Heartsick, by Chelsea Cain (thriller)

Oh, man. This is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. It opens with Archie Sheridan, a detective who's been chasing a serial killer for over ten years, being captured by that serial killer--who turns out to be a woman--and viciously tortured.

Then in the next chapter, we skip ahead two years. Archie has somehow survived his ordeal. But he's addicted to vicodin, and his wife and kids have left him. The serial killer, Gretchen Lowell, has been caught and is serving life in prison. Archie visits her weekly, for reasons we don't learn until later in the book.

The book's present-day storyline is about Archie pursuing another serial killer, but the real compelling question, the one that kept my eyes glued to the page, was WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ARCHIE?

When I read that his wife had left him, I immediately thought the worst of her. He's been through a terrible ordeal, and assuming he's not violent or dangerous (he's not), how can she abandon him to struggle through his recovery alone? But as I read further and learned more details, I realized she had very good reasons for leaving, and I sympathized. I even thought she'd done the right thing.

As for Archie's relationship with Gretchen, the woman who tortured him almost to death, it's tragic and sad and gut-twistingly disturbing.

The book isn't perfect, because the Archie and Gretchen backstory is so much more compelling than the main storyline about the new serial killer. But that backstory sure kept me reading, as did my desire to see Archie grow and recover from his extreme psychological damage.

The writing is top-notch. Let me give you an example, and the key point here is that this example is nothing special or exceptional within the novel. The whole book is like this. Archie is interviewing the teenage friend Maria of a girl who's been kidnapped by the new serial killer.

"'Have you found her?' [Maria] asked immediately.

"'Not yet,' Archie said kindly. Kids were often overlooked in police investigations. The thinking was that they made bad witnesses, but Archie had found that they noticed things that adults didn't. As long as they were interviewed appropriately, assured that they didn't have to know the answers, so they wouldn't make up what they thought the interviewer wanted to hear, kids as young as six could offer valuable observations. But Maria was fifteen. Teenage girls were unpredictable. Archie had never communicated well with them. He had spent most of his teen years attempting to start conversations with girls and flubbing miserably. He hadn't really gotten much better. 'Can we talk to you some more?' he asked Maria.

"She looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. Well, you've still got the magic touch, thought Archie."

The author is entertaining on every possible level. She's advancing the plot, she's giving me some interesting information about child witnesses, she's developing Archie's character, and she's even thrown in a funny line. These paragraphs are doing four things at once! No wonder I was never tempted to skim this novel.

I recommend this novel highly, but be careful--it's not for the squeamish. I felt dirty after reading this novel, not because of any sexual content (there was hardly any), but because it dealt with such cringe-inducing topics as the conflation of violence and intimacy, dependency and attachment, domination and love. And it never struck a false note; every word of it felt absolutely true. That's what's so damned disturbing about it. I was careful not to read this book within a hour of going to bed; I knew it would give me nightmares.

It's part of a series, and I plan to read on. But I'm going to need a palette cleanser first; too many books like this will put me in a funk. A nice Bujold or Brockmann book should do the trick.

Before:


After:

Last Monday, I shoved the vast majority of my belongings into a U-Haul and trucked down to Tanya's place. I moved into my brand new office. It was the warmest day of the week at about 0 but the ice wasn't going anywhere. So with small, sure steps, we moved my 17 tonnes of books (I'm sure the actual measure is something more) and several bookcases.

We did the entire move in two trips. Two very very exhausting trips. Next time I move, I'm calling in some people to help. Mainly because the next time I move, we're moving A LOT of furniture and 4 animals XD.

So, onto what you all want to see, the photos!

First of all, here is my house. It's effing cold out.



Next, Here is my room. Technically, it's my office but there's so much craft stuff invading, I'm not sure how long it will remain just an "office". As you can see, I'm already cluttering the desk. *headdesk*



And, and! The Globe chair! My $1250 seat of reading, writing, and thinking perfection (complete with Geogé):



Here, the bedroom. Tanya painted as per my specifications and I fine-painted the corners to ensure perfect separation of colour.



Oh, and here's the IKEA wardrobe-of-death that all my clothes are in.



Now, Tanya has been doing a lot of work on the house. Right now, she is hard at work on the bathroom. Here is the progress thus far:




Here are the vast majority of my to-be-read books that I have resolved to work on. Please note, all of my adult urban fantasy is on another shelf because there was too much to fit in one+ square:



And, finally, my wonderful girlfriend gave me roses on move-in night when we were both too exhausted to move more than an inch. Right now, they are reaching their final days but look all big and blossomy:



Alas, there are more places to take photos of but they are covered in tiling stuff, bathroom vanities, x-mas wine (Tanya got A LOT of wine various people at her work).

Gacked from jl_johnson, here's a Writer's Digest article on writing antiheroes.

I love writing antiheroes. I wrote one in my first novel (Finneas) and he was really fun.

Second, an article on subtext in fiction. This is about engaging the reader on a deeper level, such that he/she perceives things that aren't actually in the text. It's not talked about much, but I suspect subtext is often what makes me love rather than just like a novel. As the article explains, subtext is critical for character-based novels, less so for plot-driven novels.

I am 28,000 words into that Lucien novel, and trucking along at a rate of a thousand words per day. I expect to have the first draft finished by the end of March. I'm still nervous about the ending, but I've got half of it figured out now (the romance half). The action half I'm still struggling with, but that's the easy part now that I have the romance problem solved.

That antihero article made me think about my characters and whether they are heroes or antiheroes. In Finneas Trapp, Dalin was a hero and Finneas was an antihero. In "Soldier, Sage, and Vagabond," Janto and Rhianne were both heroes. There were no antiheroes in that book. Florian comes closest, but since he was acting to thwart to my heroes, he was technically a villain.

In my new book, classification gets tricker. Lucien straddles the line between a hero and an antihero. Vitala (the heroine) is in the middle as well, but probably closer to hero than antihero, because even though she's an assassin and she does things most people would consider evil, her motives are not selfish. She's trying to save her country and is willing to lay her life on the line to achieve that. Lucien's motives are more questionable and complex, but he's nowhere near as self-centered as Finneas. I think hero vs. antihero mostly comes down to motivation. If the character's motivations are unselfish, he's probably a hero. If they're selfish, he's an antihero.

Fun stuff. Fellow writers, what about you? Are your protagonists heroes or antiheroes?

28000 / 100000 words. 28% done!

In the year 2009 I read 101 books. Except I didn't finish 7 of them (because I found them too boring), so the real total for books I read in their entirety is 94.

7 were re-reads. 87 were books I was reading for the first time.

8 were books I read aloud to Sean. 86 were books I read on my own.

Books read on my own break down as follows:

31 nonfiction
55 fiction

Here's the fiction breakdown by genre:

11 SFF
16 YA (of which 10 could also be classified as SFF)
2 Historical
12 Romance (including paranormals)
6 Crime fiction
8 literary/other

( Complete list behind the cut (not including unfinished books) )

A week with no internet, no computer games, no writing, and very few responsibilities meant I got a ton of reading done. I brought 6 books with me to Texas, but within a few days I'd exhausted most of the stack, and went to a bookstore to buy 4 more. By the time I returned to Seattle, I'd read 9 of them and was halfway through the 10th. Here are capsule reviews of the 9:

Books that were totally awesome:

How to Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier. YA urban fantasy. This was a great book with very elaborate worldbuilding, including its own unique slang. It's about a girl named Charlie who doesn't like her personal fairy, a parking fairy which helps her always find the perfect parking spot. (She doesn't drive.) Meanwhile, she envies her best friend's clothes-shopping fairy and a classmate's all-boys-like-you fairy. She wants to ditch her fairy and get a new one. I saw a few things coming in this book. I figured the character Fiorenze was probably misunderstood, and that the all-boys-like-you fairy would have a serious downside, but that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book at all; instead I felt vindicated when I turned out to be right. Previously, I read another book by this author--Liar--and didn't like it because I felt the resolution was incomplete and unsatisfying. This book shows evidence of that problem as well. There were a few important questions I felt the author failed to answer (for example, whatever happened with Danders Anders?). But the main storyline was resolved, so I enjoyed this book. A lot.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Nonfiction. Wow. This is a book about word-of-mouth successes and how they happen. It's useful reading for writers, because word-of-mouth is how books become bestsellers, so it's good to understand how that works. But mostly this is one of those books that explains to you something about how the world works that you never quite understood before. Fascinating stuff.

The Dead and the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. YA science fiction. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, the sequel to Life As We Knew It (which I also read and enjoyed). Usually I hate post-apocalyptic novels because they're all about society breaking down and people shooting each other and stealing from each other and in some cases eating each other. I don't want to read about that! But this book doesn't go there. We're aware of criminal activity, and the characters have some close brushes with it, but this series is not about that. It's about people banding together and trying to survive in a frightening, changing world. This book will have you stocking up on canned goods. (Seriously. I really did stock up after reading the first book.)

Books that were okay but not as good as I'd hoped they would be:

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebond. Literary? General fiction? I never know how to classify these. This book was beautifully written, but it wasn't what I expected. I'd seen the movie trailer and it looked like a mystery-slash-creepy-ghost-story where a girl is murdered by a serial killer and, as a ghost, helps track down her killer. But it's really not that at all. It's a quieter book that's less about bringing the killer to justice than it is about grief and letting go and moving on. I spent the whole book wondering when we were going to get to the good bits, where they catch the killer, and I was disappointed when those good bits never arrived.

The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein. Literary or general fiction (not sure). I adored the first half of this book, but as we moved into the second half I felt like the author was piling misfortunes onto his protagonist to an extent that was unfair and not very believable. Three really horrible things happen to the protagonist, all of them largely unrelated and pretty much the result of bad luck, and after a while I stopped being able to suspend disbelief. I also wanted more followthrough on the "racing in the rain" concept. It was such a great setup, and I didn't feel it was delivered on. Telling the story through the eyes of the family dog was marvelous, though. I loved that.

Blood and Chocolate, by Annette Curtis Klause. Werewolf paranormal. This is one of several werewolf paranormals I've been reading to get a feel for the genre. And it appears this genre is not for me. A young female werewolf falls in love with a human boy, but ultimately comes to realize she needs to stick with her own kind. I liked the protagonist, and I thought the author did a great job of putting me in the head of a werewolf--in this book, the species are different, and they do think differently from humans. I liked that. But I didn't like the resolution, where the protagonist ended up with a werewolf guy we know almost nothing about, and she was kind of forced into the relationship. Was that a happy ending?

Bitten, by Kelly Armstrong. Werewolf paranormal. I liked the female (werewolf) protagonist, who's tough and cagey, but the worldbuilding didn't make much sense to me (no female werewolves, except for the protagonist? WHY?), and I didn't like the guy she ended up with, who was immature, selfish, and sometimes violent. He felt more like an overgrown teenager than a man (or werewolf), and I couldn't muster any attraction for him.

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, by Ally Carter. YA about a spy school for girls. This turned out to be not my thing. Too silly, not enough depth. Might work for a younger audience.

The Sharing Knife, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Fantasy with romance elements. Bujold is a goddess, but this isn't her best work. The worldbuilding's good, and I enjoyed the first half of the novel quite a bit, but then all the cool stuff got dropped for a while and we went into a straight romance plot without much conflict or tension. All romances are wish-fulfillment, but this story is a particular brand of wish-fulfillment I don't like, in which a rather nondescript heroine with problems acquires (generally through dumb luck) the Perfect Boyfriend, who then solves all her problems for her. I like to see heroines solve their problems themselves. It's okay with me if the Perfect Boyfriend helps her solve them (especially if she also helps him solve his), and it's okay if his arrival is the catalyst for her turning her life around, but I still like to see the heroine doing the work to fix her own life, not waiting for Prince Charming to come along and do it for her. Even though this one was a little disappointing, I'm still reading the next book in the series. It's Bujold after all, and she can be slow in her setups. There might be better stuff on the way, and I suspect she's got the heroine on a growth trajectory.

Here were my resolutions from 2009:

1. Finish querying "In the Company of Finneas Trapp." (Either sign with someone, or exhaust the list of agents I'm willing to sign with.)

Partial credit. I queried 19 agents, and the personal feedback I received from 2 of them on the full manuscript convinced me that while the novel might be saleable, it had some flaws I couldn't fix without rewriting it. Since I was already writing another novel--one that didn't have those flaws--I decided my time would be better spent finishing the new novel than rewriting the first. So I stopped querying Finneas. I've set it aside for now, but I haven't given up on it. I still hope to sell it someday, after I fix its problems.

2. Finish "Soldier, Sage, and Vagabond" revisions and begin sending out queries.

Again, partial credit. I completed revisions (including query letter and synopsis) but delayed sending them out because they were finished in the middle of the holiday season, a bad time to query. I will query in mid-January.

3. Write the first draft of the new novel, working title "Sea-mage."

Partial credit! I'm 27k words into the first draft of the new novel, but not finished. And it's not titled "Sea-mage" anymore (not even tentatively). It has no title. I call it "that Lucien novel."

4. When Ethan enters kindergarten (sooner, if it works out), start once-a-week Jazzercise or Yoga.

Partial credit again! I started a weekly yoga class, but I had to replace it with a more urgent need, twice-weekly strength-training sessions in the gym to strengthen my injured hip. Once I reach my target, I plan to replace one of the weekly gym visits with yoga.

Here are my resolutions for 2010:

1. Query at least 50 agents with "Soldier, Sage, and Vagabond."

2. Finish first draft of that Lucien novel.

3. Complete 2nd and 3rd drafts of the first 60k words of that Lucien novel.

4. Reach 130 lbs on hip abductor machine (currently at 110 lbs).

5. Resume weekly yoga class.

On May 4th, I wrote a post to commemorate a milestone: achieving 500,000 hits on my Flickr account. 8 months later, I get to celebrate the next milestone: 1,000,000 hits - or, 1,003,148 hits to be exact. As such, I guess it's time for another "State of the Flickr Account" update.

( In Which I Look at Some Statistics )

I just got back from an 8-day trip to Texas! During which time I mostly didn't have internet access, because I was staying at my dad's house and his computer was broken, and there was no wi-fi. I managed to check my email a couple times at friends' houses, and to post briefly on New Year's Eve, but that was it.

We visited family, and my friends Liz and Rod and Jennifer, and the kids played outside and replenished their vitamin D stores with some much-needed sunshine. Ethan has been asking me to buy him some bricks so he can build a house. I have not been wild about this idea, because he knows nothing about mortar and just plans to stack them like blocks, and they are heavy and potentially dangerous if stacked high. So I've been dodging those requests. Then he started badgering my dad (his grandfather) about it, and we talked it over and decided it would be reasonably safe if my dad bought him some, but not enough to build really high.

So my dad drove to Home Despot. They didn't have bricks, but they directed us to a brick yard (via the yellow pages). We went there, and Ethan got his bricks:

( Read more and see photos: bricks, candy cane tree, football party, the cows, and an Evil Goose )

Setting goals for the year is too hard. As a person, I change and deviate from the plan. I accept that.

So I am going to make specific goals for this month and hopefully I'll stick to them really well. They will all be a little understated so that I can hopefully achieve them all. I remember in years past where I would write seven goals of things I could only do if I applied myself fully to one of them, not all of them.

So here I go.

Goals for January 2010

1. Write 20,000 words on interWIRED.
   
2. Strength train once a week. Either free weights or a workout video of death-inducing vigour.
   
3. Once I get my treadmill (we bought a $2500 one for the new house but it's going to be delivered sometime next week), run 8 miles a week (tiny goal to start).
   
4. Read five books

There. Simple and concise with measurable success rates. We'll see how this goes.

New criteria for the year: For every two books I read off my MASSIVE to-be-read shelves, I get to purchase one new book.

I better read two fast so I can get my hands on the new Kitty Norville book XD!

I just went to close the curtains and it's snowed again - everything is white!

It had only just thawed the last lot. White Christmas and now a white New Year.

Whatever next?

And happy blue moon!



(okay, it isn't actually blue)

Yep, it's the end of the zeroes, the noughties, whatever you want to call 'em.  Where did they go?

It all happened so fast, my head's still not caught up.    I was going to do an and of year/end of decade review but in the end, I don't really want to relive much of the past year.  It started off fairly promising, once again became horrible, then lifted itself a little again towards the end.  The fact is, though, that I won't be sad to see it go.   So here is my year in the form of a first line meme Wordle:




Dull, isn't it?  Doesn't show any of the high- or low-lights - but that's me for you  ;)    

Anyway, so long 2009.  Goodbye double-oh decade - don't let the door hit you in the arse on your way out.

Here's to 2010.  May it and the coming years bring you whatever will make you happy.

So I decided that if 24 hours passed without more replies to the book survey, I would consider it done. And that has happened! So here are the results...
( Books I Read! )
Happy New Year, everyone! Thanks for participating!! :)

I know it's a couple days early for this post, but it looks like I won't be home much on the 31st, and I'm trying to gear myself up for getting work done, which has purposefully been involving a combination of doing work things and doing personal things on my list of things to do - on the assumption that EVERY accomplishment that involves anything I can even vaguely call "work" helps me to gear up and get moving.

( 2009: Exercise in Egoism (Accomplishments) )
( 2009: Review of Goals and Progress )

( 2010 Goals )
Well, that's everything I can think of for now. I'll probably come up with more - and just update this over the next few days when I do. It's always interesting to see what mattered to me a year ago, and what matters to me now...I think it's good that the list always changes, it feels right.

Happy New Year (a couple days early), Everyone!

Hey everyone. Hope ya'll had an awesome holiday! I'm gonna post a more general update soon (I'd meant to do so tonight, but I'm just too tired) but for now, I have an inane post (x posted at librarything

Every year, I've participated with joy and envy in the reading list polls that people in that community generally do around the New Year, and this year I resolved that I would actually keep track of what I read and post one of the surveys! As it turns out, today I finished what I expect will be my last completed book for 2009, so I went ahead and got my list together...and now it looks like I'll be the first to post one of these this year! I don't have a paid LJ account, but I do have a paid SurveyMonkey account, and as such, my poll can be found at: unforth's 2009 reading list poll!.

Once it looks like I'm not gonna get more replies, I'll post the full list, along with the survey results. :)

Happy New Year, everyone.

Gacked from Smart Bitches:



I love a capella groups!

Yes, it's Christmas Eve again. Can hardly believe it's already a year since the last time we did this, but here goes:



Merry Christmas Everybody!!!

Or if you don't celebrate Christmas, have a Happy [insert correct celebration here].


May you have a peaceful, joyful time.

I said before I had some extra Christmas money I planned to donate somewhere. I decided to use it at www.kiva.org, a microlender. It's a fun site to use. You look through all the individual loan requests, each of which has a story to go along with it, and all you have to donate is $25. The requested loans are for larger amounts than that, but they're funded by multiple people. If you sit for too long, reading about the people who are requesting loans, you sometimes lose the opportunity to contribute! The loan will be fulfilled by other people, and then it grays out and you can't access it anymore.

I had $100 to spend, so I donated $25 each to a woman in Ecuador, a woman in Kenya, a woman in Ghana, and a group of entrepreneurs in Kyrgyzstan.

Technically, they are not donations, but loans. They are high-risk loans, so some of them may default on me, in which case I write it off as a donation. If they get paid back (with interest), so much the better, because I can turn around and loan the money to someone else!

I like this site because 100% of the money donated (loaned) goes to the person you're reading about. (Kiva requests a separate donation to cover their administrative costs, $3.75, which I paid.) And these are people launching or expanding businesses, so I feel like I'm helping people who are also helping themselves. The money's not just disappearing into a void somewhere and perhaps winding up in the coffers of corrupt government officials. (At least I hope it's not.)

If you want to check it out, go directly to the site (http://www.kiva.org) or I can email you an invitation, in which case I get credit for the referral (not that it gains me anything, it's just cool to see it acknowledged on the site).