Kat Dancing

And just when I thought I was getting a handle on things....




Yes, dammit, that IS a calf. And a three-weeks early calf. And very nearly a dead calf; lively enough, but one of the older cows "claimed" him and chased his actual mother off. By the time my parents had beaten the old cow off, fetched him back to the barn, tried to fetch his mother (Justice), realized that Justice was completely crackercow and fetched me in from town and the bro from his comfy bed, gotten back to the field, beaten the old cow off *again*, fetched Justice, milked Justice, and found the calf bottle hiding where we'd put it last year, he was nearly dead from lack of food. We had to tube-feed him in the end, but it was worth it; within minutes he was up and running. Running away from us tube-torturing maniacs, of course, but we were happy anyway.

Today he seems completely recovered, and Justice is being either a good cow or a crackercow based on what the nice hormones tell her but we have fixed the gate and put the boards back on the fence and have hopes that good cow will win out. She's not too bad to milk, anyway.

Did I say my life was under control? *checks*

Nope, I didn't. How wise of me.

matociquala has declared this "International embarass yourself as an artist day":

Okay, I double-dog dare you. Go ahead and post the awfullest, grottiest, ancientest piece of juvenilia you still have a word processor that will open. I'll wait.

Er.

Well.

Okay.

I have exactly two bits of writing left from the days of the DOS computer. The dates have long been lost in the innumerable cross-platform transfers, and so I've no idea which is older, but I'm posting this one on the grounds that it has less formatting gunk for me to edit out.

As far as I can remember, this was my half of a collaborative novel that I was going to write with my brother. It stalled about two chapters in due to what can most tactfully be called a breakdown in communications. As I said, no dates, but the DOS lived a brief life before its unmourned passing, so I would have been between 11 and 12.

Um. It's really bad.

Am I getting paid to amuse you like this?

(Addendum: there will be a state of the life post as soon as I've had time to evaluate life and determine its state. I expect to come up against the Uncertainty Principle pretty quick, so don't hold your breath.)

[Read More!]

... and my car broke down. My father drove half an hour to pick me up, looked the damage over, and began referring to "your former car". We'll have it towed tomorrow for the autopsy.

Clearly not my day.

Dan didn't make it across the border.

We're regrouping.

Thanks to everyone who's been so good about putting him up and cheering him up over the past few weeks. You guys rock majorly.

To Those Who Use My Agent List: An Open Letter.

I have, as you know, a list of agents. It is a list of people to which you, my fellow would-be authors, can submit your work. It contains much helpful information, like the names and addresses of said agents.

You may notice that my name is not on said list.

Let me explain something to you people. I am not an agent. I don't even have an agent. My exclusive contacts with the publishing world number *counts on fingers* oh, yeah, NONE! I can't even get my own damn books published.

It is therefore the height of uselessness to email me query letters. I do not want them. I cannot use them. I could offer you helpful critiques on them (like, "broadcasting generic emails to agents is a bad idea" or "agents do not click on links to your website, so including no other information about your book than that is a bad idea") but frankly, you have not given me a positive enough impression of yourself that I'd feel comfortable opening up a dialogue. What an actual agent would think of you, considering that she probably gets twenty or thirty emails like this a week, I don't want to guess. I only hear from you nitwits once every few months and already you're getting on my tits.

If somebody sold you an email list, and it had my name on it, you may wish to petition them for your money back. If somebody didn't sell you an email list, and you somehow misinterpreted my list as "I'm an agent, please send me lame queries," then you may want to petition God for your brain back. I don't even want to talk about the one of you who thinks I am Mr. Byrne.

I mean, I'm trying to spot the honest mistake here, but it just ain't coming to me.

Please, people. When you do this kind of shit you're not just confusing my poor sad mind and exercising my spam filter, you're making me ask myself questions like "Do I really want to run a page that helps writers find agents? I mean, what have the poor agents ever done to me?"

Sincerely (and I want you to notice this bit! The way I SIGN THINGS! Like I might sign a letter to, you know, an agent, if I wasn't fuckin' STUPID!),

Kat Feete

I completely failed to complete the 50 book challenge last year, but it's not going to stop me from trying again. And discovering FM's new TBR forums is as fuel to the fire. So here's two of the books I consumed on the recent Canada trip for your diversion:



"To Play the Fool" by Laurie R. King

Finding the killer of a homeless man becomes unexpectedly complicated when the prime witness refuses to speak in anything but Bible quotes.

When a group of homeless hold an impromptu cremation of a beloved dog, it gets little attention from the LA police -- until a week later, when the same group tries to do the same thing for the dog's owner. Both dog and man died violently, and the ragtag group of failed and half-crazed homeless can't or won't tell Officer Kate Martinelli what happened. When Kate tracks down the man who arranged the dog's cremation, the much-loved Brother Erasmus, he seems even madder than the rest, refusing to speak save in quotes from Shakespeare or the Bible. But as the mystery deepens and becomes more sinister, Kate, increasingly fascinated by Erasmus, realizes that there can be a method in madness and that the past can provide good reason to become a "holy fool".

This is the second of King's Kate Martinelli mysteries, but it stands superbly on its own. As usual for King, the compelling mystery nevertheless takes a backseat to the brilliant character sketches she provides -- in this case of the homeless men and women, from the homeless-by-choice dead man John to the precise and proper sometimes-artist Catherine* to, of course, Brother Erasmus himself. The background and mythos that King provides him with, the movement of Fools, is brilliantly thought-out and painstakingly backed up, and the confusing method of communicating via quotes is amazingly well handled. One can almost feel the main character's frustration oozing from the page as she painstakingly teases bits of information out of Erasmus, but at the same time, we come to understand along with Kate how such a method can sometimes say more than mere words could.

If the book has a flaw, it is that the action moves slowly for a mystery and the end (as I've found with several King stories) seems a letdown, less the brilliant revelation of a Hercules Poirot than a simple acknowledgment of a truth that was there all along. However, the sympathetic and thought-provoking portrayals of LA's homeless population more than make up for the plot's lack. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys strong, complex characters and a good read.

* Not absolutely sure of the character's name, and the book is elsewhere. Corrections welcome.



"The Wizard Hunters (The Fall of Ile-Rien, Book 1)" by Martha Wells

A suicidal playwright finds herself in possession of magic that could save her besieged world.

Tremaine's world is dying; it has been in a personal way since her father disappeared seven years ago and in a more drastic way since the mysterious Gardier appeared three years ago and began attacking cities, killing and destroying everyone in its path. Desperate, the mages of Ile-Rien scrabble to recreate the spell that caused Tremaine's father to vanish, believing that he had been trying to create a weapon that they could use against the Gardier. It is only when Tremaine is dumped into the middle of an ocean on a strange world that anyone realizes her father had an entirely different purpose in mind.

In the meantime, Ilias and his brother Giliead, worried that a sorcerer they defeated the year before, penetrate the island that had been the sorcerer's stronghold -- only to find it filled with an entirely new kind of sorcery clearly meant for war. When the brothers become separated and Ilias stumbles across a strange (and damp) young woman who seems to share his dislike of the new sorcerers, the two worlds are given another chance to survive the ravages of the ruthless Gardier.

At first glance this book appears to be YAFT (Yet Another Fantasy Trilogy) with little to set it apart from its fellows, and I suspect that's why we haven't heard more of Martha Wells. But it's far more. For one thing, it has a sense of humor. A book that routinely delivers up such gems as "Ixion alive had been bad enough. Ixion, dead, headless and really, really annoyed was unimaginably worse," has already removed itself from the realms of the angsty and deathly serious YAFTs. There are a great many terrible things happening in Wizard Hunters, but the characters stand up to them with spirit and dry wit, which makes the occasional moments where they find something they can't face painfully touching.

For another thing, this is no generic-medieval setting. Il-Rien could be loosely described as "steampunk", while Ilias's world is more Bronze Age, but in both cases Wells (an anthropologist) twists the settings with a light but deft touch into something truly her own. The alienness of Wells's settings does not astonish; rather it creeps up on and ambushes the reader at odd points with a subtlety that is all too rare in fantasy. I was particularly impressed with the way Wells handled Ilias's people, who are neither savages nor idealized rustics but a true civilization with its own strong and weak points.

But most of all, The Wizard Hunters sets itself apart by being a remarkably good book. The writing is skilled, the storytelling on a par with the best, and the characterization simply unforgettable. I heartily recommend this to anyone with a love of good story -- and a couple of hours to spare, since once you pick this one up, you won't willingly set it down.

I'm in charge of the farm while my parents are gone (ah, the freedom! Unsupervised with a whole farm to play on! Unfettered by -- waitaminute, there's a fuckload of work here) including all the beasties. This includes the cows, who are all heavily pregnant but appear to be unaware of this; yesterday they were out in the hayground and running around bucking like a bunch of calves. Matronly, my ass. And it includes the two bulls -- soon to be hamburger -- who I have to feed from the bunk.

"Because they'll try to hump you?" I said when my father cautioned me not to go in the pen. It's a problem we've had before. The cows try and hump the humans, the cows hump each other, the bulls hump each other, the female dog humps the baby calves, the dogs occasionally hold a threesome which is a bit odd considering that one of the participants is castrated. It's your basic run-or-get-humped world. Occasionally people tell me how homosexuality is unnatural. They always seem unnerved when I start laughing hysterically.
"No," he said. "Well, yes, but only if you turn your back on them. The real problem is that they want their heads scratched and they'll knock you over if you're not careful."

This is another problem. Most humans have, I've noticed, two possible attitudes towards animals: either they see them as your basic Skinner machines, all instinct and reflex, or they think of them as furry humans. Neither is true. Animals aren't dumb, nor are they machines. They have brains. But they are also not human and may be missing some of the cognitive leaps, one of which is that "I got bigger" concept.

I am not joking. It's a well-known trick -- the Amish still use it -- to go in once a day for the first few months of a horse's life and pick it up. That way, when the horse gets to be a ton or so and capable of stomping you to a pulp, he never does, because as far as he's concerned you're still that kickass mofo who can pick him up and carry him around. You just haven't, y'know, done so recently.

Animals are not so good on the cognitive leaps, but they're buggers for remembering.

And this is where people get in trouble when raising calves. When a 50-pound calf butts you in the back of the knees for headscratchies, it's cute; when the same animal weighs 500 pounds, it's bloody dangerous. We know this; the animal doesn't. He doesn't know anything's changed, and he does not understand that he can hurt you now.

(This also gets people in trouble with the sexual thing. We don't see bulls as a sex objects no matter how much like humans we treat them, so we assume they'll understand that too. Guess again. Treat a bull like a pet, and when the hormones start a-goin' as far as he's concerned you're either his rival or his bitch, and either way you're likely to end up as a pretty red smear on the wall.)

We know all this and we're careful, but some animals are naturally friendly and one of the bulls falls into that category. He thinks he's a big fuzzy teddybear. Rule #210 of surviving farming: do not go into the bullpen with the 500 pound delusional teddybear.

It's things like these that make my career so much more interesting than most. I mean, in most places "watch your ass" is a euphemism....

Gus made a good point about my Mary Sue test:

And I scored a 9... I think maybe my problem is that my story isn't sf/fantasy/etc.

My comment got too long, so I'm posting here.

My first instinct, of course, was to protest that there's Mary Sues everywhere, not just in speculative fiction. I still think that's true. But after brushing up a bit on my literary fiction (since I know that's what you write) I'm beginning to realize that it probably would take a different test to catch them.

As a warning: I do not read literary fiction. If it's recommended to me, I may try a book or two, but in the general way of things I avoid it like I avoid movies described as "heart-warming". My methods for brushing up on the genre were to log on to CritiqueCircle and read ten entries listed as literary. It's easier to spot genre conventions in amateur work, since the pros are generally better at knowing the expectations and either avoiding or playing off them. But I have no real experience with the genre and could be completely off base here.

My conclusions:

1) Self-insertion -- usually cited as a primary Mary Sue characteristic -- isn't as big a sin in literary fiction. The reasons are pretty simple. The basis of most speculative fiction is to create a new world to which your readers can transport themselves, however briefly; to insert yourself as a character is to drag a trailing cloud of your cultural biases and assumptions and attitudes that are as a Miasma of Doom to the alien setting you're trying to build. The same goes for historical fiction. No matter how much a writer may think she's left the cloud behind, she, like everyone, is a product of her time, and it will show. In literary, on the other hand, the point is to examine existing bias, so writing about a culture you know intimately is good. What is a lead weight on the fragile confection of fantasy is grounding ballast to literary fiction.

More than that, self-insertion in adventure-oriented genres -- not just speculative fiction but mysteries, thrillers, suspense, and large chunks of romance -- becomes awkward fast. While most of us might like to think we'd react well under extraordinary pressure or situations we haven't trained for, writers are not, as a lot, great people for handling stress. Self-insertion thus leads to increasingly nonsensical situations where Ordinary Joe the insurance-agent-slash-writer gives helpful advice to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and coolly disarms terrorists. Literary fiction, on the other hand, focuses on small everyday happenings; the presence of a small everyday person is not jarring.

2) Over-achievement -- another primary Mary Sue characteristic -- isn't really applicable to literary fiction characters. This is, in a way, a reaction to the problem above; with characters doing exciting things which the writer doesn't experience, she tends to get overheated and load them down with every skill and talent in the book, where by "the book" I mean GURPS Compendium I. Then, realizing she's overloaded the character, she does just what a roleplayer realizing the same thing would do; she gives the character a bunch of big disadvantages to bring the point cost down. And -- rather like roleplayers are wont to do -- she then forgets the disadvantages; they only get brought up when she wants drama or angst, not when they'd be actually inconvenient. In speculative fiction, she isn't even limited by possible skills or talents, and there's far too many people who take one look at that and go "Woohoo! One telepathic supergenius black-belt with big tits comin' up!"

Literary fiction focuses on the small and everyday; even newbie writers look at this and realize that telepathic supergenius black-belts look silly in Suburbia. More to the point, there isn't anything for them to do. Of the literary stories I read, half started not with a situation but with someone thinking about or talking about a situation. All followed a basic pattern: something happened (frequently offscreen), and then people talked about it, or thought about it, or analyzed it, for pages and pages. Usually whatever was happening was not a direct result of the MC's actions; they were there not to do things but to have things done to them. This is a complete no-no in other genres, but in literary fiction it's expected. Most fiction, including speculative fiction, focuses on action; literary focuses on reaction.

3) Connoisseurs recognize two basic types of Mary Sues: the Perfectly Overachieving (as described above) and the Poor Me, aka Angsty Sue. In action-oriented genres, there's only so much of the latter you can get away with, and they tend to be combined into one Overachieving Angsty Sue. Most writers also tend to focus on a few major items of angst (sexually-abused-as-child is still in, I believe, and tortured-for-information never went out) and ignore the vast sea of potential angst that's out there, for the simple reason that there's a limited amount of time their characters can spend sitting around crying without alienating their readership.

Literary fiction, on the other hand... well in the ten stories I read, the starting points for the MCs were:

- A man fighting with his parents;
- A woman fighting with her lover;
- A drunk;
- A woman who was just in a car crash that killed her girlfriend;
- An insane death-row inmate;
- A Vietnam soldier returning home with a death wish;
- A depressed teenager being bullied by her teacher;
- Two gamblers;
- A child whose mother is dying;
- Two boys flying kites to distract themselves from the poverty around them and the trouble they're in at school.

I make that nine out of ten angsty protaganists. I think it's safe to say that the literary crowd has a higher angst tolerance than the adventure-reading crowd. They expect the protaganists to spend more time thinking (or complaining) about their situation than doing things. This changes the face of Mary Sue.

----

So a Mary Sue test for literary fiction would:

1) Focus less on self-insertion.
2) Focus on smaller, less dramatic achievements.
3) Focus on angst, rather than perfection. I'd suggest, from my limited reading, points for "in" angst: gay characters being persecuted and protags being bullied by their parents/teachers/spouses for not "fitting in" seem to be serving the same function for literary fiction that torture/sexual abuse is serving for us, eg, get instant sympathy points with minimal work.

Could I write such a test? Fuck no. I don't read in this genre for a reason; most of it bores me to tears or is so utterly PC that I feel urges to bite someone. It takes sympathy for the failings of the genre to write a test that will be of use to people. But it could be done. Possibly it should be done. It'd be interesting to see what came out.

Heck, I'd even donate the code. *grin*

Because a lot of people have been posting their Mary Sue Test results, and because my attempt at this has been sitting on the hard drive for too long, and because I really felt like coding*:

The Writer's Mary Sue Test.

If you feel like commenting on the test, please do so here.



* Yes, I find coding PHP therapeutic**. Bite me.

** I'm not actually any good at it, mind you. I just find it therapeutic.

Well, my mother came back from the doctor nearly shaking with relief. They'd identified the "multicellular growth" on her ovary as a cyst. Not precisely great news -- she's on antibiotics again, and there's a fair chance that there will be surgery -- but definitely the best of a bad lot of possibilities.

She has also declared the doctor to be a pretty decent guy, which coming from my mother the you-touch-I-bite doctorophobic is high praise.

Thanks a lot to everyone who sent love, hugs, and kind thoughts in the comments. It was much appreciated, even if I was too lazy/miserable to bother replying. And really, if one thing could go right? This was the one. Everything else follows Jean-Louis's ten-year rule: in ten years it'll probably be funny... but I seriously doubt my mother having cancer would be funny, ever. So the rest I can deal with.

In other news, my parents are visiting the Big Apple for the next four days, leaving me with four neurotic dogs and a shortage of spare time. Expect low postage for a while.

Well, I'm back from Canada, over a week later than planned and sans boyfriend. Let's start with the bad, in order of happening:

- Forgetting my purse on the bus, then calling up the bus driver to hear that yes, he had my purse, but it looked like it had been rifled. The bus driver, however, called the police with a description of the kid he thought was responsible, and in the time it took us to retrieve the purse, determine that yes, my wallet was missing, and call the police, they'd already arrested the kid and retrieved my stuff. I am still slightly in shock about this. Police aren't supposed to act useful.... So no harm done, aside from an hour of stressing and two sitting downtown in a police station trying not to feel nervous in the presence of uniforms. (See "child of hippies". God, I'm indoctrinated.)

- Going to the border and watching Dan be harrassed for several hours by a overgrown schoolroom bully in uniform before being turned back. The details are in this post, but basically we were applying for a very specific work visa and were told that the job description supplied covered too much stuff. A call to a lawyer revealed that a) getting the more general work visa, as they'd recommended, wasn't really an option, as one had to apply a year in advance and there was a tight limit on the number handed out, and b) we did have a case for the visa, it would just take time. And money, of course. So back to Toronto we limped.

- Going to the border again, a week later and considerably poorer, only to have the lawyer fail to deliver us the needed documents he'd promised before the relevant people left for the day, and indeed the weekend. Repeat limping.

- Leaving my purse on the bus again the next day. This time the bus driver couldn't find it and we had to assume it'd been snatched, which, considering it had all my cards and all my photo ID including my passport, was Not Happy-Making. trinshadow and wefightforpie, I do apologize for turning what should have been a proper visit into a Pity The Kat session, and dripping on you. Several hours, one panicked call to the embassy, and two cancelled credit cards later, we got back on the bus, where Dan struck up a conversation with the driver about the whole thing. She called the bus in question, where the replacement driver, on boarding the bus, had found my purse jammed behind one of the seats. Untouched, this time. I am far luckier than I deserve and not allowed to carry my own documents any more.

- Going back to the border again, to a different crossing, with documents, only to have them turn us back without even looking at them and informing us that we'd have to reapply at the border crossing where we were turned back. We did not want to go back to that crossing. Aside from our experience with the bully, our lawyer had told us that the crossing in question had a well-established bad reputation for harassing and turning back visa applicants on the slightest of pretexts. He was astounded to hear that they wouldn't take our application at the second crossing and recommended we go to the third possible crossing in Pearson airport. A call to them established that yes, they'd take the application no matter where it originated. One slight hitch: you needed a bording pass to get to them.

This time Dan limped back to Toronto alone. He was hoping to get a standby ticket to Buffalo. I crossed the border and checked into a youth hostel to wait for him.

- Learning that they don't do standby tickets any more and that "last minute tickets" start at $1800. Everything else requires a 14-day lead time. So Dan bought a ticket and settled down to wait, and I limped homewards on the Greyhound, since there was no way I could leave the farm alone for two more weeks.

- Sorting through the mail on my return to find a rejection from my Most Wanted Agent. I pretty much expected it, after all this time, and what with everything else that's going on it got no more than a resigned flinch, but still, it was a blow. I really wanted this agent. And I suspect that "not enthusiastic enough" translates to "there's nothing new about this story", which has been my worry all along. Oh well.

- Learning, on my return, that my mother has been seriously ill for the last week or more but hadn't wanted to tell me when I was already going through hell. As in, visit-the-hospital ill. As in, could-be-the-scary-word ill. She's visiting another doctor today for more scans, so we should know soon whether to worry more. No one's talking about it much until then.

- Empty house. No boy. No certainty that there will be a boy for a long time.

The good, of course, was getting to see many friends again. Thanks to all the wonderful people who let us crash on them, and to tormenta for throwing a birthday party and letting us come, and for general support and sympathy. I don't think I could have made it through without you all.

And there was one minor bit of good on my return, which was getting to see an article I'd written for The Snail (the newsletter of Slow Food USA in print. I didn't get paid for it or anything, but it was nice to see.

As for the rest, well... nothing's irretrievable. Dan may yet make it over the border. My mother may yet be okay. All I can do is wait and not think about it all too much.

Wish us all luck.