Lilith Saintcrow

Good morning (again.) Didn’t get much sleep, but I don’t feel like I needed it–I did fall into bed really tired, couldn’t sleep, read some Bukowski, and finally did sleep, with weird dreams of lanterns and spiders.

Don’t ask.

Anyway, last night the Selkie and I (on kind of short notice) made it to the Alice Hoffman signing at Beaverton Powell’s. Hoffman is only the Selkie’s favorite writer in the world, and we were both fangirly and all. Ms. Hoffman was divine–sweet and funny and old-fashioned polite. She read a bit from her newest book and answered some questions. Both the Selkie and I got questions answered, though mine was pretty much the Selkie’s question; it was about Ethan in Blue Diary. I wanted to know where he came from and the Selkie wondered why we never saw anything from his POV.

Yeah, us writers, always thinking about craft. The Selkie asked about The River King and the answer was so heartbreaking. In a kind-of-good way, though. I suppose if there was a theme to last night it was “writing can save your life.”

Anyway, Ms. Hoffman told us that Ethan was Bluebeard (which the Selkie had got ages ago but I hadn’t, and I’m usually quite good at spotting my fairytales.) And that she had to love her characters, so Ethan–a character who was either evil of had some evil in him, is how she put it–wasn’t someone she could get near.

I understood. Really, I do. The urge to love your characters is deep and profound, and I suppose I do love all of them down deep in some weird way. But mostly I dislike my heroes. I downright hate a couple of them–Michael Constantius, for one, is a manipulative asshat and I hatehatehate him. (One of the best times I ever had writing was that crucifixion scene.) Japhrimel I also dislike in some very fundamental ways, as he’s so wrapped around the axle by what he feels for Danny he won’t tell her anything for fear of losing her or frightening her. Plus, he was a demon, for Pete’s sake, and his idea of “truth” was so flexible as to be absurd. Darik? Insufferable and arrogant, but he’s nicer than the others just because of those exquisite manners. The Watchers? Collectively, they’re one creepy bunch of guys. I do like Jack Gray, though, and I’m awful fond of Merrick. I have a little black spot in my heart for Merrick.

I ramble. But the way I feel about my heroes is usually a complex mishmash of not-very-positive feelings. My heroines I’m closer to, but all of them are flawed–I mean, Christ, try spending an afternoon with Danny while she’s On The Rampage. Or with Elise when she’s in a snit, or Rowan when she won’t do anything for herself. Argh. I can understand my heroines and to some extent my heroes, but I don’t love my characters. They’re people to me, and fully-formed and fleshed people at that, but I don’t love them.

Part of that is because they’re going to leave when the story is done. Another part is that the story demands horrible thing to happen to them, and it’s wrenching. Dead Man Rising was terrible for me, because I understood Dante so thoroughly and could feel what she was feeling. It was awful.

Hrm. I’m rambling, and that can’t be very interesting. Suffice to say that it was ALL KINDS OF AWESOME to actually see Alice Hoffman in the flesh and get some of my favorites–especially Seventh Heaven–signed.

The Selkie and I had a longish dinner afterward, and a chat about character motivations. I can’t wait to read her WIP. *fidgets* Then we both wended our way home, and I settled in and read Scott Westerberg’s Uglies, which was (as I’ve said) a very good, very rolling read. It really reminded me of Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite The Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which is high praise from me. I finished it in about three hours, give or take about twenty minutes, and wasn’t bored once the whole way through. I did like how the subject of anorexia was approached, in a quiet almost-glancing way, and dealt with very lightly. I can see this book doing a lot of good.

And now it’s Tuesday morning, the kitchen is full of dishes, I haven’t had coffee yet, and I’ve got the YA to do a draft on. I think once I get through the first three chapters–which I’ve retooled and retooled because that’s what first chapters do, for me–it will go better and smoother.

Or at least, that’s the hope.

I do love my job. This is awesome.

I just read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies since I got home from Powell’s. (More on that in the morning. Later in the morning.) Wow. It reminds me of Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite The Sun, and is really rollicking-good.

Just thought I’d share.

I’m doing a lot of bulleted lists lately, for which I beg your indulgence. All my connect-the-dots is going into the writing. I just found out we need another revision on Redemption Alley. It’s not a HUGE one, it’s just one of those workmanlike things that’s got to happen once a story’s been pruned so an editor can see the nasty bits underneath. Heh.

* Gin, Television, And Social Surplus. This was AWESOME. I hope he’s right, but one of the things I’m struggling with lately is a bit of depression over humans as a species. We just seem so in love with destroying. Not even clean destruction, like a wildfire that clears everything out–but destruction for its own sake, from a dictator destroying lives and culture and social networks to wars destroying everyone who touches them in an ever-expanding ring, to gallons of poison pissed into our own life-support system. It’d be nice to find some evidence of people creating even half as much as they destroy, and just as reflexively.

You see? I’m on a real kick here. And most of it is…

* Holden Caulfield. I bought Catcher in the Rye for the Teen, since he said he’d never read it and I thought it was a) one of those books he should read, and b) that he’s old enough now he won’t go into a huge honking depression over it and end up making some silly gesture that will land him in the newspapers. Then I got to thinking, it’s been a while since I read it, too. So when he was done he put it in my TBR pile, and I read half of it last night.

The Teen says, “It’s scary. I had to put it down and give it a rest before going back to finish it because that kid? He’s me. It’s like the author KNEW me or something. When I was fourteen to sixteen, that kid was me.”

Then I started reading it, and I remember my own painful uncertainty during those years. It’s achingly depressing that Salinger remembered so much of the absolute agony of being a teenager to be able to write it down. Or, more precisely, what is depressing is that I can see the difference between that uncertainty and my adult self, I can see how that uncertainty fed into my adult self, and my heart aches for every kid who has to go through that. You couldn’t PAY me to go back to those years between thirteen and twenty. They sucked bigtime, and I never want to be that lonely and uncertain again. I never want to be that hungry for approval and affection again.

I’ve been talking to the Teen off and on about that hunger, and about the fact that he doesn’t have to have his life all mapped out at 18. I didn’t figure out who I was or what I wanted until I was about 23-25. Now I had Issues, so I was probably happening a little later in that process than I like, and it’s only now at 32 that I’ve grown (by dint of hard work) into someone I like. Nobody tells kids that they don’t have to have it figured out by 18, that it will take them a while to figure things out, and that’s okay. Well, on the one hand it can be a prolonging of adolescence, but on the other it’s necessary to build someone who isn’t a jackass stuck in high school popularity contests.

It’s funny, (she says, fully conscious it’s funny-strange, not funny-haha) but all the adults I like and get on with were outcasts, nerds, etc., in high school. Those were the kids forced to develop things outside the hothouse jungle of school to keep their souls intact. Kids that were popular in high school kind of forget there’s a world outside those glass walls. They learn to game that system so thoroughly, so young, that when they reach the Real World outside they have no fricking idea and end up settling rigidly into what they know–the reflexes that did them good in high school.

By no means is this a hard and fast universal rule, (I AM fully aware that there are decent adults who were popular in high school out there) but all my close friends had trouble/were unpopular/were outcasts/were braniacs/were nerds in school. We sometimes talk about this dynamic–the people who don’t find some way of interacting with the world that’s outside halls and lockers and taunting. And (bringing it full circle) Holden Caulfield is reminding me of that. When I read Catcher for the first time I was nine and had no idea, I just liked that the voice seemed true–not like an adult trying to impress or Teach Me A Lesson. When I read it again at fourteen it really spoke to me on some levels, and on others I thought Holden was such a privileged jerkwad; oh noes he had money and freedom and was So! Upset! And then at nineteen I read it again and thought, Jesus, I have so much else to worry about with the rent I don’t need to be reading this, but still did finish the damn thing.

Now I’m reading it as the mother-figure/friend of a teenager, the mother of a preteen girl, and seeing the painful self-doubt and uncertainties from a whole new perspective. I don’t know if this whole long ramble has a point, but I do know that Salinger did what he set out to do, if what he set out to do was write a book that people can read from several different angles. Truth–telling the truth, a writer’s truth–is like that; it’s got so many different angles. And who was it that said a good book grows with you?

* This upcoming Saturday, May 2, I’m going to be the featured speaker at the monthly Writer’s Mixer at Cover to Cover Books. I’ll be talking about continuity and characterization over the course of a multi-book series. If you have any questions etc. about writing series, why not comment or drop me a line? It will help me gauge the types of things to talk about, and if I talk about it all week I might sound halfway coherent when I do my half-hour thang.

At least, one can hope.

Happy Monday, all. I’m about to go back to the YA (it’s rested for a week) and start weaving in things I missed the first go-round because I was going so fast. Oh, and I’m making chicken tikka masala for dinner. Wish me luck.

My Friday post on writing is up. It’s about the “permission” to create bad art. *grin*

Since I’m deep into Weasel Boy and still on that same flat diet (just slide a pizza under the door, thanks, I’ll stagger around to eating it when I’m about to starve and go right back to the work) I’m just going to bullet a few things out for weekend digestion and head back to the salt mines. (Mixed metaphors, anyone?)

* On May 3, I’m going to be the featured speaker at the monthly Writer’s Mixer at Cover to Cover Books. I’ll be talking about how to keep character consistency and continuity over a multiple-book series. I’ll have a whiteboard, so I’ll be at least halfway coherent, and there will be snacks.

The best thing will probably be the snacks, given my shyness. But I’m going to give it the old college try.

* Mark Morford, again, with All The President’s Liars.

They have a potent aura of trustworthiness, fairness, decency. They are f—ing generals, for chrissakes, and hence we like to think of them as straight-talking, no-BS working men whose word is solid and whose authority unquestionable and therefore no wimp-assed monkey-faced president or scabrous Defense secretary could make them say something they didn’t actually believe.

Wrong. Oh, how horribly wrong.

So I ask again, did it work? Was America duped? Well, yes and no. There’s little doubt that this insidious, sustained PR attack — and make no mistake, it was/is an attack on the American people; such calculated “psychological operations” aimed at U.S. citizens are actually very illegal, though it’s enormously difficult to prove so in court — swayed millions of Americans, gave fuel to the preemptive attack argument, inflamed (and still inflames) the warmongering right, scammed the media, fanned the pro-war fires for years before the public recoil finally kicked in.

But oh, kick in it did. This is the fascinating thing. Even all those high-ranking military experts lying like well-decorated dogs in one of the most impressive, appalling PR campaigns in American history could not keep Bush from collapsing, could not prevent Americans from learning the real facts of the failed war and toxic presidency — eventually. (Mark Morford

* I have given up on reviewing Cassie Edwards’s Savage Wrongs. I offered to take one for the Bitchery and review it, but I just…I can’t. I’m sorry, I’ve tried several times. I just Cannot. Do. It.

So, if you live in the continental US and would like to give it a go, email me at lili at lilithsaintcrow dot com, first come first served, and you can have the damn thing. I just can’t. I’m sorry. *hangs head*

* Can I just say that Caitlin and Angela are AWESOME PEOPLE?

* A quick note: by the end of the day, between the punishing wordcount and the homeschooling and the getting the kids fed and into bed, I just want to drool as I play World of Warcraft. Dude, a human warlock in Teldrassil is ridiculously overpowered (even more so in Auberdine) and that plus-five-percent rep gain? AWESOME! Although, having a mace specialization as a race and not being able to train for maces because of being a warlock? BOGUS. I just…I guess I just like maces, especially with the regen stuff usually on them interacting with Demon Skin etc.

I am now officially, if I never was before, a geek. (Yeah. Like I wasn’t before I realized I was talking with a kid half my age about a video game and acquitting myself rawther well. Gah.)

* This morning the Teen’s Ipod-alarm woke him up with Billy Joel’s My Life. He’s taken it as a sort of anthem lately. And he tells me my music is “cool.”

I have hooked someone twenty years younger than me on Billy Joel.

I feel old now. Or maybe “mature”. Yeah. That’s the way to put it.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Note to my stupid self: When will I learn not to mutter, “Well, I prefer being busy, anyway.” where the career gods can hear me?

I know I’ve scheduled enough time for every project and a fair amount of downtime in between, but still. Sheesh.

So, erm, if you’re wanting to see me anytime in the near future…I’m afraid the closest most peeps will get is sliding the pizza under my door when I’m typing furiously.

Back to Weasel Boy. I swear I’m not even going to look at the manuscript that arrived this morning for revisions until sometime next week when I finish the YA revisions into first-draft form.

*crosses fingers*

*takes deep breath*

*dives*