Wold you do this?

Would you work eight extra hours while you’re sick, on fifteen minutes’ notice?
Because apparently I should have.

In any case.

I have finished The Naked God, and it’s like a genie popped out of nowhere to grant me all my wishes. I really loved that book.

In other news, Albert was an Asshole Royal last night – dragging me out to his friends’ place until ten when he knows I have to be at work at six, and then fucking off to some other friends untill bloody midnihgt. He also said they phoned him to go, but I was tired, not deaf. They never phoned him. So either he went there out of his own will, or he never went there at all. And thus was out doing godknowswhat with godknowswho. He also smoked all my cigarettes.

To sum up: I hate my job, I love the book, and Albert is a pain.

Seriously. Everyone in the world must read this.

Speaking as someone who has my novel open in the background while I surf the web and try to catch up on all the blogs I want to read, go read this.
You’re missing our if you don’t.

No war today, come back tomorrow.

So there was a meeting about the agebanding issue between Phil Pullman and several representatives of the publishers. From his description (which you will have read if you’d signed up, as it was sent out in an e-mail last night), it sounds like the publishers are basically frlipping their authors the bird in the politest no-we’re-totally-not-doing-it kind of way.

And Mugabe is not actually declaring war. This is a goodness.

But the most ultimate goodness of all is: I am reading the Naked God by Peter F. Hamilton. The last book in the series, and even though I have been warned that it’s one of the most blatant deus ex machina in human history, I am still adoring it.

Herewith my wishes:

• Something really horrible happens to Quinn Dexter. And I do mean horrible.
• Louise is okay.
• We see Fletcher again.
• Something really, really horrible happens to Quinn Dexter.

Big Read Book Meme

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (actually just finished it yesterday!)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (just book 1)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (Read the library copy so many times that when I left primary school the librarian gave it to me.)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (Depressing Russians…but when I read it, I had never heard of the concept of not finishing a book. Didn’t understand a whole hell of a lot of what was going on, remember even less. Basically the only thing I remember was the feeling of weary triumphant relief when I finally finished the last page.)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (Best book ever!)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (kids’ editions count, right?)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Fun!

Heart of Darkness sucked eggs though. IMHO

Quentin Tarantino has more issues than the Daily Planet

Seriously. Watch Death Proof and you’ll see why. He’s a genius, of course, but he’s also more than a little mental, seems to me. He has this skill with that moment where you realize something really horrendous is going to happen to a character, but they don’t. And he draws this moment out for ages, while you’re sitting on the edge of your seat screaming at the screen like a demented person, hoping that by some miracle they’ll actually listen to you for once.
Alas, they never do.

In other news, I am reading The Neutronium Alchemist by Peter F. Hamilton. As brilliant, if not more so, than the one before. Al Capone takes over the world, for crying out loud!
This book is the source of much joy, and also many panicky phone calls to my brother along the lines of ‘this and this and this just happened and please you have to tell me if Character X is going to be okay!’
But also, the book sucks rotten eggs. Because I am almost finished with it, and I won’t be able to get the next one for three weeks! muttermuttersulkfret.

In other other news, I have decided that reading too much grown-up Heinlein and too many bodice-rippers when I was young has permanently warped my mind and left me with the morals of an alley-cat. Haven’t decided whether I care or not.

Inspiration strikes like a thermonuclear warhead!

I have had a brainstorm. That’s like a brainfart, but it makes actual sense.
See, lately, as you might have noticed, I have been having some trouble writing. And now, I have finally figured out why that is.
You see, when I started my Monster Book of Doom, I had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen. But in the process of actually writing it, the whole feel of the stoyr has changed. I’ve gone back so many times and rewritten things that I no longer know what the central plot actually is. Hence, writer’s block.

So, to cure this most horrible of diseases, I have hit upon this: I am writing a detailed – and I do mean detailed – plot summary. Chapter-by-chapter he-did-she-did-this-happened and why. It’s like an old legend – he went there and did this and this is why, and so this happened.
As I’m writing – I’m only at Chapter 2 – I can actually feel the plot crystallizing in my mind, becoming if not set in stone, at least set in wax. It might melt and re-form later, but at least I don’t feel like I have a Hydra by the tail anymore.

I’ve never been an outliner, you see. My previous stories (all part of a monster of a saga involving much drama, many beautiful people and a practically infinite number of things happening for no apparent reason) were all very organic. They happened, more than they got written. But while a seven-thousand page multi-fandom fic involving Captain Picard, the Zerg (Starcraft), Spock, the Elves (Tolkien’s version), Gandalf, Data, sentient spaceships, vampires, people from another dimension, gods, demons, evil gods, suicidal immortals revered as gods, drugs and the sexual morals of someone who’s read way, way too many bodice-ripper romances, was great fun to write, not to mention a great way to spend the years between nine and nineteen, it didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

But this one has a plot, and I happen to think it’s a pretty damn good one. I just have to figure out what parts to include, since some of the things I’ve done either don’t fit the plot, or actually contradict pretty much everything else.
So, my Writing To-Do-List runs as so:

* Figure out plot.
* Decide whether antag is good or Evil (very important)
* Finish Plot Summary of Doom
* Rewrite Parts that don’t work while preserving parts that do.
* Edit Book
* Query Agent
* Get Published.
* Die happy

*dances around the office happily*

I am no longer flailing about! Well, I am flailing about, but now I’m flailing about with a plan!

Age-Banding books and why it’s a bad idea.

I was seven when I started reading in my second language (that would be English). Within six months I had graduated from Heidi to the ancient Greeks. My parents didn’t have many children’s books, so I read what we had – which was a lot of books. My love of reading came from being allowed to read what I wanted, when I wanted, and being praised for it. (yes, I’m a praisewhore)

Alright, some of the books I found might have been inappropriate – but putting age-bands on books isn’t going to stop that.

My brother started reading for pleasure when he was seventeen – because the girl he liked was a reader. She’s his wife now. The first book she gave him to read was Only You Can Save Mankind, by Terry Pratchett. It’s a children’s book. Imagine his reaction if it had had a big band on it saying ‘11+’ or something similar. He’d never have read it!

I believe a lot of people have already said that putting age-bands on books will discourage children who are just beginning to read – couldn’t agree more!

A book is not written for a certain age, it’s written for a certain mind. My grandmother and I both adore Harry Potter. A lot of grown-ups like Harry Potter. A lot of children like it too. How are you going to age-band it?

Are Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets going to be 6+? And then you’d have to make Prisoner of Azkaban a 9+, of course. What about the later books, which become steadily darker? Deathly Hallows should be at least 13+ then.
But what about Yiorgos, who read the entire series in his tenth year? He’d never have started it, because the first two would be for ‘babies’ and the last lot would be for kids older than him.
Or are they going to band the entire series at one age?

The idea of agebanding is not only ridiculous, but counterproductive.

Go to http://www.notoagebanding.org/ to read what other people think.