Busy Bee

I've been a very busy bee lately, mostly with the day gig, partly with other things. I've been reading a lot, and I've been listening to the Dixie Chicks' Taking the Long Way. It's excellent, and it plays in my head even when I'm not listening to the CD.

The title song keeps reminding me to be true to myself, and not to mind what the outside world says. In the end, I can't help but be myself, so I might as well get on my own bandwagon as try to make myself over into a pale copy of someone else.

You might be wondering where this comes up. It tends to come up every time I run slap into the ways my fantasy novel isn't like anything I've read or heard of. One of my secondary POV characters is going to make the journey from cynicism to faith, and another is going to struggle with competing, shifting loyalties. There's a side of me that says this is what happens in the story, and there's another side that thinks no one's going to want to read this. People want what's on the shelves.

Don't they?

I don't know. A group of writers I know were talking recently--about blogs and websites, as it happened--and one of the writers mentioned that people are buying fewer books. That writer wondered if websites and blogs were drawing readers away from books. She might be onto something, but I can't help wondering if the narrowing of the market isn't playing a part in this.

For example, I love cozy mysteries. One of my favorite series is Sarah Graves's "Home Repair is Homicide" series. I also like Rett MacPherson's Torie O'Shay mysteries, which feature an amateur sleuth who's a genealogist. When I go to the bookstore, however, it seems as if all the cozy series are organized around some kind of craft. There are tea shop mysteries, knitting mysteries, needlework mysteries...and they all seem very alike to me, so much so that when I pick the books up, I put them back down again.

In romance, there are more Regency-set historicals than you can shake a stick at. There's a limit to how many Regency-set historicals I can bear to read in a month, so that automatically limits my book-buying.

Bottom line? For me, I'm buying fewer books because fewer of the books that are currently being published interest me. It seems to me that publishing is getting more, not less, trend intensive, and that every trend has a limited audience. If every publisher is chasing after the same 25,000 readers (and ignoring the others), sales will go down.

I remember reading an article a few years ago, talking about how TV does this: glut the airwaves with the same kind of show, scheduling something like House against the original House. The writer went on to mourn the loss of counter-programming: if you're trying to find something to go up against 18-35 year old men, you don't schedule a program the men will like. Instead, you program something they won't like, something other segments of the audience will like. You serve the underserved, and they'll watch you.

(Sadly I don't remember where I read this article, or who wrote the article--if someone knows, let me know.)

I think this might be something to consider elsewhere in entertainment: don't do what the rest of the world is doing; don't chase smaller slices of an already-committed audience. Find the audience that's being ignored.

Restless

I'm feeling a little restless, a little dissatisfied with the look here. But I'm not crazy about the other possibilities and I'm feeling too 'net-stupid to figure out how to make things look the way I want them to look. However, the restlessness will reach critical mass and I'll be at a point where I won't care how long it takes me to make things the way I want them, and I'll change things.

I do that.

I go along, mildly annoyed by a situation, pretty much able to deal with it...and then one day I snap and mildly annoying is suddenly absolutely intolerable.

Usually it's about money. I don't want to spend the money to fix the situation, so I don't...but only for a while because that moment of snapping will come.

Or most of the time. Sometimes I don't snap. I haven't snapped yet over a laptop--I go through waves of craving one, and I come thisclose to buying one, but I can't quite make myself spend the necessary money, and the wave subsides. This has happened two or three times in the last couple of years.

The thing that hangs me up--or one of the things, anyway--is that I use one of those "natural" keyboards, the ones with the split in the middle, so that the b & n keys are further apart than the t & y keys. And the t & y aren't anywhere near each other. This keeps my wrists pretty much straight and it keeps my fingers from crowding one another...and it keeps all my really bad typing habits under control. (Like reaching for the 'n' with my left index finger.)

Sadly, they don't yet make laptops with a keyboard like that. I could always plug my existing keyboard into the laptop, but since the chief selling point of a laptop (for me, anyway) is portability, lugging a larger-than-ordinary keyboard around with the laptop kind of defeats the purpose.

So maybe changing the look of this blog'll turn out to be like the laptop: more trouble than it's worth... Anyway, we'll see...

Whirlybird

I don't have much to say, and very little time or energy to say it in. Busy with workshops, busy with chapter stuff, busy with demanding projects at the day gig.

Busy, busy, busy.

But I'm getting stuff done, so that's good, and there's ice cream in the fridge, which is even better.

And maybe tomorrow I'll have something to say and the time and energy to say it...

My Favorite Toy

My favorite toy is language.

In the shower this morning, I was thinking about a recent discussion I had with some friends about pronouncing Latin. It seems that not everyone pronounces it the same way--some of us pronounce the 'v' as a 'v', and some of us pronounce the 'v' and a 'w'. (Someone had the very good point that, somehow, Julius Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici [I came, I saw, I conquered]" doesn't have the same ring if you pronounce it "Waynee, weedee, weekee".)

The thing I kept thinking during the course of the discussion is none of us knows how the Romans pronounced it, and that I'd be willing to bet pronunciation had changed over the centuries the Romans were Romans. On top of that, look at all the differences between French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish--romance languages one and all. You can tell the languages have a common root, but they're also very different.

From there, I played with my recent realization that the Champs Elysées was French for Elysian Fields. Since I'd known the Latin campus means field, you'd have thought I'd made the connection, especially since Elysées isn't all that different than Elysian.

But no.

Yet that's what I love about language: those nooks and crannies and surprises. That's also why I love English. It has this way of stealing from other languages, a kind of magpie going, "Oh look, shiny", then snatching the new thing up. The language I use has its roots in Old English, Norman French, and Latin, and it's borrowed from every other language English-speaking people have come across. Opossum, pajama, skunk, circus, abalone, get: each of those words has a different root language, yet all live together in English.

And then there are the surprising ways people put all those words together. Poets and prose stylists and people you meet who speak vividly, all of them bending the language to their needs. I love that.

Love it. Playing with language is the best game there is.

I'm here. Really.

I really am.

I'm just sort of swamped by stuff, stuff that takes attention and thought and time.

Which doesn't leave me much time for anything else.

Sadly, very little of this is writing-related. Well, okay, reading Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History is writing-related, in that it's compost for the heap. I do that a lot nowadays, read things without quite knowing why, but as I read them, I know they're going to end up affecting the fabric of the fantasy. So while there won't be a land war in Asia or colonialism or nationalism (or at least I don't think so--that's not the way the imagination is going), what I've read will still be there, in thread about religion and philosophy and national myths of origin.

And politics. Though that's kind of a quagmire at the moment. Which, it seems to me, politics often is.