What I've Been Reading - W/E 12 APR 2019

[megpie71]

Have another five from my reading list for this week.

First up, I've finished re-reading "Making Money", and moved on to "Feet of Clay. Since this one doesn't have chapters, I'm reading it out loud to myself, and stopping when I get through a couple of scenes. It's about five pages a night, or thereabouts.

Next, for uni, I've been required to read Lovecraft, for the first time. "The Call of Cthulhu" and "A Shadow Over Innsmouth". Which means I've now seen the origins of a great amount of the strangeness of the internet, and possibly due to being desensitised by long exposure to the internet itself, I haven't turned into a gibbering wreck. I do see where Bob Howard gets his comments about Lovecraft's purple prose from, though. All the shades, from aubergine through heliotrope to palest, palest lilac. Plus lots of focus on the "uncanny", as well as a lot of the racism and xenophobia for which Lovecraft is rather infamous. Seriously, if the guy hadn't been so absolutely and pathologically terrified of the idea of anyone who wasn't a white male upper-middle-class American from the North-Eastern US states having any access to anything by way of knowledge or power which he didn't have, he might have been a reasonable bloke to know. As it is, reading his stuff reminds me of a lot of reading memes from the alt-right bits of the internet - same sense of gibbering terror at the very notion of difference.

If H P Lovecraft were alive and writing today, he'd be a virulent blogger for the far right. If we were very lucky, he'd have been one of the Rabid Puppies and would currently be involved in a virulent argument with Vox Day about who was more hardcore and genuine, and therefore performing a service to mankind by keeping the two of them focussed on each other and out of everyone else's hair. I can admire the craft of his writing, while disliking a lot of the content.

I also had a look at one of the Hugo-nominated short-stories, mainly because it's a T Kingfisher story I hadn't seen before: The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society. Like many of her stories, it takes a fairytale trope, and turns it on its head, in a rather humourous way. I think if I ever wind up with money, I'm going to see about buying as much of her stuff as I can lay hands on (or get delivered to Australia).

So, final item, and it's basically an author/series recommendation more than anything else. I got interested in TwilightKnight17's Hours-Verse series, which is a fusion largely of Persona 3, Persona 4 and Persona 5, where the central premise is that the end of Persona 3 changes in a particular fashion that I'm not going to share, because Spoilers. It's up to 13 parts so far, one of which is currently a work in progress, and I'd definitely recommend it if you're a fan of any of the Persona games, because even the original Persona and Persona 2 get a look in. Also look at any of their other stuff - they're well worth the read, I'm finding. Good characterisation, none of the more annoying fan-writer quirks (such as describing characters solely by epithets[1]) that can sometimes get in the way of enjoying a story, and they're very good at plotting and pacing.

So that's what I've been reading (along with a lot of Persona 5 fanfic). What's on everyone else's reading list?


[1] What is it with that one? Do neurotypical people generally think of their friends as 'the tall one', 'the short one', 'the one with blonde hair' and so on? Why not just use their names?

Comments

[kalloway]

I am fairly sure the use of epithets, as well as avoiding 'said', is something baked into the US educational system's curriculum. We're basically told again and again to vary word choice and the logical conclusion is that everyone must constantly emote and only be described by minor features. "Bob said" is anathema and grades will be lowered.

And because it's so enforced and encouraged, a lot of that nonsense makes it to fanfic and even writers who weren't brainwashed into believing it's a proper way to write can start mimicking it without meaning to.

I still pull piles of epithets from my own old stuff when I do final 'shove on AO3' edits. I can't believe my beta at the time let me keep them in, but she might've realized it wasn't worth the effort just yet.

[megpie71]

Yeah, I can see that one. We get similar things in the Australian educational system (or at least, I remember running into them when I was first heading through primary school, in grades 3 through about 6... stopped after that, I think. Or I wasn't present for the appropriate lessons - I was doing extension classes by then). But seriously, the cure for this is reading more widely - it doesn't seem to make it into formally published work (yet).

I don't know how I un-learned it myself - I think it was a combination of being advanced for my classes, and also recognising my own brain seemed to skip over things like "said" and character names without really noting them as important, while descriptive language was stuff which my brain marked as "pay attention". So if all you need the reader to note is that a certain character is speaking (you don't need them to be paying attention to the character's tone, or giving an introduction to the character or anything like that) "Bob said" works just fine to convey that information.

[kalloway]

I would have liked to have any sort of creative writing that young! I'm very jealous. I had to take a specific elective my senior year of high school and that still didn't teach much, and what it did teach was fairly junk (bemoaned the short plump over-educated gamer.) I was in a grad-level class my senior year of Uni when the instructor just took a day to refresh us all on basic punctuation and shit we were all just getting wrong because no, we'd never learned most of it, not even in our 100-200 classes.

Though by that point I was reading a lot of fanfic and having the worst of all worlds reinforced. *laughs* Reading too widely was out before that point; far too busy having to shove in school and work.

And sometime it's just padding for word count, too.

[ariaflame]

I don't know how neurotypical I am, but occasionally for no reason I can work out I can't at a particular moment in time remember someone's name. Even someone I know well. But I don't think that's the reason for it in fanfic.

[megpie71]

That's normal name-linked aphasia, and it's more of a verbal processing thing, at least in my experience - writing uses a different section of the brain, and doesn't tend to have the same sort of thing happening.

What I'm talking about is using things like "the blond man", "the brunet", "the curly-haired youth" or similar instead of a character's name. Okay once or twice per story, not so great once or twice per paragraph, and particularly not so great when you're referring to the black-haired human protagonist of a game as "the raven" on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis throughout a long story. That last one particularly annoys me because I keep thinking of the bird, and therefore getting this mental image of our Australian ravens, which are sort of the avian equivalent of the Oh God of Hangovers.

[ariaflame]

A little isn't bad, in case the person reading isn't familiar enough with the property to know what they look like. But yeah, continually doing it instead of their name would be annoying.

[archangelbeth]

1: It's supposed to keep the repetition of names from driving the reader mad (and/or make the author look at the name and go, "...this collection of letters no longer makes sense to me, because I have typed it too often"), and sneak in/reinforce description (description is TERRIBLE).

I think both of those are mentioned in some Writing Advice things that go around, and... well.

(T.Kingfisher ebooks should be available in Australia, and the Kindle versions look mostly reasonably priced? Maybe? I'm not sure what the conversion goes down to.)
(I personally went "eff it" and just adjusted the .au numbers on Kindle to match the US prices, conversions be damned.)

[megpie71]

I'd argue with you on "description is terrible" - pointless description is terrible, because it's unnecessary and should have been edited out. Necessary description isn't terrible. The big problem is a lot of people haven't figured out which bits of the description they're throwing into things is necessary and which bits aren't.

(One thing this is teaching me is I have a much longer rant waiting on this subject, which I think I shall write out and publish separately).

[archangelbeth]

No, no, you misunderstand. From my authorial perspective, description is TERRIBLE, because figuring out how to get it in without being EITHER a flow-stopping infodump OR being "snuck in" too incrementally to actually describe anything... IS TERRIBLE!

I hate description. Why cannot characters just do interesting things and say witty stuff while wandering around like blank slates, on a barren stage with the occasional necessary prop? *sobs pathetically* But nooooo, readers seem to want to actually know what the scenery looks like. *sulks*