heatheranastasiu's Xanga

Contemplating Theory is Turning Me Into an Insomniac Zombie...In A Good Way

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:17:34 GMT

I feel like completely vegetating all night and all weekend. Which I won't, because I've been like the intellectual energizer bunny lately - constantly working through these intese theoretical paradigms and working to apply them to my problem. I feel like I finally made some breakthroughs yesterday after struggling through this morass of psychoanalytic and semiotic critical texts so that I really have something innovative to say on paper that got accepted at an academic conference in Feb: The Hero in the Playground of the Id: An Inquiry into why Twilight is Popular.

But really, this is a philosophical inquiry that I've been working through over the past few years regarding my love for young adult literature - I feel like I'm finally tracing some of the threads of that attraction, and also, my own personal philosophy of the place of storytelling in one's personal and public life. Thinking and working through it all is LITERALLY keeping me up at night - I've had the worst insomnia because the idea-mill refuses to stop churning.

I went and saw New Moon this afternoon - luckily bought my tickets ahead of time because the ENTIRE day's shows were already sold out by 3pm. So I watched that, then feel like I have this overload of new data to incorperate with all that I've already been thinking about.

And I want to submit an alternate version of the paper to a book of academic essays about Twilight, so I've been trying to finalize that abstract. And I have a presentation due in another class this coming up Tuesday about three other theoretical frameworks - analyzing critical articles, identifying underlying theoretical base, and applying it to a Hemingway short story.

And what I really want to do is curl up and vegetate. Soak in, without contemplating. Just. Be. Without thinking about being, you know?

But then, what I really want is more time and energy because all of this is lighting my ass on fire to get cracking at my own YA novel (left in the dust now for a month) and enrich it with all this new shit I've been learning and feeling. The thing is - I LOVE everything that I'm doing - all the new things that I'm learning - I feel like it's been an explosion of contemplative exposure - my courses in literature have turned into courses about life, and seeing the world, and I'm completely fucking awed by it.

Blue Hair! and Painting!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:36:16 GMT

Picture time!

First, the coiffure:

And finally, the painting:

Life Blazes By, i.e., how did it get to be November already?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:11:07 GMT

Gosh, as the semester has progressed, I feel like I have less time for everything, and everyone. I have at least ten things I want to be doing at once, and just enough time and energy for one. I want to be writing fiction, researching for a paper, finishing an abstract to submit to a conference, painting, reading for class, reading for fun, spending time with friends, emailing other friends, catching up with family, playing with my kid, and sleeping, lots of sleeping.

Unfortunately, as I'm only managing one at a time, I've been focusing on research for the past two weeks - for a paper for class and for the conference abstract (two birds with one stone, you know), and hating that I don't have time to work on Persephone too. Just another month, I keep thinking, and then I'll have a whole month to focus on it before the Spring semester. Let's just not think about all that is due in the month between now and when school is done!!

School is awesome by the way - I don't think I've updated since I was first bitching about it. The students aren't any more clever, but there's a few smart kids in the bunch, and the reading regularly blows my mind, especially in my critical theories class. And the research I'm doing on my own for each class is pretty awesome.

What else is new? The front of my hair is blue now (keep meaning to post pictures), we had a fabulous halloween, I painted a new painting, as seems to be my winter tradition (again, keep meaning to post pics), I've come up with a basic idea for my thesis, Dragos is working himself to the bone between full time work and 3 grad school classes, Joseph is growing and adorable, and I'm thrilled that the second season of Legend of the Seeker has started, and I miss all my friends I haven't hung out with in forever!

Philosophy as Fiction: Is Life Meaningless?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:33:21 GMT

Literature has the power of philosophy made plain, tied to human emotions and given a body. I’m reading the 6^th in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, and I am continually moved by it’s lengthy examination of the question: is life meaningless?

This is where Goodkind shows his true genius – not in his writing skills per se, but in examining and pushing the limits of human psyche in various fictive scenarios. With the last book, I was about to give up on the series – I don’t really care about movement of troops and battles. But this book, Faith of the Fallen, he has stepped back into the intimate of the human. Why do we do what we do? What is the point of continuing on? His answer, I think, is moving toward something I’ve thought similarly – meaning is found in relationships and the experience of loving and being loved.

This sounds like a trite answer on the face of it. It is, when it’s the knee-jerk response. Love is the reason for living and for hope – a common fictional tool – It’s the thing that saved Harry Potter and is otherwise commonly depicted as the only thing can ultimately overcome the greatest evil and power. It is so common we cannot see underneath the statement – the never-ending complexity of this answer.

The more I think on love, and experience it, the more I think of it as something magical, and by that I mean, it’s Other. Not grasped by reason, or even words adequately – the experience of it, like other physical sensations I can feel, but never describe, or have described to me in any way close to the actual experience of it. I’m not even talking about understanding it from biological and anthropological standpoints – the emotion of love as a series of chemical responses and electrical brain activity that maybe one day will be charted by computers. That won’t make it less real, because it is Other. It is a language that reason cannot understand. It simply IS.

Maybe one could try to explain in terms of evolution – that these feelings of attachment evolved as a way of keeping a family unit stable, of bonding a mother to care for her infant so as to promote the survival of the species. I’ve tried for a long time to understand why love is. But at the end of the day, I can only call it magic. Other. Something I experience in different ways at different times, and whatever makes love what it is, it's the reason for living.

Making Art Without "The Mood"

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:27:45 GMT

I was reminded again today that doing art is most often about working and practicing when the mood or inspiration isn't striking. It's about the day to day, as oft-quoted Jane Yolen put it, of "Butt In Chair". Writing and painting when you DON'T feel like it, practicing a craft to become great is just like atheletes working out for hours a day. Oh god, did I just use a sports metaphor? I hate sports metaphors, but you get the idea. Other people work hard hours practicing to become good at what they do, I don't know why we think art becomes "stiff" or "formalized" if you do it when not in the mood because there's a presupposition that it should be this magical process of some muse taking over our body and producing Art. Maybe it's just a lot of hard work. Maybe we use the tired phrase of needing "inspiration" as and excuse for procrastination. If I only wrote when a thunderstorm struck and I had the perfect cup of coffee while listening to the perfect piece of music for that shining moment when I was really "in it", I'd write maybe ten pages a year.

I'm trying to get into the discipline of writing a 1,000 words a day, or about 4-5 pages, but then again, I'm in the kick-it first draft writing phase right now, so it's the get-words-into-the-blank-pages kind of writing and play around to mold it later. Pages produced, in the right 'voice' (voice being the new Big Idea affecting my writing lately). I'd say that's my primary focus right now.

Oh, and you know, grad school. Which is starting to really rock my socks off, as far as the things I'm learning. The classes themselves are still not uber-great, but all the reading I'm doing is really awesome - pushing the boundaries on my thinking kind of stuff. Both classes are challenging me with new ways to see the world and humanity. I could go off on all this stuff, and maybe I will soon. But today I mainly just wanted to express the thought: making art has to be a discipline just like everything else. The discipline should certainly be mixed in with some love and ethos, but nothing will ever get done without Butt In Chair.

The Utopia That Was Not

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 02:30:58 GMT

So. Grad School. Let's just say that it's not what I thought it would be. Because the discussions that are had are not any more intelligent than undergrad... and, how do I put this delicately? the standard for academic excellence isn't set very high. Why, in grad school, am I still only required to write five-seven page papers? In both my classes. Aren't much longer papers supposed to be the standard - like 10-20 pages? Which would be hard, but that's the point - it's supposed to be a lot harder therefore making you push yourself to new levels. Because, you know, we should have a lot more to say about topics, more research, more analysis, I mean, freakin' A! I guess I just imagined grad school like this academic utopia where every one is really smart and dedicated, and not only DOES the reading, but tries to UNDERSTAND and analyze the reading in a meaningful way that promotes intelligent discussion. Isn't that the point? Where we are learning how to participate in the larger academic community of quality scholarship??? The answer is, maybe not at Texas State University. Time will tell.

In other news, I'm re-writing the novel I had been querying agents for. Really learning the ins and outs of how the market works, especially as regards to children's publishing, has been invaluable, and something i think only could have been done the hard way - i.e. writing a book, trying to sell it, understanding why its not selling, and not just being like - fucking publishers! don't realize GENIUS when they come across it! So. There are some problems with the book. The main one of which is "voice". I kept seeing this all over agent requirements - they don't care what the material is but only if it has strong voice. One agent put it simply, "Voice, voice, voice!" And me sitting there constantly seeing the phrase and idea pop up, was like, what the fuck is voice????? That was always one of those words I'd heard bandied around, and vaguely had an idea of meaning, but not specifically, and not enough to put my novel and my writing under the litmus test to discover if it had this elusive entity of "voice".

I'm finally kind of getting it. It's like tone, which is also hard for me to define, other than just saying - you know, how it feels, the vibe you get from reading it. But where the rubber meets the road - how the hell do you CREATE that feeling or tone? I've been writing seriously for four years now, written two and a half novels (two of which were about Persephone, trying different angles, but all completely different...and all shitty) and I still don't know exactly how to manipulate language to create the tone I want - though I'm finally learning. I've written thirty pages on the new novel, writing it as Persephone in the 21st century as a teenager - and I'm writing first person, plopped directly in her head, so that what is on the page are her thoughts and personality. And I think it's getting a vibe.

Also, it should be a much better sell when I start querying for it because it actually FITS. Unlike straight high fantasy, which the one I've had is. Urban fantasy, or at least starting from a relatable protagonist who is just like us, and then taking her to crazy places, is not going out of style anytime soon. It's kind of timeless - that starting in our world and then bringing in fantasy or surreal elements. Just ask Alice. And I'm writing with attention to voice for the first time, which is this wild paradigm shift that I've really needed to move forward with my writing. I'll still be querying and honing the old version in case I do catch interest somewhere, but I have a feeling it'll be the new version that starts that chapter in my life. By the way, it just kills me to have to do this - thinking I was finished and having to start over again. But I've done it before and I think it's called for here.

My Name in Print !!!

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:36:55 GMT

Eeeeeee! Exciting - the first thing that I've had published in a print literary journal!! Came in the mail today! See how pretty!!!

Realization of Category fit. And Zombies.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:21:46 GMT

So since I've been reviewing all these YA books, it's made it clearer to me where my book fits in the genre. It struck me yesterday that while my book isn't urban fantasy, the gods are kind of like the heartless faeries - all powerful and many completely without morality. In tone, my writing is kind of like Melissa Marr or Libba Bray though without the gritty urban sheen.

Then today it struck me, when trying to describe what the dead would look and act like in the Underworld, that the best near description would be zombies (I'm reading a zombie book right now). Corporeal, but for the most part zoned and out of it (though not chasing the living around trying to canabalize them or anything). Zombies are another bizarre category in YA that's coming into style.

I've only read a couple zombie books, all though yesterday I came across a post of a person coining the term "Zom Rom", as in, zombie romance as a genre. WTF? These seem like two incompatible categories, though the book I was reading last night does a pretty good job of it:

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters - this book is suprisingly kick ass. Maybe I've just been reading so many poorly written books lately that I'm just shocked by how well written this book is. Really good, intelligent. It takes the undead trying to integrate into society in a situation throw-back to the 60's racial hatred at integration. Fascinating look at humanity - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan - first of all - how amazing is that title? Hands down, best title of the year. And here you get traditional zombies - mindless, hungering for human flesh, kept at bay from a small community in a post-apocalyptic world by a giant fence. Good and intense.

Faerie Tales - YA Lit Part II

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 03:16:21 GMT

So, faeries. And no, I'm not trying to be pretentious writing it that way, believe me, that's the way the new faery-tale writers want it spelled - or rather, the way it used to be spelled and they are going back to the original idea of The Fair Folk as mischievous baby-stealing hedonists.

Rundown of the goods out there:

Wicked Lovely Series by Melissa Marr - Definately the best writing. But in book II of the series, she focuses on completely different characters, then back to the main one's for book III (in all, there will be five books). And the narrative goes places I don't want it to go. Unpleasant, certainly uncomfortable. But very REAL characters. Gritty. Urban. Just not my cup of tea, you know? I like conflict, but maybe not this much.
Impossible by Nancy Werlin - I really, really liked this book. It's not as heavily into the faery mythology as some of the others, but is based around a fairy-curse with an evil fairy-like dude taking his revenge, generation by generation. It's good stuff. It's out in paperback now. Check it out.
Wings by Aprilynne Pike - Slower start, but got very good by the end. A new take on fairy mythology, and I really liked it. I liked the love triangle built. I read it quick and wanted to know what comes next. Always a good thing.
Lament by Maggie Stiefvater - I didn't like this as much as I thought I would. I first read her newest book Shiver about werewolves, and it was excellent, so then I picked up this one, her first book. And I thought there were some leaps in logic that didn't quite make it for me - the love story between the two leads wasn't quite believeable enough. It just didn't do it for me.
Tithe by Holly Black - this is really the seminal book for the faery book revival- of faeries as dangerously beautiful and murderous, and humans as mere playthings. In a gritty, urban setting. It's good. I didn't love it, but then, I'm not all about gritty urban fantasy.
Wondrous Strange by Leslie Livingston - It was good. Okay. Nothing great, nothing horrible. If you like the genre, check it out, but otherwise, meh. There's a sequel coming out soon. I'll probably still read it. But I'll wait for it to come out in paperback.

Others I haven't read (though I currently have one checked out from the library!)

Bones of Faerie - by Janni Lee Simner
Fairy Tale - by Cyn Balog - I've heard good feedback about this one. I'll probably check it out if I can track down a cheap or library copy.

In other exciting news - an agent requested a partial of my manuscript for Becoming Persephone! Which I know, I know, it's just a first step, and most partials eventually get rejected, but still! I got a bite!

Heather's Low Down on YA Lit Part I - Vampires

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:01:45 GMT

I’ve read a ton this summer – consuming and chomping up books like they were chex mix, almost exclusively young adult novels. Through a rag tag combination of library, Half-Price Books, buying full price, and even Ebay, I have read everything popular, checked out some award winning books, chewed through series. I’ve read about vampires (of course, and almost all of them done poorly), werewolves, witches, faeries (so many faerie books lately!), immortals, dream-walkers, and re-told old-fashioned fairy tales. Ok, this makes me want to rank them by creature and quality. Let’s start with the obvious, shall we?

VAMPIRES

Twilight Series – sorry folks, but Stephenie Meyer is the best story-teller of the bunch, even if I did have multiple ick moments with Book IV.
Vampire Academy Series – Rachelle Mead tells damn good stories. With a great mythology, and great also because the lead character isn’t even a vampire, but a vampire protector. Great thoughts about loyalty, sacrifice, self-denial. And a kick your guts in love story, which I’m hoping will somehow magically resolve itself in the book coming out on August 25^th. Mead is going to be in town, so I’m going to a book signing for the release! Very excited, both about meeting her, and getting to finally read the next book.
Evernight Series – Again an academy, with cool plot twists. And she’s just a better writer than some of them out there – good flow between scenes, good dialogue and relationships. I’m surprised this one isn’t more popular. I really liked it.
House of Night Series – by P.C. and Kristen Cast. So. This one was a good enough read. Again with the boarding school thing, and the predictable ream of friends and dumb dialogue. But it had some interesting ideas in it.
Vampire Diaries – I barely remember what it was about. Interesting enough for a couple night’s reading, but nothing to write home about. Throw-away relationships between the kids, stupid dialogue. I think this one just got popular because of it’s timing – it was already published (in the late 90's) when Twilight was first got popular, and was an easy go-to for people wanting more sexy teen vamps. And this one is coming out as a TV show on the CW.
Vampire Kisses Series by Ellen Schreiber – Horrible. HORR-I-BLE. The most shallow piece of tripe I’ve read. The relationship doesn’t even ATTEMPT to develop, and the main character is dumb. She’s a goth chick, by which the author thinks that's all she has to do for characterization and the reader will think the girl is "deep". Great. And falls in with the maybe-vamp, love at first sight. Shocker.

While we are at it, I am SO tired of the same storyline over and over and over and over again. Either the protagonist moves to a new town, or new/mysterious boy arrives. (And in at least ten different series, the stupid male/female love leads meet because they are science lab partners!! Freakin' A! Get some imagination!) Immediate attraction, interest. Secrecy. Ooooooooo, are you tingling in your bedspreads yet? Time for some sublimated sexual innuendo! Or, in some cases, like the House of Night series, your first introduction to a main character accidently walking in on him getting a blow job. Not to mention the book I just read tonight was about a secret teacher-teen sex ring! Maybe you can talk about sex in YA. In Perfect Chemistry (not a vamp book), the author even talks about the dude’s “erection”. Sex is everywhere – or at least heavy, detailed foreplay, and then shut the curtain for the main event.

Tomorrow I’ll give you my run down on faeries. I generally don’t like the faerie books, with their throwback to the original faeries as gleefully murderous fey. You can never really like the faeries, and that can be a problem, when they are the freaking protagonists!