While I’ve occasionally written about Disney here, I’m not sure the nerdy High School Musical fangirl has ever come out. So, for those of you who’ve never had the, uh, pleasure of hearing me talk about it person: I love High School Musical. Like… Love. Like, I have poster of Corbin Bleu in my bedroom and carry my MetroCard in a plastic HSM wallet and have a poster hanging above my desk at work. I saw the third movie in the theater three times. And I will watch, essentially, anything with a HSM alum in it.

Anything.

Which is why I not only watched I Kissed a Vampire — a parody rock musical webseries featuring HSM alumns Lucas Grabeel and Drew Seeley — but also went to the premier.

Pro: Lucas Grabeel and Drew Seeley were there! I love them! A lot!

Con: It was really, really bad. (Review over at Tweenage Wasteland.)

But on the upside, look at how cute these gentlemen are! I love them!

I’ve been on vacation for a few days, and it has been wonderful. This is my first-ever “adult” vacation, which is not nearly as racy as it sounds; all I mean is that it’s the first one I’ve ever planned and paid for by myself. I took a few days off of work, flew down to Georgia, and visited one of my best friends. (Also the World of Coke. It was like returning to the mothership. I am basically a walking brand advertisement to begin with…)

Anyway, another lovely thing about travel-heavy vacation? Hours of uninterrupted reading time! Aside from the books in my previous post, I also finished Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld and reviewed it over at AV. Enjoy!

As for me, back to work tomorrow. Boo. But at least I feel nicely recharged!

Most of the books I read are either not things I have enough thoughts on to bother writing reviews of, or fold into the genres we review at AV. But here are a couple that don’t, that are worth talking about:


Dani Noir by Nova Ren Suma
Fade-in on thirteen-year-old Dani Callanzano. It’s the summer before eighth grade, and Dani’s stuck in her nowhere mountain town with only her favorite noir mysteries at the Little Art Movie Theatre to keep her company. But when a big secret invades the scene in real life, Dani decides to bring the truth to light.

Full disclosure: I picked this book up because the author, Nova Ren Suma, is a lovely person who I know from a forum and have met for coffee once. Generally, when browsing, I lean more towards scifi/fantasy (shock, I know), but I think I probably would have picked up Dani regardless, because the title is catchy, the cover is gorgeous, and the idea of a tween girl heroine who loves noir movies is awesome.¹

The book stands up. It’s very voice-y, and Dani is a great character. She’s interesting, but not always very nice, striking a great balance as a character who was often selfish and inconsiderate, but still likable; whose motivations are always clear and make her bad behavior understandable, even sympathetic. But what really stood out to me were two elements. First, the setting, a small town in upstate NY. Hey, I’m from one of those! I kept smiling at the descriptions throughout. My town is actually even more rural and much smaller than Dani’s, but it’s also a town where all the adults know who all of the kids are, where someone might see you when you’re hiding and call your mom because everyone knows everyone’s business.

Then there was Taylor. Taylor had been Dani’s best friend growing up, but they’d grown apart; Taylor was kind of weird and nerdy, and Dani was frustrated with her for not getting that maybe the friendship was past its sell-by date. The friendship story arch was great, but it also made me cringe and have to read through my fingers like I was watching a horror movie, because I am Taylor. Or at least, I was when I was in middle school.

Actually, that got me thinking: I’ve always read scifi/fantasy as escapism, and someday I’ll probably write a much longer post on that.² But reading about the relationship between Dani and Taylor drove that home to me: genre fiction is much further removed from my own experiences, and I’m much more comfortable reading it. But the fact that it made me cringe is, I think, a testament to how right the book gets things.

Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

I was born with a light covering of fur.
After three days it had all fallen off, but the damage was done. My mother stopped trusting my father because it was a family condition he had not told her about. One of many omissions and lies.
My father is a liar and so am I.
But I’m going to stop. I have to stop.
I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.
That’s my promise.
This time I truly mean it.

There isn’t nearly as much to say about this one. Or rather, there is. There’s lots and lots to say about it, because I’m not going to.

The author put out a plea for people not to give out — or read — spoilers. I sort of shrugged that off originally; I don’t really seek spoilers, but I’m generally indifferent when I stumble upon them.

You don’t want to be spoiled for Liar.

It’s a psychological thriller, but not at all what I expected going into it, even though I’ve been reading the author’s blog since before she began writing it and had also read all of the promo material. All of the elements within it are laid down brilliantly; I can’t say I saw the (first) big twist coming, but there was enough there that, blown away as I was, it also all made sense. The rest of it? I’m still trying to pin down what was truth and what was lie, and who actually committed the crime.

I finished it and handed it to my best friend almost immediately, so she could read it and I’d have someone to discuss the ending with. It’s already on my reread list. And, having read nearly everything else by Larbalestier,³ I feel pretty confident in saying it’s her best book.

Running laundry in my building is like doing a word problem for a middle school math class: there are six washing machines, but three of them hold only half as much as the other three. Of the larger three washing machines, only one actually works. There are three dryers. All of them work, but the first two cost more than the third to achieve the same level of dryness. However, the third sometimes eats laundry tokens rather than drying your clothing. Assuming optimal conditions in which none of the washers or dryers are already in use, how many tokens do you need in order to run two loads of laundry in the most efficient manner?

And then there’s the laundry token issue in and of itself. The washers and dryers don’t take quarters, only tokens — not that there is a sign explaining this anywhere, which was very confusing the first time I tried to run laundry and no machines would take my change. There also isn’t a token dispenser or anything helpful like that. To acquire tokens, you have to knock the super’s door and ask his wife for them.

This is complicated by three factors. First, the wife — who’s name I don’t know, which I should really rectify one of these days — isn’t always home, and no one else in their family speaks English, and I only speak English, so trading quarters for tokens requires a lot of elaborate hand gestures. Second, I have an almost pathological fear of bothering people, so needless to say, knocking on the door and asking someone to stop what she’s doing to give me tokens is really, really, really not my favorite thing. Third, about half the time, they’re entirely out of tokens anyway.

We’ve been living in this building for well over a year, so I’ve mostly learned to deal with all of this. But there are still weeks where I’d rather buy five new pairs of underwear than go to the trouble of getting laundry tokens and then trying to negotiate the actual washers and dryers.

–

I feel weird and self conscious writing about writing here. Can’t quite explain why. But here goes.

It’s coming up on National Novel Writing Month, wherein people strive to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I know a lot of people who are signed up already and getting psyched, writing outlines, totally geared up to go. I, however, am not one of them.

Way back in January, I made passing reference to trying to get a manuscript into shape to start submitting to agents by the end of the year. This is not going to happen. But I have revised that goal a little: I’d like to have my current round of revisions done by the end of the year. I’m not at a point where Nano, as much fun as it is (and it is!) would help.

Or rather: I’ve done Nano successfully four times (2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007). I am totally secure in my ability to write a whole lot in a short time period. And I got a lot out of Nano, beyond four unreadably bad novellas. It really did help me get into the habit of coming home from class (and later work) and opening up my project, sitting down and getting to work, and getting a heck of a lot accomplished.

But I can do that now. I know I can. Writing messy first drafts is not my problem, and motivating myself to work on them regularly is also not my problem. I have plenty of rough drafts, finished but never revised, sitting around on my hard drive or printed out and gathering dust. I love writing rough drafts. I love discovering things, world building, working out story structure, and getting lost in it all with no pressure for it to be good. I can do that. I’ve done that.

What I’ve never done is made the leap from a jumbled bunch of good ideas to a polished version that I’m not embarrassed by the thought of other humans reading. I’m not good at revising. It intimidates the crap out of me. And when I’m not going “Aaaaugh, how do I do this???” I find myself going, “Aaaaaugh, why did I ever think I could write well, this is the worst prose that has ever happened, omg I give up.” And then I give up and write another rough draft of a different project.

So it’s time. I’ve got a very rough, but I think salvageable, manuscript draft. Writing it from the ground up took me about three months, if you take out the few months in the middle when my computer broke and I lost everything and then was too busy sulking about what I’d lost to get back to work. So I’m hoping three months will also be adequate to make this next leap. What I’m looking at now, I think, is about 2/3 rewriting to 1/3 revising existing text — with frequent pauses to polish the bits I’ve rewritten, which is not something I usually do when writing rough drafts.

So that’s my plan. I’m putting it out here because making it public makes it feel real to me, and I do better with an actual deadline. Wish me luck. (And to all you Nano-ites out there, have fun!)