Katiefoolery

This journal has been re-located to its very own home at Katiefoolery.com!


Please come and visit me there.

Well, one video. But definitely more than one book.

This week's video is a bit of a catch-up on my week. Which is rather logical. Why not spare a couple of minutes and catch up on said weekness?



Unfortunately, I've finished reading House of Many Ways by now. I really didn't want to. I tried my hardest to avoid it, but it happened eventually. This book definitely felt like a return to Diana Wynne Jones's inventively magical best, especially after I failed to be blown away by The Pinhoe Egg. If you've read Howl's Moving Castle, then you need to read House of Many Ways. And if you haven't read Howl... why on earth not? It's all fairytales and sarcasm and vanity and confusion. And yes, it's much better than the movie version, although the adaptation certainly has its charms. I just prefer my Howl to be a jerk, not a misunderstood anti-hero.

One of the things I like about Diana Wynne Jones is the way her characters develop in a very understated way. I was just sitting here thinking that Charmain never really grew or changed throughout House... but she did, in much the same way Sophie does in Howl's Moving Castle.

So read it. And then you can read Company of Liars, for it is similarly addictive. It's set in the time of the plague in England, but it might as well be a fantasty realm. Superstitions are upheld and mythical creatures are believed in - even a man with a wing for an arm is accepted as something that just happens. It's fascinating and beautifully written and packed full of fascinating characters. And yes, it's another book that really shouldn't have to end, but inevitably does.

Since I seem to be developing a trend here, I'm going to ask you all to recommend me your latest book-you-can't-put-down. Please?

(Also, I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and now believe that Luna Lovegood is made of some sort of crazy awesome. She was seriously the best thing about that movie and she was only in about three scenes or something.)

It's writing week at fivedotnerds! Again! I have no idea how it manages to roll around so quickly. How can three weeks pass by without my noticing them? It doesn't seem right.

It is also:

1. The last day of term


2. Practically the first day of my holidays


3. A dress-up day at work, therefore I am dressed up


4. Only a week until I'm in Sydney with LOOOOOOOOONS!!

More on that later. For now, please accept this video with numerous, vaguely-entertaining background noises, as well as my thoughts on world-building:



When it comes to world-building, I suffer from a sense of mis-placed achievement. If I were to sit there and map out the world and write pieces about the history and the culture, then my brain would decide that this is it. Hooray! We have done the work and the work is good.

Pity it's not a story, but you can't have everything. Or so they say.

Damn them.

Tell me all about your world-building. Or when you think it goes over-board. Or doesn't go far enough. You can throw in your plans for world-domination, if you wish - provided it's your own world you plan to dominate and not this one.

Or it could not. I would, of course, be referring to over-thinking. I do it all the time. No seriously, All. The. Time. To offer a case in point: the reason I haven't written in this journal for the last week and a bit is because I keep over-thinking the process. Where normal people would just sit down and blog about things, I have to turn them over and examine them from all angles and ask them questions.

By which point, it's about two days later and the news, she is old.

The reason for most of this thinking? Oh, that would be the new blog I'm putting together for my work. Not to mention browsing through other writers' blogs. It's making me want to work out what should go on here, or if I should get a domain again... I don't know. And I still want to incorporate more videos into this thing, as a sort of complementary thing.

But I know I'll just end up over-thinking it, by which time it'll be a decade later and the internet will be, like, sooooooo passé.

Anyway, in news that isn't old and hasn't been over-thought (but does most definitely involve brains), I should mention that the fivedotnerds channel is under seige... by the undead.



Any tips on what we should do to survive the onslaught? I'm not sure I prepared myself well enough, really...

Yes, genre, despite the fact that I kept referring to this video as "my thoughts on grammar". I have no idea why. It's not as though I'm obsessively interested in grammar or anything.

It's writing week again! The fact that this has rolled around so quickly disturbs me somewhat, mostly because it seems like the previous writing week was just a couple of days ago. Which leads to the further conclusion that the year is passing far too quickly.

On the up side, this means Winter may not drag out for as long as I fear it will. However, I'm not entirely sure I want the year to pass quite this quickly.

But to return to writing week and genre-not-grammar. In this video, I talk about genre, tropes, the prejudices of my university lecturers and... well, what more could you want, actually?



I'd love to know about everyone's favourite or most influential genres, too. Are there genres you love to read but would never write, for example? Tell me all. :D

Spectacular amounts of fail are occurring around me at present. Firstly, I burnt myself on my iron. I swear it was lurking about behind me, waiting for the chance to strike. And by "chance to strike" I mean "waiting for me to move my arm stupidly". Damned inanimate objects, taking advantage of my natural clumsiness.

Secondly, I have inherited the nasty cold/virus-type thing that was being passed around by the staff in the revue item. Huzzah! Now I know what my day has been missing: a throat full of razors and a general feeling of bleh, why am I at work?

Thirdly, our final night at said revue was a wonderful disaster. People forgot lines; other people couldn't turn up because they were too sick; we missed cues and got moves wrong... and we laughed all the way through it. And yet, it was still fun and we didn't really care at all.

Therefore, I declare it a success. In a faily kind of way.

Finally, I happen to be in need of luck and/or good wishes later this morning, so if you have any to spare, please send them my way.

I want to rant about this article. I want to rant about it so hard and I want to use bad grammar while I do so in the hopes that I'll make some sort of ironic point.

Because.

GAH.

So much wrong in so little time. So much that I was arguing with the screen as I read the article this morning. The author of the article states that she actually loves grammar; she's a fan of grammar; grammar makes her all kinds of happy. And yet, I'd happily stab her with an exclamation mark, should I ever happen across her in the street.

Let's start with this:

Most grammar rules don’t matter, though. That is, if you get them wrong, the reader still can find the meaning. For example, few people know when to use effect and when to use affect. But it doesn’t matter because the first is a noun and the second is a verb so the likelihood you'll mistake the meaning of a sentence because of a grammar error in this case is extremely low.

That's my bolding in there. Because I just love bold font. Or maybe to highlight a basic error before we go on to the substance of the paragraph. (Because you know you want to. You want to hear me ranting about grammar so damn bad, right? :P)

"...the first is a noun and the second is a verb" - actually, the first is a verb, too. Yes, most people confuse affect and effect. I used the wrong one by accident the other day. While messaging. And corrected myself a few lines down. But seriously, I was talking to my writer at the time and I didn't want to give the impression that their beta couldn't tell the different between effect and affect.

Let's see them in use:

He effected an air of jollity, although she wasn't deceived for a second. The effect reminded her somewhat of a puppy that was bravely attempting to pretend its favourite ball hadn't been stolen; it was impossible not to be affected by that.

Three different effect/affects, all used in different senses. Very easy to confuse. (So easy to confuse that I actually wrote "affect" instead of "effect" the first time around...) You could argue that it would still make sense if I'd used "affect" the whole way through. Then again, you could also argue that "ur" is a valid spelling of "your".

I WOULD NOT AGREE WITH YOU, should you try. Fair warning. We could still be friends, but your texts would probably make me wince whenever I read them.

If there's one thing I've learnt about bad grammar, it's this: You can read your own bad grammar, but you cannot read that of another. We're several centuries too young to remember when spelling and sentence structure was an optional, person-by-person concept... but it can't have been any fun at all. And it raises a question: why is it we're allowed to advance in technology, yet we're encouraged by some people to go backwards when it comes to communication?

Around half-way through, I experienced a small paroxysm as a result of the following statement:

We should judge people by their ideas, their creativity, their enthusiasm. None of this naturally comes at the heels of good grammar.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

This, my friends, is the one statement GUARANTEED TO DRIVE ME CRAZY. How, for the love of lamingtons, are people to express said ideas, creativity and enthusiasm if they don't have the tools that will allow them to do so? So you have ideas and creativity to hand... fantastic. What a shame you can't express them, due to your inability to spell or use words in a coherent, easily-understandable sense. Why are we constantly being told we don't have to use our brains? That we don't have to spell properly or understand how our own language works? I can only see one advantage to keeping the general populace in a state of ignorance, so let's just prepare ourselves for our new overlords right now, shall we?

And apparently, those overlords are going to be Google. Please see the following quote:

Anyway, if Google is deciding that these rules are no longer useful guidelines, then we can all follow suit.

Admittedly, at this point, I started wondering if the whole article had been an experiment in irony that had gone horribly wrong. Seriously. Who on earth is going to use Google as the standard by which all things are judged? Google.

I ask you.

We use this langauge of ours every day. Surely it's not asking too much to have a little care and love for it.

Fanfiction: what is it good for?

Well, lots of things, really. It is all things to all people. And to some people, it's nothing at all. It's so odd to think there are people out there who have no idea fanfiction even exists... or that it can be fodder for the most cracktastic events and debates. Oh, fanfic, you're like a microcosm of crazy.

More coherent thoughts on fanfic and its value can be found in this week's video, seen here:

What does everyone else think? Do you read or write fanfic? Do you think it has merit? Would you allow it if you were a published author?

I think I can safely say I'd allow it. I'd encourage it. Voraciously.

Voraciously isn't quite the right word, but that's still how I'd do it.

I read a blurb on the book the other day that caused me to laugh out loud. Which, believe me, doesn't usually go down too well in a library... but I couldn't help it. The worst bit is that the subject matter is intended to be rather serious and heart-wrenching, so I felt bad about laughing at it.

For a second or two.

Then I laughed some more.

The blurb starts thusly: Willow O'Keefe is born with osteogenesis imperfecta...

Which is a huge laugh, right? Small child, constantly in pain. I wasn't laughing at that bit, OK?

It continues:

...[a]s her family struggles to cover medial expenses, her mother Charlotte decides to file a wrongful birth lawsuit against her obstetrician for compensation that might ensure a lifetime of care for Willow.

But it means Charlotte has to say in a court of law that she would have terminated the pregnancy if she'd known about the disability in advance. And the obstetrician she's suing isn't just her physician - she's her best friend.

It shouldn't make me laugh, right?

And yet, I can't help it. It's just one tragedy after another until it reaches ridiculous proportions. There's no way I could take a book like that seriously. I mean, you might as well write a blurb that says:

Adorable, pig-tailed child gets a kitten, which dies. She gets a new kitten which digs up the old kitten AND EATS IT. Then dies.

Blurbs are such hit and miss things, though, aren't they? One of my favourite books as a teenager was Obernewtyn and I almost didn't read it because of the blurb, which read like some stock-standard, post-apocalyptic story of the far future.

It also makes me think that I could come up with a pretty amusingly tragic blurb for that doomed first draft of Black Fiddle. Behold:

Jeannie lives a happy, carefree life with her music-loving family until a deadly plague begins to eat away at the land. She and her sister are sent to fend for themselves in the city while the rest of her family falls victim to the plague, leaving them as orphans among strangers. They face prejudice and starvation, forcing Jeannie to sell the precious family heirloom entrusted to her by her grandmother: the Black Fiddle of Barnet.

In a cruel twist of fate, Jeannie's sister is stolen away by Sidhe trapped in the mortal realm seeking a way home... and the only thing that can bring her back is the fiddle Jeannie just sold.

And so on and woe and wailing and woe on woe-tarts with extra woe topping.

Sure, we're all searching for a twist or to submit our characters to the utmost levels of torment in some vain attempt at retribution for ruining our lives and our sleep and our sanity with their insistence on having their stories written. But there's a point where it just goes too far and you break through the walls of tragedy and tension, straight into the realms of ridiculousness.

So has anyone else read any laughably melodramatic blurbs lately? Or, better still: how would you write a blurb of your current WIP (novel, short story, ficlet - whatever it may be) to make it so ridiculously tragic that people are already reaching for the tissues before they even open the cover?

To state that I am insanely happy with this week's video would be a slight exaggeration. I am happy with the majority of it, but please, let me list the things that bug me about it.

1. I had to shoot it on one of the cruddiest days we've had so far this year. Actually, now that I think about it, the title of "Cruddiest Day" may actually go to any of those that fell during the heatwave and/or the horrendous bushfires... So let me revise that: I had to shoot it on the coldest, windiest, rainiest, darkest day of the year so far. So the quality's grainier than I'd like it to be (which is "not at all").

2. My camera was so obsessed with the sound of my central heating that it decided it should CONSTANTLY BE IN THE BACKGROUND.

3. So much footage had to be tossed so cruelly away, even when it begged to be included on bended knee and subsequently sent me chocolates and fruit hampers in the hopes of tempting me to give in.

But that aside, there are so many things that worked exactly as I wanted them to and I couldn't be happier. I mean, seriously, exactly as I wanted them to. It's not often that things come together like that and behave. There were points during the editing process where I was actually squeeing because it was working so well.

I had so much fun making it; I really hope you all have just as much fun watching it. Here, for your enjoyment, is Cupcake Wednesday:



And yes, I would like to know which style of cooking best equates to your writing style. I wouldn't recommend making a video to illustrate your answer, although I'd love to see one. The painful truth of the matter is that I had to winnow through thirty-six minutes of footage to bring you the four you see before you today.

Painful.

But ultimately rewarding.

So tell me: is your writing style a lovely pasta, or is it a delicious pie?