Warren G shouldn’t have been allowed to regulate.

Posted by greengeekgirl — May 8, 2013

So, I said I would be writing about more things than just books here. Mostly, I’ve still been writing about books; so, I thought, what better way to introduce general entertainment posts than with a post about mid-90′s rap? Super perfect. (fist pump)

Warren G’s “Regulate” came out when I was 11; the song, along with the upstairs neighbor who was allowed to watch as much MTV as she wanted, helped define my middle-school-era musical tastes. I would listen to it over and over again . . . which, I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to do, since it doesn’t exactly speak kindly of women. Recently, when I needed to put together a workout mix, I turned to the mid-90′s rap that I still pretty much love. Listening to “Regulate” again for the first time in quite awhile made me arch my brow (especially after reading this hilarious post about it).

Warren G is a terrible regulator.

No, seriously.

I mean, at the very beginning of the song, he says you can’t be any “geek off the street” if you want to regulate. You’ve gotta like, you know, be good at it. In fact, he says that–”and we’re damn good, too.” So, let’s see how the night goes for Warren G:

Goes out looking for females.
Stops for a dice game and has guns pulled on him.
Proceeds to get robbed at gunpoint in his own town.
Starts wishing he was a bird so he could fly far, far far away.
Is saved by Nate Dogg.
Is led to a car full of stranded women, found by Nate Dogg.
Presumably scores with one or some of the women, but Nate Dogg got the one that he said was “sexy as hell.” Sexiness status of the other women is unknown.

Is it just me, or does Warren G kind of sound like a chump? Rolling up to a game of dice and getting robbed at gunpoint seems exactly like something that would happen to a geek off the street. And Warren G was definitely not handy with the steel (ie, his gun, which, let’s be real–they probably stole from him). Then, Warren G didn’t even help with finding the lay-deez for that evening’s romp. I bet Nate Dogg even had to pay for the hotel rooms, unless they recovered Warren’s stolen property before leaving the scene of their mass murder–or, I guess, mass-self-defense.

Also . . . in a dangerous situation, it doesn’t seem very tough to me to wish you had wings to fly away instead of doing something proactive, like reaching for your own gun or, y’know . . . fighting back somehow. I would fully expect a regulator to be able to take on a bunch of random thugs on the street. (Regulators are kind of like Batman, right? That’s what I’m getting from that song. A Batman who goes out trawling for “hoes”.)

At this point, I kind of feel like Warren G is Gilligan to Nate Dogg’s Skipper. Not very competent, but Nate Dogg keeps him around because he just loves his “little buddy.”

Gilligan-The-Skipper-gilligans-island-26546640-800-597

‘Man, I wanted to find the freaks this time.’ ‘Someday, little buddy, someday.’

Filed under: Yes, these are things I really think about. Welcome to the inner part of my brain.

The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: Tony’s Tale

Posted by tonbird — May 6, 2013

Unlike many booksluts, I was not a natural born reader. I have no stories about teaching myself to read or learning to read before I started school. But I had a lot of people in my life who read to me at a young age. My mom read Little Golden Books to me all the time, and so did my Aunt Jill and Aunt Stephanie. I could recite my favorite books from memory, even if I couldn’t understand the letters and words.

One of my childhood favorites

Once I started school, it wasn’t until near the end of kindergarten that I learned to read very simple words, and throughout first and second grade, I struggled with reading and usually got placed in the slower reading groups.

But my love for information and a good story overcame my difficulties. Despite my challenges with school-related readings, I started reading books on my own. I always loved library day, and I would check out books from the A New True Book series to learn about different kinds of animals and dinosaurs and whatever else I was interested in at the moment. They fed my information addiction like a 1980s children’s version of Wikipedia. At night I read stories by my nightlight when my parents though thought I was asleep. I had a variety of storybooks and an illustrated book of surprisingly graphic Bible stories that my dad used to read from. This one quickly became my favorite, and when Dad’s job got too busy for him to keep up with family readings, I started reading it on my own.

All I see now is a bunch of white people posing as Hebrews.

Before long, I was moving on to bigger and better books, and my school librarian guided me to the mythology section. I read everything in it. Then I spent a while devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books.

For summer vacations, I would ride my bike down to the park, and then to the pool, and then I’d go to the public library in damp swim trunks with the moisture soaking through the bottom of my T-shirt. I checked out how-to books, and I read about all kinds of different crafts and artwork, drawing, origami, and making neat toys out of junk. I also read even more about animals and some of my favorite books were the ones about where to catch critters and how to keep them alive in homemade habitats.

I apologize to all the creatures who suffered this fate at my hands. Animals once considered me a super villain.

Those first years of reading were great, and I enjoyed them very much, but as I got older I moved on to different kinds of books. At the age of twelve, I spent a day at my Aunt Tina’s house and I told her how I planned to read The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings because one of my friends had suggested it. She put the conversation on hold as she ran into a different room to dig in her closet, and she came back with a bare green hardback copy of The Silmarillion. I’ll never know what the dust jacket looked like. “This is what came before The Hobbit,” she told me. She let me borrow it, and I read the whole thing before I read any of the other books. How, as a twelve-year-old, I had the patience for dry reading like The Silmarillion, I can only attribute to my previous readings of mythology and the Bible. I quickly moved on to Tolkien’s other works, and finished off the entire Tolkien section of my middle school’s library, including Farmer Giles of Ham and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Following Tolkien, I made a deal with one of my friends that if he read The Hobbit, I would read Mossflower by Brian Jacques. I loved it for the anthropomorphic rodent heroes, and I read every other book that was available from the Redwall series. Even better was Watership Down. After that, I became an indiscriminate sci-fi/fantasy junkie, which continued throughout my high school years.

Strangely enough, I very seldom enjoyed the “literature” I was assigned to read for school. I won’t hate on A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby too much, but I never got myself interested in them enough to match the enthusiasm that my English teachers had. I was never assigned to read Hemingway, so naturally, he became my favorite literary author. Of all the things I was assigned to read in high school, the only two I really appreciated were Grendel and To Kill a Mockingbird. I obsessed over the dragon’s lecture to Grendel, trying to puzzle out all the big words and make sense of what my teacher had summed up as “a bunch of gobbledegook”.

Like Susie, I joined in academic competition and got to read and analyze a few literary works. The one I remember best was Antigone. I don’t know if it was the work itself or just that particular translation, but I found it moving. Other than these few exceptions, though, I spent most of my time in high school reading pulp sci-fi and fantasy novels. If I could have unread all the Terry Brooks books and been given the time back to socialize, perhaps the Virginity Fairy would have relieved me of my V-card much sooner.

The Virginity Fairy visited me a little later than she did most people I know.

Near the end of my high school days, my friend Eric introduced me to Stephen King by getting me The Shining as a Christmas gift. I got a few chapters into it before my dad confiscated it for religious reasons. Undaunted, I read ‘Salem’s Lot, keeping it discreetly hidden.

Given my unwillingness to read most assigned books, I really wonder what possessed me to major in English when I started college. Nevertheless, I did. During my years at Indiana State, I hardly had time to read anything that wasn’t part of the curriculum. It turned out that this was my time to finally gain an appreciation for some of the classics. I tore up Things Fall Apart by recently departed Chinua Achebe. I also loved me some Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bram Stoker, and Mark Twain. Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I decided to embrace my heritage and read the Bible from cover to cover. I liked Ecclesiastes the most. At that time in my life, it was comforting to know that everything is meaningless.

I kept reading and working my way toward a degree in English literature. I was required to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for a pop culture class. I followed the morbid misadventures of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, and I finally got a lesson in Chaucer where the professor assigned the Miller’s Tale.

Not all of my reading was in English. For my classical studies courses, I translated Ovid, Vergil, and Catullus into English. I especially liked Catullus. His love affair with Lesbia mirrored my own heartbreaking college romance, so I really related to the euphoric poems at first, and the miserable ones later.

I graduated and took a break from reading literature for a while. Instead I read self-help books about business as I tried to find my way in the world. Thinking journalism to be a viable option for making a living, I started reading magazines and newspapers more than books.

In the decade since college, my appreciation for books has continued to develop. For whatever reason, I did Cliff’s Notes on A Tale of Two Cities. (I had blown it off to read Fight Club and Choke.) I remembered that the lecture made it sound interesting, so I went back and read it years after I graduated. I read the remainder of the Harry Potter series after the last book finally came out. I also discovered Gregory McGuire, Christopher Moore, and George R.R. Martin. Finally, my best friend Eric–the same one who got me The Shining–talked me into reading The Gunslinger. I shirked a lot of my personal responsibilities as I got sucked into that world. Not long after, I began my love affair with audiobooks. I usually listen to books I’ve already read, but occasionally I listen to something completely new, especially if it’s non-fiction. I’ve done On Becoming a Leader, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Pimsleur courses for Cantonese and Japanese.

My most recent discovery is Haruki Murakami. I just finished Norwegian Wood, and I have The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in my to-read queue.

So there it is: Tony’s dirty, dirty past as a bookslut. What about you, fellow booksluttians? Did we read any of the same books? How did you come to be a bookslut?

The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: sj

Posted by sj — April 15, 2013

young_sj

I don’t remember learning how to read. I know that I was reading before my fourth birthday – and have vague memories of being impatient with “age appropriate” books when I was in pre-school – but don’t remember if it was my dad who taught me how or if it was just something I was determined to pick up on my own.

It wasn’t just the books I was impatient with, but with pre-school in general. I wanted more time to read, but was instead encouraged to (ugh) spend time OUTSIDE. And INTERACTING. I have never had the greatest social skills. This was particularly evident the time I smacked a girl in the face because she’d stolen my jacket that had the book I was reading in the pocket…only to later find out that we just had the same jacket.

In kindergarten, I was so proud when Mrs Heck (yes, really) asked me daily to read aloud to my class at naptime. I later found out that when I was reading a chapter of Chocolate Fever to my classmates, Mrs Heck was outside having a smoke break. I could be upset about this, but I can totally understand.

Heh, Chocolate Fever. Did you all read that, too?

In the first grade I was tested for the GATE program, and was told that my reading and comprehension were already at a college level. In addition to having to switch classrooms to go with the other GATE kids (it was 3 grades in one class because there weren’t enough smart kids in the school to have individual classes for each grade), I had to visit the 6th grade GATE class during Reading and Language classes every day. Luckily, I was always tall for my age, so I wasn’t this tiny little kid being sent to hang out with the 11 year olds for half the morning, but when you’re six, even when you’re in a class with the other “smart kids” this can kind of do a number on you.

I had a difficult time making friends, and (again) had no interest in playing Thundercats during recess, so I spent most of my days hiding in the library, or just sitting next to my classroom door with whatever book I was reading at the time.

In early elementary school, I was in love with the work of Edward Eager and I tore through Nancy Drews like nobody’s business. These were easy reads, and I had no problem burning through two or three in a day (especially during vacations when I could just READ AND READ FOREVER!). In the 4th grade, my uncle gave me my first two Stephen King novels (I talked about that a little here), and for a while, I read as much of Unky Steve’s work as I could get my hands on.

I added Tolkien and Diane Duane to my list of favourites and discovered that fantasy was my first true love, as it provided me with the biggest escape. I didn’t like reading about things that too closely resembled my own reality, so I stuck with things I knew weren’t really real.

Late elementary school/junior high also rekindled my love for faerie tales. By the time I was 13, I’d collected nearly all of Lang’s Colour Faerie books and was moving on to re-tellings/re-imaginings. I found a copy of Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer at a yard sale, I read and re-read those stories (but when I tried to re-read it last year, I lost my patience with them and gave up after only reading two or three).

THEN! Towards the end of junior high, I was given the opportunity to volunteer at my teeny tiny two room local library in the summers. I jumped at the chance because I got to spend 3 days a week sitting behind the actual desk and reading the whole day away. The librarian (who was also a volunteer, tiny town, no money for a real library) would leave me there alone and go pick up the ILLs or…I don’t know, I’m pretty sure she frequently went to hang out at the General Store (go ahead and laugh) to have ice cream or whatever, since someone else was holding the fort.

I didn’t care what she was doing, it was just the best being able to be surrounded by books and pick whatever I wanted off the shelves to lose myself in.

What_mad_universe That was when I discovered sf, and when I found a lot of the books and authors that are still my favourites today. PKD, Fredric Brown, Douglas Adams (actually, I have a different story about my introduction to The Guide, which you can read here if you’re interested) – my science fiction roots may have been planted in Star Wars soil, but the pulpy greats of the 50s and 60s were (and still are) some of the best Imagination MiracleGro I’ve ever encountered.

I still primarily read fantasy and sf. I occasionally branch out into other genres, but I’m not an adventurous sort at all when it comes to the books I choose.

I still read to escape, and because I slip into books to get away from the things that are making me mad/sad/angry/frustrated, I know I am not as well-read as many of my contemporaries. Heh. Yeah, I read a lot, but I’m not well-read. That’s my new catch phrase.

Reading Rage: You can’t hide a self-published work under a vanity press name. Just don’t.

Posted by greengeekgirl — April 12, 2013

I will just say that my book was published by Fancy Unicorn Pants Press and people will never know I published it myself.

Our review policy has undergone (is that a word? did I conjugate that correctly?) some changes in the recent past. I decided to stop accepting pitches from self-published authors because it was eating up an enormous amount of my time for very little return on my time investment. I changed the policy at that time to say that we would only accept books published by small and/or independent presses, because that’s kind of our bag when it comes to reviewing books.

An interesting thing happened when I changed the policy, which led directly to our new new policy (we just don’t accept books anymore). We started getting a lot of books that were “published” by small presses that I’d never, ever heard of before. Not that I’ve heard of every small press, but I’ve gotten fairly well-versed in small presses; when I see one I haven’t heard of, I like to look them up. Just for my own education–and, okay yeah, because some of these “small presses” were a tad suspicious. When I followed the Google trail for these presses, I found some interesting things:

Many of the small presses were vanity presses, where the author paid to have their book published. This? is not the same as being published by a small press.
Other authors actually made up small presses, which had only published their book, or maybe two or three selections (probably from their friends). The pages for these presses are usually nothing more than a makeshift, generically-branded shop where you can purchase the author’s book. It’s pretty obvious that it’s a fake press.
Still other authors didn’t even bother making any kind of online presence for their fake press. They would slap an appropriate-sounding press name on their book, but when I searched for any inkling of the press existing, I found nothing.

headdesk

Look, authors who have tried or are considering trying this–it’s really obvious when a small press is not a real press. It’s really obvious when someone starts a press (even if they’re legitimately trying to start a real press, which is only true about half a percent of the time in these cases) just to self-publish without being “self-published.” I’ve never run across this situation where I have had to carefully ponder whether the press was real or not. The evidence is immediately damning. The only way to be slick enough to pull this off is actually to fully launch a legitimate small press where you have editors and designers and you publish books for real… and then you’re not being sneaky anyway, you’re being industrious.

Pretending to have been published by a small press when you haven’t been is really annoying. For one thing, it’s totally lying, which I hate on its own. Only smarmy people and grifters lie about things that they’re representing or selling. If you published your own book, you shouldn’t hide that behind a fake press name–in my eyes, that’s tantamount to fraud. The difference between being published and publishing one’s own book is quite significant in terms of process; to indicate that you were published when you did the process yourself is to misrepresent your book. If you want to put a vanity name on your book, then you need to make it clear that it’s a self-published book under the name of your vanity press. I shouldn’t have to go hunt through Google to try to figure out whether you published your book yourself.

(And if you’re reading this thinking “What’s the big deal?”–if it weren’t a big deal, it wouldn’t be happening in the first place; nobody would be trying to bury the self-published stigma under a fake press name.)

It was also annoying because it was disrespectful to us. Our policy clearly stated no self-published books. Even if your book has a press name slapped on it, if you self-published it, you self-published it. The fake press names were included specifically to circumvent our policy, which had 0% to do with whether a book had a press name on it and 100% to do with the differences in process between small-press publishing and self-publishing. Those authors were attempting to cheat their way into getting a review, and apparently didn’t think I would be smart enough to figure out their tactics. Because, you know, that’s exactly the kind of person you want writing a review of your book. Derp.

Dear respectable self-published authors: all of these shady jerkwads are ruining it for the rest of you. I’m so sorry you have to deal with stigma because a bunch of people don’t know how to be courteous and professional.

Here’s the deal, shady authors: bloggers such as myself put a lot of work into our blogs. We will do our homework if we specify certain policies. And we talk to each other–try to put one over on one of us, and word is going to get around to many of the rest of us. Information travels at high speed these days, and we don’t like to be tricked or lied to, so that’s information we will definitely pass along whenever the opportunity arises. So, you need to stop trying to loophole yourself out of being self-published. If you did the work yourself, own it! Don’t bury it under a fake press name. It’s rude and perilously close to fraud.

Have you experienced this tactic as a blogger or a reader? Have you bought books thinking that they were traditionally-published, only to find out later that they were self-published? What’s your favorite TV show? Leave your comments below!

The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: Susie

Posted by greengeekgirl — April 8, 2013

Not me, but a reasonable facsimile.

This is a new series we’re doing, talking about how we got into reading, how we got into reading what we read, and so forth.

I don’t know if I would be a reader if it weren’t for my mother. Mom has been a reader as far back as I can remember (and probably further back than that, although I’ve never asked her about her reading history); when I was little-little, she read to me every day. Some of my favorites: Ernie’s Big Mess, The Care Bears and the Terrible Twos (I totally had Care Bear sheets; I loved the shit out of some Care Bears, y’all), The Monster at the End of this Book, The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. Also that Dr. Seuss alphabet book.

Between her reading to me and watching as much Sesame Street as I could find on television, I learned to read when I was about three. I know, Mom thought I was just memorizing the books, too–until we were at the grocery store one day, and while we were checking out, I pointed at something and said “Look, Mom! Buy one, get one free!” The surprise face that my mom makes when she tells that story is priceless. She loves telling that story, I think, because she’s the one who taught me how to read and write.

Thanks, Mama. Owe you one.

Mom is also the one who got me into my first big-girl chapter books. My parents got divorced when I was, mm, eight I think. My birthday was a few months later, and my mom sent me a box of gifts that included a Baby-Sitters Club book, Mary Anne Saves the Day. I downed that book in about an hour. What was this magic that was The Baby-Sitters Club? For years, I used my five-dollar-a-week allowance to collect the books. The best time of the week was getting to go to the bookstore and pick out a new, un-read book. My dad moved our single bookcase into my room (Dad was never much of a reader, although I did turn him onto Kurt Vonnegut when I was a teen–there’s a writer for everyone, I think) to hold my collection, which I took great pride in keeping very organized–unlike the rest of my room, which could have been declared a federal disaster area.

4,_Mary_Anne_Saves_the_Day

When I had all of the BSC books that the store had–and somehow, I never bought a duplicate; I could just remember which ones I had because I’d read them all five or six or fifteen times–I branched out into other books. At some point, I picked up my very first science-fiction(eqsue?) book, A Wrinkle in Time. Which I promptly read to pieces. I bet I read that book at least fifty times, maybe more. Maybe quite a lot more. The seed that it planted bloomed later when I discovered adult science fiction; I read Ray Bradbury in middle school, Asimov and Douglas Adams in high school, and went from there. I may not write about it much here, but I have a deep love of sci-fi and speculative fiction. And, okay, I admit it–I also love Star Trek and I read a crapload of Star Trek novels.

In school, I was a rather . . . troubled student, up until about eighth grade. Low grades, detentions, and I took my fair turn being hauled into the principal’s office. I definitely got detention for giving a cafeteria worker the finger behind her back, and someone ratted me out (dirty snitch . . . in my defense, that cafeteria worker was a first-class twat). I almost had to drop out of accelerated English in 7th grade, because I was actually failing. Yes, I was failing English. Me. I got my ass in gear around that time, and I’m pretty sure everyone was completely shocked when, after summer break, I came back busting out A’s on every report card. It was like I had been replaced with a cyborg who did homework.

To go along with my new super-student status, I also joined the Academic Team. You know, that team where you memorize stuff and regurgitate it while taking tests or doing quiz bowl? My focus, being the reader that I was, ended up being Literature, and that changed my reading life considerably. Academic Team exposed me to books I’d never heard about before then, poetry and classics, and tons of literary terms that I had to memorize. I started getting curious about the books I was memorizing facts about; I started reading them in my spare time, in-between trashy horror novels.

Academic Team was like this, but less funny.

In related news: I was a giant nerd. That whole “geek girl” moniker is completely legit.

Two things happened when I was a senior that cemented my reading habits pretty firmly–at least, as firmly as they ever get cemented, since they’re always evolving somewhat. The Richards family had finally gotten the internet not too long before (seriously, it took us forever to get the damn internet) and I found myself frequenting a bookish chatroom. You know, back when you chatted with IRC? That’s where I met Rob way back in the day. (Fun fact? Also met my husband through people in this room. INTERNET ROMANCE.) Nearly everyone who visited this room was older and read quality stuff. I became a literature snob for a long time (thankfully, I grew out of that).

During this time, I also got a job at a bookstore, which gave me 1) disposable income with almost no bills save gasoline, and 2) a discount on books. I bought ALL THE BOOKS. I bought Kerouac and Burroughs, Salinger and Orwell, Márquez, Ellison, Vonnegut (which my father swiped from me). I didn’t even get around to reading all of these books yet, but I loved collecting them. The stories they held felt like magic. I was sad when I sold my collection off several years ago–I had carted them from place to place for years, much to everyone’s dismay who ever helped me move.

I didn’t grow up in an environment that exactly fostered reading; with my mom not being around, and being in a town that isn’t known for its great readers (for years, the only bookstore I knew of was a small Waldenbooks in the mall), reading was actually kind of discouraged. I can’t count the number of times my dad yelled at me to get my nose out of a book and go outside. I needed reading, though. I needed it badly–as an escape, primarily, but also as an education. Books taught me things that my family and teachers neglected; I learned compassion and critical thinking, rationality. And I learned about love and humanity. Reading saved my life.

Thanks, reading. Thanks, books, for always being there.

Don’t worry books; I will never do this to you.

What makes a good villain?

Posted by greengeekgirl — April 2, 2013

Possibly more comic-book-villain than literary-villain but YOU GET THE POINT

We love villains, don’t we? I mean, we love heroes, sure . . . but a good villain really turns our cranks. They get to be wild, unconstrained badasses; they get the best lines; they get to give into those primitive human urges that the rest of us only dream of dabbling in. They get to wear cool outfits and make funny jokes. Heroes can be kind of square, but villains? Far less likely.

What makes a villain good, though? I mean, besides the badassery and the well-timed barbs. I ask because it’s entirely possible to write a shitty villain. Just being a villain doesn’t make a character awesome. So let’s explore some of the characteristics that make legendary villains.

A good villain has complex motivations.

When we find out that someone did something heinous–killed a bunch of people, for example, although that’s probably not even the worst example–for something as piddly as basic greed, I think it tends to leave a bad taste in our mouths. “He did all of that.. just for money? What an asshole.“ I feel that way about certain real-life people (cough) who go around wrecking other people’s lives because they have the mentality of children seeing how much they can get away with before they get punished. I envision a fat little Dudley Dursley type, sticking his hand in the cookie jar again and again until someone finally smacks it. That’s not a good villain at all, that’s a chump villain–they can make great characters, and even great antagonists, but as the major nemesis of a hero? I think not.

A good villain has a good back story. He or she has a reason to be so fucked up. He’s not just greedy, or bloodthirsty, or generically “evil.” Something drives a good villain; he lacks something that he’s desperate to fix or fill. A good villain would scoff at someone who gave in so easily and crudely to base desires. Common murderer? Please. Where’s the passion? Stumbling into villainy is for amateurs.

We don’t need that back story explained to fucking death, though.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, pisses me off more than when people take a great villain and, after he becomes popular, go back and explain exactly how he got so disturbed in exhausting and/or convenient detail. An example off the top of my head: Rob Zombie’s Halloween. Is it just me, or was Michael Myers a hell of a lot scarier before Rob Zombie made up some bullshit white trash background for him? The original Michael Myers was a “force of nature,” with a complex pathology hinted at through his family background and first murder; Rob Zombie turned him into an episode of Jerry Springer.

The truth is, it’s really hard to completely explain extreme villainous behavior in back story. You’re looking at a potent brew of trauma, brokenness, bad seeds, bad timing, opportunity. But a good villain also has to own what they do, or they’re chumps–writers often get carried away creating elaborate reasons for a villain to have gone bad, but in doing so, they take away some of the significance of that choice to cross the line. Letting a villain off with the insanity defense makes him more of a victim than a villain–he can be both, but taking away the choice pales him as an antagonist.

There’s also the risk that a writer will end up writing a completely unbelievable back story that’s so full of holes Swiss cheese would be envious. Over-explanation can absolutely ruin a good villain.

A good villain should be as powerful as the hero, and probably just a tiny bit more powerful.

Imagine the story of David and Goliath. Now imagine reversing them. David, although still righteous, comes off a bit of a bully if he’s the big one and Goliath is the puny one. I mean, it wouldn’t even be a story. Big guy crushes little guy, yawn.

A good villain may have started off life weak and defenseless, but if he doesn’t become strong–either mentally or physically–then he doesn’t pose any kind of challenge for the hero. There’s no story there.

Weak villain syndrome is sometimes known as over-powered hero syndrome. The villain isn’t necessarily meant to be weak, but the hero has no weaknesses at all and defeats the villain without a lot of effort. (A lot of the J.D. Robbs lately have fallen prey to this . . .) If the hero doesn’t fail at least once, the story sucks. Let’s be real. There’s not even a point if the hero can just swagger in and take care of business without breaking a sweat.

A good villain is also not predictable.

If a villain telegraphs all of his moves so that the hero can counter them effectively, well, that doesn’t make for a very good story, either. See previous point about the hero needing to fail and break a sweat and etc etc.

Good villains have a multifaceted personality.

I always feel like a villain, in a different set of circumstances, could have been a hero. They have many of the same qualities–passion, inner strength, resolve, drive–but somewhere along the way, the villain got fucked up about something. Even totally fucked-up people, though–even super-evil people–have more than that to their personalities. The Joker is a great example; everyone knows that Catwoman and Batman have a sometimes-romance, but fewer people talk about the bromance between Joker and Batman. Joker, despite being a psychopath who constantly puts Batman (and many others) in fatal danger, is also one of the few people who really, truly understands Batman; the Joker’s understanding is, of course, a little twisted . . . but it’s there. In The Killing Joke, Alan Moore explores this theme, showing flashes of humanity in Joker that we rarely see; in the final scenes, Batman tries to convince Joker that he can change his ways, but Joker, regretfully, tells Batman that this isn’t possible. (The film The Dark Knight also explores the Batman and Joker connection but doesn’t show any real vulnerability in Joker.)

Showing a villain’s soft underbelly makes the character more complex, more sympathetic–hell, even likable at times. This can cause great emotional conflict in many of us (the Snape Debates still rage on: good guy, or bad guy?) because his actions make him so unlikable. Or it can spark understanding in us, which can be disturbing as we contemplate how we could just as easily end up in the same position. Emotional connection is good, but almost nobody can connect to someone who is pure evil and little else. Purely evil people simply don’t exist; even psychopaths have a distinct pathology that goes beyond “just evil.”

A good villain needs to be his or her own entity, not just a challenge for the hero.

This ties into having complex motivations and humanity, so I won’t linger here. Suffice to say that the villain needs his or her own momentum–a villain can’t just exist for the hero to fight against. It’s like how a love interest is boring if they’re only there to further the protagonist’s arc. We have to be just as emotionally invested in the villain as we are the hero, so he can’t just be a throwaway pawn–he needs substance.

A good villain hits our hero right in the feels.

Wanna ratchet up the tension between hero and villain? Have the villain pull off some dastardly plot that harms a person or thing that the hero holds dear, or have the villain outwit the hero and pull off an amazing scheme while rubbing the hero’s nose in his victory. The hero just went from “Gee, this guy, he’s kind of an evil bastard” to “I WILL FUCKING DESTROY YOU.” A good villain is able to upset the hero, able to disrupt his whole damn life until their beef is settled.

What’s your favorite aspect of a good villain?

I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to good villainy. What do you love in a villain? What makes a villain unforgettable? Also, what do writers do wrong with villains that drives you insane? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!

I do not like the thing that you like, and that is okay.

Posted by greengeekgirl — March 29, 2013

Also books, television, films, and clothing.

If you’ve been poking around IB for awhile, you know that I have pretty distinct tastes in books. While I’m not a total book snob (see also, my husband, who will re-read War and Peace fifty times before he will ever finish On the Road. And those are both literature), I do tend to hug the border of book snobbery fairly closely. I’m not one to take recommendations from people because it puts me in an obligatory position–and more often than not, I end up having to pretend I really liked something when I really did not. I know I could just be honest and say it very kindly, but people still tend to get a puppy-dog look when you tell them that the book they asked you to read really was not your cuppa. The look, it wounds me.

So, I get literary elitism, to a point. I do. And yeah, I am firmly in the “some books are better than others” camp–not just that I like some books better than others, but that some books actually have more overall literary quality than others. I do believe that there are certain marks of “good” writing (although I’m probably a lot less rigid on those marks than some, admittedly). Yeah, the criteria were made up by people, and yeah, they are subjective–but they have been fine-tuned by hundreds, nay, thousands of writers, editors, and scholars through the years, so I think they’re legitimate standards of quality.

So I get it. I do.

Here’s where the whole subject of literary elitism–any kind of elitism, really–breaks down for me: when people start not only judging the work, but judging the people who like the work. Looking down your nose at someone because they enjoy something? Not cool. Not cool at all. Like, it’s fine to say you think Dan Brown is a talentless hack . . . but, you know, when your friend just told you how much they really loved the new Dan Brown novel, that might not be the best timing.

Cue the eye-rolling here, of course. Die-hard snobs–the ones who have this problem in the first place–feel that it’s perfectly acceptable to judge others for what they enjoy. Why should they worry about another person’s feelings? They’re the ones who have to live with their shitty taste. Etc, etc. The fault in this logic, though, is that it assumes taste is built solely on the perceived quality of the work and the ability of the person to appreciate works of quality. Taste isn’t just limited to how good the work is, though. You have other factors coming into play–emotional connection, nostalgia, memory, personality, life experiences, setting, mood. Taste can be as individual as fingerprints.

Even though this is a bookish blog, I’m going to use music as an example. Music is an area where I constantly feel insecure. I actually thought about writing this post when I realized that I almost never share music on my social media. I’m friends with a lot of people who have very strong opinions about music, and a few who have made it clear that they have no qualms telling people when they have shitty taste. I’m not going to subject myself to that kind of treatment for something that I like, even if what I like isn’t considered “cool;” I have my reasons for liking what I like, and I don’t have to apologize for it. But I keep quiet about it all the same, just to avoid grief.

I never want to make a person feel that way about what they like–especially because most of us slum it in some ways. I see literary writers on Twitter live-tweeting The Bachelorette; I see those same music snob friends going crazy on Facebook over candy-pop tween book series. These kinds of things are mindless entertainment, and why shouldn’t we be able to have that without people looking down their noses at us? I have admitted freely that I watch The Jersey Shore. Yes, it’s trashy, and that’s what I love about it. I love that I can get embroiled in someone else’s dramz for an hour or so and not have to think about things. It’s kind of awesome.

I guess the overall point that I’m trying to make is that, yes, you certainly can judge things to be good or bad–but for pity’s sake, shut the hell up about it if you’re in danger of hurting someone’s feelings over it, because you can’t judge a person by their mindless entertainment. You can, however, judge someone for being an elitist asshole. I have to beg to differ with Rob Fleming/Gordon, here: it’s not what you like, it’s what you are like that matters. And if you’re the kind of person who kills the joy that someone else finds in entertainment because it’s not up to your standards, you’re a fucking jerk.

Read a Classic: Naked Lunch

Posted by thetwors — March 20, 2013

Book: Naked Lunch

Author: William S. Burroughs

Published: July 1959 by Olympia Press in Paris; banned from the US for obscenity until 1962, when it was published by Grove Press in NYC

First Line: “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train…Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me.”

Genre/Rating: Postmodern literary fiction, 4.25/5 packets of bug powder

Sometimes when I read stream of consciousness writing, I find myself thinking, “I might understand this better if I were drunk.” When reading Naked Lunch, though, I remember thinking “If I were drunk or high right now I’d probably start freaking out, lock all the doors, unplug the TV, and go hide in my bathtub.”

The bare bones plot of Naked Lunch is what happens to junkie exterminator William Lee as he embarks on a series of drug trips that lead him through the US, Mexico, Tangiers, and the nebulous Interzone. As vague as this sounds, it has to be one of the most direct descriptions of the plot, because the beauty in this work is not the storyline, but the ingenuity of structure and style Burroughs employs. In my mind, this work is the hallmark of postmodernism with its non-linear narrative structure; the vignettes, or “routines” as Burroughs called them, were designed to be read in any order. Think about that for a second – any order. You could read this book a million (or something, I don’t know math) ways! Time and space are irrelevant and flexible, and letting go of those constructs makes for a freewheeling reading experience.

All that said, Naked Lunch could be a difficult read. Who am I kidding – it IS a difficult read. The work is confusing, blistering, unreal. The best way to approach this text, I believe, is to just jump in and start reading. Don’t expect to have a clear understanding of anything; nothing is constant, and you will forever be questioning if this is reality, a drug trip, a dream, or something completely different. Also, be prepared for some seriously gross imagery and profanity. I don’t believe these things detract from the work – they are purposeful and integral to what Burroughs is telling us – but I do want to give a head’s up for you future readers.

In 1991, David Cronenberg made a film adaptation of what was considered to be an unfilmable novel. In a similar vein, watching the film is like watching a hallucination. Simultaneously revolting and compelling in its exploration of human baseness, Cronenberg’s journey is not as important to film as Burrough’s work is to literature, but one has to admire his efforts to translate such a fragmented work into film

Reading Naked Lunch is as mind-bending as the insanity that Lee goes through when high. You, as the reader, get all the benefits of many drug trips without damaging any brain cells!

Things I wish I could say to Roger Zelazny.

Posted by GuestBookslut — March 16, 2013

Today’s guest post comes from author David Jón Fuller.

NinePrincesInAmber As every year passes, I become more convinced Roger Zelazny died way too soon.

I first encountered his work when I was fourteen, thanks to a friend who thrust Nine Princes in Amber into my hands and swore it was one of the best books he’d ever read.

Since I was already reading two huge fantasy series concurrently at the time, I don’t know why I agreed to start reading a third – maybe his enthusiasm won me over.

Unfortunately, my brain does not enjoy trying to fit a trilogy and two quintilogies (is that a word?) in at the same time, so I eventually abandoned Nine Princes after chapter two and didn’t pick it up again for months.

Funny thing, though. I couldn’t stop thinking about it; and when I picked up the book again I started from scratch and was hooked. An amnesiac prince whose bloodline allows him to walk through any reality he can conceive of has to overthrow his brother for the throne of Amber, the one true reality. Plus, he swears, smokes, makes offhand references to literature, philosophy, politics and history like a boss, all with a sharp sense of humour? I’m there.

I actually read the series slowly the first time, thinking about each book for a long time after I read it.

The concepts Zelazny brought into his sci-fi and fantasy books were sometimes beyond me (was I going to really appreciate an aside about Van Gogh or musings about Freud at fourteen? Not really), but the story, characters, and world were so different from standard fantasy tropes you always had to turn the page to see what he was going to throw at you next.

Also, his books were short! While the norm for fantasy series in the 1980s was for each volume to be 400 – 500 pages a volume, Zelazny’s often rounded out at 200 or fewer. One of his best, The Courts of Chaos, is almost short enough to be a novella. He was a man of few words, then; but he made them all count.

Since Zelazny was still alive as I hoovered up his Amber series, I kept rereading it as each new book came out. Through high school and university. Gaining new understanding of the context behind off-the-cuff remarks, scenes and character motives I thought I knew inside out. The series was one I turned to after two nasty breakups… maybe, like Corwin, I wanted to walk through the shadows and find myself a new reality.

Born in Cleveland Ohio in 1937, Zelazny was a prolific writer by the time he was 17, selling “Mr. Fuller’s Revolt” to Literary Cavalcade in 1954. (This is a story that by rights, I really should have read, but I haven’t been able to find a copy). He studied at both Western Reserve University and later Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. He won prizes in poetry, served in the U.S. National Guard, and was involved in a serious car accident. (I imagine the last of these, especially, added context for the car crash that sets in motion the plot of Nine Princes in Amber.)

His father died in 1964, and Zelazny later went on to great success, winning the Hugo award for his novel Lord of Light in 1968. He won a Nebula Award and another Hugo for “Home is the Hangman.” In the 1970s and ’80s he wrote the Amber novels while still publishing many other books (such asRoadmarks). He cowrote Deus Irae with Philip K. Dick, and his influence on other writers, including Neil Gaiman and Steven Brust, was great. Despite that, his books are (sadly) very hard to find nowadays.

As an aside, Zelazny can be fairly criticized for rewriting a similar character in many stories – a flawed superhuman (or supremely talented) man who must unravel a mystery and outwit forces of chaos in order to establish a new order or reality. In his defence, when he does it really well (as in Amber or Donnerjack), he’s better than anyone else.

I’ve had the privilege to see, meet, or talk to some of my favourite authors in person, including Brust, Mordecai Richler, Guy Gavriel Kay, Michael Rowe, and others. But Zelazny, who died in 1995, was one I never got to meet. Even though I haven’t read all of his work, his stories and novels still bang around in my mind, and I wish he were still around to write a few more.

There are things I wish I could say to Roger Zelazny, if he were still alive. Here are a few of them.

You made me question reality.

Seriously. I think this is one reason I didn’t rocket through all the Amber books right away after Nine Princes in Amber when I read it in the autumn of grade nine. What if everything around me is not real? How would I know? What would happen if I could walk through different realities just by deciding to?

The fact this is also a perfect metaphor for reading, or in fact for making choices in your life that matter, escaped me when I was fourteen, by the way.

You made the ordinary seem wondrous and the wondrous seem ordinary.

The scent of chestnut blossoms along the Champs-Elysées in 1905 Paris can somehow make me feel as if I understand the end of the world in The Courts of Chaos. The workaday vastness of cyberspace in Donnerjack still dwarfs the actual Internet. And when genetic manipulation allows German Shepherds to speak — yes, I think they’d talk exactly the way you wrote Sigmund’s dialogue in “He Who Shapes.”

You taught me how to reread.

Every time I came back to one of your books after a year or two away, I realized I’d learned something that made me appreciate the story in a different way. When I reread the Amber books in grade twelve, I got so many more of the literary and historical references then that I realized I’d only grasped a tiny part of the story the first time around. And you had a lot of true things to say about large, Machiavellian families, too.

This happened every time I came back to them, by the way. I slowly realized that though your words didn’t change, maybe I did – and I was enjoying the books on much deeper levels. I started looking for this in all my favourite books. Some stood up to it (hello Tolkien, and Guy Gavriel Kay); others did not (goodbye, Dragonlance Chronicles… gah).

You broke rules I’m only starting to understand, and you made it work somehow.

No seriously, how the hell did you publish parts of Sign of the Unicorn serially first and still make it fit into a five-book epic? In Doorways in the Sand I can sort of see it, but it took me four chapters before I realized each one was basically a standalone story as well.

I still haven’t made it through Lord of Light.

I know. I KNOW. It’s embarrassing to admit it, especially when Steven Brust has been extolling its virtues for years. Maybe this year will be the year I do it.

That Corwin can inscribe a new universe but not reach his father in time to reconcile with him is heartbreaking.

I’m no psychologist, but the fact that you lost your father in 1962, before you made a career creating so many worlds of your own, is not lost on me.

You make me want to write great books.

If folks like Gaiman and Brust wanted to continue your Amber series, that sets a high bar indeed. (They didn’t of course, based on your express verbal wish that no one do that. Guess your estate didn’t feel the same way, sadly.)

The fact you conjured such engrossing stories without writing novels as thick as phone books helps me cut out everything I don’t need from my own work. And I learned to love the power of first person-narrative from you, even if I think in the later Amber books Merlin sounds an awful lot like Corwin did in the earlier ones…

One day I may write a closing line as good as yours, but I doubt it.

“Goodbye and hello, as always.”

What about you? Who is an author, living or dead, you wish you could talk to — and what would you say?

David Jón Fuller is a writer working on an urban fantasy novel that will never be as good as The Guns of Avalon (damn it), but that’s not going too stop him from trying. He blogs at As You Were (http://www.davidjonfuller.com).

BookPairing Guest Post: Making Outlander by Diana Gabaldon Better with Beer

Posted by GuestBookslut — March 12, 2013

Today’s guest post is brought to you courtesy of Nikki from BookPairing.

Ready for a tale of historical romance, time travel, and just a bit of smut to get spring started off right? What if I told you—nay, encouraged you—to read it with a nice, cold beer in your hand? That’s the beauty of BookPairing and today we’re doing it Arizona style. Scratch that, Scottish style. Dang—Scottish and Arizona style at the same time? I mean nothing quite goes down like a haggis and margarita, if you know what I’m saying… Heck, let’s just get into this.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Diana Gabaldon, a local Arizona author, begins her novel with a married couple that is taking a trip back to the Scottish Highlands after being separated during World War II. Claire is a refreshingly forward, quick-witted former nurse and her husband, Frank, is a quirky history professor.

While gathering plants, Claire is mysteriously transported back to the year 1743 in Scotland—complete with what she takes to be a battle reenactment between some Red Coats and Clansmen. Through a series of adventures, Claire finds herself in the stronghold of the Clan MacKenzie, unable to tell anybody of her true identity and barred from finding a way back to the place where she slipped between layers of time.

All of this back story—and it’s a 600 page book that we’re talking about (let’s not even get into the six, soon to be seven, books that follow in the series)—is all really just a wash until we get to meet Jaime Fraser, the big hulky man made of dreams and tartan. Now pick up your beers ladies and gents, because we get some great hanky panky scenes, moments of bonding and Highland humor, adventure!, danger!, and finally, at the end, some more superb hanky panky.
The book is a fantastic, incredibly well-researched look into a different time and place, and how love can still exist when it shouldn’t. There are moments of great tenderness that don’t lose themselves in the sweet drippiness of many romance novels. I’m only at the first one into the series, but I can’t wait to pick up the next one even if it means backlisting some of my other to-read novels.

Kiltlifter by Four Peaks Brewery

kiltlifter

Now that you’ve got your book, handcrafted by one of Arizona’s most celebrated authors, let’s make sure not to let our mouths go dry with all the excitement. If you’re lucky enough to be in Arizona right now, I suggest you try one of the state’s finest beers, Kiltlifter—a Scottish style ale that is almost sweet with malt but still finishes with a nice dry, somewhat smoky finish. It’s an immensely drinkable red ale, that’s just about perfect for the charmingly sweet, yet rich story that Gabaldon tells in Outlander.

However, since Four Peaks only distributes in Arizona, and I really care about your pairing experience and all, the rest of you are going to have to settle for Oskar Blues’ Old Chub. It will be a hard settling for sure, but with a stronger malt and smokiness, it might even do a bit better for people that enjoy their beers on the rougher side. [Susie: Rougher . . . like Jamie? *fans self*]

Have you read any of the Outlander series? If so, introduce me to some of your favorite beers that you think would go perfect with it.

Nikki Steele is a freelance writer and editor. You can find her at her personal blog, BookPairing.com, where she pairs books with wine and beer to show how one can make the other so much better.