much, especially for a NaNoWriMo veteran like myself. But it adds up fast if you stay committed.

1,000 words a day is 365,000 words a year - or four full length novels with 45K in change for short stories.

I have a whiteboard above my desk, and every morning, I write the total goal word count. Today's goal was to hit 18,000 words on Book #2. So I sat on the couch, with the cat curled up next to me, and after a while I checked and I was at 18133. Spiffy keen!

Getting to know the characters

I'm dealing with a few new characters I had to invent for the sake of progressing the plot. They're a little thin right now, but I'll flesh them out later.

Usually, I start with a real person I know. A friend, an old professor, someone I met once at a convention and never spoke to again . . . all fair game. That's just for physical looks though. If every character were based on how I envision people looking, they'd be too pretty. Real people aren't perfect.

Then I'll tailor them to fit the role the character is fulfilling. For example, the character of Huliol in Book #2 is meant to look a bit like my high school's valedictorian. She's quiet, thoughtful, nice - a marked contrast to the volatile and temperamental Vazeria. But she's also naive, a romantic, and an optimist.

What drives her? What is her goal in life? Where did she come from? All these things will tell themselves to me as I'm writing her parts in the story - eventually. They may take a while to unfold. She is a secondary character, after all.

I don't think I really get to know her until the first draft of this book is done. Then as I'm revising, I'll change her dialogue around until I have her voice firmly in place.

It's the way with all the characters in my stories. I have to get to know them as I write them. If I try to do the D&D "build a character" route, it will force them into stereotypes. And that's the last thing I want.