Book Recommendation: Bleeding Violet

My latest stack of library books was a random assortment of titles that had been on my tbr list for a while and all happened to be available at the same time. Included in that stack was Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves, which I had seen mentioned a few times in various places but didn't know much about. The blurb didn't particularly grab me, so I was surprised—in a good way—when the book turned out to be something different from the usual urban fantasy.

Bleeding Violet is a quirky book, a bit off center from normal. It's about a girl named Hanna, who wears only purple and whose flavor-of-the-month mental diagnosis is manic-depression. She hallucinates, she's occasionally violent, and she's the most emotionally needy main character I've ever read. But the funny thing is, she's one of the most enjoyable characters I've ever read, too. Despite the above, she comes across as sane, sweet and self-confident.

On the surface the plot sounds pretty typical: outcast girl moves to a new town where she doesn't fit in until crazy things start happening and she turns out to be just what the town needed. But that's just the framework. Even if you've read that story line a hundred times, you've never read anything like this book.

For one thing, the town of Portero isn't normal. It's got monsters and mayhem, and strangers usually don't survive past the first few weeks. Whereas in most towns ordinary is good and freak is bad, in Portero freak is average and ordinary gets you killed.

Fortunately Hanna's used to weird. She's grown so accustomed to her hallucinations that at first she doesn't even realize there's something different about Portero. And when she does, she's still determined to stay. Her only desire in life is to make her mother love her, and if that means becoming the baddest monster-hunter in town to impress the woman, then that's what she'll do. (Her mother, incidentally, is her own brand of crazy, and just as interesting.)

The secondary characters were excellent as well. I would highly recommend this book as a study on “characters that work.” While the plot was fun, the relationships and flawed personalities were really what kept me turning pages. Brilliantly handled, with a satisfying ending. I really enjoyed this book.

Good Days and Bad Days

Anyone who has been writing for more than a day knows that sometimes writing is wonderful and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's not.

The bad days can come at the slightest provocation: a discouraging critique, a rejection, a negative review. Even going through the motions of surviving the social media circus can throw an entire writing day off kilter.

For me, yesterday was one of the bad days. By trying to do everything, I was effectively doing nothing, and to complicate matters, real life got in the way as well. I woke up fully intending to dive into chapter six of Unmade, but by the end of the day I hadn't written a single word.

Are any of you ever paralyzed by days like that? Sometimes during this time of year I'm seized by writing mania, and I can't stop working without feeling like the whole world will end. So when I get a day like yesterday and I don't write anything at all, the guilt starts clawing its way down my throat to my belly.

Those are the times when I really need to remember why I'm writing in the first place. For every negative there are a half dozen positives: the joy of discovery, the feel of accomplishment, the thrill of improving bit by bit; the characters who teach us about ourselves, the worlds that spark our creativity, the plots that draw us deeper and deeper; meeting someone else who loves to write, hearing back from someone who loved our work, connecting to people through words in ways were weren't able to before. All that and more.

Today was a good writing day. Today I wrote a lot of words (and some of them were even good). Today I'm thinking about all the reasons I keep pressing on.

How are you today? Are you caught up in the excitement of writing or are you in that moment when you need to remember why you keep coming back, day after day? Whichever place you're in, take a moment to celebrate the reasons you love to write.

My Description Journey

Once, way back in middle school, as I was talking to a good friend of mine, I brought up a girl I had introduced to her a few months before. “Oh!” she said. “You mean the girl in the yellow dress?” I frowned. Did she actually remember other people by what they were wearing? I never noticed anyone's clothes!

(As I realized later, that was probably why I had such horrible fashion sense.)

My lack of observational skills didn't end with clothing, though. To this day I will often go into the grocery store looking for one particular item, and I can find the right aisle and stare at the item for ten minutes without seeing it. I've come to accept my blindness to the world around me (a feature, not a bug, I tell myself, because if I weren't so much in my own head I wouldn't be making up stories). But the one downside for writing is that I struggle with description.

For a long, long time description has been my sore spot, the part of writing that I detested. The setting didn't matter to me. I was so much more interested in the people and what they were doing. My first novels had only the barest mentions of the characters' surroundings, and only when the outside world intruded on the action. In later novels I sketched out a little more, if only because I knew I had to, but most of the details were of the dreary, expected variety: everyday furniture in an everyday room, repetitive features on a repetitive face.

But finally in the past year I've begun to enjoy description. I love picking out the unique details that bring a setting to life. Description has become a hunt for the unexpected and a personal challenge to find the one piece that says more than a hundred other words could.

So when one of my critique partners wrote the following about chapter one of Unmade, I was pretty excited: “I thoroughly enjoyed your initial descriptions of the neighborhood... the fact that you used more than one sense to describe her surroundings... Deftly done and all good stuff.” Yay! If I'm finally learning to put these things in the first draft, I must be making progress.

How about you? Do you love description? Hate it? What are your tricks for making it pop?

Book Recommendation: The Goddess Test

Ever since buzz started circling about The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter, I knew it was something I had to read. I preordered the book for my Kindle and read it all in one day as soon as it came out on Tuesday.

The book had a lot of hype and the premise sounded interesting, but plenty of other such books had turned out to be duds for me, so I didn't know what to expect. Fortunately, The Goddess Test was as good as I hoped.

Kate has just moved from New York City to rural Michigan so that her mother can die in peace in her hometown. Kate isn't expecting to put down any roots, but right away she catches the attention of several of her classmates, who aren't so keen on letting her fade into the background.

Then she meets Henry, a mysterious boy who has an impossible talent for bringing the dead back to life. He claims he can save Kate's mother too, if Kate will only agree to spend the next six months in his closed-off estate. But there's more to the bargain than Kate knows. She has seven tests ahead of her, plus one major problem—the previous eleven girls who accepted Henry's bargain are all dead, and she could be next.

The first third of the book was good enough to keep me reading, and then the next two thirds I couldn't put down. The plot was as interesting as it had sounded and delivered on all the points that had attracted me to the story. I enjoyed the twists and the new look at some very old gods. The story comes from the Persephone myth, which is one of my favorites, but tells it in a slightly different light.

I found Kate's character to be compelling. I had a real sense of who she was by the end of the story, and I think this is one of the major strengths of the book. Some of the secondary characters drew me in as well, particularly Ava and James, who are part of the story from the beginning.

I had a few minor issues with the seven tests (they didn't fit the Greek theme and thus felt out of place) and the identities of the gods (many weren't obvious until the note at the end, and some of the names were misleading). Nevertheless, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the book, particularly to anyone interested in mythology.

Crutch Words

Two great blog posts showed up in my google reader today, Scott Westerfeld's on Word Clouds and one on words that tell instead of show over at The Other Side of the Story. These both touch on a topic that has been casting its shadow over my mind lately: the overuse and abuse of crutch words.

I have them. I know I have them, both the kind that go completely unnoticed by me and the kind that even as I'm writing the word I think “I sure have been typing this a lot.” Some of the known crutches I'm trying to eradicate are:

Just. Everyone is always “just” doing something. “She just wondered...” “If he could just go...” “I should just ask...”

But note to self: unless there's some justice going on, this is a four-letter word I could probably forgo.

Gestures. Particularly those having to do with the eyes. Though eyes may be the windows to the soul, describing the windows doesn't always say enough about the building. My personal vices: “look,” “gaze,” “stare,” and “focus.”

But other common gestures crop up as well. My characters give out a lot of shrugs and smiles. But do I really want them to bounce between nonchalant and happy all the time? Surely human expression covers a far greater range of emotion.

Seemed. This one was recently pointed out to me in a critique of chapter one of the new novel. It's a guilt-laden word, and I knew I was using it, but I didn't realize how much. Oops!

Good thing the first draft doesn't have to be perfect. Three cheers for the power of revision!