Your browser is not supported.

at my other blogs lately: both the book and music ones.

software I’m taking for a spin right now is Scrivener, which is a tool to help you organize your writing. Basically it’s a glorified text editor, but it adds a way for you to organize your writing (e.g. fiction) hierarchically by scene or snippet, and attaches metadata to each, so you can add summaries or notes or researched information to each section without altering the content of the section itself.

From the parent folder of each section, you can see a “corkboard” view of the summaries of each section, drag and drop to reorder sections, and generate an outline. And when you’re all ready to send the whole shebang off to a proofreader or editor or friend, it’ll export the contents as a Word file or in various other formats.

Writing, simplified. I love this thing so much after a few days that I am definitely going to buy it. Awesome. (Via argh ink)

Check out my latest book review.

Again, one of my very favorites, an automatic buy. While not as technically accomplished as Kay or West (e.g., she tends to put too much exposition in dialogue), she is brilliant at writing engaging, gorgeously plotted stories with some of the best characterization you’ll ever read. Really. She makes poetry of human frailty, is unflinching in her treatment of a whole character as few are.

Speaking technically, Robin Hobb is a master of the first-person POV, something that’s hard to get right without drowning the reader in the emotions of the narrating character, all the while creating the emotional intimacy that’s the strong point of first-person.

She’s written 11 books to date, starting with a trilogy of trilogies, which each stand alone but are parts of a larger whole:

• The Farseer:
  • Assassin’s Apprentice
  • Royal Assassin
  • Assassin’s Quest
• The Liveship Traders:
  • Ship of Magic
  • Mad Ship
  • Ship of Destiny
• The Tawny Man:
  • Fool’s Errand
  • Golden Fool
  • Fool’s Fate

I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved these books. They are, simply, a life experience. Don’t miss them. The other 2 of the 11 are the first two books in her new trilogy:

• The Soldier Son:
  • Shaman’s Crossing
  • Forest Mage

I’ve read Shaman’s Crossing, and am right now rereading it in preparation for Forest Mage. The latter of which, I am happy to report, I got a signed copy of when Robin Hobb did a booksigning practically next door late last year.

Here is Robin Hobb’s website, which is extremely difficult to navigate, and, as it is mostly static HTML, probably a pain in the ass to update, which in turn is probably why it’s not updated frequently. Yeesh. What is it about author websites? She also writes as Megan Lindholm.

She’s another one of my favorites. Also highly literate, also accessible. I started with her Sun Sword sextet, which is IMO one of the best fantasy series ever written. Really. Up there with Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Though it has all the hallmarks of great epic fantasy—a big story, great character development, intricate plotting—far and away the best thing about it is the rich detail of its setting. West takes us deeply into the lands and cultures her story takes place in, giving it a nuance and subtlety not often found elsewhere. The fully realized context is almost as important as the story itself, granting it a lovely complexity and another dimension of meaning; I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of authors that do this as well, or even come close. If you’re a fantasy fan and you’ve never read her work, you’re really missing out. It should be an immediate addition to your queue.

Some Michelle West links:

• Her official website, which, frankly, sucks. Why is it that so many authors’ websites are so bad? Yeesh.
• Her LiveJournal page. Kind of like a blog, which thankfully seems to be somewhat regularly updated.

I said this before, and I don’t think I could say it again better, so:

Not so many years ago, this guy was it for me. My very favorite author, who combined everything I loved about books and writing and fantasy—his chosen genre, and my favorite one. His writing was technically unparalleled: his plots beautifully complex, his characterizations deep but never simple, his stories fiercely engaging, alternately heartbreaking and joyful. Hyperbole, I know, but as I said, he was it. The one. As close to perfect as you can get in my eyes.

To that I can add that his writing is highly literate but never inaccessible. Fantasy for everyone, accessible in ways that Tolkien’s writing simply wasn’t. It’s so sad that genre fiction is often marginalized by the literary elite (ironic, I know, coming from a shameless elitist like me), because I really think Kay is one of the best writers of our time.

I’ve read all his novels except his latest, which I’ve just bought, but I have every expectation that it will be as wonderful as his others. I can’t say enough about his work, but you won’t believe me until you read it for yourself. Which you should do at the earliest opportunity. You can thank me later.

Here’s his official website, which interestingly was created by a fan who solicited his cooperation and approval.

I’ve begun more seriously toying with the idea of writing stories. Last year, as you know, I took a short-fiction writing class, and then, when it was over, promptly forgot about doing my own writing until just about now, when I’m starting to get all fired up about it again. Why? Well, cause I like it, of course, and also because I’ve been reading this blog, Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer’s year-long online writing workshop/blog. It’s updated twice weekly with discussions on the technical side of storytelling. Fascinating stuff; not to be missed by aspiring writers, or just people interested in the anatomy of a novel. You normally have to pay to get instruction like this. Pretty cool!

• Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay – his latest, which just got published. The good thing about waiting so long to read The Last Light of the Sun is that I finished just when his next book was published, so there won’t be such a long wait till I can read the next one.
• Into the Dark Lands, Children of the Blood and Lady of Mercy by Michelle Sagara West – the first three books of a reprinted quartet, the first books Michelle West had published. It’s been a long time since the last book of the Sun Sword series came out, and will be a while yet till her next book is published, so I figured I’d go and read her backlog.

The Lion of Senet by Jennifer Fallon

I just couldn’t do it. I can’t handle writing that’s clumsy enough to take you out of the story, even if, as it was in this case, it’s not actually bad. I’ve got like 15 books on my queue—and that’s just what I can come up with off the top of my head—and if the book isn’t interesting enough to make me want to come back to it, it gets kicked off the queue. Simple as that.

The Crimson Sword by Eldon Thompson

This one looked promising, too, but I had a problem with the writing. This after I had read the first page, deemed it acceptable and bought it. Again, the writing wasn’t, technically speaking, bad at all—quite a bit better, in fact, than in The Lion of Senet—but it seemed…clunky. Not graceful. Also, there were too many adverbs (something my own writing suffers from, so I can empathize). Too much of “he dodged calmly,” and “he bowed smoothly,” and so on and so forth. The other thing, and this is very subjective, is that I found the characterization clumsy. And maybe this is the result of reading too many really great books (if that is even possible), but if I don’t have at least an inkling of a character’s, well, character within a paragraph or two, if I’m not interested in who s/he is right away, it’s hard to get into the story.

Every time I read James Lileks’ blog, I am humbled by, in awe of, struck speechless by his effortless writing skill. Today’s post is no different:

I’m not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It’s just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?

Because a herd of frozen zeks dying in the snows of Wherdifugistan doesn’t really connect, you know? Whereas six guys sitting around the Carnegie Deli bitching about cowardly sponsors, that strikes a chord.

You know the drill: read the whole thing. (Via InstaPundit)