The last several weeks have been intense crunch time to finish the first draft of Feedback (sequel to Variant). I have until the end of next Wednesday to meet my self-imposed deadline, and I’m optimistic. It will require some long days and sleepless nights, and the end result will be a very very rough draft, but I think I’ll make it. (By the way, the awesome Shannon Hale posted a fantastic description of drafting on her Twitter last week: “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” I love that.)

However, despite being busy I’ve been doing a lot of reading. And, since it’s been a while since I’ve blogged and it’s been an even longer while since I’ve given a report of my media consumption, I figure we’re due.

Here is some of the media I’ve consumed lately. This isn’t necessarily the list of the best stuff, but it’s the list of stuff I find interesting to talk about.

Books

Incarceron:

I’d heard a lot about this one for a long time, but somehow I’d never crossed paths with it. I didn’t know much about Incarceron, but it committed one of my speculative fiction pet peeves: a science fiction world that looks like a fantasy world. Fortunately, I was happy to find that there’s a pretty interesting explanation for it and, unlike many in that category, it seemed there was actually a good, story-based reason for that setting (rather than just lazy worldbuilding).

My second pleasant surprise was that the characters are screwed up. One of the main characters begins the story as a thief and (reluctant) kidnapper, and the other is kind of a snobby aristocrat. Even better, the side characters have all sorts of secrets–and the secrets make sense and aren’t intended for the sole purpose of yanking the carpet out from under you!

I realize that all of these compliments are mainly saying “This book was good and I wasn’t expecting it to be!” and for that I’m sorry. But really, this book was good and I wasn’t expecting it to be.

All the Devils Are Here:

A major gear shift from YA science fiction here. I’m a big fan of The Smartest Guys In The Room, the Enron expose authored by Bethany McLean, so when I saw she’d written this detailed account of the current financial crisis I had to get it.

Short review: it’s fantastic. I’ve been annoyed for a long time by the simplistic coverage of the financial crisis by the media, and more annoyed by the partisan fingerpointing–conservatives blame the an overregulating, idealistic government while liberals blame greedy Wall Street bankers and real estate speculators–so it was a breath of fresh air to read an objective, detailed account of what actually happened.

Well, I should actually say “it was a breath of disgusting, noxious air”. The title of the book, a quote from The Tempest (“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”) is an apt description of the players involved. While some are definitely painted as more devious than others, few people or organizations come across as innocent as the complicated tangle of deceit, greed, hubris, ignorance and ridiculously blind optimism brings America to its knees.

One criticism: there are actually two authors–Joe Nocera joins Bethany McLean–and while I don’t know who wrote what, this book is definitely a harder read than The Smartest Guys in the Room. There are passages of detailed and dynamic storytelling, like McLean had previously used, but there are a lot of drier passages as well, and it often feels disjointed.

Even so, definitely a worthwhile read. If you’ve ever watched any of the fingerpointing and wondered who was right (or if you’ve pointed a few fingers yourself), you owe it to yourself to read this.

Cherub: The Recruit:

Jumping back to YA again (because that’s the bulk of what I’ve been reading this last year), I picked this one up at Barnes and Noble without knowing anything about it. I’d never heard of the book or the author, but I was intrigued by the premise, and I love a good YA adventure targeted at boys.

After reading it, I was not at all surprised to find that the author wrote it specifically for his nephew–it reads very much like tween boy wish fulfillment: kids are spies for the government, they learn martial arts, they vandalize (as part of their job!), they go to parties with older teenage girls and drink beer. And, despite all of the obviousness of the “I’m giving my nephew exactly what he wants”, it’s a dang fun read. It’s not great literature, but I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Apparently, this series is popular all over the world–there are already twelve novels in the series, in dozens of countries!–but it didn’t really get much a release in the US until 2010.

TV

The Chicago Code:

This is currently my hands-down favorite show on TV. I intend to blog about it in detail next week, once this first draft is finished. For now, suffice it to say that this show is a masterpiece of gray characters–no one, from the most noble cop to the baddest of the corrupt politicians–is all bad or all good. I know that most cop shows pretend like they do this, giving a character a minor drug problem or a secret mistress, but The Chicago Code gets it right. Man, I want to blog all about it right now…. It’ll have to wait.

Top Shot:

I’ve mentioned this show before on this blog, and I’m happy to see it back on the air. However, I’ve been watching it on DVR and skipping most of the interpersonal drama this time around. It manages to be just as entertaining, and a third the length.

American Idol:

Remember how I’ve blogged about American Idol every year since season three? And how I obsess, and how I actually devoted an entire blog to it last season (along with fellow author Tristi Pinkston)? Well, I gave up this year. Part of it was that I was reluctant to watch Steven Tyler, who I dislike, and Jennifer Lopez, who I hate. But the bigger part was that I just didn’t have the time to devote to it. And–shocker!–I haven’t missed it.

Community and 30 Rock:

These continue to be the best comedies on TV, regardless of what those Modern Family dorks say.

Movies

I’ve watched a lot of movies lately, but two in particular make for interesting discussion. (These movies are old: I rarely make it to the theater, so I see everything on RedBox or On Demand.) First, I watched Salt, starring Angelina Jolie as a maybe-she’s-a-spy-and-maybe-she’s-a-double-agent. Shortly after, I watched Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise as a spy and Cameron Diaz as a normal person.

Remember when I posted about implausibilty in cop shows, and how it drove me crazy? My basic premise was this: We all know how the real world works, so if you’re portraying the real world, you have to do it realistically, or else we’ll all roll our eyes.

Salt and Knight and Day illustrate this well. Both Jolie and Cruise play super amazing James Bond-esque spies who can do insane stunts and defy gravity and kill all the bad guys without trying. The difference: Salt pretends like it’s the real world. It puts on airs of being a Very Serious Movie. And it obviously fails to acheive those goals because absolutely nothing that ever happens is believable.  On the other hand, Knight and Day is an action comedy, where the fact that Cruise is the quintessential superspy is played for laughs. (One quick sequence shows him hanging upside down in a torture chamber, and it’s the funniest scene in the movie, essentially saying: “Of course he’s going to escape, because he’s better than James Bond; he’s the love child of John McClane and River Tam.”)

In Salt, Jolie does ridiculous stuff and we roll our eyes. In Knight and Day, Cruise does ridiculous stuff and we cheer. The moral: if you want your story to be realistic, then you have to make it realistic. If you tell someone this is the real world, then we don’t suspend our disbelief nearly as much as we do if we’re told it’s fake.

Music

I don’t have much to say here, because I haven’t dabbled into too much new music lately. I did, however, get the new Iron and Wine album, and it’s awesome. I know Iron and Wine is not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. I’m not enough of a music critic to describe this in intelligent detail. But it’s fantastic.

Anyway, my deadline for the first draft is Wednesday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Last night I went to a Natalie Merchant concert. While I know that it likely qualifies me as unmanly, Natalie Merchant is my favorite musician of all time, with the possible exception of The Beatles. She’s recently released her first studio album in seven years, and this was the first time I’ve ever had a chance to see her live.

It was awesome, of course. The music was phenomenal, and she was great–energetic and entertaining.

And, as I was sitting there in the amphitheater, I thought about writing (because I’m always thinking about writing) and how the structure of the concert related to writing a novel.

A little quick background on Natalie Merchant’s music: If we’re judging popularity based on radio performance, she was at her popularity peak early in her career, when she was the lead singer with 10,000 Maniacs and then with her first solo album, Tigerlily. Since that time she has moved out of mainstream pop and into other less commercially popular genres. Initially (with Motherland) it was in a more blues/rock direction, but then she dove headfirst into folk. Her 2003 album had old hymns and ballads, and her latest, Leave Your Sleep, is a collection of childrens poems set to music. It’s all really fantastic, amazing music, but it’s not anything you’d hear on the radio.

So, back to the concert. Natalie appeared without any dramatic entrance, strolling up to the microphone and launching into one of the songs off the new album–one of the poem songs.

The venue, Red Butte Gardens, is an outdoor amphitheater where you bring blankets and sit on the grass. You can bring your own food (and alcohol) and there were hundreds of little picnic dinner parties going on as the show started. And, since the concert was delayed more than an hour because of rain and lightning, the audience had had plenty of time to get preemptively drunk.

And, here’s the other thing I noticed about the audience: it didn’t seem like many people knew her music. They were fans of 10,000 Maniacs, or the mid-nineties solo albums, but not any of her non-radio songs. No one around me seemed to recognize anything from the new album–and the new stuff made up the entire first half of the show.

I was a little annoyed with the crowd, because it felt like no one was paying much attention to these new songs–and they’re really great songs, and the 8-piece band was fantastic.

But then, perhaps sensing the crowds detachment, she launched into a couple faster, more-upbeat songs. They weren’t her old radio hits, but you could definitely dance to them. And the crowd responded. People started getting up on their feet, crowding down toward the stage. And, after one particularly successful song that really engaged the crowd, she declared “Let’s do it again!” and was met with cheers.

And then she said: “My job is to make you happy.”

I had been annoyed with the crowd all of this time, because they weren’t fluent in Natalie’s songlist and they weren’t trying hard enough to get into the slower, more-unusual songs. But Natalie didn’t see it that way. She saw it as her responsibility to get the crowd engaged. And, when she saw what they wanted, she altered her performance to give it to them. (And, once they were engaged, she was able to give them more of what she wanted, too.)

It made me think about the responsibilities of an author and the role of the audience. I think a lot of the time we get it backwards. I’m not saying that there’s no place for books that are challenging might take some effort to get into, nor am I saying that we need to write pure fan service.

What I am saying is that readers don’t owe authors anything. No matter how famous the writer is, or how critically acclaimed and well-loved, readers are under no obligation to care. They don’t buy books because of charity. It’s not the reader’s job to make the author feel good. Instead, like Natalie Merchant said at the concert: “My job is to make you happy.” We, as authors, need to give readers a reason to care. We need to get you engaged, not just expect that engagement will happen without effort.

Books
Catching Fire , by Suzanne Collins
I read The Hunger Games in one day, up on the sixth floor of the Tanner Building while I was supposed to be studying for a finance exam. I was not, as you can see, the typical MBA student.

I’ve been postponing reading Catching Fire because I just wasn’t expecting it to be as good as its predecessor. I don’t like love triangles (and there appeared to be a major one) and my assumptions about the plot were that it was going to be repetitive–a retread of Book One. I’m happy to say that I was very wrong on the latter worry, and the love triangle was mostly painless.

In fact, I think that Catching Fire can be used as an example of How To Write a Sequel. The author managed to capture the tone and feel of the first book perfectly, and managed to keep the plot elements that readers loved (the games, the preparations, etc) but their inclusion was necessary, inevitable and different, not fan service.

Movies
Wives and Daughters
We have recently acquired a modern miracle in the form of a NetFlix Wii DVD. (I don’t know the product’s real name.) The disk lets you access hundreds of movies on demand. And, more fun, the selection is based on NetFlix’s guesses about your movie preferences. It’s been fun (read: bizarre) to see what an algorithm assumes I like.

One of the movies it suggested (based on my wife’s preferences, I hope) is Wives And Daughters, a mid-nineteenth century movie that I want to call a Regency but which probably isn’t. The story is basically this: there are daughters and wives, and the main character is really cute. I don’t really know much more about it, despite it being eight hours long. My wife liked it. I was in the same room, but probably paying attention to something else.

All the President’s Men
One thing I find interesting about this movie (also a NetFlix Wii find) is that it is incredibly lean–there’s absolutely no fluff. Every scene and every line is important.

I think the thing I love the most about it is that they don’t dumb anything down. There’s no significant exposition, and they spend very little time explaining things to the audience. They expect you to sit still and pay attention. It’s a convoluted and complex mystery, and the writers throw you in headfirst. It’s refreshing.

I’ve always thought the ending was a little abrupt. It’s the only part of the movie that I’m not sold on. But, just like there’s very little exposition, there’s very little (or no) denoument. I don’t necessarily dislike the ending, but it’s jarring.

The Neverending Story
This was also a gift from NetFlix. I hadn’t seen it since I was probably seven years old. And, if you’re wondering if it holds up years later, the answer is an unequivocal, unwavering: HOLY CRAP WHAT IS THIS WEIRD THING?

RiffTrax: Twilight and New Moon
RiffTrax, if you’re unaware, is made by the people who did Mystery Science Theater. (If you’re unaware of MST, it was a TV program that showed old crappy movies, and three characters watched the movie and mocked it. It’s a classic of awesome awesomeness.) After MST was cancelled (due mainly to being unable to afford the rights to use movies), the writers got together and started RiffTrax. They record an audio commentary that you listen to while watching a regular DVD. And, because this avoids copyright issues, they are free to make fun of any bad movie, not just old crappy public domain ones.

That was a long introduction to a short review: RiffTrax offers audio commentaries for Twilight and New Moon, and they’re howlingly funny. Downloading a commentary only cost $3.99. You need to do this. Tonight.

TV
American Idol
As you know, I like American Idol. In particular, I like guessing who will win/lose. Hopefully you also know that Tristi Pinkston and I have a blog where we talk about this. We’re nerds. (Her more than me, though.)

Currently, I’m ahead of her in the predictions by two points. Depending on how merciful we’re being, however, she’s ahead of me by three. Consequently, we’re not being very merciful.

Music
Natalie Merchant, Leave Your Sleep
My favorite artist of all time (well, maybe besides the Beatles) is Natalie Merchant. You may recall her as the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s. You might also recall her from her highly acclaimed 90s albums, Tigerlily and Ophelia. You likely won’t recall her from the 2000s, because she started getting weird. I still totally, completely love her.

And then this CD came out. It’s her very distinct folksy style, but the songs are all based on childrens’ poems, some old and some modern. The combination is very weird. All the lyrics are things that only kids would like (one extreme example being Ebeneezer Bleazer’s Ice Cream Store) but kids wouldn’t like the music. In other words, there’s no audience for this.

Except me, I guess, because I like it. I don’t love it, but I like it.

Band of Skulls, Baby Darling Doll Face Honey
I discovered Band of Skulls a year ago on indie radio in Minnesota, and instantly fell in ooey-gooey love with them. And then one of their songs was included on the New Moon soundtrack, so a million pre-teen girls are also in love with them. Sad.

Even so, the music is awesome.