Reading, Writing, No Arithmetic

Once upon a time, there was a girl that read romance novels like chocoholics eat Godiva’s. She read and read and read, sometimes devouring 2-3 books in a day. Off and on, she’d get stuck in a rut and read nothing but Regency romances (both traditional and full of teh sexxin’z). One day, she picked up some books from work on a whim, and one of them happened to be Teresa Medeiros’s A Kiss to Remember. Our heroine sat down and read it around work time, sleep time, and such, only to remember that she already had a copy of it somewhere and was less than enraptured with it both times that she had consumed said guilty pleasure.

To put it bluntly: you can tell that A Kiss to Remember was written on a deadline. It has no heart, no soul, no real wit. The most engaging character is the murderous little Lottie, who would be awesome if she didn’t suddenly go on the straight and narrow. Hell, to be honest, I was more interested in why Lottie was so obsessed with murder, poison, etc., than I was whether or not the Duke and Duchess of Devonbrooke got their jollies or their damnable heir(s).

All of this is quite sad to me because I love Teresa Medeiros’s writing style and infusion of wit in her books. This one, however, is a party I just can’t get behind. It’s too much like everything else, absent the brilliant originality I usually associate with her work.

Someone pass the Alka-Seltzer, please?

She lives!

Lately, I’ve been sinking my teeth into books by A. Lee Martinez and Nora Roberts. (One of my co-workers gave me a bag full of Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel, and even though they aren’t exactly to my taste, it’s not like I have endless money to throw around on securing new books.) Monster and Gil’s All-Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez get two very enthusiastic thumbs up from me. I’m also dying for the release of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and since last we met, I’ve devoured the remaining couple of Jacqueline Carey’s books that I hadn’t managed to finish. I love her to pieces and I totally don’t mind doing anything to support her writing more books.

On my own writing front, I’m approximately 26,000 words into the initial first draft of what I’m lovingly calling Four Bitches and a Funeral; a story of four sisters and how their relationship changes after their father dies. (Oh shut up. It’s not a total chick story.)

And now I must away to my “real life”.

Nobody puts baby in a corner. HAHA — yeah, right.

I’ve been uberbusy, but I’ve been reading and writing as the mood takes me. Two books highly recommended: Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Graham Smith. *huge thumbs up*

I’m working on a project that’s alternating between the titles “The 4 Bitches of the Apocalypse” and “Four Sisters and a Funeral”, but… it’s taking it’s sweet time.

And now I’m off to bed.

I’ve been sitting on this for a few days because it made me so irritated that I needed to fully mull out in my mind what exactly made me so angry. Now that I have done just that, I have to share it.

I follow a writer on my Twitter account, and she recently tweeted that she was going to stop writing/participating in online forums until she’s written something someone wants to read. My immediate response was, “You’re published. STFU and STFD.”

It took me a while to understand why I had that reaction.

An author doesn’t serve their audience, they serve the story. If they think that writing for a specific set of people is a guarantee that the story will be good, they’re sadly mistaken. An author’s wanting to please their audience =/= a perfect (or even a good) story. Trying to please other people is like trying to paddle upriver with a hockey stick; it isn’t going to happen.

Stephenie Meyer wrote the Twilight series as her own personal whatever. I’m not saying that they’re good or anything, but you can tell that she poured herself into them and that effort served the stories. If she had been writing them to cater to the fans, there would be a whole different level of crap in them. (Not saying that they aren’t crap anyway, but that’s my personal opinion and not necessarily relevent.)

If you think that writing begins and ends with the story, then moves directly on to someone buying the book and publishing it, that’s… totally not true. And kind of insane. It’s a lot of work to make everything work. I still haven’t gotten there. I may never get there. But if I do, I’m not going to forget that I serve the story.

The story = GOD.

And if I am so lucky as to get published in any way, I’m not going to get huffy and flouncy because “no one wants to read my stuff”. I don’t write for the elusive audience that may or may not exist; I write to get the damn story out of my head so I can sleep.

I don’t know how much of this makes sense. It’s been a long day.

So, okay, everyone knows I’m a Reader. I devour books and spit them back out. I own entirely too many books and I’m always collecting more because, let’s face it, READING IS GOOD.

That being said, there’s a break in my brain right now.

E-books and regular books.

I know that regular books kill forests and that kind of bugs me, but at the same time, I love the feeling of a book in my hands. I like knowing that I can just put a bookmark in when my hands/wrists fall asleep and it will still be there when I come back to it. I love the smell of the ink on the paper, the weight and substance of the book in my hands. It’s something I’ve become accustomed to and expect.

E-books, while more convenient being in the digital platform (no killing of trees for paper, no fading of ink due to the book sitting in the sun, and so on), just… don’t feel right. They’re more awkward for me, because I read so quickly, and sometimes, the down arrow on my computers can’t keep up. They also don’t have that comfort factor that I associate with physically substantive books (the smell, the physicality, etc.), and they’re just as expensive as going out, killing a few trees, and having a real book.

So I’m torn.

Can we leave it at ‘a book is a book is a book’?