Side Jobs (a book review post)

This is Dresden book 12.5. At least, that's usually how it's listed. It falls in between Changes (book 12) and Ghost Story (book 13), but, as suggested by the ".5" designation, it is not a novel. It is, in fact, a collection of short stories that fall within the series as a whole with only the final story falling in between books 12 and 13.

This book is a good reason why I don't generally tend to care for short stories and why I don't generally care to like first person very much.

So let's have a writing lesson (yeah, I know it's a book review, but I can't talk about this issue without the writing lesson):

First person is seductive, especially to the beginning writer. It's easy and it feels natural. But, see, it's a trap. When you're writing in first person, the author isn't writing from his/her voice, s/he's writing from the character's voice. The problem, then, is that most authors can't differentiate between their own voice and their characters'. And, you know, that's fine as long as you only ever write the one character in first person. But that's not what usually happens, and it's not what happened here.

Butcher's been writing Dresden a long time. Dresden's voice is distinct. But, see, it's that seduction of the young writer to write in first person, and Dresden's voice is really Butcher's (which is why we get the occasional preachy episode in the Dresden books). It hadn't occurred to me nor would I have ever noticed if Butcher hadn't decided to write from some other characters' POVs in these short stories.

There's a story from the POV of Thomas and, other than that Thomas reminds us that it's him, the story reads just like it's from the POV of Harry. Sure, it's an interesting story with all of the Oblivion War stuff in it, but Butcher should have switched to third person so that it didn't feel like Harry talking.

And there's a story from the POV of Murphy which is only differentiated by the fact that she spends a lot of time talking about Harry and that there are sections describing her hand-to-hand fighting. However, those sections have the exact same feel as Harry describing how he uses magic, essentially making it the same voice. The only other thing is the reference to men speaking Martian, but it's not enough to set the piece apart from all of the Dresden pieces.

A first person character voice should be as distinctive as listening to someone speak in person. Butcher doesn't pull that off, which was more than a little disappointing.

Then, there is the issue that the stories are of vastly variable quality with only a few feeling like they actually added anything to the Dresden world. And when the heck did Georgia become Butcher's Lois Lane? Really, we had to have two different stories about her getting kidnapped? I get that Will and Georgia are the only characters that Butcher has allowed to have any kind of long term relationship and they have to be the default for that kind of story, but, sheesh, damsel in distress much?

All of that said, if you're a fan of The Dresden Files, you'll want to read the book. "Day Off" and "The Warrior" were both very good and, actually, so is "Something Borrowed" (despite the Georgia kidnapping). And, then, "Aftermath" is almost essential reading. Almost. You could get by without it, but it's worth the read to fill in some space between books 12 and 13. And, of course, you get rescue Georgia again.

In Short Supply (a book review post)

You can see my review of part one of A Shot in the Light here.
There will be some slight spoilery-ness since this is a review of part two, but it's not going to be significant spoilery-ness. In other words, I don't think it's going to hurt anything for you to know any of what I might say in this review.
Also, I have no idea what the cover of this part has to do with this part of the story. As far as I can tell, there is no relevance. Unless I've forgotten something, but I don't think I have. Maybe I just don't understand what the picture is.

Okay, so we find out pretty much right away that there is some kind of conspiracy going on. That there is a conspiracy both helps the story and hurts it. Well, at this point, it hurts it, because it raises the "How the heck do you contrive a conspiracy to spread a deadly flu around and expect that work out?" question. Maybe, down the line, there will be an answer to that, but everything so far undermines the story's plausibility. Still, there are eight parts to go, and people do do incredibly stupid things, so I'm willing to go with that. For the moment. That there is a conspiracy helps in that it makes sense out of a few things from "A Flock of Ill Omens."

However, there is an issue from part one that carries over into this one, and it's something I have to talk about, especially in light of the current Ebola crisis. One of the things that is so far pushing the plot of A Shot in the Light (and, granted, this is only part two) is the lack of information to people. This bothered me in part one, but it's even worse in part two. There are repeated statements in the book about how there is no news getting out about how bad the flu epidemic is and how many people are dying from it (and even just in part two it's a considerable amount). The central characters (two of which are reporters) are having to do all of the research themselves. One of them even says something to the effect of how no one else in the world but her has the information that she has.

The problem, though, is that these characters in the book do almost all of their research online. Yeah, I said they are using the Internet to find all this stuff out, but the presentation is as if these people are the only ones with the skills to do this, so no one else knows what's really going on, and no one is reporting on this stuff. That includes the reporters, by the way. People are in the dark except for how things are immediately affecting them.

I just can't buy into this idea at all. It seems to me to go beyond just implausible to downright impossible. I mean, personally, I get all of my news online. All of it. Because that's what happens when you don't have TV. Okay, actually, I get some very minor parts from the radio when I'm in the car, but I don't spend a huge amount of time driving, so it is just a small portion and usually along the lines of getting the headlines, which I later read about online if I hadn't already seen it. I am not at all unique in getting the vastness of my news from the Internet, so the idea that the populace of the United States is ignorant of the extent of this flu virus in the book because there is no news of it is beyond what I can buy into. And, heck, with what we've seen of the coverage of Ebola in the US, it just heightens to me what a weak plot ploy this is.

Okay, yes, there's a conspiracy. But no conspiracy is enough to stop all the free roaming people of the Internet to talk about things. People would know what's going on.

Also, I continue to be bothered by how all of the characters have the same mannerisms. Although there are many point-of-view characters, it's like reading from the POV of the same character all the time. Even the military guy acts just like all of the women. Everything is all business all the time in the same crisp, efficient pattern. And that more than one character has thoughts of how everything is like being a spy just heightens that none of the characters have distinctive personalities.

The writing is fast paced, though, and, because of the Ebola issue, I'm interested to see where the author takes it, so I plan to keep reading. I'll read at least through part four and see how I feel at that point.

Lawhead's Skin Map

One of the authors I mention on my Of significance... page is Stephen Lawhead. He's long been one of my favorite authors and has some wonderful books. I got my introduction to Lawhead through his Pendragon Cycle which I read because I was interested in the Arthurian content. Prior to reading Lawhead, my exposure to the Arthurian legend had been things like Excalibur which, although full of knights in shining armor and all of that, were not very historically accurate. However, The Pendragon Cycle, although a work of fantasy, was being presented as historical fiction, and I wanted to see what it was about. The original Pendragon Trilogy remain my favorite Arthurian books to date (Jack Whyte's series comes close, though).

If you are at all interested in the Arthurian mythos, I would highly suggest Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur, the original trilogy. Lawhead did go back later and add in a few more books. I don't remember liking Pendragon (the 4th book) very much, and I can't remember how I felt about Grail, so, maybe, I need to go back and read that again. The 6th book, Avalon, is not technically part of the series. It takes place in the near future and is about the return of Arthur and was quite good. Darn... now I'm wanting to go back and re-read all of them.

Lawhead is not always a great author. Some of his works are tremendous, but some are... less than good. The works that are great, though, are really, really great and make him an author I follow. My favorite book by him is Byzantium, also a work of historical fiction. More recently, he wrote a trilogy about Robin Hood. Prior to Star Wars, Robin Hood was my childhood hero. The first two books of that series, Hood and Scarlet, are great, although I felt he dropped the ball a bit on the final book, Tuck. It's probably a good book, but Hood and Scarlet are great, so I was let down when I got to Tuck.

All of that to say that I was very excited to hear about his Bright Empires series, especially since the title of the first book is so good: The Skin Map. What a great title! [And the next book, The Bone House, also has a great title.]  However, The Skin Map is somewhat of a departure from his usual style of writing. Lawhead generally sticks to just one POV at a time, even in books where more than one POV is used. Often, he will divide a book into sections so that each section is done from a different POV. Probably his most effective style is when he uses a narrator from within the story to tell the story about a different character. It's kind of a 1st/3rd person blend with a singular POV and most of his best books have been written in this style. [Now, I'm trying to think of other novels written this way, and I'm completely drawing a blank. Well, other than the Sherlock Holmes stories which are narrated by Watson.] The Skin Map, though, has five separate POVs (that I can remember off the top of my head) that he bounces between with no discernible pattern. I found this, from him, distinctly less effective than his style in his other novels.

I also didn't particularly care for his main character, although I am somewhat hesitant to call Kit the main character; he was, nevertheless, the central character around whom the story revolved, which may have been my issue with all the different POVs. We just spent too much time away from Kit for me to become invested in him. Since it seems apparent that Kit is the main character (based on the ending), it would have been nice to have more from him. Of course, like I said, I didn't much care for him. At the beginning of the book, he is a character to whom things happen only. He has no initiative, no ambition, no opinions. My response to him was, repeatedly, "Oh! My! Gosh!" There was an inkling of a change in him by the end of the book, but I'll have to reserve judgement until I read The Bone House.

So, yes, it was good enough that I want to read the next one, although I can not deny that part of that is on the strength of the author, not the book itself. It's hard to say whether I would want to read the next book if I didn't like Lawhead so much. The end of the book does open up a bit more, so to speak, but the first 2/3 were a real struggle to get through. A greater mystery is revealed towards the end, and there are some rather unexpected twists, so that may have been enough to make me want to go on even if it wasn't Lawhead. Since it is Lawhead, I'll be looking to get the next book soon.

At the moment, I'd give The Skin Map a "C," mostly because I struggled with it so much. It just seemed pretty typical. However, given that it's part of a series, my opinion on that may change as I read the next books. If, in retrospect, I can see that this was a great set up for what's going to happen, my opinion may change.

Note:
I ended the freebie special on "Part One: The Tunnel" (see the Shadow Spinner tab up top) a bit early. The first two days, it had brisk downloads, and it peaked at #26 on Amazon's contemporary fantasy list, which, I think is pretty good. However, the third day, the downloads dwindled, so I'm guessing that everyone that's going to download it, right now, has pretty much done so. I'll save the other two free days for a later date. Thank you to all of you that downloaded it! I hope you enjoy it.
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table" will be available Monday, August 13.

Create Your Audience

As is so often the case with me, I was thinking of something that lead me into thinking about something else entirely and making a connection between the two. Just follow along, and it will all become clear. I hope.

We are all, probably, (somewhat) familiar with the story of how Apple got its start and how no one believed that there would be any interest in the consumer market for the personal computer. We've all learned about how HP and who knows who all else turned down Wozniak and Jobs and how wrong they were for doing so. Short-sighted. Closed minded. Whatever you want to call it. All these guys said, "there's no market for that," and we've derided them for it ever since. I mean, I learned about this as early as 6th grade and continued to have it drilled into my head for the next 12 years, give-or-take, of schooling after that. All the way through my (required) college computer class. Those business guys were just stupid to not see the potential that Wozniak and Jobs were trying to introduce. This has become, in many ways, part of our cultural mythology.

The thing is, though (and here is where my thinking sort of went off track), those guys were not wrong. Yes, I said that. The HP corporate types and all those suits that said "no" were not wrong. There was no market for the home computer. To put it in other terms, the home computer didn't have an audience. Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak) created that audience.

And it's kind of amazing when you think about it. I use my computer all the time. It's a tool and a toy, and I can't really imagine trying to get by without it (even if it was nice to be away from it while on vacation (although, in that case, it was that it was nice to be away from the Internet more than the computer itself)). But, looking back, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would have wanted to own a personal computer way back in 1980. They didn't do anything. And, yet, we were enamored of them.

I had one friend who had one (not "one" as in a particular friend, like "I had this one friend," but "one" as in I only knew one person that actually had one), an Apple IIe (I think; It could have been a II+). His parents were doctors, not just regular doctors but some kind of specialized research doctors, and he's the smartest guy I've ever known. Smarter than me (if only by a few points (of course, a few IQ points are huge)). He was in his head all the time and had almost no social skills. I was the only person that could really relate to him when we were in 4th grade (before we got moved away to the school for smart kids), so I was the one that got to go over to his house and "play on the computer." He didn't have any other friends. There was no Windows, only a DOS prompt. There was some game that we played with this little guy that ran around and dug holes and climbed ladders. When we got to 6th grade and had our first computer class (remember, smart kid school; this was the only elementary school computer class in all of Shreveport, possibly in all of Louisiana), I'd go over to his house to test my BASIC program assignments. That's not an adjective, by the way, it's a computer language that I would bet most millennials have never even heard of. We got to write programs that did things like allow us to use the computer as a simple calculator. You know, because, if you didn't write a program for it, you could not use the computer for that!

Do you understand what I'm saying? When the first personal home computers came out, they did... NOTHING! I can't, now, figure out why anyone would have wanted one. And I have no idea what my friend's parents did with theirs. Of course, they were both research scientists, so I'm sure they had uses for it; I just can't imagine them. So, when those corporate suit guys said, "there's no market for that," they weren't wrong. And, yet, they were.

Because Steve Jobs went out and created a market. An audience. And, now, we can't imagine living without the things. Even though your smart phone can do oh so much more than the first personal computers ever dreamed of doing. I'm talking about your phone, here!

Likewise, there was a time when science fiction, as a genre, didn't exist. Imagine if it still didn't and Jules Verne was only just now writing his odd stories about travelling to the moon and into the center of the earth and in the depths of  the seas. Publishers would say "there's no audience for that" and they would be right. Verne, along with Wells not too much later, would create the audience.

And, although fantasy did already exist before Tolkien, Tolkien created the fantasy genre as we know it today. He was told, with both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there is no audience for this. Why? Because there wasn't. It's rather difficult for there to be an audience for something that does not yet exist. Tolkien created his audience.

But, as I said way back up there at the beginning, I was thinking about one thing that lead into a supposedly unrelated thing. That other thing is a conversation in this writing group on Facebook:

An author posed the question of whether it's a "bad idea" to switch from 1st person POV to 3rd person POV in the middle of a story. Of course, I didn't want to just say, "hey, I've done that, so I think it's fine," so I responded from a more neutral stance of asking why the author wanted to do it. Not that I wanted to know but that the author needed to know. Basically, there should be a reason for it beyond just the desire to switch POVs. Later, I said that the author needs to tell the story that she needs to tell it in the way that she needs to tell it (that's what I believe about any story (tell your story)).

What surprised me, though, is the number of people that responded that it is a bad idea and that the reason that it is a bad idea really boiled to "there is no audience for it." Basically, "it's not done that way" meaning  that it's not done that way because no one would be interested in that, just like no one would be interested in owning a home computer. Or science fiction. Or fantasy epics.

What gets me here is the lack of willingness, often, in the writing community to try anything new. To go to new places. People look around and say way to often "it's not done that way" meaning "you shouldn't do that." But the rest of the world doesn't really work that way. The rest of the world spends its time looking for the new big thing while the writing world spends its time only looking for only the next big thing. I think this is at the heart of the troubles in the publishing world. When e-books became a thing, a new thing, the publishing world screamed "it's not done that way!" and "there's no audience for that!" Clearly, they were wrong.

But that's beside the point...

The point is that you should never let someone tell you "there's no audience for that" for a thing that has never been tried. Or something  that has rarely been tried. I mean, if there's an audience for deep fried pickles, and there is, there's bound to be an audience for anything. And everything. The response, always, to "it's not done that way" should always be "yet." "It's not done that way... yet." So, you know, big deal if there's no audience for what it is you want to do. Go out and make your audience. Create it. Build it.

The thing is is that Wozniak did not build that first computer because he was trying to build something for public consumption; he built it because he was interested in it. He knew that he wanted to have something like that for himself. He didn't really know how many other people would be interested, but he knew he was. Jules Verne didn't start writing his science fiction stories because he looked around and decided that he needed to create a new genre of literature; he wrote the kind of story he wanted to read. The same was true of Tolkien. He wrote, created, what he wanted, what he felt a need for.

The lesson, then, is this for you writers out there: write what you want. Unless you are completely, uniquely idiosyncratic, it's more than likely that there are other people out there that want the same thing you want. So, if you want to switch from 1st person to 3rd and back or... whatever, if it's what you want for your story, do it. Then go create your audience.