Steam Trains and Ghosts - Margaret Taylor's Writing Blog

Book Covers!

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:17:00 +0000

I have a newfound respect for graphic designers. You probably don't want to guess how many hours it took wrestling around with Photoshop to get the colors of the circly things in the background just right. These people must put so much time and effort into every cover that hits bookstore shelves.

Anyway, my efforts do look homemade, but I'm quite happy with how they came out. That lady in blue there is Nasan, by the way, heroine of the upcoming Confederacy. I got to bust out the old watercolor pencils for her. I used to draw a lot when I was a teenager but quit when the writing thing took off. Maybe it's time to pick it back up.

A Very Traditional Klingon War Chant

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:08:00 +0000

Klingon War Chant

Oh, the nerdiness ... I love it.

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:23:00 +0000

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery. It's not exactly deep, but aw, hell, neither is I Can Has Cheezburger.

The Tower at Stony Wood

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:00:00 +0000

In adventurous stories, there often happens to be this character who knows what's going on. They're the one who dribbles out confusing riddles to the hero just as he needs them, and no more. The one who could just tell everybody the big plot secret but won't, because if that happened the characters could just resolve the story's conflict and go home. These characters seem to take a perverse enjoyment of their job, reveling in the "Nyah, nyah, I know something you don't know!" Such a character is the Bard of Skye in Patricia A. McKillip's Tower at Stony Wood.

The Tower at Stony Wood starts out conventionally enough for a fantasy novel. Cyan Dag, knight of the kingdom of Yves, receives a visit from the Bard of Skye on his king's wedding night. The Bard gives him a dire warning: the king has just married a monster in mortal form, and his true bride has been trapped in a tower! The book then proceeds like a strange dream. Cyan Dag has no specific instructions from the Bard (nor did he think to ask), so he wanders the countrysides of Yves and Skye at random, trying the towers that he comes across. He's not the sharpest sword in the scabbard.

Invariably his experiences with towers go something like this: "Thank you! But our princess is in another castle. Please try again."

Meanwhile, the Bard and her sister send Cyan unhelpful dreams, and in two apparently unrelated plotlines, another man in another tower is attempting to tame a dragon, and a baker and her daughter are in yet another tower watching the whole affair – princess, knight, dragon, and Bard – by magic mirror. I think I counted at least six towers in all in this book. Or maybe they were the same tower, all mystically connected? McKillip is never quite clear on this point.

Cyan and I would both like to grab Ms. Bard by the robe and ask her, "What the dickens is going on here?" There is a partial explanation at the end, but it left me feeling like somebody had just played a card trick on me.

The "Sesame Seed Treat"

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:16:00 +0000

Has the Carleton Snack Bar managed to top the doughnuts with the sausages on them?

Perhaps. The photo on the right simply does not do their latest creation justice. Earlier in the week these cups appeared on the Snack Bar shelves, enigmatically labeled "gluten free" and nothing more. Curious (and expecting a pudding), I bought one.

They are sesame seeds suspended in honey.

To be fair, they are sesame seeds suspended in honey, with chocolate sauce and whipped cream on top. But ... sesame seeds in honey? Why? Does it have a reputation for health-giving powers? Is it some culture's traditional dish?

To be fair, nothing about this, er, slurry is gross. It's tasty, like a spoonful of apricot jam is tasty. Like apricot jam, it would be quite good on toast. But I wouldn't want to eat a whole cupful of it.

As a matter of fact, after a little Google searching I've discovered that the Greeks have a candy called pasteli that is made almost exclusively of sesame seeds and honey. But pasteli is dry and chewy, kind of like a nut roll. Not like a, um ... oh, I don't even know what to call this stuff.

Darn Those Vegans

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Pineapple Spice Pudding Cake

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:26:00 +0000

Adapted from Allrecipes.com.

Tasty, but not all that exciting. I think the problem was that I overbaked it, so the pudding on the bottom all dried up and it was just a spice cake. The ingredients are so dirt cheap that I might try it again. This recipe uses less sugar than the Allrecipes version, which was definitely a good idea, and if I was to do it again I think I'd up the butter content and add vanilla.

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp nutmeg
1 cup milk

1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 1/2 cups water
1 tbsp butter

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 can pineapple rings

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom of a 9" square baking dish. Bring brown sugar, water, and butter to a boil in a saucepan.

Meanwhile, combine flour, white sugar, baking powder, spices and salt, then stir in milk. Once it's well-mixed, stir in walnuts. Pour into baking dish. Pour the hot sugar mixture over that. It'll look gross, but don't worry.

Top with pineapple rings in a pretty pattern. Bake 35-40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. You definitely want to use secondary containment here – look how that sugary mess bubbled all over the pan.

Enjoy!

Witches

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Eh-heh-heh!

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:17:00 +0000

Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics

Oh, my gosh, so true. I love blowing stuff up in my stories.

Jack of Kinrowan

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Meh. "Fairies in Ottawa" is all you need to know. That was the book's schtick, and that's about all there was to the plot, too.

Keeps Me Awake at Night

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:00:00 +0000

The Confederacy of Heaven: Coming in 2010 to a Theater Near You

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Hey, everybody. I've got a few announcements to make.

First of all, is that I've been playing around with Wordpress to see if I can get a blog with a more professional look. I like what I see over there, so you can probably expect Steam Trains and Ghosts to migrate over to Wordpress sometime this winter. In the meantime, posting here is going to continue as normal.

Second is that I'm going to be releasing Grizelda as an e-book with the folks over at Smashwords.com. They're cool folks with author-friendly policies. I haven't got a specific timetable on that yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Finally, here's the big deal: My sophomore literary effort, The Confederacy of Heaven, will hit the Internet in fall of 2010, barring it getting picked up by a traditional agent. It's a post-apocalyptic tale about a drought that's sucking the life out of the world. Nasan Rattlingbones has been exiled from her nomad clan and left to die in the desert. There a sprite called Oscar cons her into becoming a reluctant heroine. A very reluctant heroine. When Nasan finds out what Oscar is really up to, heads will roll.

Vampire Carrying Capacity

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:25:00 +0000

There is a scholarly paper making the rounds of the Internet (“Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality,” by Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi) that claims to have disproved the existence of vampires using math. Their central claim is that, if a vampire needs to feed once a month, and every vampire’s victim becomes a vampire, the vampire population would increase geometrically and the human race would be wiped out in a couple of years.

Everybody knows that vampires don’t turn their victims every time. That would be as ridiculous as … as vampires actually existing. Well, anyway. In this essay, I was going to rebut their argument with some more math, but I discovered it’s already been done. Brian Thomas does a wonderful job of explaining the population ecology of vampires and humans in Sunnyvale (“Vampire Ecology in the Jossverse,” easily Googleable), and he uses much more advanced math than I could ever muster. Oh, well. Go read both papers. I have only a few notes to add, and all I have to invoke is a little algebra.

There seem to be two major feeding strategies among vampires. As far as I can tell, nobody’s named the strategies, so I’m just going to call them “grazers” and “gorgers.” Gorgers are kind of like your pet snake – they can go for weeks without food, and then they go and drain all the blood out of a human body. Grazers suck peoples’ blood, but they don’t kill them while they’re doing it, and presumably they have to do it more often.

Since vampires don’t exist, I have absolutely no facts to go on. All the numbers that I’m using I have had to pull out of thin air. The only real number I have is this: the Red Cross says that a healthy adult can lose a unit of blood (half a liter) every eight weeks without suffering any ill effects.

Say one of your grazing vampires needed a unit of blood every night to “survive.” He’d need, as an absolute minimum, fifty-six humans to give the first human enough time to recover before coming back to feed on her again.

One vampire to every fifty-six humans and the Red Cross would be pissed.

But in light of those numbers, one vampire to every thousand people or so starts to sound pretty reasonable. A small town like Northfield could support a coven of 17 or 18.

For “gorger” vampires, the math is a little different. Here we’re not concerned with how much blood a person can lose without getting hurt, but with how many people are dying. Say a gorger vampire needs to consume one victim every two weeks. A vampire like this would increase the annual death rate of a population by 26. What the vampire needs, then, is a population big enough where that increase in the death rate won’t get people suspicious.

Remember those lovely population histograms from the Elves? Birthrate/deathrate calculations are going to come in handy again. In a nice Western country where the life expectancy is around 80, 1/80^th of the people have to die each year to keep the population constant. So a population with an annual death rate of 26 would have x * 1/80 =26 or 2080 people. But wait – if a vampire moved into a population of 2080, the death rate would double. The local townsfolk would be knocking on Buffy’s door in no time. Let’s multiply that by a hundred. In a city of 208,000, there are about 2,600 deaths a year. Add a vampire and the death rate would go up to 2626. Such a vampire could plausibly manage not to get caught.

Notice that the gorger model supports a much lower population density than the grazers – one individual in a city of 208,000, instead of 17 in a Northfield. And there’s the fact that a gorger’s victims would be dying under highly mysterious circumstances – it’s hard to hide all those dessicated corpses. A gorger vampire would have to limit herself to people who won’t be missed, which would drive the vampire population density even lower. There are many questions left unanswered about the grazer strategy, too. How likely are people to notice a fang-shaped hickey and waking up light-headed in the morning? Still, if you’re a vampire, it pays to be a grazer.

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Hey, all, and welcome back to Carleton! Over the summer, we got a bunch of new donations:

Hellblazer: The Devil You Know
The Glasswright's Apprentice, by Mindy L. Klasky
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
Amber and Ashes (Dragonlance, the Dark Disciple, Vol. 1) by Margaret Weis
Victorian Fairy Tales, the Revolt of the Fairies and Elves by Jack David Zipes

So come on over and check them out!

9: Awesome Robot Pterodactyl

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:37:00 +0000

Warning: this blog post contains spoilers for the movie 9 (though not the spoiler for the really big secret).

9 does something that a lot of major, well-funded movies are not willing to do: it kills off characters. And it hurts. The MPAA’s rating of PG-13 is appropriate, so brace yourself for a difficult but thrilling ride.

At only 81 minutes, Shane Ackerman’s debut movie does not contain one iota of flab. A machine called the Brain has turned against us and wiped out humanity. The only survivors are nine little hackey-sack dolls. The Brain is still out there. It must be stopped, and it’s going to cost them.

As a matter of fact, the very tightness of the plot is one of the things I have to complain about the movie. 9’s creative team seems to be holding itself back from long, self-indulgent panning shots, but since the movie is so short anyway, I wouldn’t have minded slowing down to wander around in the neat world they’ve created a bit more. Only the major strokes of each doll’s personality are sketched out, and I think there could have been more there if they’d dug deeper.

But who the heck am I kidding? The robot pterodactyl was sweet.

On a technical note, I admire Ackerman & Co’s work at balancing the dolls’ narrative roles. I know from writing that when a bunch of characters have the same job, like members of a crime-fighting team, it’s hard to keep them from interfering with each other. Notice how the movie introduces the characters gradually and never allows all nine of the dolls to be in the same room together just to keep things from getting symmetrical. 3 and 4 are twins, so they have a different relationship to each other than they do to the other teammates, and there’s some factionation going on, so 1 and 8 are closer to each other than to the others.

9 is visually stunning, artistic, but also dismaying. The ending will leave you with a big, “But now what are they going to do?” It’s tempting to compare 9 to Wall-E, since they’re both post-apocalyptic animated films with cute robots for main characters. See Wall-E and then see 9 to cut the sweet, or better yet, see 9 and then see Wall-E to help you recover.

It’s true that the characters in 9 are simplistically done, but I’m still not going to forget 2 for a long time.

Pardon the dust...

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:57:00 +0000

You might have noticed I've been jiggering some things around here. I'm updating this blog to make it more website-ish. The dust will all be settled in a week or two.

Edit: changes are done. Hope you find the sidebar more organized and informative now.

Uncle Silas

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:26:00 +0000

When Miss Maud Ruthyn, heiress, is orphaned, she’s sent to live with her creepy old uncle until she reaches her majority. Said uncle is suspected of once murdering a man to whom he owed gambling debts. Oh, and if Maud were to die somehow before becoming an adult, Uncle Silas would get everything. Her father arranged it that way in his will to prove to the world that Silas isn’t a murderer. Maud gets the delightful experience of being the pork chop dangled in front of the starving wolf.

Deliciously gothicky, but there’s still plenty wrong with this novel by J. Sheridan le Fanu (better known for his short stories). For one thing, scary it ain’t. “And … there was a bloodstain … on the floor!” is about as intense as it gets. Did the Victorians scare easier than we do, or did the authors just hold themselves back? It’s a depressing prospect to think that we live in a scarier world than in 1899, but compared to Chernobyl, Silas’s murderous history is pretty tame.

Ah, Maud Ruthyn. How I love to hate her. Throughout the book she vacillates between a fainting flower petal and an imperious little brat who knows she’s better than the menials because of her education and good breeding. I know she would have made for an acceptable heroine in the 19th century, but cultural relativism can only be carried so far. I’m still allowed to be upset when she’s denigrating her own gender (The weaker sex? The weaker sex? I do beg your pardon?), failing to play an active role in the ending, or eerily echoing Robinson Crusoe:

‘I want your hand, cousin,’ she said, at the same time taking it by the wrist, and administering with it a sudden slap on her plump cheek, which made the room ring, and my fingers tingle; and before I had recovered from my surprise, she had vanished.

And if you were expecting a twist at the end, which would be reasonable to do in such a suspenseful novel, you will be disappointed. Le Fanu tells you over and over that a certain event is going to happen. And then it happens.

Now that I’ve told you everything that’s wrong with the book, I strongly urge you to go read it. If you’re the sort of person who read Frankenstein for fun, not for English class, you will love it. The point of Uncle Silas is the mood, not its illiberal characters or preposterous plot. The haunted house of Bartram-Haugh abounds with creaky rooms, opium addiction, gypsy prophecies, and … Swedenborgians. Le Fanu is a master of suspense. Just as soon as you’re dying to know what happens next, he slows the story down. He draws out each excruciating moment as the massive conspiracy surrounding Maud closes in on her. I read the last five chapters all at a gulp (nearly making myself late for work) and finished gasping for air. It was only about an hour later that I realized nothing particularly cool happened. Le Fanu just writes it so well. Definitely recommended for any fan of the Gothic style.

9 Movie Trailer

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:41:00 +0000

Golems! Post-apocalyptic awesomeness! Tim Burton! I think I'm going to swoon now.

9 The Movie

Okay, some time has passed since I started this post and I'm somewhat more capable of coherent thought. Seriously, though, I'm going to see this movie as soon as I am able and you can rely on it that I will review it.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:54:00 +0000

The UC has some pretty interesting architecture up there. I think it's because it's built on a hill.

Characters and Viewpoint

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:20:00 +0000

I’ve been reading a book on craft by Orson Scott Card lately* where he suggests, to make readers hate the villain, to make the villain really, really smart.

This isn’t true in every culture, but certainly the American audience resents any character who is smarter and better educated than other people. … We’re afraid of and resent people who know more than we do, and when they act as if they think it makes them superior to us, we hate them.

That’s sad. Card is probably right, and probably the technique works, but is it right to do it? Tapping into the worst part of people’s natures to make them feel something about a character? He also suggests making bad guys insane to make us hate them.

These are a couple of prejudices that it’s more or less still socially acceptable to have – I certainly couldn’t get away with having a scheming Shylock as my antagonist. But it’s not just that. I also take issue with his lukewarm acceptance of sympathetic, morally ambiguous villains.

When you separate sympathy from moral decisions – exactly what a judge and jury must try to do in a trial – you can’t be sure that your audience will reach the ‘right’ conclusions; you can’t be sure that they’ll agree with you.

What, am I going to hurt my readers’ brains?

Maybe this is why I didn’t like Seventh Son much.

I’d be interested to see what other amateur writers think. How do you build character? Do you add attributes to characters just to make them more evil/heroic, and does it work for you?

* Characters and Viewpoint, in the Elements of Fiction Writing series.

Robot Toilets!

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:03:00 +0000

San Francisco's answer to the public restroom. These pod-shaped toilets dot the city every few blocks; they come with a page-long set of operating instructions and power doors that slide back when you push a button. When you are done, an electronic readout tells you it's going through a "55-second cleansing cycle," which I can only assume involves zapping the inside with ozone or something, because one can't observe it directly.

I keep expecting Dr. Who to come bursting out of one of these things and go save the world.

Mondegreen

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:44:00 +0000

Sarah McLachlan's song, Building A Mystery, has a pair of lines that go:

You strut your rasta wear
And your suicide poem
And a cross from a faith that died
Before Jesus came

I had long interpreted these lyrics to be, in fact, about x-treme yoga:

You spread your ass to where
In a suicide pose
Across from a faith that died
Before Jesus came

Now, Kiss This Guy confirms that I'm not going crazy. (At least not for that reason.) This site keeps a database on all the mondegreens on all the popular songs people have ever heard. Other people think McLachlan is singing about extreme yoga, too, and in fact, one user has proposed an even better interpretation of the lines:

You strap your ass to a suicide machine.

Unexplained Mediumship Fragment

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:32:00 +0000

This is a plotbunny orphan; it doesn't have any story to go with it.

Most of us have this traumatic incident in our childhoods where we realize we're different. Mine was at my dad's funeral. I was five years old, tired of the velveteen dress they'd put me in and wanting to go home, and I stood up and said, "Why is everybody so sad? You can still talk to him!" That earned me a quick trip to the child psychologist, who decided it was my way of coping. At least Dad understood.

Lentil Curry

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:31:00 +0000

I discovered that this recipe works quite well.

LENTIL CURRY

1 package (1lb) lentils
2 onions
4-5 cloves garlic
1 package (1lb) tofu
10 cups broth
handful of dark green leafies
curry powder to taste
half & half to taste

Rinse lentils, then cover in broth and simmer ~30 mins. Meanwhile, cube the tofu and sauté on high heat. You want the outside of the cubes to get nice and crispy. Caramelize the onions and garlic in the same pan. Add dark green leafies of your choice – I used the green tops of leeks because that’s what I had, but it should be very tasty with collards. Once those are wilted, add the whole caboodle to the lentils. Season with curry powder (maybe also some salt and pepper) to taste, then add half & half until it’s creamy. Serve on rice.

This makes a ton, probably enough for about 6 people.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley (Well, San Francisco, Really) Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Margaret Taylor) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:39:00 +0000

Never, ever go to Fisherman’s Wharf on the Fourth of July. I let an old friend from high school talk me into it, and man. Between the hour spent looking for parking, the hour-long waits at every single restaurant, and the twenty-minute line at the restroom, it leaves one wondering how the entire population of the Bay Area has managed to squeeze into a space about the size of three blocks. We had a good time, though. I got to try sharkmeat (It’s like tuna but without the fishiness; that is to say, extremely mild. It would be good with horseradish.) and we saw some pretty sweet fireworks.

And I managed to get some cool shots of the carousel at the end of the wharf: