Evil Wrapped in a Fangirl Disguise

A big thank you to shetiger for the lovely snowflake cookie! It is awesome and you are awesome and basically made my day. ♥


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Yesterday we were completely without the internet. This morning Dad rebooted it (the whole internet, he's talented like that) and now it works. So it turns out yesterday we could have had it all along and I could have accomplished slightly more than I did. Oh well.

I did finish reading Kate DiCamillo's The Magician's Elephant. Easy, quick read. I really enjoy her style of writing. And now when kids check it out, I can say, "I liked that book," and we can have something to discuss.

Also finished writing two fics. That's right, TWO. Though one of them will probably not see the light of day in it's current draft/form. The other I am e-mailing away to be polished up for posting. It's a follow-up to Busted. Which, ha, I kind of can't believe I wrote a follow-up. There's also a third one planned. ginnith says that I grew up in the time of the trilogy and it makes sense that should be reflected in my writing.

Though I can honestly say I never, ever thought I would write on a pornographic trilogy involving hot angel/man love when I was in high school. Out of the many things we talked about during breaks in Choir, that was not one of them.

Oh, which reminds me I should ask Neesh about the lyrics for "O Holy Crap."

I also watched the first part of Alice on SyFy (uuuugh channel). I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed it quite a bit. It reminded me a lot of Tin Man (which I also enjoyed, mostly, though I think it ran too long). At first this really annoyed me - the similar heroine, the mysterious past, the mysterious family, the not-quite-our-world setting - but then I realized that similarities go back farther than the adaptations.

It's likely I'll post more about that after part two tonight.

Media doesn't know Quileutes are real.

::facepalm::

Today was fantastic. I love my job. The librarian one, I mean.

Instead of subbing at the library today like I was supposed to, I attended training at the service center. And by training I mean a lecture on the best children and young adult books of the year.

It was brilliant. The guy is very popular in the library circuit apparently. He helped choose the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards finalists and winners. So now I have his lists of books and I basically want to read everything on them. There are a handful that really stood out to me and my particular literary interests, so now I'm kind of antsy to get my hands on them.

We also got free books. I picked up Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia, which I read on a slow day subbing and loved. I think Tan's use of text and visual is wonderful.

I've also read his book The Arrival which is just brilliant. It's a book about the immigrant experience and the only text in it is that on signs or paperwork in the new land. But all of that is in an invented language, so the reader ends up in the same shoes as the main character. I love it.

The other book I picked up was The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim. Yang also wrote American Born Chinese, which I read a few months ago. That was primarily why I picked this one up.

I love that we're seeing more and more "main-stream" graphic novels. It's a form of literature that gets overlooked or shot down a lot which is unfortunate because there are so many beautiful, challenging, insightful things you can do with them. The good ones anyway. I am a fan.

The latest Entertainment Weekly is about vampires. It includes a list of the "20 Greatest Vampires of All Time" which makes me want to cry a little because Edward Cullen is number four. That is sad.

Lestat is number one. I don't really have an opinion on that, except that I thought Interview With the Vampire was kind of dull. Maybe I need to re-read it. Maybe it was just Louis that I was bored by.

Anyway, what I found interesting were the small Q&A bits with authors who write stories featuring vampires. And I particularly agreed with Laurell K. Hamilton's response when asked, "What are your thoughts on the Twilight phenomenon?"

"Stephanie Meyer has come and she's taken the genre that I sort of pioneered. Her original audiences was 11- and 12-year-olds, so she - very rightly - sanitized the genre. She took out a lot of the sex and violence, especially for the first book. My readership is both male and female, but Twilight is very much a girls' book. I ask people, Why has this really captured you? What I heard from all ages is that it was very romantic that he was willing to wait for her and that there was no sex. They like the idea that [Bella] was like the fairy princess and [Edward] is the handsome prince that rides in and saves her. The fact that women are so attracted to that idea - that they want to wait for Prince Charming rather than taking control of their own life - I find that frightening."

What she said.

Twilight was a guilty pleasure book for me and I enjoyed it, but I have not read the final two books and I don't really plan to because I know what happens and the characters drive me crazy. Plus, the writing makes me want to shoot myself in the face.

But what bugs me the most about the books is that they're just carrying on that idea of Prince Charming. Where the Prince Charming is emotionally abusive. Which is NOT OKAY.

It's not the idea of Prince Charming in general that ticks me off. It's the idea that the girl waits for Prince Charming to enter (and save her) and then her life starts. In the past couple of years, Sleeping Beauty has become my least favorite fairy tale for exactly this reason. I mean, Aurora's not even a heroine, is she? What does she do? She goes and does the one thing she's not supposed to and then falls into a coma and the rest of the kingdom follows after. And then a prince comes and wakes her with a kiss (or other things in some versions) and they get married and there's a happy ending.

All she did was prick her finger, sleep, and wait for some guy to come in and wake her up, making her life "complete."

And, okay, symbolic of sexual awakening. Sure. But it's still that idea that in order for a woman to fully come into her own, she has to have a man. Load of hooey.

Seriously, though, how is she a heroine? Is she somehow brave because she faced the one thing that could harm her? I want to understand how other people view it. Because to me she's just a empty vessel waiting for other people - the fairies, the prince - to fill her.

I apologize if it's anyone's favorite fairy tale. Maybe if I found source material and read more versions I'd get something else out of it.

I didn't know this post was going here when I started it.

Spent the morning doing an interview for a feature with the woman I sell peaches for. It was delightful and we spent most of the time off-topic. She's just such a fun person to talk with. As she's mentioned before, it's funny that there's such a gap in our ages (she's old enough to be my grandmother) and yet we enjoy many of the same things and have similar opinions.

Don't know when the peaches will start this year yet. Won't know until they actually do.

Meanwhile, I get to muddle through the proposed school district budget for '09-'10 for the article on July's school board meeting. The business manager even told me it was the most confusing budget he'd ever done, since a lot of the funding is hypothetical at this point and just because the numbers aren't in one fund, doesn't mean they're not in another. So I'm going to look back through my notes and what my editor would like and what the packet actually says and see if I need to call him and go, "Okay, explain this to me again please..."

But beside that, I've finished a book and a TV series (posting about it later, maybe) and have started A Study in Scarlet. There are popsicles in the freezer and two fantastically cool rooms in the house. My Headache from Hell has not return since Sunday. I am excited about people coming over for the rodeo and people maybe coming over for the Best Peaches in the World, No Seriously and others coming over just to hang out. Things are pretty good.

Tuesday I finished reading Vonda N. McIntyre's The Entropy Effect, which is the first Star Trek-related book I've read. It's got singularities and time travel and Spock and McCoy being pretty fantastic. It also supports both Spock/Kirk (boy does it ever) and McCoy/Kirk. While I am a Spock/Kirk girl myself, I am totally behind all the love. I enjoyed the book a lot.

Except for the written Scottish dialect. We know Scotty is Scottish. I don't need to be confused by additional vowels, missing consonants, or random apostrophes. Other than that, though, it was solid. Ending maybe a little anti-climatic.

( Spoilerific )

It's a storyline I wouldn't mind seeing applied to the new Trek 'verse. Not movie-wise, but fic-wise. I want to see new Kirk and Spock with their different history (and histories) go through this. Because I want to see how they'd react.

Now I really want to read more Trek books.

My love for Spock is massive.

One of the books I am currently reading, off a friend's recommendation, is Hideyuki Kikuchi and Yoshitaka Amano's Vampire Hunter D. On the one hand, I'm intrigued by the story. On the other hand, the writing makes me want to bang my head against something.

For example:

From the farm he road hard north by northwest for two hours, until he came to a spot where a massive ashen citadel towering quietly atop a hillock loomed menacingly overhead.
- p. 57

Overkill, much?

Now, I'm going to mostly blame the translation. Whenever anything gets translated from the original language to something else, there is lots of room for error and massive failure. But I've still got to wonder what the original writing is like. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm also reading Dickens at the moment.

I'm having other issues with it, too. Like the way in which information is presented. There could be some more subtlety involved.

I don't really want to speak ill of it though. Like I said, I am enjoying the storyline enough to keep reading. And I want to know what happens. But it's a little like finding a piece of fanfiction that has an excellent idea and fails on the execution.


Now I'm a little afraid I get too adjective-happy.

- Black Books series two came from Netflix yesterday. YEA. Which means I'm into episodes I haven't seen before.

- I'm always impressed with how closely the performances in the various BBC adaptations of Charles Dickens novels resemble the descriptions in the books. (Burn Gorman's Mr. Guppy even looked like the illustrations in Bleak House.) Reading Little Dorrit right now.

- Today is the Fire District 50th Anniversary/County 100th Birthday Celebration. At noon they are ringing the bell at the Methodist Church 100 times. I am lending a hand by picking up sandwiches. And other things too, I'm sure.

- Tomorrow I'm helping out with National Youth Service Day. The kids are painting a mural on a tavern!

- City council was DULL. And, like, 80 degrees F in the building at 7 PM. Blah. Thankfully, it was only about an hour. I wonder if they have air conditioning in there, or if by July/August I'm going to want to kill myself because of the heat?

- Will be spending the first couple of weeks of July in Seattle doing my usual house-/dog-sitting. YEA. As always, I'm looking forward to it. Maybe moreso this year as I've spent so little time over there lately.

( Quiz Results )

I should not read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box while watching Ghost Hunters. This is a recipe for disaster.

We are small but we are many
We are many we are small
We were here before you rose
We will be here when you fall.

We have teeth and we have tails
We have tails we have eyes
We were here before you fell
You will be here when we rise.

I forgot how creepy the rats are in Coraline.

Also, some of Dave McKean's illustrations. Especially the one in chapter six.