Category Archives: Comic

August 1, 2013 · 11:20 AM

A Look Back – Leaves (Part 2)

Obviously if you’re just joining us you should read the post before this one.

Ok, moving right along.

The problems with Leaves:

For one thing, it is incredibly difficult to write children.  I have probably not spent enough time with children to be able to write them well.  Molly started out as an eight-year-old who spoke and acted with the perspicacity of a world-weary grandmother.  When my mother pointed this out, I changed it so Molly was ten.  So then she became a ten-year-old who spoke and acted with the perspicacity of a world-weary grandmother.

“It probably does,” Molly stated, picking up another nut. “You’re trying to sound sure of yourself to make me feel better, but you know as well as I do that our chances of finding her aren’t very good.  First of all, before I could look for her, I’d have to look for a way back to my village, and that would be hard enough.  Then I’d have to actually search for her all over the countryside, which is also an impossible task.”

The biggest problem, though, is one I still face – I was attempting to write a historical novel when my grasp of history is laughably poor.  Whenever I try to write books of this nature, I run into the same questions I can never answer: How did they speak?  What technology did they have available to them?  What historical events had happened?  How did they travel?  Did they wear hats?  What were the class systems like?  On and on.  And I tried to write despite not knowing any of that, which, as you can imagine, did not work out so well.

Finally, the plot was shaky and cobbled together, the characters not well developed enough, and the tone too kitschy.  I had set out to make it read like a dark fairy tale.  Instead it reads like a book someone wrote with the goal of having it sound like a dark fairy tale.

HOW I’D FIX IT – For one thing, I’d have to do my research.  Maybe learn how kids act, talk, and think.  Definitely learn how History works.  I’d tighten up the plot and really try to give each character a life of his or her own.  Those are the issues that I need to tackle before I can even begin to rewrite this book, and I just don’t know when I’ll have the time.

That’s it for now.  Might want to talk about Grotesque.  We’ll see how I feel.

Word of the Day: Perspicacity (n) – Keenness of mental perception and understanding; discernment

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July 24, 2013 · 7:51 AM

A Look Back – Leaves

Here we go again!  Have you read this post?  If not, consider glancing through it so you know what’s going on.  For those who haven’t guessed, I’m going to go over a book I wrote called Leaves.  This book holds a special place in my heart for reasons I can’t begin to understand, and at 93,300 words (about 175 pages, single-spaced on Word), it is the longest book I’ve ever written.  By far.  And that makes me want to cry, because I want to rewrite the whole damn thing.  Alright, let’s get on with this.

INSPIRATION – It was the summer before I was going to start college, and I had a dream that was exactly like a movie.  I was not in it; I was just watching it happen.  There was a little girl with curly hair who lived with her mother.  Her father, I understood without being told, was a bad man who was either dead or just out of the picture.  Then the girl got separated from her mother, and somehow ended up in another world.  She was standing in a forest, in the middle of a hollow, ankle deep in a pile of leaves.  The trees that surrounded her were crooked and black, and leafless.  Cut to a shot over a man’s shoulder.  He has one hand braced on a tree and is peering at the girl from behind the trunk.  The man looks like Jack Skellington if Jack had skin – huge torso, thin, spindly legs, tattered pinstriped suit.  He has skin like parchment and looks like a fearsome thing, but he is actually kind.  I can tell that this man wants to help the little girl, but he is afraid that she will fear him, so he puts an illusion on himself to make him look more friendly.  Cut to inside the hollow – the man approaches from between the trees wearing a suit that is striped with all the colors of Fall – brown, orange, and yellow.  His appearance has changed so that he looks less like a dead man walking and more like a human.  He steps up to the girl, and she quickly looks down at her shoes.  Then he says, “Aren’t you even going to look at me?”  The girl looks up at him and says, “I’m Molly.”  Then the “camera” pans around them, circling slowly.  As it gets around to the back of the man in the suit, a flash of lightning briefly illuminates his true likeness, though Molly doesn’t notice.  (I swear to God I am not making any of this up)

Then…something.  There is some adventure that I could not remember, but Molly is in danger and the man does everything he can to help her.  They become very close.  Then this happens: Molly and the man are sleeping on beds of leaves.  Molly’s mother appears out of nowhere and wakes her to take her away.  I remember feeling like something was wrong.  I should have been happy that Molly had been reunited with her mother, but even Molly looked apprehensive.  Then the man wakes up and sees that Molly is gone.  He searches frantically for her, then he looks up to the heavens and bellows her name.  And I woke up with the heartbroken wail of “MOLLLLYYYY!” still ringing in my ears.  I tried desperately to go back to sleep.  I needed to know how it ended, but, of course, it didn’t work that way.  I was awake for good, and I never found out.  So I wrote a book.

I swear that is the shortest version I can write.  I can see already that this is going to be a two-parter.  Damn.  I’ll tell you the plot of the book I guess and then save the rest for the next post.

PLOT – A little girl named Molly lives with her mother until one day her mother is kidnapped.  As she runs through town searching for help, Molly stops to catch her breath at a fountain and ends up falling into it.  Instead of hitting the bottom, though, she tumbles through some misty portal and ends up somewhere else, standing in a pile of leaves and…well you know this part.  So then Molly and Zan (I named the Jack Skellington guy Zan) have some adventures looking for Molly’s mother, but all is not as it seems and there’s a whole second part to the book which centers around grown-up Molly which is just stupid because I was doing the whole living-through-the-character thing again.  That’s about it.

I’ll spare you for now.  Soon to follow – the thrilling conclusion!

Word of the Day: Amalgamate (v) – To mix or merge so as to make a combination; blend; unite; combine

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July 20, 2013 · 11:44 AM

Another Quick (Not Really) Book Review

I know I owe you at least one more post about my previously written books, but first…

A week or two ago I was at the movies and a trailer for The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (book written by Cassandra Clare) came on.  I didn’t recognize the plot, but I recognized the title.  I’d passed by those books more than a couple times in the bookstore.  So I decided to go pick up the first in the series to see what it was all about.  I have to keep myself apprised of my competition, after all.

Here are my impressions summed up: It is not a terrible book.  I did enjoy reading it for the most part.  I am not going to go into exhaustive detail on why I liked it, but I am going to talk extensively about what I didn’t like, for educational purposes, you know?  Since I’m most comfortable with lists, I’m going to give you a list [Minor Spoiler Warning]:

What I liked: The idea of demons, vampires, werewolves and the like being real is not a new one.  But I did like the concept of using “magic wands” of a sort that have been re-purposed into “steles” that tattoo powerful runes onto the skin and other things.

What I didn’t like:

1. Confusion – I am very used to reading about new and exciting fantastical worlds with their own sets of rules, and I was still very confused by the book.  Even worse, the main character herself was confused by the explanations she was receiving.  Clare made a point of saying so:

“Forgive me,” he said.  “This must be confusing for you.”

“You think?”

City of Bones, 77-78

What Clare didn’t consider is the possibility that if her “mundane” main character was confused, the reader probably would be, too.

2. Motivation – A lot of times in the book, I found myself doubting the characters’ motivations for doing things.  They seemed contrived, more intent on furthering the plot than staying true to what real people might do.  For example, Clary (the main character) finds herself facing a portal to she-has-NO-idea-where that she finds out her mother would’ve used from time to time.  Her mother has disappeared, seemingly killed or kidnapped.  The idea of her escaping has never been discussed.  Yet this happens:

“I want to see where she would have gone,” she said, reaching for the door.  “I want to see where she was going to escape to -”

City of Bones, 109

She then proceeds to go through the portal.  Note that Clary’s reasoning was she wanted to see where her mother “would have gone.”  Not, “Maybe she escaped.  Maybe if I go through here I’ll find her.”  No, it was just “If she had escaped, which I don’t believe she did and we never talked about her doing, she would be here.  She won’t be, but I just want to see where she would have been.”  It’s worth noting here that Clary has never been shy about asking questions, yet she suddenly decides to jump through a portal she knows nothing about just to see where her mother definitely won’t be.  See what I mean?  I hope so.

3. Clary – I am being harsh.  I know.  But I can’t help it.  Clary is a useless main character.  Yes, she is a fifteen-year-old girl.  Yes, God knows I was useless when I was fifteen.  But Clary is the “special” main character of a book, so one would expect her to be worthy of the title Protagonist.  Instead, she is a character who things happen to and around.  She very rarely actively does.  I can list all the notable things she does do right here: She accidentally kills a demon by throwing her hands out in defense and shoving a magical object into its mouth, she jumps through a portal, she uses two runes – one to turn a picture of a cup into a cup, the other to break through a magical barrier, she throws a knife on a whim and it happens to connect with the target, she throws herself in front of somebody to stop them from being killed.  That’s about it.  The rest of the time, everyone else fights and does things while dragging her along.  Clary even laments the fact that she is useless at one point in the book.

I knew it was there, Clary thought. I should have acted on it.  Even if I didn’t have a ________ like _____, I could have thrown something at it or told Jace about it.  She felt stupid and useless and thick…

City of Bones, 360 (some words omitted to avoid major spoilers)

And don’t talk to me about character arcs.  This is three quarters of the way into the book.  No arc has happened at this point.  My friend was sitting by me as I read the final climactic scene in the book and started screaming at the fictional character to do something.  This happened.  I swear.  She was just standing there as the climax happened.  In the end, I came to this conclusion: It felt as if Clare had read a manual on how to create a Strong Female Lead without really understanding what it meant.  Clary is constantly doing things like refusing to be left behind – “Stay here, you hear me?  Stay here.”  “Like hell I will,” she muttered – but then she doesn’t add anything to the plot by not staying behind.  Literally nothing different would have happened in that scene if she really had stayed.  That was the worst part – almost all the side characters were infinitely more interesting and more competent than she was.  It was a very Bella Swan problem.  (Yes “Bella Swan” is an adjective now)

4. Cliche – Look…everything’s been done.  Everything.  If you’ve thought about it, so has someone else.  The only reason the next generation of Supernatural Boyfriends isn’t going to include some kind of were-weasel is that no one would buy the books…I hope.

were-weasel

The thing is, certain cliches are just tired.  First there’s the “Just get out of here you big, dumb, stupid animal” scenario, in which a character tells Clary that he doesn’t care about her in order to protect her, and she falls for it.  Who hasn’t seen that a million times before?  The one that really got me though was that Clary and Jace fell on top of each other multiple times.  Remember that portal that Clary falls through?  Jace goes after her and falls prone on top of her.  Then on two different occasions the two of them are riding in a vehicle together and the vehicle swerves and Clary falls into Jace.  (I have just now realized what Clare might have been doing given how the book ends, but I still think it was blatantly overused)  Those moments pulled me out of the book each time.  I think she could have done better.  (I didn’t cite anything in this one because DAMN this post has gone on too long.  You’ll just have to trust me.)

Final diagnosis?  City of Bones gets a B- .  Not terrible, but certainly not amazing.  The end.

Word of the Day: Adversary (n) – a person, group, or force that opposes or attacks; opponent; enemy; foe

(I’m working on a comic right now, but it won’t be ready until my next post.  Sorry.)

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