Bibelot & other words; No I don't spend too much time online?

Dictionary.com's word of the day is bibelot! You heard it here first! (Well, probably.) Now go look up anfractuously. Just because you know defenestration and antidisestablishmentarianism doesn't mean you have to pretend you know them all.

In other news, I am having way too much fun on Twitter. But I have lots of reading for class...and I need to shop for textbooks online. So perhaps I should get off Twitter, off this blog, perhaps even- gasp- off the computer entirely! A girl can dream, can't she?

After the recent report saying that kids these days (I say that like I'm old or something) spend more hours using media than there are actually hours in the day (waking hours anyway) then perhaps I should be more careful. One could metaphorically say it like this:

[Twitter/ Facebook/ blogs/ insert preferred social media of choice] is a drug. You start saying you'll only use it a little bit and then suddenly you find yourself saying, I can quit whenever I want. Only you don't. And slowly it consumes your normal life, until your social life is semi-dependent on it and you just can't stop...

Scary stuff, eh? But that won't stop anyone from continuing, will it Let alone me and I said it! I make excuses of why I need it. We all do. But sometimes I have to wonder- how would my life be different if all this stuff didn't exist? Or if I had never gotten started using it?

A Mouse's Schedule

A mentsch tracht und der Eibeshter lacht. Man plans and God laughs. An apt expression for what happened to me this morning. Not that I can spell in German or Yiddish or whatever language that is. (My friend, E, used to say it a lot.) Or, "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley," if you prefer. (I always liked that Robert Burns poem- can do part of it by heart in fact.)

So what's the laughing and the mice got to do with my first day of classes this semester? My schedule- my busy plan- it was full. But I liked it and was excited for all of my classes. And then I walk up to the door of the first one and get told I'm in the wrong section, I should be in a later class, which conflicts with my next class and basically half my plan just fell apart in a rude awakening.

So I told myself, "Get used to disappointment." (Ooh, Princess Bride, I am full of quotes today!) Better than anger or denial or whatever, acceptance is best, right? And I am sure it's for the best ultimately- my schedule was too hard before.

Now I think I'll go eat lunch and make an even better schedule this evening. One setback does not a disaster make. A schedule with any other class can be as sweet. Happiness is where you look for it. I'll have a great semester regardless, I hope.

First or Sequel?

I'm heading back to the spring semester, so as I bid a fond farewell to winter vacation, I want to talk about first books vs. second books. (Ha, I wish I'd written even a first book. But as a reader, for now.)

I read Graceling, by Kristin Cashore, before it was quite so popular. I thought it was good, nice writing, good characters, nice plot, but it didn't really stand out for me. I was sort of surprised as it rose up the best seller list. And then I picked up Fire. Wow. The prose scintillates, the characters are so much more interesting and compelling than Katsa and Po ever were for me. I haven't actually finished it yet because I no longer had access to the copy of Fire I was reading but I am seriously impatient to get back to it.

There are other authors, though, who work the other way around. For example, Maria Snyder wrote Poison Study, which I loved. Yelena and Valek are the perfect characters (not in an annoying way either) and the setting of Ixia was well thought out and interesting. I totally love Valek and the Commander's conversations. And the evil is real (unlike some books where the villainy is contrived- not like that here). I was eager for the sequels- and while there was nothing wrong with them, they just didn't compel me to keep reading as the first had. I was in love with Poison Study from the first scene. (Snyder is publishing a new book soon, Inside Out, which is set in a completely different world and looks really good, and I hope I will like it as much as Poison Study.)

I loved Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, but when I read the sequel Castle in the Air I was so impatient for some Howl/Sophie action to show up, that I couldn't appreciate the book in itself. If it was set in its own world, I'd have loved Flower and Abdullah for themselves. But now they paled next to my anticipation for the characters I knew and loved already. I guess she felt there wasn't enough of a story left to tell for Howl and Sophie. But is it better to have them as guest stars then not at all? (Although Christopher Chant, I'll take in any form. He's possibly my favorite character in all of fantasy.)

So why does it work that way? Why do some sequels work for the story and characters and have that magical combination of elements that make a book really excellent? (In Fire's case, pushing Graceling higher up on the bestseller list as well even though you don't need at all to read them together.) And others just fall flat or land in the shadow.

Speaking of shadow. I just read Ender's Shadow over break and loved it as much- but differently- as I'd loved Ender's Game. I like that he calls it a parallax, that name works well to describe its function. (Midnight Sun, anyone? I couldn't finish that, I tried it after SM posted it and it wasn't as good as the main books. But Midnight Sun isn't really a parallax proper, as it's not that different from Twilight itself.)I believe there are more books about Bean, right? Always wanted to find out what happens down on earth after Ender leaves. I read Game, Speaker, and Xenocide and I would love to read more of those too.

It would be great if every book you read was just as good in different ways. Failing that, we tend to go by author. Sometimes, this works, and sometimes, it doesn't. And sometimes you can be surprised. Maybe it's better that way.

In other news, I now have a twitter account. I begin with haiku but will go far from there. If I feel like it. I'm heatherlette if you want to find me.

Writer's Block- version 2.0

I have a new form of writer's block, and it's a doozy. It might not be new to the world, but I'm pretty sure it's new to me. I simply can't write more than a few pages of any one story without freezing up. I come up with a million and a half reasons and excuses of why I'm not ready to write just now, and go and read one of my endless forms of procrastination online.

This has resulted in a large number of files with stories just-begun, or nearly done but I somehow can't bring myself to finish them. I flit between one and the next like a hunter-shy bird, not able to stay longer than it takes to type a few words and then I come up with an idea for a new story, or I cast around for something to read in a book or online.

How do I get out of this pattern? How do other people do it? Usually I'm pretty good at concentrating on only one thing for a long period of time if it interests me. How can I get my stories to interest me again? One at a time, I mean.

So much for new year's resolutions, right?

Endings

A lot of my posts have been about politics, and I've decided I'd rather talk about something more fun- story.

I've been thinking about endings. It's very easy to talk about and analyze beginnings, but for endings you have to read the whole book first to really get them, so you'll end up with a lot of articles and discussion on opening sentences, the endings are a wee bit neglected. With exceptions, of course.

It just occured to me that this question is very fitting for the end of the calendar year. That wasn't why I was thinking about it, though.

So what is the purpose of an ending? Are you trying to satisfy readers or keep them wanting more? Tie up all the loose ends or introduce a surprise twist? There are many ways of writing a good ending, but what makes an ending good? And what should an ending be trying to accomplish?

When I used to write short stories in high school my teacher would ask me to fix the endings- she invariably would think that my ending was too abrupt and I left the reader hanging. I'd argue, but this is what the story needs! I wanted to leave some things ambiguous, let the reader be able to imagine variable endings. It's a fact that only established authors can get away with this, as in a tenth grader it looks like you just couldn't decide on the ending instead of an artistic choice, but I came to realize that a lot of times she was right and my ending did need something more, and there was usually a way to fill it out a bit without compromising my artistic deliberate ambiguity.

With novels it's harder, and the truth is, with all the novels I'm always trying to write, I have yet to reach an ending. I don't know what I will do when I get there- I have to think about what an ending is and what it should accomplish. It might depend on the book, true, but surely there's something all endings share. Does it vary so much between short stories and novels, do you think?

Now I just have to keep working long enough to write the middle...

Obama's Nobel Speech- Some Thoughts on War and Peace and Society

I wanted to do a full analysis of Obama's speech, the transcript of which I just finished reading. But I haven't the time to do it justice at the moment. So a just a few thoughts and impressions here.

I will say that I was impressed. By his opening, by who he chose to quote and acknowledge (not who you'd necessarily expect), and by the issues he brought up and discussed. I like how he acknowledges the need to struggle against evil even though we cannot win in our lifetimes, and I like the fact that he uses his brain when he talks and his ideas are well thought out and presented- on both moral/ethical and intellectual grounds.

I think there were some issues that he did not bring up, and could have, maybe should have. But he chose to stick with the obvious topics pretty much throughout- although it was bold to give specific examples of countries that fell short. Not so PC but nothing too offensive to anyone either.

I'd need to do a lot of thinking before I figured out myself exactly where I think he's right and where I disagree. As he's obviously put a lot more thought into the subject of war and peace than I have. (Maybe that's as it should be, maybe not.)

Not everyone will agree with everything he says. But I do think that there should be people in the society who think differently from the leader of the society when it comes to issues like this. Let the leaders take the stance that's best for the whole world overall, if someone must. In general, it should be the job of individuals, not a leader, to be wholly anti-war and stand up for the individual lives that are destroyed in fighting. Only if you have those voices raised up, and heard, can you have a leader who argues, like Obama is doing, that some wars do need to be fought as a matter of conscience (and he said it very well).

I think sometimes you need people around who remind you of all sides, the collective and the individual rights and welfare, who can help society find the right balance for each situation. Every country's job is to set up a system in which the right things in that balance can happen; where no one person's plan of action blocks consideration of any other option.

I do like how he cites people from JFK to Nixon to a pope. It's kind of fascinating, how he works-it's like how he made a staff out of his electionary opponents (Biden, Clinton) and admires Reagan as a president despite how different they all are.

Here's a sampling of which words he used most frequently- can be telling sometimes. I saw elsewhere on the internet that he used the word war double the number of times he used peace- but I don't think it was quite that drastic, he used peace a lot too, and one cannot entirely forget context (not taking into account if he said something like, no more war, for example). But for what it's worth, and because wordles are lots of fun, take a look.

Erasing Memory

At this appalling wee hour of the morning I came across the following on boingboing, which I haven't visited in quite some time and only stumbled across now after following the randomest of trails, true to the subtitle of this blog, but I will not enumerate the entire list of links explored now. Sometime I should track one of these trails of mine, though. What caught my attention was this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/14/rewriting-fear-memor.html

Being able to rewrite the fear from a painful, emotional experience- selectively erasing bad memories. It might sound good to some- but to me, even if it works, without some terrible kind of side effect (and I imagine a side effect could be pretty bad) but still, I think it's a terrible idea, for all its shiny intriguiness. (new word there!) You're supposed to learn from bad experiences- to face your fears and overcome them! To grow as a person! The bad things were not meaningless, nothing in life is. Everything that happens to you is an oppurtunity to be used. Part of being human is facing experiences that scare you and push you out of your comfort zone.

If you can just erase all that by taking a pill or whatever then what was the point? What's the point of experiencing anything if you can just choose to erase it all afterwards? Will we start erasing all the bad decisions we make from our memories, so we literally have no regrets?

To me, this seems wrong. I wish they would think things through before trying ideas like this out on people. Progress for the sake of progress should not be the goal, and even when some advantages can be gained from it (helping people with severe PTSD from really horrible events no person should have to think about, I guess?) first you have to think about all the consequences, their implications, and the eventualities that stem from them. If not, humanity will suffer all the more.