Okay, I promise I will post something other than a Booking Through Thursday soon. Things have been nuts for me in the personal realm lately. Anyway, here is today’s:

While acknowledging that we can’t judge books by their covers, how much does the design of a book affect your reading enjoyment? Hardcover vs. softcover? Trade paperback vs. mass market paperback? Font? Illustrations? Etc.?

It matters a lot to me, way more than it should. What can I say? I’m a visual kinda girl. Pretty artwork will make me take notice (especially Todd Lockwood’s incredible Drizzt Do’Urden covers, which single-handedly revived my interest in the character), and elves on the cover is almost a sure bet that I’ll at least take a look. I’m also drawn to forests, mysterious jewelry, and all the other things that signal High Fantasy. I like the colour pink (ie Mercedes Lackey covers), but I have yet to read a pink book that I really loved. I’m drawn more to illustration-style artwork than photorealistic. A neat typeface is a plus, but not required—and I can’t help but be charmed by the big, ten-foot-tall red typefaces on a lot of Sci-Fi novels. I’d never noticed it before, but it’s funny. The font screams, “FTL TRAVEL INSIDE!!”

But one thing that almost always makes me pause, and there seems to be no real reason behind it, is texture: I can’t resist touching a hardback with a matte slipcover. If I have two books in front of me with equally pretty artwork on the covers, I will always choose the one with the matte finish. I don’t know why this is, but I seem to have this texture issue with almost everything I own or collect: notebooks, teacups, anything. The way something feels in my hands is almost as important as how it looks.

In respect to the actual innards of the book, I enjoy reading more when there is a map (or two, or five) in the front. I like a lovely, traditional serif typeface, punctuated by ornaments or small illustrations, preferably something unique to the book or related to the story. Ultimately though, the story itself has to be great or an attractive design can’t make up for it. A pretty book with a boring or stupid story will end up at Powell’s.

Now that I’m happy with the state of Special Patrol Group (my hard-drive), I’ve been going through my library, setting aside books to take to Powell’s City of Books for sale, and writing down all the ISBNs so I can update my LibraryThing. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to start over from scratch; I set aside so many books to sell this year without taking note of what they were that it’s ridiculously obsolete. There are also a lot of books I haven’t added yet, so starting over will be best. I’m going to keep track of what I’ve read, what I haven’t read, and which don’t have covers in their entries at LibraryThing (and therefore need to be scanned).

As for the writing, I had a lot of catching up on personal stuff to do over the past week or two, but I’ll start writing again tonight, beginning with some crits for my writing group, Dreaming in Ink. Then on to just a little more world-building before I start the current novel, Faradris.

Holy mackerel! It’s been a week since I’ve posted. How embarassing! Here’s today’s Booking Through Thursday:

You’ve just reached the end of a book . . . what do you do now? Savor and muse over the book? Dive right into the next one? Go take the dog for a walk, the kids to the park, before even thinking about the next book you’re going to read? What?

(Obviously, there can be more than one answer, here–a book with a cliff-hanger is going to engender different reactions than a serene, stand-alone, but you get the idea!)

I don’t normally jump right into the next book in a series, though there are exceptions (Harry Potter *ahem*); I like to space them out a bit, so I experience the proper narrative rhythm. I have this quirk: when reading books or watching movies or TV, I like to have as close an experience to the original audience as possible. By that I mean it is required that I read The Chronicles of Narnia starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, not The Magician’s Nephew, because that’s what the original reader would have experienced. I watch Star Wars starting with Episode Four, not Episode One. This is true even with television sitcoms. I started watching reruns of That 70s Show when it was in its seventh season, and when I realized I loved it and was becoming a fan, I refused to watch any more reruns, and started buying the DVDs starting with season one.

What all this means is that when I read a series that’s already published, I like to read each book with one or two books from another author in between, so that the series is differentiated into individual books, rather than one big blur. That is, if I can help myself. Some cliffhangers make jumping into the next book irresistable.

Speaking more generally, regardless of whether a book is part of a series or not, I can usually start another book the next day, but I won’t start one the same day I finish. What would be the point? I’m not in a marathon; I’d rather let the book I just finished soak in a bit.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

How about a chance to play editor-in-chief? Fill in the blanks:

__________ would have been a much better book if ______________________.

Hmm. . . .

Hart’s Hope would have been a better book if there wasn’t so much filth, excrement and gore.

Sorry. I love OSC, but I just couldn’t get through it. I think I had just 1/10th of the book left to read when I finally went, “Okay, enough.” You could say I wussed out. But seriously, ew.

I’m working through my novel folders, and I successfully navigated my “Development Hell” folder, where I hid away all the novels I couldn’t bear to look at after wrestling with them for frustrated months. Most of those were not salvageable. I did keep some characters and some notes, and stuck a couple of things in my “Read Later” folder, because they looked worthwhile but were too long to read in a sitting.

As I’m going through all these old pieces, I’m reminded of a Livejournal post by Elizabeth Bear on Conscious Incompetence and the other three stages of learning a new skill.

I think I’m at a stage of Conscious Incompetence in my storytelling, but moving toward Conscious Competence. I’m able to pinpoint what is wrong with most of these old manuscripts, and I can almost feel where the plot is going wrong (or barely exists, as the case may be). I’m not sure I know how to fix these problems yet, but I think maybe I could. I’m ready to move past this state in which I’m too afraid of letting myself go creatively, and everything I write seems robotic and overly calculated. I think I need to finish something new soon. I have a Searoyal short story I’m in the middle of; that might be a good choice.

Or maybe it just feels like a thousand.

Over the past weekend and yesterday, I’ve been going through my very old writing files, looking through them, keeping what seemed salveable and tossing the unredeemably stupid.

It’s interesting reading. I can tell which ideas I wrote before I learned a thing about solid story structure. Some of the actual prose is very good, and leaves me with doubt that I can write anything so inspired anymore; that is, I wonder whether I haven’t learnt a bit too much. I doubt that’s the case. Anyway, even if I have, what good is luminous prose without a solid foundation beneath it? I’m not into literary fiction.

I’ve written a lot of fanfiction. A lot. Mostly Harry Potter. It’s surprising how good some of it is, and most of my finished pieces are short fanfic. I think I was writing the Hufflepuff-centric fanfics during that transitional period when I’d started to figure out how to make stories work, but still felt the sense of freedom that comes from knowing you aren’t writing for publication. I am learning slowly how to get that feeling back, even when writing original work. If I find I can’t get there, I may take a foray back into fanfic writing for a short while; if I can experience that again, maybe I can recapture it in my original work too. That may not be necessary, but looking at the fanfic was enlightening.

I had to trash a lot of my original stuff, but some of it was very old. Some of it is certainly salvageable, and the ideas in some were too good to part with. I have a lot more to go through, but when I’m done I’ll finally feel able to set up a new system for organizing and back up.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite Male lead character? And why?

R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden is one of the great serial characters, written far after the Golden Age of serials. He has all the qualities you want in the lead of a swashbuckling adventure series: deadly skill, sharp wit, a tortured past, a keen intellect, a noble soul and wickedly dark good looks (Todd Lockwood’s cover illustrations certainly present nice visuals).

The rare, wild interrobang. Somehow I suspect writers shouldn’t include it in submissions . . . but still it’s kinda cute for a punctuation mark!

On Saturday, the Dreaming in Ink Spring 2008 Writing Challenge began. I’ve got off to a slow start but I’m pleased with it. I think I’ll be happy with whatever I achieve this year.

For the World Builder Challenge, I’ve worked out a list of characters for my setting, and two character profiles that I finished in about an hour. Now, this is a minor miracle. I normally spend hours a day over two or three days on a character profile, but this time I’ve decided that once I choose a name (which is important to me and worth the extra time) I will spend no more than twenty minutes on each character. Mind you, what I get out of this is not a completed profile, but rather a freewrite about the character focused on a few of the right questions. The resulting information should be plenty for me to start writing with. I also take a few notes on appearance and anything else that seems crucial.

The questions I choose are a combination of whatever springs to mind, and questions from Holly Lisle’s very awesome Create A Character Clinic. This book helps you choose a compelling need for your character, and gives you questions from a variety of areas (such as Past, Present & Future, Work & Play, Moral Stance and so on) to ask yourself about your character, as well as techniques to gain deeper insight into your characters. It takes your character planning out of the realm of D&D character sheets and lists of likes and dislikes, and opens up the freewriting, brainstorming world of your Muse. Detailed character sheets can be worked out later; unshackled creativity is what you need to get started.

I have about ten more characters to create before I can move on to the next stage. For once, that doesn’t seem so daunting. I can see myself actually beginning with all my players ready to come out on stage, with their clothes on and everything.

(I’m affiliated with HollyShop and therefore receive a referral fee for the purchase of the above book, but as always will never recommend anything I haven’t used and found helpful myself.)