Did you know...?

Did you know what my typing speed is? No?! Shocking. I was just on a website that tests your typing speed for you (ok, kind of cool if you happen to want to know what it is) and then it informed me that I can now post my typing speed on my blog! How cool is that?! I mean I just know you've all been wondering how long it takes me to type all this drivel, right? Is it minutes, or long, torturous hours? Does it hurt as much to type it as it does to read it? Is that even possible?

Well, now I can tell you! Only to tell you the truth, I just can't. I just can't imagine, even using my very vivid imagination about all our fictional readers (and our 3 non-fictional ones) that anyone actually cares what my typing speed is. It just defies my ability to dream. I do not regard this as a bad thing, however! It restores my faith in humanity.

Granted, I imagine you're just dying to know what computer game I'm playing today. Or my favorite passage in obscure sci-fi or fantasy novels. But not the typing, no, not that. That would just be weird.

Wheel of Time Update

Ok, quick break from grant work to let you all know that 1) Shifter is still alive and 2) Shifter is STILL reading Wheel of Time. I am now on book 11 (Knife of Dreams) and am only about 200 pages away from FINALLY getting to read the new book, The Gathering Storm. Reading the series has been an interesting experience. First, it has taken longer than I thought. Partly because I just couldn't help myself from cheating and reading other books here and there, and partly because other things ate my life (such as evil Facebook games, now dead to me). One of the things that surprised me was that overall I enjoyed most of the series more than I had recalled. There is an undeniable change in the style and nature of the writing as the books progressed, which still does make me sad. The books were always filled with detail, from Eye of the World on, but it used to be filled with rich and interesting detail. After 11 books it just got to be repetitive and boring detail. It's hard to criticize Jordan for this because, well, he's dead, but also because he just kept doing what he had done all along. Maybe that's the problem - he needed to adapt by giving less of the agonizing details as he went on. I think a part of it was that the storyline got to be very complex, and he had to remind the readers, in each book, who everyone was, what they looked like, what their accent was, what clothes they wore, and even (occasionally) what the hell they were doing there. Oddly enough he didn't remind you often about that last point, which I really would have appreciated.

But this post was not meant to complain about WoT. On the contrary, in spite of the writing style I found that I enjoyed the books straight through much more than I had one at a time. I was better able to remember all the characters and plot lines, and that did make it more interesting. I was more, rather than less, frustrated by all the little re-descriptions that were required in each book (you'd still be getting those half way through every book), but I could see why they were there. But I now agree with Brandon Sanderson, oddly enough, that the series was not written to be read one book every 2-3 years but instead as a series. One can speculate on the wisdom of writing a series of HUGE books that has TWELVE VOLUMES (now expanded to 14 by Sanderson because book 12 would have been the size of an unabridged dictionary) and expecting it to be read in sequence over a short period of time, but there you have it. There are a few freaks (e.g., me) who will do this, but most people probably won't.

In any case, the 11th book, which I am on, is a lot of fun, as was book 9 (Winter's Heart). In it you can see that Jordan really means to bring this all to a close - the last battle is coming and there will actually BE a last battle, not just some convenient narrative trick that avoids it even happening. Which is surprisingly rare sometimes - lots of build up then "presto, quest solved" happens too often in fantasy. But Book 10, Crossroads at Twilight, was pure dog doo. It is the one book that Jordan said he was not pleased with, it's the one book Sanderson, his fanboy/successor (who I do like a lot as a writer, fandom aside) said he wasn't thrilled with, and it is the one book I wish I had never read twice. If you try this experiment I'd advise reading the cliff notes version of the book online. It will save you time, brain cells, and sanity, and you'll be less confused and better informed than if you had read it.

So, probably within the week (work allowing) I'll actually be reading the novel I set out to read 8 months ago. And they said I wasn't single minded! I can't wait to see how Sanderson tackles Jordan's world and plot.

So, What's the Point of Fiction?

I'm just going to bring this into the blog, because I think it's something both Shifter and I are interested in. And I'm not spoiler tagging anything--if you haven't read Tana French's first novel, I'm sorry to say that it is two years old and you are officially on your own. Feel free to go away and read it now. When you've finished it after two sleepless nights, the blog will still be here. Are you back now? Good.

Seeker, our most faithful commenter and author of her own blog, made note of the fact that I'm reading Tana French's new novel, Faithful Place. As it happens, I've been waiting for it desperately since I finished her last one, which I had been waiting for desperately since I finished her first book. Seeker asked if it was like her first book, In The Woods, the ending of which didn't meet with her approval:

The fact that she did not RESOLVE what happened IN THE WOODS made me CRAZY....I thought it was very unfair to her audience. Let me know when you finish if I can trust that she does not do the same thing in her other novels....

So, I don't need to finish French's book to answer you. If I were you, I just wouldn't read them. I don't think you and Tana French see eye to eye about what makes a good story, and I don't think that makes her an unfair writer or a bad writer or a mean writer. I think it just means she may not be writing for you.

I don't need a bow on everything, especially if the writer has any inkling that she might write about a character again. Frankly it makes the characters a lot less interesting if all their problems can be resolved in a mere three to five hundred pages. I know I have a boatload of stories that I'll never know the ending to in my life, and it doesn't bother me if a writer chooses to make her stories lifelike in that way.

And a cop who's dealing with an unresolved mystery in his past is far more interesting than a cop who figured it all out and put it to rest. I mean, I might be happy for the cop whose story has a bow on it...but I could understand if a writer never wanted to write about him again. I worry deeply about my favorite characters when I see the writer making a bow (Val McDermid, I'm looking at you).

I understand that part of the problem is that In The Woods was marketed as a mystery, and it is. And the convention in a mystery is for the detectives to figure it all out at the end. I think this serves some deeply human desire for us to see the Rebel Alliance defeat the Evil Empire, to see The Federation triumph over The Borg, and even to see Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson find their perverted criminal and put him away every Wednesday at 9:00 (8:00 Central). It's not a trivial thing--I think there's a very real and eternal need we have for fiction to put things right in a way that we don't get often in life, and mysteries are champs at this.

But here's the thing. The mystery genre has been around for a very long time. (Opinions differ on exactly how long--I'm partial to giving Wilkie Collins the credit for The Woman In White in 1860, but then I'm partial to Wilkie Collins in general.) There's a very recognizable formula, which is why we have all these subgenres around--it's a desperate effort to breathe some vitality and variety into a genre where avid readers nearly always know what's going to happen. I have no idea when my mother was last surprised by the end of a mystery. I suspect she may have been in her teens. Once it becomes so formulaic that all that distinguishes you is the type of crime and how technical or gut-driven your detectives are, you've gotten to the point where software can write a serviceable detective novel. (I sometimes wonder whether Hal has taken charge of Elliot and Olivia.)

When that happens, great writers play with the genre, and I think Tana French does really interesting things with it. In The Woods is delicately poised on a knife edge between mystery and the freakishly nebulous genre of Serious Fiction.* And there are two things that pull her novel out of the ordinary (well, two that matter to me as a reader). One is the characters--they had a life before the story and they have a life after the story, and none of it seems like it's any less complicated than the bit we're seeing for the 400 pages or so where we keep them company. And the other is that she frustrates our expectations in a genre that's held very few surprises for decades--which only makes the characters more exciting. I would be thrilled to see Rob or Cassie again. I have often wondered, since I put the book down, how Rob will make sense of what we've seen him go through.

If every book ends with everything all tied up it starts to remind me of a television show that's written to be syndicated and run out of order, like a sitcom. (Or, indeed, Law and Order. "Do you think he did it?" "Yeah, it's 9:52.") It's a very artificial narrative style. That's fine sometimes, but it would be awful if every story on earth had to be like that or be branded as "unfair." Luckily, there are plenty of great writers whose fiction will satisfy your ideas of fairness and good storytelling--we're spoiled for choice, and there is something for everyone. It's kind of like being at an amusement park. You're either a spinny-ride person or you're a roller coaster person.

Me, I want the descendants of Wilkie Collins, whose advice to Charles Dickens was, "Make 'em laugh...make 'em cry.........make 'em WAIT." If a writer were nice to us all the time, Little Nell would have lived, and men all over England would have gone to their graves without once crying in public. If you can always count on a fair universe, it takes away a little of the suspense. I read partly because I want the thrill of the unknown, the frisson of being pulled inexorably from page to page under the spell of a writer's story. And I read my favorite writers partly to give myself over to their safekeeping, to trust them to take me somewhere that I might not go myself and that I might not even like, because I think the experience is one worth having. If you bought your ticket for the spinny ride once and you threw up at the very end, look for a roller-coaster. Look for someone who will thrill you in a way that makes you trust them to take you on a worthwhile journey.

As always, someone else has said it better than I. I think this is very much related to the "the writer isn't working for you" theme that Neil Gaiman has progressively elaborated from time to time, to the vexation of lots of different readers (which I kind of think proves his point). As he says, "For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that."





*NB: You have to say "Serious Fiction" with a Very Serious Face.

The Credit Card Gnome

I can't stop thinking about how hilarious it is that the charges that alerted my credit card to fraud were for dating services. I keep imagining the gnome at Credit Card Headquarters whose job it is to look at everything I buy. (I know the gnome is actually a data mining program, but gnome is funnier.) And here's what I'm seeing:

Dinner for One
Dinner for One
Dinner for One
Dinner for One
Dinner for One
Sensible Shoes
Sensible Shoes
Cute Skirt
Cute Skirt
Cute Skirt
Cute Skirt
(Dear Lord, how many skirts does this woman need?)
Dinner for One
Dinner for One
Dinner for One
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Books
Ereader!
Ebooks
Ebooks
Ebooks
Ebooks
Ebooks
Sensible shoes
Dinner for One
Jdate
EHarmony
Match.com
HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! THIS IS NOT MY HUMAN! MY HUMAN IS A BOOK-READING, SKIRT WEARING, SENSIBLY SHOD PERSON WHO DOESN'T COOK!

I'm sorry, it's just getting funnier and funnier the more I think about it.

Is the Application the Exam?

So I'm applying to take a certification exam, and the application is notoriously brutal.  You're basically trying to correctly categorize all of your experience so that as little of it as possible is frowned upon by the certification committee (because you, say, miscategorized a peer review and put it in the wrong place). I've just spent the last week estimating and/or documenting my hours on various projects, which was, in itself, an insane process.  Now I'm going through an Excel spreadsheet where everything I've ever done for every project I've ever worked on is laid out with an attendant number of hours next to it.  I'm going through to see if I can remember enough of what I did to put all those hours in the application.  If I estimated 40 hours on something but I can only remember 5 hours of work, I figure that'd be an issue.  So far I've had no trouble figuring out what I was doing for all that time, although when you spent 200 hours doing something it puts things into horrific perspective--I guess the 14- and 16-hour days add up.

 

Here's the thing.  If I put all this shit in the right categories and my hours are right, I almost don't think I should have to take the exam.  I realize this is ludicrous.  For one thing, there are things on the exam that I've never done or that I've done infrequently, and I suppose I ought to know them.  But holy mackerel, if I don't know the difference between verification and validation by the time I get that application filled out, I'll be in a sorry state indeed.