An Odyssey of Dreams

( Fantasy & Fables: Fantasy in Graphic Novel Form )

I was going to write up George R. R. Martin's reading, but someone else did it better right here.

( The Fantastic and the Mundane: A Look at Urban Fantasy )

Next up, Sunday!

Apparently all the talk of slash and yaoi annoyed matociquala away from reading reviews. Which is a shame, I think, because I believe in positive reinforcement. And this might be my favorite of her books to date.

I'll try not to let the OMG!SQUEEEE!!! and drool overrun as I type, but no promises.

I wasn't going to get Carnival until after the New Year. With my habitual lack of faith in the library system (Actually not true, I think libraries are great. I just don't think they work well for me.) I've come to rely heavily on the kindness of strangers and my Discover card to provide me with Borders and B&N gift cards which allow me to buy books without compromising my ability to pay rent. And the holiday season is a time when bookstore gift cards are showered in my general direction because people (my family) understand that one of the greatest gifts they can give me is the license to prance around a bookstore and actually get to pick out things that I can take home with me. And other people may be stumped beyond the knowledge that "She likes books. And biology. But we can't really get her biology. And we're not too sure on what kind of books she likes." mrsix is an exception, but he rocks like a rocking thing. (Sorry, tangent.)

Anyway, I was going to wait until I had accumulated a nice pile of gift cards before making the book purchases that would hopefully tide me over the next semester. But given the slash debate (on which I am not taking sides), I was intrigued enough to go read Amazon and see if I could find more reviews. And then I stumbled on the Exerpt.

Well, shit. There went that plan. Frantically I search for a bookstore in the general area, only to find they're all way out of my way. Annoying, but then it turns out that Doyle's doing some last-minute holiday shopping in the neighborhood of one store that says it has it. Yay! On the sixth night of Hanukkah my boyfriend gave to me....

It is somewhat amusing to realize just how much Bear's writing style (at least on the sci-fi end) appeals to my brain. Or maybe it's just training. Hammered took me a bit to really get into, it was on my second try that I actually did. Scardown was a race between myself and my dad (the last time I bring something he might want to read as my first book for a family vacation), and by the time I picked up Worldwired it was such a smooth transition I don't think I noticed. Much like Vincent hitting his stride, Carnival and I just clicked the moment I read that exerpt.

That's at least partly due to the fact that Our Heroes were giving off enough sexual and other tension to drive me up a wall. You read "Chapter One" and bang! here comes conflict. I love it.

Have I mentioned just how much I love the fact that Bear's protagonists are, as a rule, over the age of 50? It gives so much more to the plot - in wisdom, in knowledge, in experience and depth. When you say "these people were lovers who were separated" that doesn't mean "they had one or two screws and went their separate ways" but "they maintained a secret relationship for over 20 years before they were forced apart for 17." So much more history, so much more at stake. It explains everything from how well they work together to how much weight on their shoulders they're both carrying.

It is a love story. Without a single "I love you," without weepy dramatic sex, without things that may look fine to a romance writer but generally make me want to spork my eyes out in the cold light of day. (There is sex; it's not weepy.) It's difficult to describe just how the way Vincent and Angelo are presented together appeals to me, except to say that as I've grown, I've encountered the fact that love is like this. That no matter how much you love, there are things you will not sacrifice, or forsake for the fear of no longer being yourself. That the thought of giving something so precious up would terrify and hurt you, but to do the morally wrong thing would simply destroy you. And these two are the best example of it I ever read.

To put simpler, their love is not hearts and flowers. It's pain, and lies, and ( spoiler )

But the book cannot stand on its own with just the two of them. Ultimately, as much as it is about Vincent and Angelo's relationship, it is also about New Amazonia, about New Earth and Ur, and the OECC (which we never actually see, so that's pretty darn impressive), about Lesa and how far you will go to give your children the best chance you can, about cultures taken to the extreme, and about the lies we tell ourselves to live.

Pretty impressive, no? Throw in all that physics (I'm pretty sure one round of research on superstring theory will keep on giving as far as Bear's writing goes), ( more spoiler ), espionage and intrigue, a bit of art, and you get an incredible book.

When I first met Elizabeth Bear, I told her that I, traditionally, had a hard time reading science fiction. Not entirely true when I think back to my childhood - Verne was on top of the list - but generally true when I open an Asimov novel. I suspect that in this "deficiency" I am far from alone. I told her that what really made me care about the story was character driving plot driving character development. Perhaps that's why this novel works so well for me.

I do have some quibbles, though. I'm not sure if one of them isn't just an error in printing, but one is a small plot point that's never addressed. It doesn't detract from the story, but if I'm giving a full review, it feels right to note that as much as I love it, it's not a perfect book.

So. There has been a recent "meme" of sorts about the all the cool people's blogs about "how to write a novel." (In case you don't read, it can be found here, here, here, here, and here, at the very least and in the order I saw them.) And really, that's great.

I've already (technically) written a novel, though. And while I don't think I'm cool enough to share the process, I will say that my brain did conjure something very similar to the spreadsheet idea as a cookie for me (it was a notepad file, started off by keeping wordcount, and then evolved to keeping the names of the chapters - Glamour's not the sort of book where I need to keep track of the POV). In any case, I have a fairly "set" method for writing novels that is differently-evolved from my method of writing short stories or essays, and I'm pretty happy with it. It works for me.

What I don't have is a way to actually get myself to look at the book again. I can think about it, make a list of all the things that are broken and need to be fixed - even, on occasion, how I can fix them, but I can't bring myself to open that bloody file labelled "Glamour Draft 2.doc" and get to work. I dread it. I'm absolutely sure it'll be horrible, and I'll hate it and won't stand to even edit it and will destroy my own creation in a blaze of madness.

Rationally, I know it's not that bad. I know where it's broken, but I also know where the strong points are. It is fixable, but I actually need to be willing to fix it. I'm willing to bet that it'd be nice work if I could get it. And if you can get it, please won't you tell me how?