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Showing posts with the label novels

Game of Thrones: Why Daenerys As Queen Is the End Game

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Spoilers for anyone who has not read A Feast for Crows or A Dance With Dragons, or the released chapters of The Winds of Winter. By now, viewers of Game of Thrones  can see that the show's creators are beginning to shift the story toward its end game, toward the final Ice Zombie Apocalypse and One Who Wins the Iron Throne.  The outcome of most characters is highly uncertain.  Will Daenerys Targaryen fly her way back to the Throne on dragon wings?  Or will Jon Snow forge his way to the Iron Throne through a phalanx of ice zombies?  Or will it be stoic, meticulous Stannis Baratheon?  Or (f)Aegon?  Or Sansa Stark?  Maybe some combination of the above, like Jon and Daenerys, or even Jon and Sansa.* Who do I think it will be?  Daenerys. She seems like the obvious choice, which in the A Song of Ice and Fire universe usually means she is marked for death.  And I would not at all put it past Martin or the show's producers to kill her off...

Novel Update: The Unlikeable Female Protagonist

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I gave my novel draft over to be critiqued by a professional editor, as I said I would do i n my last update .  While she had a lot of positive things to say about the story and characters, she had one major criticism: she did not like my female protagonist. I've gone into my novel and its characters in previous posts .  Suffice it to say, my character, Isabella, has a lot of issues.  She is young, angry, scared, and overwhelmed.  She responds by lashing out at those who don't deserve it, with some pretty terrible consequences.  As a result, she bears a life-long scar.  Though she reforms, by the end of the novel, her reformation is not complete.  And, to be perfectly honest, it will probably never be. Isabella is not my first "challenging" female protagonist.  For a pilot script I wrote some years ago, my female protagonist was also angry.  She had just lost her job and ended a relationship.  She finally bonded with her teenage n...

Dickens Watch 2015

This is just a brief update.  Work has been grueling of late, I've been trying to write my one page per night, and damn those seasonal allergies.  Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning that I've put aside Bleak House  for now.  I was into it for a short while, but somewhere around the time the heroine met Mr. Jarndyce, or whatever his name, I stopped caring.  I'm not sure how many pages I am into the book... my Kindle tells me 8%.  I'll try again, really. Some observations: Dickens uses a mixture of styles that I had considered to be "modern" and hadn't really seen in other Victorian novels (though my catalogue is far from complete).  The first chapter begins almost like free-verse poetry, written by someone on crack: "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Bo...

Book Review: Fingersmith

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I feel as though I've been living in a cave.  Sarah Waters has been publishing neo-Victorian and early/mid 20th century novels since 1998, yet I learned about her only a year ago.  More is the pity, because her writing style is so compulsively readable, at least going by her third novel,  Fingersmith  (2002). As with Crimson Petal and the White  and The Seance , I read with one eye toward seeing (1) what aspects of the Victorian Era were incorporated, (2) what "modern" elements were added, (3) what worked and did not work, (4) how well Fingersmith  conformed to expectations of "what would sell," and (5) whether it was a good story. Starting with No. 2, one common aspect of Sarah Waters's novels is that their protagonists are lesbians.  Not all, but at least the first three, including  Fingersmith .  Waters was working toward a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, with a thesis focused on "lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to...

Book Review: The Seance

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As I stated in my The Crimson Petal and the White review , I will be reviewing neo-Victorian novels that were written within the past 10 to 15 years.  I am interested in learning: (1) what aspects of the Victorian Era they incorporate; (2) what "modern" elements they bring; (3) what works and does not work; (4) how well they conform to expectations of "what will sell"; and (5) whether it's a good story. John Harwood's The Seance  (2008) was never a big best seller like The Crimson Petal and the White , but it was well received.  It is quiet in all of the ways that  Crimson is flashy, never trying to be about a big idea or a shocking premise.  Yet it still manages to be bittersweet and effective. The Seance is characterized as a "horror" novel, but I never read it as such.  Instead, I saw it as a novel interested in the supernatural, and in certain fads of that time period.  It uses that angle to explore the hopes and fears of the main charac...

Ten Ways That Jane Austen Is Not a Victorian Novelist

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Jane Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817.  Most of her work was published between 1811 and 1818.  Yet she is repeatedly lumped together with authors from a much later time, such as George Eliot (1819-1880), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882).  Together, they and many others are referred to as "Victorian authors," even though Queen Victoria didn't come to the throne until 1837. The reason seems to be because these authors, and more, frequently set their works in the English countryside, where towns were small, life was slow, and old landed wealth reigned supreme.  Of course Victorian authors covered much more than that, as anyone who has read Charles Dickens would know.  And while the countryside did, in many ways, seem suspended in time throughout the 19th century (something I comment on in a Downton Abbey  post ), it still experienced fundamental changes.  Changes that were beginning during Austen's lifetime, but ...

Give Me Some of That Old Time Description

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The sunset was like a bright beam of orange spun cotton candy dancing on a fiery mound of... oh screw it. So description.... yeah... Even though I draw, my writing has always been weakest when I try to describe things.  Objects in a room.  A sunset.  Clothing.  Faces. Still, I didn't think that my description was that bad until I encountered the view that historical novels should immerse  you in the period, fully fleshing out the world to make you feel as if you were there.  See, for example,  The Crimson Petal and the White . I don't immerse.  I describe and move on.  Now and then, I'll mention a detail if I think it's important.  Or I might give a thorough description of a character if that character matters.  But I don't linger.  I rarely paint a scene. I never thought that lessened my readers' enjoyment, but maybe I've been depriving them.  Maybe I should take the time to really sketch out the surround...

Book Review: The Crimson Petal and the White

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This will shock you: when I sat down to write my neo-Victorian novel , I was not exactly aware of the current market for my genre.  I simply reasoned that if people still liked books written 150 years ago, they would be just as happy to read a more modern take. Turns out that knowing your market is pretty important.  One reason is because when you write a query letter, it is often ideal to suggest that your book resembles Book X, which was written in the past 10 to 15 years and sold bazillions of copies.  I did some Google searches, but the neo-Victorian market was surprisingly sparse -- most well-known books like The French Lieutenant's Woman  had been written decades ago. So I went onto Victorian listserv and asked for some examples of popular recent Victorian novels.  One of the examples mentioned was Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White  (2002).  Since that seems to be the most popular recent example, that is where I will start. ...

Game of Thrones: Is Daenerys Targaryen Really Such a Bad Ruler?

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For those who have only watched the television show or those who have not read A Dance With Dragons , spoilers for the series are below!!! After Season Four, Game of Thrones  the television series will have a tough task: making A Feast for Crows  and A Dance With Dragons  into a compelling viewing experience.  While A Feast for Crows is criticized for focusing too much on side characters and subplots, A Dance With Dragons  may be more frustrating -- it promises series progression and largely fails to deliver. In Dance  we are finally reunited with Daenerys and Tyrion Lannister -- the former of whom is trying to rule Meereen, a conquered slave city, and the latter of whom is traveling to serve her.  Readers know that after 1,000 or so pages, Tyrion never actually meets Daenerys.  However, the biggest source of disappointment may be Daenerys herself. The Situation Many critics believe that Daenerys is simply a poor ruler.  During her ...