Scriniary

So Monday night I watched the premeire of Heroes. It was fun, and I’ll keep watching it in hopes that it will be good. Hardly anything new for SF, but that’s not why I watch tv.

Two things about the show struck me:

It’s about a group of people who discover they have special powers, like regeneration or teleportation or flying. There’s eight or so of them, and though they’re about half white and afaik straight, they’re a more diverse group than on most tv I’ve seen. So four are women and four are men, right? Half and half? No, of course not. Two are women. Both women are caucasian, and blonde. One is a high school cheerleader. The other earns a living by stripping for a web cam.

Yeah. That almost makes me not want to watch any more.

There’s another major female character, who is not white and whose dress leads me to think she might have a respectable job, but she doesn’t seem to be one of the people with special powers. She’s connected to the group through men: her boyfriend is one of the special people, and another (male) special person might be interested in her. Sigh.

The other thing, which is amusing rather than annoying, is NBC’s grass-roots style marketing and the growing fan stuff. As I pay basically no attention to television, I didn’t know they’d showed an early version of the pilot at ComicCon this summer, and made it available for download on iTunes. So some people had already seen it months before it aired. NBC even started the official fan site ages ago, apparently. One of the characters has a blog, and the show’s creator did a live blog after the pilot aired, and there’s an online graphic novel that covers an event left out of the pilot. It’s amazing what networks feel they have to do to get an audience with so much competition from elsewhere.

What really cracked me up was that people have already started making LJ icons and communities for shippers and even writing fan fiction about the show. I fail to see how anyone could write fan fiction about a show that’s only aired one episode. I guess I see two reasons for writing/reading fan fiction – either the show’s writers got something “wrong” and the fan wants to fix it, or the fan wants to explore something that the show skipped over or left unexplained. Starting all that before the pilot’s even aired seems a wee bit early to me. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong…

(Clearly, however, I should take up writing fanfic and turn half the men into women, and the cheerleader into chess club president.)

Filed by scriniary at 6:00 pm under Television
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How Megan Lindholm became a writer. And why I need a cat.

Filed by scriniary at 5:40 pm under Writing
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Very much enjoyed Devlin’s Luck by Patricia Bray ().

Like many fantasy novels, this one follows a somewhat reluctant normal guy who is chosen by the gods to save the kingdom. What’s unusual is that Devlin, a former farmer and metalsmith, sought the post as a way of commiting suicide out of guilt over his families’ deaths. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for the kingdom), he keeps managing to survive.

The plot was a little too simple for my taste, with an unknown enemy who is too easy to guess (although it seemed reasonable for the characters not to figure it out, as they didn’t know they were in a novel). Whenever a new character appears, it’s pretty obvious whether they are going to be good or bad based on what the plot needs. Despite that, it wasn’t ever boring or slow, and it wasn’t quite clear how it all tied together. There are still some questions (and two sequels).

For the most part, the characters themselves are well-done, and didn’t fall too badly into fantasy cliches. (Exceptions being the king and the Duke, who were weak-willed and arrogant, respectively, and without particular reason.) Even Devlin’s depression seems reasonable and is not annoying.

The prose is at times a little lengthy for the content, reemphasizing what was already clear, and the beginning seemed a bit slow, but it picked up fairly quickly.

It’s the first of a trilogy, and I plan to pick up the other two, as well as her latest. Nice thing about being years behind in my reading is that by the time I start a trilogy, all the books are out.

This book belongs to my favorite subgenre of fantasy [1], and the one which I’ve been reading the least of lately, so reading it was like coming home after a long vacation – happy to have seen new sights, but glad to return to my own bed.

[1] Dunno how it’s defined. Pick some amalgam of epic, heroic, and sword & sorcery without lots of action.

Filed by scriniary at 7:13 am under Books
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Roasted Chicken with Dried Plums and Shallots, Cooking Light, Sept. 2006.

Mmmmmmmm. I’ll be making this again.

It has prunes. And fennel. And shallots. Mmmmmmmm. I *love* fennel.

It calls for four chicken breasts; I had two packages of three, so the two extras got turned into cooked chicken + broth (needed some broth for tonight anyway). Need the cooked chicken for Wednesday’s dinner (stay tuned…).

Supposed to have brussels sprouts on the side; one of us refuses to eat them, so we had broccoli instead.

Aside 1: If they give away the recipes on their website, why do I subscribe?

Aside 2: One of my projects for my oodles of free time (ha) is to put together a web-based recipe database, so I can, say, look in the fridge and notice I have chicken and fennel and then do a search for recipes that include those ingredients. Also, so I can find recipes I like and make them again. It’s hard to track multiple cookbooks + magazines + clippings + printouts.

Filed by scriniary at 5:54 am under Food
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[Amazon link]

For the most part I enjoyed the book. Kitty, a werewolf, accidentally starts a call-in radio advice show for werewolves and vampires, which kicks off some pack politics. Vaughn did a nice job at making the werewolf part of Kitty seem understandable and alien, but none of the other characters seemed more than quickly sketched, and the plot was at times too convenient and not high-stakes enough to really interest me. The radio show, however, was delightful.

This was a freebie at some con last year; otherwise I’d have been unlikely to pick it up, as I’ve never been a werewolf fan.

Filed by scriniary at 12:07 am under Books
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•The New York Times reviews companies that sell term papers.

EDIT: Sorry, this turned pay-to-read between the time I read it and the time I posted it. A quick summary – most papers aren’t worth the money.

• Via sartorias, I’ve been listening to Pandora Internet Radio, which I first heard about when I was still on dial-up. I’m sure Columbus has a decent radio station or two, but I haven’t found one yet.

•NYTimes Asst. Mangaging Ed. Richard Berke answers reader questions in the Talk to the Newsroom column.

My faves:

Q. Why do stories written by reporters need editing? … A. Many reporters here would say, Amen!…

Q. Can you please tell me how to search for articles in the papers when it [is] sent to you like this? All morning I’ve been trying to locate the articles from the Post still nothing happen. This is a part of [an] assignment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001158.html –Sharon Holquin A. I’m all for helping students with their homework. But here’s a lesson for you: Don’t ask an editor from The New York Times to lend a hand so you can access the Washington Post Web site. I’m not asking that you only read the Times. By all means, read as much as you can. But since you’re already here, why not take a look at a few of our articles? I mean, you’re already on our site and everything.

•“Rewriting the Rules of Fiction” – Wall Street Journal article on fan fiction. (Haven’t had time to actually read this yet.)

Filed by scriniary at 7:47 pm under Uncategorized
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Merrie Haskell lists podcasts on writing.

Elizabeth Bear on when to start submitting a novel. That’s when it’s as good as you can make it, not when it’s perfect. Same thing Pat Wrede has said on rasfc.

Filed by scriniary at 3:37 pm under Writing
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My review of Ann Hood’s Creating Character Emotions is up in the Sept./Oct. issue of Vision.

Filed by scriniary at 9:01 pm under Writing
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Jennifer Jackson () on success. Kristin Nelson gets in on the posting query summaries on a blog thing, taking the idea from (Rachel Vater), and commenters are not impressed. My quibble with this action (not K.N.’s specifically) isn’t with posting summaries of rejected queries, it’s with doing so before sending the rejection letter to the author. Even with a vague summary that doesn’t identify the book, it just doesn’t seem right for the whole internet to know about a rejection before the author does.

Filed by scriniary at 8:24 pm under Writing
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