Mini Book Review: The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Arizela

It’s extraordinarily rare for something as simple as a title or a cover to catch my attention as a reader. I read blurbs. I read reviews. I seek out recommendations from my friends and family. I can think of two books in the whole of my adult life that I’ve picked up based on cover art or title.

This is one of them:

Something about that title really caught my imagination. I didn’t even know what genre the book qualified as, but I knew I wanted it. I looked up the author. I discovered that this is classified as science fiction, set in a far future where the zombies are real and humanity is a small village lost in a forest of hands and teeth. I wanted it even more.

Downloaded the Kindle sample chapter for iPhone and I read it all the way to the end. This is one of those books that gives me the feeling people will generally either love it or hate it. Oddly, I love it and hate it. The story was beautiful, the emotion and the characters and the setting were hauntingly, tantalizingly real. And I couldn’t finish it.

Sometimes, no matter how beautiful a story is, no matter how wonderfully imagined and detailed, style matters. This story is written in first person (which I generally don’t get along with, as a rule. Something about all those my me I’s leaves me feeling like I’m reading the tale of a narcissist) and in present tense (*wince*).

In the end, this is a book I would recommend highly to anyone who doesn’t mind present tense, and to anyone who is a writer if they’re looking for something beautiful to study.

WTB version not written in present tense.

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Fatigue – re: the broken heart

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Arizela

Six weeks ago, my doc and I decided to go up on my medication, bisoprolol – the first one that hasn’t given me either crushing chest pain or crushing depression. I had a glimmer of hope for a while that perhaps a very, very gradual increase of this medication would leave me feeling… almost normal. At least well enough to consider holding down a desk job and maybe driving myself to the grocery store.

Alas, the best laid plans and all that. I’ve been dealing with some pretty significant fatigue the last few weeks that seems to be getting gradually worse. As in, I’m sleeping 12-14 hours a day and haven’t got much food left in the house because I haven’t been able to carry through the grocery shopping for more than about 15 minutes, but that’s ok, because I haven’t really had the energy to cook either.

One would think that all this sitting in recliners would at least afford me the ability to write, but not. The second worst side effect of miracle-med is memory and concentration problems. I type the wrong words. A lot. I know which word I mean, and type something completely different. Reply instead of retaliate. Either instead of ethereal. Which means a lot more reading and rereading to make sure I actually got down a sentence that made sense. And lack of concentration means a lot more time spent distracted by things other than writing.

So next week when I meet with the cardiologist again, my plan is to go back down to 2.5mg of the bisoprolol and hope that I return to my not-good, but better than awful state from 6 weeks ago. Hopefully, this will translate into my brain functioning well enough to post new Muse Medicine things and deep thoughts on writing things.

I’ve had a few people lately asking me a question that I want to address here, though. Why not have surgery?

Last time we met, Doc asked me again about surgery; he told me I knew his goals and reservations with doing it, and left it up to me. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. A lot, actually. And tonight I had a conversation with my husband about it. A frank, open, “I know it’s my decision, but I want your honest opinion” discussion. Because this isn’t just my life and livelihood here. It effects him, too. And our son, for that matter, who told his teacher this week that he wanted to learn CPR because he might need it for his mom someday.

Hubby and I have pretty much always been on the same page about everything, and I found out tonight that we’re pretty much on the same page about this, too. The thought of me having heart surgery scares him witless. The thought of one surgery doesn’t really scare me that badly, but the thought of surgery again and again… and again for the rest of my life… that’s a notion worthy of horror-fic.

If it were to save my life, it would be different, but the reality of the situation is, it might save my career as a nurse, and  it might help me feel better in between surgeries. What it won’t do is “cure” anything, because if you need surgery ever 6 months for a while and then every 5 years for the rest of your life, that’s not much of a cure.

Surgery won’t save my life, because IST isn’t killing me. Risking death, stroke, and worse disability, and there are always those risks with surgery, just doesn’t make sense. Putting my family through surgery after surgery is almost as horrifying a prospect as putting myself through it.

The side effects of the meds are bad. The symptoms of IST are bad. But my life is not bad. Not even when the fatigue makes me immobile and the concentration issues and memory problems make me frustrated. Not even when I’m short of breath and dizzy and clutching my chest. Because I have people who love me through all of that – my husband, my son, my family and my friends. I will never be able to adequately thank them for treating me like I’m still myself, if a little more fragile, and not a broken thing in need of a mechanic.

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Not Dead

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Arizela

So I haven’t posted in a while. This is a natural consequence of having applied my butt to a chair and my hands to a keyboard in the direction of actually working on my writing for the last couple of weeks.

Specifically, I’ve given Hunters another quick polish and edit, based on Mr. Agent’s feedback on the full, and I am now doing some intensive research regarding who’ll receive my next round of queries.

I’m bucking the trend with querying. I know all the advice says query widely, and it may come to that, but rather than sending out form query letters to every agent on the list (and receiving as many form rejections, I figure), I’m hand-tailoring each query to the agent. I’m researching the agent through a variety of methods, including looking them up in Jeff Herman’s guide, at Publishers Marketplace, through Absolute Write and the Writer Beware projects, and on their own personal website. I’ve even gone so far as to google map the business addresses of a few (and trust me, I will not be querying the guy who’s working out of his Florida retirement community or the lady from the Conneticut suburbs).

I’d like to sell Hunters, but my focus isn’t on finding anybody (and I mean ANYBODY) who will take it off my hands. My goal is to find an agent who will work with me toward building a solid career as a professional writer. And that means only submitting my work to people I want to work with. It means being selective, even downright picky. It means trusting my gut when my gut says even Big Name Agent isn’t right for me. And most of all, it means trusting that even if Hunters isn’t the book that launches my career, that book will come.

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Genre conventions

Posted on April 28, 2010 by Arizela

… and no, I’m not talking those fancon get togethers.

The conventions of a genre are the things that a reader comes to expect.

So, for instance, if I were to pick up a mystery novel (which I’d NEVER do, btw), I would expect to start off with the victim and perhaps a shadowy hint of a villain. I would expect the crime to be solved somewhere toward the end of the book, and that the investigator does the work and figures it out (rather than being handed the answer deus ex machina style).

Conventions are hard to deal with as a writer because:

  • They aren’t very well defined – readers might have varying opinions on how important a particular convention is, or even if the convention is needed at all.
  • They aren’t static – conventions change over time. Third person omniscient used to be the convention for science fiction and fantasy novels and today the third limited and first person povs are much more common
  • They become the cliches – what was a beloved convention can become the tired old dog in the blink of a publisher’s eye. In certain forms of fantasy, a clear division between good and evil is becoming less and less desired by readers who want more difficult choices, more human characters, more realistic action.
  • They can be hard to find – if you aren’t well read in a genre, you may not pick up on the subtler conventions at all, and even if you are widely read, if your reading isn’t current, you might miss key points.
  • You have to have something to compare them to – how can you tell something is a convention of your genre, if you don’t know what is expected from other genres?

This all points out how very important it is to keep reading when you are a writer. Reading widely will help you recognize the conventions of your genre and others, and help you innovate new and creative ways to approach those conventions and perhaps even to crossbreed them with the conventions of other genres.

—

What genres do you read and write, and how do the conventions of your genre steer your writing?

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Working hypothesis

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Arizela

Nursing was supposed to be my life-long pursuit and career and passion. I invested years of training, tens of thousands of dollars, and long hours of ethical thinking, meta-analysis, and professional inquiry to that pursuit. Writing was supposed to be nothing more than a side item, a serious hobby. Oh, I dedicated an inordinate amount of time to it even before my heart broke, but it was never meant to put food on the proverbial table. It was my passion and my joy, NOT my career. Pleasure, not business, and despite the fact that I have been actually working toward becoming a professional quality writer for years, I never intended to become a professional.

Having been forced by circumstances beyond my control to give up my first choice profession has been both fortunate and unfortunate for me. It is certainly giving me more time to focus on family and writing, but it has also left me with no reason to get out of my pajamas 6 days a week, which is far from my definition of healthy and active living.

My options are certainly limited by my health – I cannot drive, I cannot face the daily stress of the corporate life, I cannot in good conscience trust my body to do the work my mind and heart led me to do as a nurse. Most people find a career to fall back on while they’re waiting for their big break into publishing, but I was the polar opposite. I took writing as seriously as anyone, but perhaps it was always meant to be my fall-back – the thing I would do when my body gave out (well into my 70’s, I imagined), and I could no longer do my chosen work.

Well, for the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with writing as work. It still hasn’t put any food, proverbially or otherwise, on my table. But I have been sitting down to do it for two rather short windows of time, at the same time every week day. I still don’t have the endurance to face even that sort of work for more than a few hours a day, but I’ve been treating them like a commitment. And so far, things are working out.

Today, I take a further step toward that end. I cleared off my desk. I polished it until it shined (which took me better than half an hour, with breaks). I removed every distracting thing from the environment. I poured myself a glass of green tea and put on my writing music. I turned on every lamp in the room. I told myself that people do not go to work in their pajamas. People do not go to work with bare feet. I sat down, wearing my nursing scrubs, with my nursing shoes on my feet – they were my uniform for the last five years, and so they remain.

This is not the corporate world, and my deadlines are my own. There is no stress here, to make my heart race and my head spin, but there is still work to be done.

In a moment, I will open my current project file and begin. Where it will take me, I do not yet know, but I do know that it feels rather good to finally be back to work.

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