M. T. Anderson Finally Has A Website

M.T. Anderson's website is rather big news for those of us who have wanted to link to info about him while blogging about his books. My life has just become easier.

Note that he classifies the Octavian Nothing titles as Books for Teens and Adults.

Again, you can thank Cynsations for this.

How Punk Rock Got Its Cover

readergirlz has a post up on how So Punk Rock got its cover. A cover I like, by the way.

Found the link at Cynsations.


Training Report: Some revision that required 78 new words! Huzzah! I'm not just being pathetically positive. Today is an elders/life chore day. I usually don't do any work at all on elders/life chore days.

Easter Dinner Table Talk

"Hey, you remember that book Tomorrow, When the War Began?" one brother asked the other. "It's going to be a movie."

Voila, a trailer.

These books were quite popular at Chez Gauthier for a while. If I go rooting around in a bedroom, I might find at least the original one.

Training Report: Nearly 1,500 words, which is quite satisfactory for me. I also worked on preparing a submission. The job was quite time consuming and isn't finished.

So How Should We Handle These Kinds Of Situations?

Slate has one of its slideshows up, this on how biographies of sports figures differ when written for children rather than adults. I don't know when any of these books were published, which seems as if it might be significant.

If I knew more about writing biographies I might comment on this situation. Since I don't, I will remain silent.

We're Not Feeling Very Confident Here At Chez Gauthier

Blogger has asked us to migrate somewhere, and we don't have a lot of confidence that we have arrived where we were supposed to go. So here's a little test.

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The Garmann Sequel

The Excelsior File reviews Garmann's Street, the further adventures of the wild and wacky kid from Garmann's Summer.

Guess Who Just Had The Best Workday This Year?

Last week I began revising the 365 Story Project (again), this time into a traditional novel using only one of the story lines from the original material. This week I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of various parts of the job. I used a spreadsheet while I was working on my last book, and while that still hasn't sold, I do think a spreadsheet gives me more control of the on-going work. And it allows me to keep track of word count, which is nice in terms of daily goal setting.

Today I reworked (sometimes generating new material) one thousand, two hundred and forty-seven words! Yes, I know there are writers who wouldn't fire up their word processors for that, but I am not one of them. In addition, I made a submission, which involved doing a little market research. And I continued with some research for another project I want to get started on soon. This means, I'm sort of working on two projects at once, which is a new experience for me. I'm rather liking it.

Now that I've got the spread sheet going and am working a big three days a week, I can go back to giving you training reports, which I had to give up last August. Excited, aren't you? My computer guy found the training reports mind-numbing, which I will remember the next time he gets going on the kind of mind-numbing thing only a computer guy can go on about.

What's the point of doing training reports here? It allows me to use the blog as a sort of writer work buddy. Some writers report to their writer buddies each day, which makes them work harder so they'll have something to report. Why training report instead of work report? I like the whole idea of training. Working, not so much.

If You Have A Lot Of Time...

...you might want to decipher the ISBN on the book you're reading. Or you might want to work on a cure for cancer instead.

Sort of related--I was just reading today that evidence from mummy autopsies suggests that cancer was pretty much unknown among ancient Egyptians. Their secret may be that they didn't live long enough to develop it.

But I Did Like It

I used the above title because I can recall years ago reading long, long reviews that went on for a column and a half before the reviewer began to say anything about the book. Ah, those were the good old days, when newsprint was cheap and a reviewer could drone on and on, showing the world how clever she was.

Anyway, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld--To cut to the chase, it's set in an alternative, steampunk just barely pre-WWI world in which the German-type folks, or Clankers, are into machines like no machines the German-type folks of that real era ever knew,and the British-type folks, known as Darwinists, are into "fabricated animals" that do all kinds of things for them, including serving as dirigibles. (Fabricating animals to function as machines seems like a great deal of work to me, but then science was never my strong suit. I am, in fact, still waiting to find my strong suit.)

The New York Times, where I used to read a lot of those long-winded reviews I was talking about earlier, carried a review for Leviathan in which the reviewer said there was "something a little mechanical (or bioengineered?)" about the two main characters. I would go further and say there was something a little mechanical about the whole book. You've got one storyline about Alek, the classic royal refugee on the run with loyal retainers. You've got Deryn the classic girl disguised as a boy so she can follow her bliss in a line of work not open to women in the Victorian era. Deryn's bliss is flying on those fabricated beasties the Darwinists use to get around on, much as Matt in Airborn (another steampunk novel) is into gadding about on dirigibles. You've got a character here, Dr. Barlow, who reminded me of Europe in Monster Blood Tattoo. In fact, you have illustrations in this book that reminded me of those in Monster Blood Tattoo.

The book seemed to be manufactured of parts that would be recognizable to someone who had done much reading. It's well done, nonetheless. And less experienced readers won't have read a lot of books about girls going undercover as boys and royalty having to run for their lives. Leviathan won't sound as familiar to them. And I did like it--until I got twenty or thirty pages from the end, when I realized that this story wasn't going to be wrapped up in this volume and that I was reading a hardcore serial. Then I began to feel a little testy.

Scott Westerfeld has redone his website with a Leviathan theme. I thought the Leviathan trailer looked as if it was made by the same folks who did the trailer for Monster Blood Tattoo. Leviathan's had a neat ending, though. "Do you oil your war machines or do you feed them?"

And since steampunk deals with technology, this seems like a good time to refer you to Science Fiction and the Frame of Technology by Paul Woodlin, which I found a while back through Cynsations.

Plot Project: I almost forgot about the plotting project, in which I'm supposed to determine whether or not a plot was generated by a character wanting something and the author creating obstacles to the character getting it. Well, one thing I'm learning from thinking about the plots of the books I read is that you can't read authors' minds. You can only guess how a plot came about. I'm also becoming less and less entranced with the "find out what your character wants and then keep her from getting it" plot plan. If you go to Holly Lisle's Create Your Professional Plot Outline (thank you Procrastinating Writers), you'll see that she says you can develop a plot starting from a number of points, including world building. My guess is that even if a book like Leviathan began with its two traditional characters who can take off from traditional jumping off points--prince escaping, girl disguising herself as boy in order to gain entry into a male world--because it is steampunk, the world building would be crucial to plot development. It seems as if a lot of world building would have to come before the writer could do much with the plot. But that's just speculation.