What the Weather?!

It is January 4th and there is not a single speck of snow on the ground. The grass of our front lawn is the color of jade. Across the road, two kids are running around in shirtsleeves, and earlier this week, my oldest son went for a bike ride.

This is the weirdest Canadian winter ever.

We Interrupt To Bring You This Comic-Strip Rant (plus bonus Writer Angst!)

I've just read today's FBOFW and it made me want to scream. How disgustingly obvious is it that Warren McPlotContrivancePants is going to fly Liz up to Mtigwaki in his helicopter a day early so that she can stumble upon Suds and Chipper in all their faithless glory, and flee tearfully back to southern Ontario to throw herself into Granthony's wimpy arms?

BARF BARF BARF

I hope I'm totally wrong about this, but I have very little hope. Curse you, Lynnions!

On a positive note, I have library books. Lois Lowry's Messenger, Wendy Mass's A Mango Shaped Space (thank you for the rec, variella) and Jeffrey Moore's The Memory Artists. The latter two books are about synaesthesia, so I can tear my hair out over things like Wendy's heroine being named Mia and mine being named Thea, and sink into bleak despair at the realization that everything I wanted to say in Touching Indigo has been said before and better by somebody else.

Kind of like I'm currently tearing my hair out over the fact that I cannot write a 250-word hook for Knife that doesn't confuse the heck out of people who haven't read it and give them a totally wrong impression about the story.

I can't not write, but sometimes I think I ought to take up an easier and more soothing occupation, like carving the 23rd Psalm in medieval script onto individual grains of rice.

Sigh.

A Mango Shaped Space, by Wendy Mass

THIS BOOK IS MADE OF AWESOME.

Not unexpectedly since it's about a teenaged girl who discovers she has synaesthesia, there's a little bit of overlap with Touching Indigo in terms of plot and characterization. But I think they're different enough that there might be room for both. Plus, Thea is significantly older than Mia and has a very different family background and dynamics, and things that are major subplots in Indigo are only minor ones in Mango or not really there at all (and vice versa). And, of course, my book has a major SF/Fantasy element whereas Wendy Mass's book doesn't. This is a relief, because I would hate to feel that all my ideas have been taken already, or that nobody would be able to read Indigo without making odious comparisons.

Meanwhile, Day Four has been a complete creative disaster, in spite of the trouble I took to drive the kids out to their grandparents' farm for the day so I could really knuckle down and get some work done. I still haven't decided what to do about my setting, my research list is sketchy at best, and I started my plot summary only to give up when I couldn't even decide on a decent Story Goal (i.e. the main point that all the characterization and action in the book is working towards). I know how Indigo started -- with the question, "What if someone had synaesthesia so intense that it screwed up her life and made everybody around her think she was crazy?" But that still doesn't tell me anything about The Point Of It All.

All I know is that I do not want to write yet another teen novel where a girl is ashamed of being weird and outcast and desperately wants to be ordinary and popular for a change, and tries for a while to pretend she's just like the popular girls at school but it all backfires, and in the end she learns that she is special and finds friends who are just like her and all is sunshine and butterflies. I for one am heartily sick of that particular YA motif.

Oh, yeah, THAT problem... and a minor rant on style

I must be the most naive person in the world. Seriously, here I am asking these questions about whether it would be better to use a real town with fictional elements or a wholly fictionalized one, and not once did it occur to me to worry about whether people living in that town might think I am writing about them. And yet this appears to be the first thing that most of the writers on the Verla Kay board thought of when deciding on the setting for their books.

And even now that it's occurred to me, the idea of someone from my past suing me because they think I'm writing about them seems so ridiculous that I just don't care. See? Naive. Or just pig-headed. You decide.

In other news, I thought The Giver and Gathering Blue were pretty good, but Messenger seemed to me dull, preachy and obvious, and I found Lois Lowry's writing style boring. Actually, I'm finding most of the books I've read lately quite lacking style-wise. I know Patricia A. McKillip's books have become next thing to incomprehensible, but my word, her style is gorgeous. Robin McKinley is probably a better balance -- lovely sentence structure and imagery and a recognizable plot. Reading Lloyd Alexander out loud to my six-year-old son has given me a new appreciation for his descriptive abilities. And I can think of many others whose writing style I enjoyed when I was in my teens and enjoy reading still (bows to pameladean). But where are the stylists in YA fantasy these days? Has everybody been brainwashed into thinking they have to write with a limited vocabulary and short sentences so the illiterate teenage masses can keep up?

Of the books I've read over the past year I've encountered only one author who tried her hand at the kind of lyrical, vivid style I associate with great fantasy, and even there it seemed to me that the really good bits of her writing came in flashes with a lot of merely average stuff in between, while at other times I itched to line-edit her prose.

Or maybe I'm just hypercritical of everybody's style at the moment because I'm unhappy with my own. Again, you decide. But I do think I have a point about the lack of lyricism in modern YA fantasy writing. Though I'm certainly open to correction if anybody has good counter-examples to recommend.