Life in a Northern Town

For the past few years, I've done a little photography project that I call Monday Melt: every Monday in April, I go around the property and take pictures, so that I can compare them to past years and see how our spring is coming along.

(And yes, I know it's not Monday, but I took these pictures on Monday; I'm just now getting around to dl'ing them from the camera!)



As you can see, we have a ways to go yet.

( A couple more pictures and comparisons to past years under the cut )

The latest book from my Library Pile is one that I’d thought to be a historical murder mystery from the cover, but once I started to read, I realized it was a mystery-romance. The heroine has a meet-cute with a guy on the ferry that she’s taking to the Greek island where the events of the book take place. On the island, he is giving her a lift in his sporty little car, when he accidentally knocks over an old lady’s fruit stand, knocking oranges all over the road. Immediately, he stops, apologizes, and helps the old lady pick up her fruit.

And this really gave me pause; it made me stop and go, “Wow, I like this guy! This one’s a keeper, lady.”

… then about five pages later, the actual romantic hero shows up, which is clearly signposted because he is a total dick and the heroine hates him. Just to be sure, I turned to the blurb on the back (normally I avoid those, being a spoilerphobe) and discovered that not only is Dick Boy our “hero”, but the guy I’d liked so much is slated to be the murder victim.

Yeah. No. This one goes straight back to the library.

But this made me realize just how thoroughly over the alpha-hero trope I am. Over. Done. I want characters (male and female) who are the sort of person who would stop to help an old lady pick up her oranges. I am hungry for kind characters in literature, the sort of people who are aware that they exist as part of a community; who, when they accidentally hurt someone, notice and apologize for it, even if it’s a stranger, and doubly so if it’s a loved one.

And I think it was very eye-opening for me how startling it was, to encounter a scene in the opening pages of the book in which the character that I had believed to be the hero does something kind and altruistic. That’s rare. And it shouldn’t be. And this isn’t a problem specific to the romance genre. I read so many books in which the characters are misanthropic loners or just general jerks. I can enjoy me some misanthropic loners, but these days, I find that I’m really craving books about characters who aren’t. (Even if they may occasionally mistake themselves for one.)

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Crossposted from Wordpress.  

Well, I tried doing that "what are you reading on Wednesday?" meme, but I kinda petered out because it was simply too random; the last book I read was usually something I didn't have much to say about, and I ended up talking about a lot of books I didn't like, and that wasn't fun.

So instead, I'll use these Wednesday reading posts to recommend a book that I read and liked.

This week, it's Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road in Australia). It's YA, and it was originally recommended to me by naye. The library finally had it -- it's been checked out every time I've gone looking for it for the last few months -- so I read it and was completely blown away. Also I somehow forgot the part of naye's recommendation post (note: spoilers in the comments on the LJ side) where she mentioned that the book "wrenched my heart out and set it on fire and threw the ashes in the river." Er, yes, that about sums it up. It turned me into a sobbing MESS. Although I realized when I started trying to explain to Orion why his wife was crying her eyes out that ... it's actually sort of hard to describe WHY I was so wrecked at the end of the book. It was a good kind of wrecked! Really, I swear.

Anyway, the book is YA, so if a basic, to-the-point YA writing style and teen protagonists are not your thing, then you may not like it. Also, it really does put you through the emotional wringer. But I absolutely loved it and recommend it VERY highly. It's been a long time since I read a book that was so completely surprising, on almost every level; although I finally got a decent grasp on it by about halfway through, it's a book that really throws all your expectations in terms of genre and characters and plot. It's difficult to talk about the book in more detail without getting into spoilers, and this is a book that I am very glad I read unspoiled. However, there are some more spoilery comments under the cut (not really a "review" so much as random things I liked about the book).

( Spoilers here (mainly for the first half of the book - but I do STRONGLY recommend reading unspoiled if you prefer to read that way) )

Short version: this is highly recommended. :)

Going back through Hunter's Moon in search of a particular bit of canon that I need to know for the page I'm currently working on, I came to a panel which I think is probably my favorite Fleetwood panel in the whole comic.



... though granted, it probably makes little sense out of context. I'm not sure why this panel amuses me so much. It's just such a quintessentially Fleetwood reaction to someone threatening to kill him.

I finished getting the annotated Raven's Children and Sun-Cutter wordpress accounts set up with the existing archives. I plan to start updating both of these as soon as I have an adequate backlog of Sun-Cutter pages (I'm tentatively shooting for the first week of May; this seems like a nice time to do it!). Now the question is how to handle things on the Dreamwidth end. I don't want to spam people; on the other hand, I was spamming people before, when I was posting the pages directly at this journal, so it wouldn't be too different. *g*



((This poll is also on Livejournal.)

Before I get to the rest of this, my romance alias Layla M. Wier has a story out now in the anthology Snow on the Roof, from Dreamspinner Press. This is an M/M anthology of stories about men over 40. I’m very happy with the company I’m in; the final story in the anthology in particular, “Granddad’s Cup of Tea”, is just really good fiction, nevermind romance. And it’s a pleasantly less-tropy-than-usual collection of romantic fiction. Here’s its Goodreads page. I’ll also have a novelette with a female protagonist (F/F and F/M pairings) in an anthology coming out from Storm Moon Press in July. Small steps, yes, but hey, I’m selling stuff.

Anyway, right now I’m making WordPress sites for Sun-Cutter and for the Annotated Raven’s Children. Having already created an account on WordPress.com for my (rarely updated) romance blog, I discovered that it is incredibly easy to create new WordPress accounts and manage them all from the same hub. So now annotatedravenschildren.wordpress.com is a go, and so is kismetsuncutter.wordpress.com. (No real content in either place yet; I’m still getting them set up — well, at the moment, trying to figure out how I can stop the site scheme I chose for the Sun-Cutter site from putting a line around all my images. Knock it off, CSS!) I also figured it would be a good idea to lock down the “laylalawlor” name at WordPress too, since in both the above cases, the addresses I really wanted (“ravenschildren” and “suncutter”) were already taken.

… which is partly because WordPress’s rules for deleting accounts are STUPID. You can only delete an account by completely locking it out of the system, so that no one else, including you, will ever be able to use that address again. Why would they do that?! I much prefer LJ’s system, where a deleted username can either redirect to your new site or become available for other people to use. Once you select a WordPress username, no one can EVER use that name at WordPress, and if you delete it, you can’t ever change your mind and undelete it. Right now I have a spare WordPress account that I (somewhat stupidly) made in the beginning, back when I was futzing around with different romance aliases and thought I wanted to be Lenora Glass. (Turned out I didn’t.) But I like that pseud and I’m keeping the account even though it’s just visual clutter on my dashboard, because otherwise I can never ever use it again at WordPress.com.

(Seriously, why would they do that, WHY.)

Other than that, though, I like WordPress a lot. Most of my site management on my website is now being done that way; I still have some tag cleanup to do at LJ/DW to get the two of them in sync with the way I’m handling tags at WordPress, but, now that I’ve managed to staunch the tide of spam by setting it to registered users only, I’m quite comfortable working with it. When I start updating the Kismet and Raven’s Children wordpress accounts, I will probably crosspost them to LJ & DW much as I’ve been doing with my main laylalawlor.com blog (where I’m typing this update right now); there’s no reason, I think, why you can’t crosspost from multiple WordPress blogs into the same LJ account.

A partial website “to do” list for the next couple of weeks:

• Get the Sun-Cutter and Raven’s Children archives set up on WordPress, so that I can start updating RC again.
• Somehow figure out a good fiction archive interface for my website. (I want to start posting free short stories and putting up ebook versions of the fiction I already have online, but I’m not sure exactly how I want to handle it. Right now it is, like all else, a scattered mess.)
• Set up a website store, selling books, art, ebooks, etc. (Aargh, so overdue!)

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and finally decided to make a post/braindump out of it.

As some of you know, in 2009 (wow, has it really been that long?) I quit my well-paying 9-to-5 job, first of all to go back to school, and subsequently to try to make a go at freelancing and novel-writing. (This part is still a work in progress.) I’m a fairly risk-averse person, have always been, and this was terrifying to me. Since I started working at the News-Miner in 1998, there had only been a period of a few months when I was unemployed, while I was changing jobs after moving to Illinois. This is mostly a case of “right place, right time” luck, as well as having a skill set, as a newspaper layout artist, that was, up to the mid-2000s, highly employable. (The fact that by the late 2000s this had stopped being true was one of the main factors in my decision to go back to college and finish my degree. A career that had seemed a guaranteed job ticket a decade earlier was now teetering on the brink of going the way of buggy whip manufacturers.)

I’d occasionally worked part-time while freelancing or working on my creative projects in my spare time, but not having a regular job at all was an order of magnitude more intimidating. I have a TON of respect for people who start their own businesses, all the more so for those who are single or the family’s major breadwinner, because I was in basically the best of all possible worlds as far as doing this (my spouse has a good-paying job with excellent job security and benefits) and it still felt like stepping off a cliff. Stepping off that cliff while being entirely responsible for keeping a roof over your head is something I have trouble contemplating.

Still, it’s been very interesting to suddenly, in my mid-30s, have a whole new world open up in front of me: the world of people who aren’t tied to a 9-to-5 work schedule. You wouldn’t think this would feel so life-changing for me, because I grew up in a household in which my parents were largely unemployed or self-employed throughout my entire childhood. As an adult, though, I had primarily been around other adults who were white-collar workers, like me. And I was married to one. It’s an oddly self-selecting thing, because when you work a 9 to 5, you mostly associate with other 9-to-5ers by pure happenstance. You’re just not in a position to meet people who are on a radically different schedule. I did, of course, have self-employed friends who were artists or old school buddies or whatnot, but I tended to see them on my schedule, rather than theirs. In a way, the difference between their lives and mine was largely invisible to me, because I was fixed to my schedule (free only on evenings and weekends; had to get to bed early to get up for work, etc).

And it’s a startling thing, now, to be exposed to a whole new demographic, a whole world of people who (for example) shop at the grocery store at 2 in the afternoon or 10 p.m. on a weeknight. And there are a lot of them! I don’t think I’d ever realized how many. There’s an interesting kind of tunnel vision you develop when you work a 9-to-5 job, where it feels like everyone else is doing the same thing (but only because that’s the people you largely associate with) and it seems as if having an employer and a 401K and a steady paycheck is the only path to adulthood. It’s not, of course, but once you’ve gotten into that lifestyle, it’s strangely difficult to think outside that box until you get out of it.

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

What are you reading now?

The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty – It’s tough to talk about this one because I’ve only just started, so it’s still early to tell how much I’m going to enjoy this or, for that matter, what the plot is going to be (I don’t like to read cover copy on books; I prefer to discover it as I go along). Thus far: guy is in Maine on vacation, guy’s parents die, guy’s sister is mentally ill. It was recommended by the person who loaned it to me and the writing is good — I’m liking it so far. Not everything has to be high-concept.

What did you just finish?

The Clairvoyant Countess by Dorothy Gilman – Well, for certain values of “finished”, anyway. This is another one from the cheap-paperback pile, which I had picked up at the used bookstore because I like her Mrs. Pollifax books; they’re a bit twee, but also very charming. And straight back to the used bookstore it goes, because it’s so unbearably twee that I quit halfway through. There is no overall plot, just a series of mini-mysteries in which Madame Karitska, psychic, helps the police, usually by telling them things that are so blindingly obvious that I’d already figured out the twist a few pages ago. The police in this town can’t find the bathroom without Madame Kariska telling them where it is. Tightened up a bit and with a solid plot, I think I might have enjoyed this book a lot more, because the characters are likable, but it’s just too rambling and self-consciously precious; there’s too much of Madame Karitska being wise and darling and telling people really obvious stuff that solves all their problems.

What are you reading next?

Something else from the Cheap Paperback Pile, no doubt.

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

Poetry Fishbowl today at Elizabeth Barrette’s journal. Explanation for how it works at the link.

The shared setting Torn World has just launched a new core storyline in which the cultures of the South and North meet for the first time. The first story is here, and you can follow the South meets North tag on the Torn World Livejournal to keep up on it. This is something I’ve been rather excited about; I really like the Torn World setting (it’s fantastically complex, with a huge amount of material) but it’s difficult to find a good place to jump in, especially as there are few large ongoing storylines — for the most part, Torn World exists in a lot of small vignettes without a core story. This storyline is meant to be a jumping-on point for new readers and a window for exploring the world.

Today’s main creative project (though I’m currently procrastinating, as you can see) is writing a query letter and synopsis of my novel for an agent submission package. As I was browsing through synopsis-writing advice, I stumbled upon this interesting page on developing a novel’s plot by focusing on the main story goal and the complications that follow from that. I’m still trying to find a method of story development that works for me other than the highly inefficient “just start writing” method; I’ll have to try this!

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

As noted in the last post, we’re now on Karamanda 2.0, The Re-Karamanding. *g*

Earlier posts from Karamanda v1.0 (much of which is now invalid):
Day 1: Geography & Climate – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth
Day 2: History & Politics – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth
Day 3: Religion & Magic – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth

And the full list of blogfest participants, for your reading pleasure!

So, at this point, I’ve moved them from the mountains to the middle of a Mediterranean-like sea, and done away with most of my plot. *facepalm* One side effect of doing this is that most of the cultural stuff I’d come up with is no longer valid. A great deal of their material culture has changed tremendously — food and clothing, for example.

( Read the rest of this entry )

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.