Third time's the charm

...I hope.

I've rewritten the opening scene of this particular story so many times I've lost track. I started with a basic setup and rewrote that first version over and over. Changed the main character's age. Changed the POV of the entire story. Then decided to drastically chop the opening scene after lots of feedback pointing to the story starting too soon.

Of course I swung too far the other direction. At least I only went through one really horrible version of that intro. Unfortunately, that was the intro I used to enter a contest. In some ways it worked out anyway, though, because that contest let me know that I had really screwed up the beginning quickly so I didn't waste as much time on it.

On to the third try, and I think I've struck the balance I need. I've resigned myself to the fact that this particular story doesn't lend itself to starting off with a bang; it's advice I've heard before, but I hadn't consciously realized that I was trying so hard to start with a bang. For Emily's story to work, the reader has to get inside her head a little more before her world starts to fall apart around her. It's more subtle. Starting with a huge action scene is great for some stories, but sometimes it's okay to take a step back. If the reader is investing in a character more than a series of dramatic events, then the reader has to get to know that character and start to care about her/him first. So that's where my story starts now, and I'm loving it.

Hopefully other people will too. Here's the first page of Emily's story:

I knocked on the door to Room 113, but no one answered. Just to make sure, I rapped harder. Still nothing.

I wiped my clammy hands on my jeans before grabbing the bronze doorknob, half-hoping it would be locked.

No such luck. It gave easily, and the door swung inward without a sound.

“Ms. Briggs? You asked me to meet you after school…” My voice trailed off as I saw that the classroom was empty.

Well, except for the antiquated beast sitting on top of my desk. Curious, I stepped inside.

A note stuck out of the machine, addressed to me in sweeping blue cursive.

“Emily, I’ve decided what to do about your uncharacteristically irresponsible behavior on Monday. You have one chance to make up your final exam. You have until the 15^th to write a complete novella of at least 30,000 words, or you will fail the final and the class. As part of your punishment, you must use this typewriter instead of your computer to write the story. I hope you will find the creative experience illuminating, perhaps even enjoyable.”

I eyed the metal monstrosity. A typewriter? Writing a novella in two weeks was going to be hard enough, but using a typewriter? Ms. Briggs must have been more upset with me than she’d let on.

My muscles groaned as I scooped up the bulky machine. Once I found my balance I made my way to the bus stop, lurching through the halls like something out of an old horror flick.

Grimmerye

Grimmerye is a project I've been working on for the past two years, so it's near and dear to my heart. In Grimmerye, I played with the backstory for two Grimm villainesses. I wanted to discover what else could be under the surface, to find the human side of the women who did these terrible things with seemingly no provocation. The challenge I posed to myself was, under what circumstances could their murderous, thieving, kidnapping ways not only be justified, but in the traditional hero(ine)'s best interest?

Note that I'm not telling you which stories I based mine on, because it's not meant to be evident at first. Discovering which story you're in as a reader is part of the fun.
I had the opportunity to run the first few pages and query by an agent recently, and got some interesting advice. He said that it was good, but because it's a series of stories, it would be a hard sell for a first time author. I had to agree--short story collections are a hard sell unless big-name authors are involved, and that's what Grimmerye currently is at its lowest level.
Enter the advice of my best critique partners: find a way to take the two stories and unite them into a coherent single narrative. So while one of my other manuscripts is being looked over by Pitch Wars mentors (check out for info on Pitch Wars if you don't know what it is), I'm working on finding a way to loosely tie the first two stories together with a third. I have a crazy idea up my sleeve that just might do the trick, and it will be challenging to write. Exciting!

Anywhooo...Here's the first 213 words of the first story. I throw you right into the story with a bang on this one, appropriate to this particular antiheroine's narrative.

I lay awake in my bed, unable to sleep, dreading the morrow.
My birthday. My stomach churned at the thought of it.
For as long as I could remember, the Woman had celebrated all of our birthdays—and there were many of us—in the same fashion. She would wake the unfortunate child in the morning with a clawed hand grasping the poor girl’s throat, screaming in her face, spittle dripping like venom from Her lips as she recounted Her story. The Woman had no use for boy-children; they were sent away to their fathers as soon as they could be weaned. She kept those of us who were unfortunate enough to be girls and paid just enough attention to us to make sure we didn’t die—at least, not until after She’d discovered if we would prove useful to Her schemes or not. After that, She didn’t care about our fates; most of the older girls had been dragged off in the night by nameless village men whose faces blended into one dark, leering grimace that haunted my sleep. On occasion, girls simply vanished, and if one of us dared to ask the Woman where they had gone, She merely shrugged indifferently.
None of us would have dreamed of calling Her “Mother”.

Ursula K. LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea

Overall Rating: 4/5 stars
Genre: Fantasy (Middle school - adult)
Gender Appeal: All
Re-read value: High
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Earthsea-The-Cycle-ebook/dp/B008T9L6AM/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0K05W4KJPNH886HMKX1D
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13642.A_Wizard_of_Earthsea?from_search=true


This book is one of those books that really stayed with me after I read it for the first time. In fact, the first time I read it, I only made it about 2/3 of the way through, and got so scared I had to put it down. (I came back to it not too much later because I had an insatiable curiosity about how things turned out.) Don't let my experience put you off the book, though, because I have a notoriously low tolerance for terror.


The premise of the book is that a young man, named Sparrowhawk, discovers that he has magical powers; he subsequently trains with a famous mage who lives nearby, and later goes to the school for mages that trains all mages who live in the archipelago. (Side note - I always found the fact that the book is set on an archipelago fascinating. Not your traditional landscape.)


Sparrowhawk, coming from a poor region, clashes with some of the more wealthy students at the school. His pride causes him to do some pretty stupid things in order to compete with the other students; he also has great aptitude to match his pride, of course.


MINOR SPOILER ALERT! (although the back of the book will tell you this)




Sparrowhawk's pride leads him to try out an extremely powerful spell one night, but his magic goes awry. A hungry specter takes advantage of his spell and slinks through into the human world. The evil spirit and Sparrowhawk are linked with an unbreakable bond, and he knows that the spirit will hunt him until the day he dies if he cannot find a way to conquer it.




END SPOILER!


One of the things I love about this book is the characterization. Sparrowhawk and his friends, as well as his rivals, are well-fleshed out. You get inside his head - you sympathize with him, even when you know he's making poor decisions. And as I mentioned above, when I first read this book (sometime around the age of 11-12) it was truly creepy enough and haunting enough that it unnerved me. But the story had me so hooked that I had to know how things turned out. While it's a story about a magician and the battle between good and evil, it's also the story of Sparrowhawk's inner battle to develop himself, to grow beyond his pride and open himself to greater possibilities.


The Earthsea cycle is composed of four books altogether; and while I really like the first three, I admit that I have mixed feelings about the fourth. It's worth reading, but... I can't say more without spoiling the whole thing for you. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. And if you saw that incredibly awful made for TV movie version, know that the story in the books is very different - and of course much better. The book is always better.

Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn

Overall Rating: 5/5 stars
Genre: Fantasy (adult or teen; situationally and language wise it's clean)
Gender Appeal: All
Re-read value: High
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Mistborn-The-Final-Empire-Book/dp/0765350386
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68428.Mistborn


To be completely up front with you, I have to admit something. I love just about every book I've read by Brandon Sanderson. I like some better than others; but his knack for leading the reader - and the characters - around like a bull being pulled by a ring in its nose and then tossing them upside down... well, it's just amazing. And it makes it fun to reread the stories, so you can look for hints of what was really going on, how the reader and character were deceived so completely.

Mistborn is the first book in his trilogy, The Final Empire. The beginning of the back blurb on the paperback was what hooked me into buying the book:

"Once, a hero arose to save the world. A young man with a mysterious heritage courageously challenged the darkness that strangled the land.

He failed."

It's so blunt and surprising; the idea of the chosen hero rising up, trying his best, and failing at his quest. The whole premise is handled so ingeniously throughout the book (and the rest of the trilogy), that it almost makes you wonder why heroes always succeed in stories. A story of failure can be just as fascinating.

Of course, part of what makes this story so fascinating is the way that it's told - not through the eyes of the hero as he begins his quest, but a young woman named Vin, who lives in a society that has to deal with the aftermath of this failure a thousand years later.

The Hero of Ages only partially failed in his duty; he lives on as the Lord Ruler, and he rules with an iron fist. Life is terrible for most people. Poverty and oppression run rampant. Into this atmosphere, Vin is born. She discovers shortly into the book that she has what Sanderson terms "Allomantic powers." Allomancy, in the Mistborn universe, is the ability certain individuals have to ingest specific metals and "burn" them, causing various effects. Most people with Allomantic powers can only use a single type of metal; Vin is one of the rarest creatures there is, a full "mistborn" who can burn any allomantic metal. Such beings are extraordinarily dangerous and valuable, and are carefully controlled by the Lord Ruler.

Sanderson's descriptions of Vin flying through the air, pushing and pulling on various metal sources around her (with a careful attention to the laws of physics and motion) were fascinating to me. Sometimes, he can get a little carried away with it, but in this case I think I'd rather have a little bit too much detail than not enough.

Vin is one of my favorite heroines in an adult book. She's incredibly strong, given her mistborn capabilities, yet she's so uncertain of herself. She spent most of her formative years on the street in a thieving crew, trying to avoid beatings and other unwanted physical attention. She's always alert, wary, slow to trust, and yet she isn't crippled by her upbringing. She is able to grow and change throughout the series, and that's a rare occurrence in a novel. Vin is like that underdog sports team that you just can't help rooting for.

Without giving away any major plot points, I'd have to say that Sanderson is amazingly adept at sleight-of-hand. Just when you think you know what direction the plot is going, he yanks it around and turns you on your head. And when you think you finally know how things are going to resolve, he gives you some vital piece of information or a new viewpoint that changes everything. He's great at using the limitations of third person point-of-view to obscure the bigger picture of what's really going on. And while I love a good mystery, and I'm pretty good at solving puzzles, it's even more satisfying to not be able to puzzle things out and be completely surprised - but not because the ending is far-fetched.

Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogy

Overall Rating: 3/5 stars
Genre: Young Adult / Dystopian / Romance (however, given some of the language and sexual tension, I'm not sure I'd recommend this to anyone I know under 16)
Gender Appeal: Primarily feminine
Re-read value: None for me
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Delirium-Lauren-Oliver-ebook/dp/B00A9V2JSG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401667017&sr=1-1&keywords=delirium
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11614718-delirium?from_search=true



First off, I really liked the premise of this series. The idea that, at some point in the future, scientists somewhere would decide that love (or all strong emotions, really) ought to be wiped out for the good of humanity, is just far-fetched enough to be startling, but believable enough to make the story work.

The tension throughout the books was good; the pace kept things moving along nicely. There was a good balance of action and more mundane moments, which helped to develop at least some of the characters.

The way Lena longs for her procedure in the beginning posed an interesting dilemma to me, as a reader. My natural instinct is to think that it's ridiculous how much she wants to be "cured," when I know that this cure is going to rob her of some of her most precious moments in life - marrying someone you love, having children, forming close bonds with friends, and such. However, as someone who has depression and was a rather socially awkward teenager, I can sympathize with her desire to eliminate those same feelings, especially in order to fit in better with society. Part of me thinks that at some point, most teenagers would jump at the ability to suppress those overwhelming feelings of love, loss, anguish, and isolation that Lena struggles with.

A nit-picky sort of thing that bothered me was the language. The book was, for the most part, devoid of swearing. But every now and then, someone would just start going off and drop lots of curse words, and not necessarily because they were in a situation that really demanded such a change in tone from the rest of the book. It was jarring, and if you don't enjoy that sort of language, you might want to avoid this book.

One of the main flaws to me is one that seems to be common in these types of young adult books: the instant, love-at-first-sight sort of relationship that Lena forms with Alex. It's not quite as bad in this book as Bella and Edward in Twilight, but it's similar. At least Lena and Alex spend some time together and know a few things about each other before they decide that they are madly in love. Now, I know that this is actually a common teen phenomenon - believe me, I fell prey to it enough times myself when I was a teen; however, these types of relationships don't usually last in real life. (And can you imagine what life might be like if you had ended up with your first teenage crush? I don't know about you, but that would NOT have been a good choice for me, at least.)

I'd have to say that, on the whole, this book was okay. The first book was my favorite; I kind of rolled my eyes at the end of the second book (and the way that how that situation came about was never really explained to my satisfaction); and the ending to the third was just plain bad writing. It felt like a cop out. More details below.


WARNING: BELOW THIS LINE WILL BE SPOILERS!!!


I have to admit that the end of the first book had me in tears. The emotional experience Oliver created for the reader was intense, and she carries it over nicely into the beginning of the second book, when Lena is hallucinating and dragging herself through the woods. That's a point in her favor.

The second book felt a bit awkward to me. In some ways, it made more sense after reading the supplemental story Annabel. I couldn't understand how Lena and the rest of the Resistance were able to so easily sneak into regular society, given how terrified Lena is of being caught in the first book. But Annabel (Lena's mother) reveals that the cure was first used when she was a young woman herself. This societal structure is much younger than we are led to believe. Which, again, feels a little odd, because that means that Lena's parents' generation were raised with parents who loved them and would have treated them very differently than they treated their own children. The new structure takes hold very quickly, and the Resistance itself takes hold almost as fast. That's a lot of social and political turmoil to take place within just 2 generations.

Hana's story just annoyed me, but only partially because of her behavior. If everyone knows there are rumors about her husband-to-be being this brutal, awful man, how was he able to avoid getting in trouble with the thought police? His own parents knew he was messed up; given Lena's fear of the authorities, I have a hard time believing that he could get away with everything he did. And yes, I know that money buys power, but it still just seemed odd.

But here is my biggest annoyance with the novel: the ending. It was so awful that I read it out loud to my husband, after giving him the 3 sentence summary of the trilogy, just to see if it was really as awful as I thought it was. He agreed. Breaking the "4th wall" and addressing the reader like that was so incredibly strange. And there was just enough ambiguity about the passage that I couldn't tell if it was really Lena addressing the reader, or if she was simply talking to the other cities that hadn't been brought down by the rebels yet. Either way, it felt so incredibly awkward to read. It felt like she got to the end of the story, and then had no idea how to give it a good sense of closure. As an "amateur" author, I sympathize, but there had to have been a better way than that. And poor Julian! Lena just decides to dump him and run off with Alex and she doesn't even look for him to see if he was killed when the retook the walls and tell him that she doesn't really love him. That was heartless. It also seemed unnecessary. The love triangle tension could easily have been accomplished with whatever that other chick's name was (you know your characterization is bad when people can't even remember your characters' names...) and Alex's anger at Lena. And the big discussion Lena has with her mom just fell flat for me. Lena went from being all mad at her mom for leaving her to suddenly just being okay with it.

I'd say that Oliver needs to take some more time to flesh out her characters and think about how and why people act the way they do if she wants to keep writing. A good plot idea will only get you so far so many times before people get tired of reading your stories.