How to make a romance excruciating

The house is keeping me busy, so I decided it would be nice to unwind by watching more of the Hong sisters' output, starting with their very first show--you know, made back before they had the pull to make a non-generic drama.

Remind me not to do that again.

The show is called Delightful Girl Choon Hyang, and in theory it's supposed to be a retelling of a folktale, except that it's not. The interesting and very funny bits actually are, but they are few and far between--and they are incredibly frustrating, because you can see the Hong sisters' wit and humor come out to play for a tiny bit, but then all the good stuff is shoved back into its cage and we're just stuck with the annoying generic romance.

It's annoying because its the kind of romance that gins up drama by having the characters be crazy and dumb, which I dislike in any story but I think is more of an issue in that genre because it's so character-driven. If the ENTIRE FOCUS of the story is a relationship between two people, shouldn't that relationship and those people actually be worth something?

I mean, the vast majority of people have some level of relationship skills. But that's not helpful to a romance writer who needs to pad out a book or script! So the characters act like a pair of hypersensitive 14-year-olds with attachment disorders!

Let's see if you are a real-life adult or a badly! written! romance! character! with a quiz!

You really, really like someone! In fact, you're in love! Do you:

1. Show affection for the person and ask them out.

2. Treat the person like dirt and repeatedly inform them that you don't even like them--don't worry about them taking it seriously, they can read your mind!

A significant other--or even just a friend--suddenly is in a very bad mood for no apparent reason. Do you:

1. Ask them what's wrong, and offer to help if possible.

2. Assume the worst! They hate you, and if the two of you are dating or married, they're cheating!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. A problem crops up in some other area of your life. Do you:

1. Discuss it with your partner.

2. LIE! LIE!! LIE!!!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. Their psycho stalker ex, who you know full well would do or say absolutely anything to sabotage the relationship, tells you something negative about your partner. Do you:

1. Laugh in their face, then go home and have a good laugh about it with your partner.

2. Believe them completely!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. A horrible, abusive relative of theirs tells you it would be better for your partner if you went away, leaving them isolated with said abuser. Do you.

1. Laugh in their face, then go home and have a good laugh about it with your partner.

2. Do exactly what they tell you to!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. The two of you are extremely close, and you communicate very well/have a wonderful sex life. Someone who is not nearly as close to your partner as you are suggests that you radically alter your communication/sexual style. Do you:

1. Nod politely, then go home and have a good laugh about it with your partner.

2. Accept the advice and follow it slavishly, without (and this is key) discussing it with your partner first!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. Some random person tells you that your partner has done something very wrong, and unless you do exactly what they say, they will reveal this misdeed to the authorities. Do you:

1. Discuss the matter with your partner and figure out what to do together.

2. Submit to blackmail alone, because teamwork is for suckers!

Angsty post

So, the house is chugging along--I'm glad I've been focusing on it, because it actually does make things happen a lot quicker if the homeowner has already made decisions about stuff, or is willing to run off to the REALLY big Home Depot to pick up that thing that the nearby merely-large Home Depot doesn't carry.

But I'm still having the writing itch. I've been taking it out on the other blog--including writing posts and then deleting them without publishing them, which I think is like a Grade A symptom of Frustrated Writerdom. ("I have nothing to say! But I shall write it down anyway!")

I'm really of two minds about blogging there--and I was already of two minds about blogging here. I know there are writers who think that it is important to just write anything, so much so that they will count blog posts toward their daily word count. Maybe it's because I spent a few years having to switch between working on Trang and Trust, and writing for a living, but I feel like you have to decide, Do I want to be a novelist, or do I want to be a blogger? I had to do this before with the freelance writing--did I want to be a novelist (and spend time writing novels), or did I want to be a journalist (and spend time networking and pitching stories)?

A blog can really reel you in, so that you begin to focus on building readership and networking with other blogs that you like, which can be a major time-suck and distraction. The other issue is that it's simply easier to do blog posts, so writing them can be a form of procrastination--Look! I wrote 1,000 words today! Everything's fine!--just like the way to-do lists can be abused.

Part of me feels like I should just delete the other blog--prune off that writerly outlet so that output is forced into the novel. (Can you tell that I garden?) Part of me wonders if the writing-is-like-exercise people have a point. I think I'm going keep both blogs, but make an effort to channel the writing into the novel--at least it's a good sign that I want to write, and that even though the house takes a lot of time and focus, I've been able to write, even if it's just for that random blog.

Wow, that got bad quick

(So, yeah, HOUSE has eaten all my time, plus I've been really sick. But at this point, the hazard-abatement stuff is pretty much done, plus I found a general contractor to deal with the flooring/painting/renovating stuff, so there's less of a burden on me to schlep out there every day at the crack of dawn to meet various workers. And I'm starting to feel better, although still tired. So I may get writing again fairly soon. ETA: Yeah, that's not going to happen--as more stuff gets done on the house, more decisions and preparations have to be made for the next steps. Sorry.)

I've mentioned that I like the show Sherlock. My sister really likes it, so she recorded the third season when it aired, and I've been watching it at her house.

And man, was it bad! Like, yelling-at-the-television bad.

It's always painful to watch a show go downhill, but the speed and efficiency with which Sherlock has taken the plunge has only been matched by a few shows (the first season of Enterprise springs, ever-unbidden, to mind).

The main problem as I see it is that Sherlock used to be a mystery show with engaging characters and the occasional vague conspiracy. Now it's a soap opera featuring vague conspiracies and a bunch of whiny dysfunctional characters who yammer on about their feelings and, every now and again, make reference to those mysteries they used to solve back when they did that sort of thing.

Mystery is a very logical genre. And unfortunately it felt like, in deciding to abandon the rigor of mystery, the Sherlock writers decided to abandon all other forms of rigor as well. Sometimes this lost rigor was logical (Why would North Korea want to blow up Parliament? Why would an evil genius reveal to his opponents the only way to stop his evil plans?), but one of the things that really stuck out to me was a bit of lost production rigor: The show stopped showing Sherlock's thought process.

That was one of the more-original and better-done things in the first two seasons of Sherlock. Sherlock would come across a crime scene and examine it. As he was doing so, little words (or sometimes images) would appear ("damp" maybe, or "clean clean clean dirty"). It usually wasn't enough for you to easily put the pieces together, but when Sherlock later did, you could see how he got where he was.

It was a neat trick, and it tied the television series to the original stories quite well, since Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was always noticing these tiny details and making deductions from them. It also was something that clearly took a lot of work on the part of the writers, the production crew, and the actors--so of course it had to go!

In the third season, the visual element is divorced from Sherlock's thought process: He looks at stuff and words and images appear, but it's like a music video--looks cool, doesn't mean much. Then Sherlock just kind of magically knows things--unless it's more convenient for him to remain completely clueless, even in situations where he is paying close attention. The degeneration of the Sherlock character from puzzle-solver to convenience-clairvoyant reminds me quite a bit of what P.G. Wodehouse did to Jeeves.

In addition, what the third season made me realize was that I found the character of Sherlock engaging specifically because his thought process was entertaining. He was doing good and delighting me to boot, so I cared about the fact that he was a recovering addict and that he couldn't have sex and that he was deeply attached to Watson, even though he tended to treat Watson like crap. Take away the interesting bit of his character, and I'm left with the dysfunctional, soap-opera stuff--I MIGHT TAKE DRUGS! I DON'T HAVE SEX! DON'T GO WATSON, I NEED SOMEONE TO CRAP ON!--and no particular reason for me to care about it.

Open Road still not making much sense

This was in the Wall Street Journal (all emphases added):

Forty years ago, "Airport" author Arthur Hailey was one of the country's best-known novelists. Today nine of his 11 novels are out of print in the U.S. and difficult to find even in used bookstores.

That's about to change. This spring, six Arthur Hailey novels, including "Airport" and "Wheels," will be published [by Open Road] in e-book form, priced at $14.99 each.

The article goes on to say that publishers are discovering that e-books are good for backlist revenues.

The re-issuance of the writers' works reflects a broader effort by publishers to mine their inventories of "backlist" titles—books published more than a year ago—in a bid to generate revenue from younger readers.

And it quotes Mark Tavani, editorial director of fiction at the Random House Publishing Group, as saying:

"These [backlist books] aren't front list titles, books that your friends are talking about. But people who shop electronically are willing to load up and try stuff if the price is low."

Notice a slight contradiction there between the first quote and the second two? Younger readers have never even heard of Arthur Halley, and people who read e-books will buy unknown backlist books if they aren't too expensive. So Open Road's plan is to woo readers who have no idea who Hailey is . . . with a FIFTEEN DOLLAR e-book?

Fifteen dollars? For fuck's sake, that's more than any mass market paperback, and many a trade paperback. All for a license to read something--a license that you cannot sell yourself later on.

Oh, and maybe you can't find Hailey in used book stores, but on Amazon? You can buy used copies of his books for a penny. Yes, you have to pay for shipping, so it comes out to a whopping $4. For a hardcover edition.

Hailey is dead. He's been dead for a decade. He's not going to be coming out with a big new book that will create a splash and drive interest in his backlist. If you want to interest new readers in what is to them a new writer, $15 e-books are NOT the way to go.

Certain jobs are REALLY not stories

The HVAC guy took forever yesterday (verdict: the furnace can be saved; the heat pump, not so much), so I wound up reading a bad novel by a writer who is famous, but not for novels. (Which means that all the jacket blurbs were these atrocious, ass-kissy, "What a masterful genius!!!! I only hope you write more of your WONDERFUL novels (and give me a job!)"-type things. I was like, Dear God, don't encourage this crap.)

One of the WONDERFUL aspects of the novel, showing the author's masterful genius!!!, was that the actual plot did not begin until fully a third of the way into the book. Instead, the entire first third of the book was dedicated to describing the day-to-day life of . . . a professional writer.

Not just any professional writer--a professional writer who doesn't write novels (but would like to write one), and who is about the same age and lives in the same area and is the same gender as the actual author. (Yeah, he really dug deep into his imagination for that one. I'm gonna assume that the resentful ex-wife and adult children are his, too.)

I keep reading this. Since everyone who writes a book is a writer, there are a bazillion gazillion not-particularly-imaginative books out there about, you guessed it, life as a writer.

As I've said before, someone simply doing a job is not enough to carry a book. And let's face it, writers have about the most boring jobs imaginable.

Especially established writers. This guy's not poor; he's not uneducated; he's not desperate. What does he spend an entire third of the book doing? Oh, you know, arguing with his agent, worrying about the wording of his latest contract, wondering when he'll get time to write that novel, wondering if he'll have to (shudder) teach another university class (the horror!!!) to maintain his middle-class lifestyle.

These are the kinds of thing that, when Tweeted about, get you on White Whine. Honestly, the only way the stakes of that story could have gotten any lower would have been if the guy was having lots of great sex, but not with the woman he really wanted to have sex with.

Ooops! Sorry! That was in there, too!

In a way, the book reminded me of Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys, if The Wonder Boys had sucked instead of being awesome. Once the plot starts, the guy . . . kind of realizes that there is a world around him? But not really. The book is not, Guy Realizes That He Is a Self-Indulgent Prat so much as it is, Self-Indulgent Prat Learns To Feel Better About Himself, which . . . what are the stakes here, exactly?

Well, this explains why I don't listen to the radio anymore

I thought it was just because Seattle radio sucks donkey balls compared to NYC, but according to the Wall Street Journal, this is the wave of the future:

Faced with growing competition from digital alternatives, traditional broadcasters have managed to expand their listenership with an unlikely tactic: offering less variety than ever.

The strategy is based on a growing amount of research that shows in increasingly granular detail what radio programmers have long believed—listeners tend to stay tuned when they hear a familiar song, and tune out when they hear music they don't recognize. . . .

The top 10 songs last year were played close to twice as much on the radio than they were 10 years ago, according to Mediabase, a division of Clear Channel Communications Inc. that tracks radio spins for all broadcasters. . . .

"[T]aking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before."

Aiiigggh! (And double-aiiigggh! because that last quote is from someone who works for an NYC radio station.)

Ok, now that that's out of my system: That seems to be another common effect of digitization, right? I mean, that's definitely what's happening to publishing--the traditional publishers are getting more and more risk-adverse.

I guess it's OK as long as there are ways for indies to make money--it's harder for musicians to get top-40 radio play nowadays, just like it's harder for writers to get tradpub contracts, but if they can make money selling on their own, who cares?

I just hope my iPod never breaks, you know? I actually wound up listening to the radio in my sister's car during the holidays, and I heard maybe one song I didn't already know--and it's been almost a year since I stopped.

This actually makes me feel better about myself

As I mentioned in the comments here, I've basically stopped reading posts by writers, because I just couldn't deal with all the chirpy little "I've written a billion words today!"-type posts.

Obviously, this is my issue--when I'm productive, I make those kinds of posts, and they're a major reason why this blog exists. But, you know, when you're not being productive, reading about other people being super-productive can be a recipe for misery. If you read that sort of post, and your very first thought is, "FUCK YOU!!" then it's time to do something else with your time.

But oddly enough, when I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about Russell Blake, I felt totally fine. According to the article, Blake "churns out 7,000 to 10,000 words a day and often works from eight in the morning until midnight."

You know, good for him, but that is a life I would never, ever want to have. Ever.

And that, I think, is the real problem with envy and getting into the habit of comparing yourself to other writers: In addition to fostering misery, it takes your focus away from figuring out what it is you actually want in life, and what you actually want from your writing. Maybe you don't want to write full time. Maybe someone else's work habits would render you entirely unproductive. Maybe your goals are not Russell Blake's goals.

There was a point in life (maybe when I was in my late 20s?) when I realized that if I wanted my life to be like Person X's, then that meant I had to accept the whole shebang--I couldn't just cherry pick the nice things. If Person X was glamorous but vapid, then to be more like them, I would have to be more vapid--and I'd rather not. If Person X was successful professionally because they didn't mind being a tiny, fairly-useless cog in an enormous, impersonal machine, well, guess what? I either was going to have to learn to love the rat race, or accept the fact that my career was going to have a more unusual trajectory.

*crunch*

That sound you heard was my word count running into the fact that I just bought a house.

I'm trying to make it so that my daily schedule does not read:

1. Get up

2. HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE

3. Go to sleep

Ironically, I think I'm going to be helped by the fact that the house was a foreclosure and is something of a mess--even the jobs that seem simple (the ivy needs to be taken out of the front yard) are on such a scale (THERE ARE MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF IVY SMOTHERING THE ENTIRE FRONT YARD) that I am simply going to have to hire people. (And I yanked out most of my front lawn myself, so trust me when I say that that ivy is not a one-person job!)

There's still some running around that I must do, but hopefully soon I will be in a place where I can get back to the book!

The itch is returning

First off: Happy Holidays! Enjoy your movie and Chinese food, or whatever festivities you have planned!

(Is it OK for me to make that joke? I'm not actually Jewish. But the Church of Paranoid Christians has been putting up signs where I live saying that if you don't say "M---y C-------s" every single time, you are an Evil Satanic Communist, and I really want to join that group now that the Illuminati has vanished. (Or has it!?!))

Anyway, I've been increasingly having the itch to write lately--to just sort of write anything. I think that after the visiting relatives decamp next week, I'm going to start in on the young-adult fantasy novel I've had outlined for ages.

Without question, I will be getting back to the Trang series--Trials is partially written, both books are outlined, I even have covers!--but right now it's simply too hard. Basically there's a really unfortunate combination of where I was in writing the book (just where things got really depressing) and life circumstances. To seriously mix a metaphor, I can't pick up the thread of the one without touching the third rail of the other.

The young-adult fantasy novel is not nearly so focused on grief and loss, so hopefully it will be more doable (and hopefully I'm not killing the urge by making this post). I want it to be fun and cute (while also being deep and meaningful, of course! I iz broody artiste!), and something I will really enjoy writing.

ETA: Oh, and according to my last Amazon statement, I've sold copies of Trust in France, Germany, and Japan!

The telenovela thing, some more

I was just going to respond to Jim Self's comment here, but then the reply just got longer and longer, and I figured I might as well make another post out of it. We were talking about how, now that Netflix lets people watch television shows however they want, they seem to want to watch them pretty much the way you read a novel.

Jim wrote:

What I find interesting about this is that people are now consuming other kinds of media in the way they always read books. When you discover a new series of books and love the first one, you immediately go out and get the next, and next, and so on. Now we do it with TV shows.

You know, come to think of it, that doesn't just apply to TV shows themselves: If I really like a show, I'll look for other shows by the same author. Obviously that's been a thing with movies for a while (and certain television producers, like Norman Lear, have always had name recognition), but Netflix makes it so you can click on a name and get the person's other work, just like you can with Amazon or a library catalog. So I wonder if authorship is going to become more important in branding shows--it seems likely that it would, especially as television becomes less focused on mass-market ratings.

So, at least anecdotally, it seems that people prefer to consume lengthy stories all at once. That can cause people to put off a show they'd otherwise watch weekly, though. I keep meaning to continue Breaking Bad now that it's complete, but I never do.

Yeah, I feel the novel form has been around for some time now, and now that they can people are kind of molding television-watching into a video novel, so maybe the format just appeals to our psyches in a way that episodic media does not.

It's definitely a challenge to the industry. One thing I've noticed as I've shifted to Netflix is that, in the past, I might watch an episode of a show and not like it. And then a year or so later, assuming the show was still on, I'd check it out again, sometimes to find that it had improved considerably. Then I'd start watching it regularly.

With Netflix, though, there's no way--a bad first episode or a weak first few episodes, and I'm gone. If it takes a show a season or two to hit its stride, I'll never know, because not only am I not going to sit through all the bad episodes, I'm also not willing to skip the first 20-odd or 40-odd episodes to get to the good part--which is new. Before I didn't feel a need to start at the beginning and watch every single episode, but now, interestingly enough, I do.

So I think that as television shows are consumed more like novels, first episodes will become extremely important, the way the first chapter of a novel (or really, the first chapter of the first novel in a series) is.

Shouldn't the cure match the disease?

I'm a hard sell with romance, I know, and I think a big part of the problem is that I can't get behind a relationship if I don't think it's actually benefiting the people involved--I just don't think relationships are automatically good things.

Likewise--and this probably doesn't come as a shock--I don't buy into the notion that a woman's problems can all be solved by having some kids. In recent years, my sister had a couple of kids, and it's remarkable how much her life and career continued unabated--she did take time off when they were very young, but she also worked part-time, went back to school, and is now working only slightly less than full time in her new field. Children, while quite demanding especially when small, are not the eternal time-sink that people sometimes make them out to be, and having them is no substitute for figuring out what you want to do. Indeed, I would argue that if you are having children in order to avoid getting your shit together, you're probably going to be a lousy parent.

It's interesting because in older books and movies, characters do sometimes basically prescribe having children as a cure for a woman's problems--but some of the time, it's really obvious from the way the story is written that those characters are full of shit, so it's not like people in the past were all blind to the complexities of human nature or anything.

But I recently saw a movie--made well past the time where anyone would seriously recommend relationships and children as a panacea for women--where the characters themselves seem to think the whole have-a-relationship-and-have-kids thing is a solution. The female character is stifled in a dead-end job because she is afraid to move out into the world and figure out what she wants to do. The male character realizes the situation she's in, and his solution is to have her quit her job, move into his place, and . . . just kind of hang out all day. Doing nothing. Except having sex with him sometimes because she's got nothing else to do. And maybe someday all that sex will lead to kids, who will of course will fix everything.

It's very bizarre because the guy knows what the problem is--he's explicitly aware of it! He talks about her need to go out into the world! He just doesn't seem to see how this should apply to their actual life! It's like watching a movie about a brilliant doctor who correctly diagnoses a patient who has a particularly sneaky form of lupus . . . and then tries to cure the lupus by applying leeches. I don't get it.

Not shockingly, the relationship has! a! big! crisis! and the woman moves out of the guy's house and into the world to, you guessed it, try to figure out what she wants to do. It's a real blow to the guy, but it's hard to have sympathy for him, you know? Like, how did he not see that one coming?

More to the point, it was hard for me to be invested in the relationship itself when it was obviously precisely not what the woman needed. They did get back together in the end, but they never explicitly hashed out how they were going to accommodate the woman's ambitions to be an adult, so it was hard for me to care. I guess I was supposed to take it on faith that the guy finally made a trip down to the Clue Shop and got one, but who really knows?

More telenovelas!

Netflix released a bunch of information on how people watch shows when they can choose how many episodes they watch at a time. From the Wall Street Journal:

For one serialized drama, 25% of the viewers finished the entire 13-episode season in two days, while it took 48% of them one week to do so. The pace was pretty much the same for a very different kind of show—a sitcom with a 22-episode season: 16% of viewers finished the season in the equivalent of a weekend, while 47% completed it within one week.

That pattern—especially the apparent sweet spot of polishing off one season in a week—was similar across various styles of shows in the sample, including those with audiences that skew male or female, younger or older.

Another finding: The majority of viewers only immersed themselves in one show at a time, rather than juggle several at once. . . .

[A Netflix spokesperson said,] "We're just now getting to the stage where we can come up with some basic truths about how people behave when they have control over how and when they watch stuff."

I find it fascinating just how much people are treating television shows like novels: They do one show at a time, and they focus on it to get it done within a relatively short period of time. I wouldn't be shocked to discover that it took most people about a week to polish off a longish novel.

It's funny because right now, I'm showing You're Beautiful to my sister. I have Netflix and she does not, so she has to come here, and with her schedule she can only watch an episode or two a week.

(Speaking of her house and my house, I should note that I did indeed find a house near her, and should close in January. But I can't move in right away, because of course I bought a fixer-upper. It's like a disease.)

Anyway, my sister finds it pretty frustrating that she can't binge-watch that show, because it's harder for her to keep track of who knows what about who (which is pretty complicated in that show). She would probably love to be able to watch the entire series in a week. And I've been feeling like I can't start watching another television series until we're done with You're Beautiful, for pretty much the same reason I usually finish one novel before starting another. So even though we're not following the one-season-a-week rule, we're still like little case-studies for Netflix here....

After the egg breaks

One of my favorite movies is Last Tango in Paris. I should note that it is also one of THE MOST disturbing films I have EVER seen--if you're going watch it, you should be prepared to get extremely upset. But I have tremendous respect for that movie. Likewise I have a lot of respect for Belle de Jour, although I don't think it's as good.

These are movies that are about sex, and they're both French (kinda), so as result, there's a lot of tittering nonsense about them--the assumption is, if they're about sex (and they're about kinky sex! And have I mentioned that they are both French!?! Sort of?), then they must be porn. You know, just like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is porn. (And the title is French! There you go!)

The idea that there could be a serious movie about kinky sex--a person has a problem, and they try to work it out sexually--just seems to be beyond people. The fact that neither movie ends well (nor does Jules et Jim, for that matter) kind of flies over everyone's heads: Marlon Brando can claim that Last Tango in Paris was simply the director's crude sex fantasy, but I'd argue that most men's sexual fantasies don't end with the woman deciding that the guy is a TOTAL loser and then killing him.

(And in fact, a lot of non-Americans criticize those movies for being too moralistic. That's got to be a sign you did a good job, right? Half the people are complaining that your movie is porn, and the other half are carping about your moralizing.)

I'm going to just go ahead and generalize irresponsibly here, but I think part of the problem with the American perception of these films is that in an typical American movie about, say, a troubled relationship, the buildup is often to the question of whether someone will cheat or not. Will a transgression happen? That's the climax of the film, so the transgression is extremely significant: If the answer is no, the person will not transgress, then the relationship can be saved. If the answer is yes, then the other person can leave the relationship (and most likely end up in a better one).

It seems to me that a more typical approach for a French movie about a troubled relationship would be to have the cheating happen, and happen early. It's not the big pivotal climax; it's often more a precipitating event: This person has transgressed. Now what? What does it mean? What are the consequences?

Obviously there are plenty of French (and American) movies where the consequences of transgression are pretty minimal (except you get to see boobies, which for me is just not that big a thrill), but in the better movies the transgression is highly significant, even though it's not the climax of the film: Why did it happen? Now that's it has happened, what do people do about it? What does it mean about the person who transgressed?

I think if people could get over the FRENCH!!! thing, they could see that both approaches are valid. After all, it's really just the age-old question: Do you make the drama about whether or not someone will cross a line, or do you make it about what happens after a line has been crossed?

Harry Potter and moral choice

One of the things I've wanted to do for some time was read the Harry Potter books all in one go. I started reading the series when it was about half out, and I just wasn't going to go stand in line at the bookstore at midnight or anything like that (I did actually buy two of the books--both in paperback at airport bookstores--but other than that I used the library), so I wound up waiting a year or two between books, at which point I'd forgotten who half the characters were. So I thought it would be worthwhile to re-read them all at once.

It's interesting how different an experience that can be. One of the things about reading Harry Potter the first time around was that I didn't know whether it was just a bunch of cute kid's stories or if it would turn out to be the plotting wonder it actually was. It's clear re-reading it that it is really just one HUGE book, and knowing that, the ups and downs are far less pronounced. I got a lot more enjoyment out of the first couple of books in the series this time around because I knew what they were setting up. Order of the Phoenix annoyed me much less this time, because although that book doesn't really have much of a plot payoff by itself, it does set up the later books. On the other hand, Goblet of Fire, while enjoyable, wasn't the absolute kick in the pants it was the first time I read it and realized that, as the character of Harry aged, the books were going to get waaaaaay more sophisticated.

I do kind of feel more ambivalent about the ending. (This is going to get VERY spoilery, so if you haven't read the books yet--hey, my sister hasn't--go do that first. Really.)

A number of people argue that Neville Longbottom is the most important character in the Harry Potter books, and I can totally see that--Neville has a great character arc, and as a writer, I think there's a lot to be said for having tertiary characters that have discrete arcs, even if we only see those arcs in glimpses. It's really intriguing to realize that something's going on elsewhere, plus it gives the reader the sense that this is a real world, not one in which all the other characters exist for the sole purpose of serving the main plot and main character. (The fact that Ron and not Harry winds up with Hermione is another example of J.K. Rowling making her world more robust and realistic, and less of a fantasy-fulfillment thing. In lesser hands, Hermione would have been the prize that Harry wins, and Ron would have accepted it because, you know, Harry's the main character.)

But I think Rowling kind of slipped up in the end, because in his final confrontation with Voldemort's snake, Neville is simply more heroic: He withstands torture, breaks a curse, summons a magical object, and without hesitation slays a powerful semi-magical creature.

Harry has also been extremely heroic, of course--he's been tortured and has actually died, on purpose, in order to defeat Voldemort. In addition, he has delved deeply into the world of wand lore and has uncovered vital knowledge that will allow him to overpower Voldemort.

But at the very end, what does he do? Harry uses a disarming charm, and Voldemort's own curse bounces back on him, killing him.

At least it's not explicitly an accident, but that's pretty weak, isn't it? If had been made explicit that this was an effect Harry could expect from a really solid disarming, I'd be OK with it, but it just seems like a bit of a cop-out, especially compared to all the other stuff Harry has both suffered and done. (And he's done quite a bit--Rowling is not shy about having Harry & Co cross lines and do things they once though shockingly immoral, which is something I really like about the book.)

The Harry Potter books are actually better than most: The whole thing where heroes have to kill the evil villain, but of course they can't just murder someone, because they're the good guys!!! is rarely handled well--more often than not, the death of the villain is explicitly accidental. That's supposed to make you think that the good guys are still good (I guess because they are unsullied by sin), but I hate it--it smacks of Pontius Pilate washing his hands to me. Heroic people--hell, just plain old decent people--do not go through life abdicating responsibility and trusting on chance to set everything straight. When the choice is between doing something unpleasant or allowing something genuinely horrible to happen, the person who preserves their precious purity by doing nothing is NOT a hero.

The one time where I saw this handled really well was in another story that is supposedly for kids but actually quite gratifying for adults: The television series (NOT the movie) Avatar: The Last Airbender. In that series the main character, Aang, is so opposed to killing that he is a vegetarian, and yet he's put in a position where he is expected to kill the main villain (who is very, very bad). What I like about it is that Aang's opposition to killing is a real choice with real consequences--the writers don't just have a rock fall out of the sky and solve Aang's problem for him--and Aang has to stand up for his choice and find an alternate solution in an environment where that is very difficult. What makes it heroic is the moral courage--Aang must take action, and he must do what's right, not just for him, but for everyone else, too. And it's a much more realistic take on what being a decent person is actually like: The stars don't magically align for you because you try to do the right thing; you have to do the right thing even when it's difficult.

Evil marketing, good marketing

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting pair of compare 'n' contrast articles about on-line marketing.

The first is about the sleazy world of fake Twitter accounts--you can pay people to create huge blocks of Twitter accounts that will follow you and reTweet you and generally make you look more popular than you are, at least to people who give a crap about Twitter.

"If you're not padding your numbers, you're not doing it right," [Ethically-Challenged Rapper] says. "It's part of the game."

Can you guess that I disagree? I mean, if "the game" is to impress some idiot gatekeeper, OK then, but if your goal is to actually reach readers, I don't see how this helps, especially if you are a novelist. If you're not positioning yourself as a non-fiction expert, social media in general isn't all that helpful, and having a bunch of fake followers...? Plenty of real people are already ignoring you on Twitter, trust me. And I'm not even getting into the fact that if you pay for a bunch of fake Twitter accounts to follow you, you have absolutely no guarantee that Twitter won't shut them all down 30 seconds after you buy them.

Ethically-Challenged Rapper's argument in favor of doing this is that it's more cost-effective than advertising on Twitter. I don't know what that says other than that you probably shouldn't bother to advertise on Twitter, either.

(And can I just take a moment to note that it infuriates me when people assume you have to cheat to win. You don't. Remember how people were arguing that paid reviews, while bad, for some reason should be the norm? Remember how that blew up? Nobody likes a cheat.)

Article #2 is about asking fans to give you their e-mail address, so that you have a database of people who already know they like your stuff. (Lindsay Buroker has a lot of useful things to say about this strategy as well.)

Oh, and look! Actual numbers indicating value!

A fan who gives Arcade Fire his or her email address spends, on average, a lifetime total of $6.26 to buy music, merchandise and tickets directly from the Canadian indie-rock act.

Meanwhile, the Icelandic band Sigur Rós boasts an email base of fans worth an average of $10.91. And followers of the progressive rock band Umphrey's McGee generate an average $32.96.

Industrywide, the average fan email address has a value of about $3.78 in direct purchases from artists over the owner's lifetime, according to new data from Topspin Media Inc., a six-year-old Santa Monica, Calif., company that manages online stores for more than 70,000 artists.

That may not sound like much, but it is nearly four times the price of a single from Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store.

Also, as a manger for The Pixies points out, when you've got a mailing list of existing fans, advertising to them couldn't be cheaper--you just shoot out an e-mail, and you're good. The cost savings means that your profit margin on purchases is even better.

The bands that really maximize revenues offer unique (and pricey) goodies exclusively to fans--totally something writers can do. And freebies are always good--according to the article:

Fans who get free music in exchange for an email address are 11 times more likely to make future purchases directly from a band than fans who get nothing for forking over their contact details, Topspin's data show.