Fate vs. Free Will

So about a week ago, the series finale of a really great kids show, Avatar: The Last Airbender, aired the whiz-bang 2-hour conclusion. It was pretty awesome. Now, I'm not going to spoil anything for you, but I will say this: the main character, Aang, is facing a very difficult choice at one point, and struggles with how to solve it. In the end, a series of coincidences and accidents aide Aang and basically make the choice for him.

Avatar may be a TV show, but it still has writing, and that writing is directed at young audiences. I had a problem with this particular bit of writing, and have discussed it with several other online buddies.

The problems are solved by fate. It's out of the character's hands, and therefore I have no real interest in the outcome and am more than a bit disappointed. If a writer has everything happen according to fate or destiny, his character's actions mean nothing, because no matter what, they are on a railroad to the inevitable outcome. So they can do just about anything, or nothing, and it'll all turn out as it should in the end. Yawn. Boring.

I like free will. I like consequences. I like things not going as planned and the character, and reader/viewer being surprised.

I didn't like the writers' answer to Aang's problems because Aang never made a decision. He had a decision handed to him, so he didn't grow as a character. He wasn't dynamic, he was passive. I mentioned this to my buddies and some of them replied "Well, he's a kid. sometimes kids just wait and see."

I'm not interested in the characters who wait and see. I want them to be decisive, to drive the story and events through their actions, not sitting on the roadside waiting for the answer to pull up. Kids are capable of making decisions, and since they're young, they are often the wrong ones. That's something any kid can relate to. Screwing up is just part of growing up. I will respect a character that has the balls to make a decision on his own, then live with the consequences. Even if that decision is really, tremendously stupid, if the outcome and fallout and the character's reaction are real, I am still on board.

I will not respect the character that hides and waits for his problems to solve themselves.

So if you are a writer, just say no to Fate.

Fun With Agents: Rejection Theatre

It’s very easy to hate literary agents. They call you “Dear Author,” reply with bland, vague, copy-pasted letters (on those rare occasions they bother to reply to you at all), and nine times out of ten, toss your query letter aside after maybe 30 seconds of contemplation after you spent a week writing it.

To date, I’ve received somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 rejections from agents on one book, accumulated over the past 2 and a half years. So I have a very good reason to despise agents and their ilk, but oddly enough, I don’t.

That’s not to say there haven’t been instances where I haven’t been frustrated, or wanted to pelt the offending agent with lots of hard, sharp objects, but publishing is a business, and it’s nothing personal. They’re doing their job, and any reason for them rejecting my work is my fault, not theirs.

I think that’s something a lot of authors forget. It’s very easy to blame the market, or a particular agent, instead of directing that critical finger at yourself. I know I can be a bit of a bastard in my writing. I take a good bit of sadistic glee in cutting into a bad piece of published literature. I earned more than my fair share of hatred in my various college writing classes when I would tell my peers that what they had written was atrocious and they should cut off their writing hand in shame. But as critical as I am of others, I’m twice as bad on myself.

So I don’t hate agents for rejecting my work, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t disheartening, or that I did throw the occasional tantrum. It’s not fun having somebody snub something you’ve put months and/or years of work into. It’s demoralizing, and more often than not, makes me want to give up on this writing business altogether and take up a less emotionally painful hobby, like knitting or punching myself in the balls.

But like a true masochist I keep coming back for more, and am oddly grateful for the rejections I receive. That project I’ve gotten 50-60 rejections on, I finally gave up on it. I may do a page one rewrite somewhere down the road (because even though there are pacing and plot issues aplenty, it’s still rich with character development and original ideas), I know that now it’s time to move on.

When I was 19 and just starting college, I wanted desperately to be published. To be one of those sensational youthful authors. I look back on that now and want to write a personal Thank You card to any agent that was smart enough to turn me down. My writing back then was embarrassing. Still a far sight better than what seniors in my capstone course writing class were shitting out, but embarrassing none-the-less.

I look at things Swordbird, by Nancy Yi-Fan, who was published at 14, and can’t help but feel sorry for the girl. The book is absurd. It’s laughably bad, shallow, and frankly, stupid.

Wait.

Stop.

I know the response you’re already cooking up in your head. I’m using my psychic powers to infiltrate your brain. “But it’s really good for a 14-year-old,” or something along those lines. Right? I agree. Swordbird is very good for a 14-year-old writer. But it isn’t good for a writer, period. When somebody is published, I’m going to hold them up to other authors and my own reading experience. I do not give handicaps or special bonuses for age. Swordbird is not a good book and its author is not a good writer. No addendums of “She’s only 14,” none of that.

Nancy Yi-Fan needed an agent or a publisher to send her a rejection letter. She needed to grow as an author, and grow-up in the general sense, before she could be considered a good writer. Instead she, like other wunderkind authors, is riding by on the fact that they are young. That’s it. I have no doubt that if an adult had submitted Swordbird in the same fashion Nancy Yi-Fan had, they would have been lucky to get a form rejection.

It would have been a painful experience, one I became familiar with at a much younger age, but it would have been a benefit to her in the long run.

So don’t hate agents, at least, not most of them. Most of them are good folks doing their job, and conducting business as they see fit. Rewrite your manuscript or start on a new one. It can only be better than what you’ve got now.

Where's the YA Horror at?

So there’s a lot of vampire/werewolf type YA novels floating around out there right now. There’s also a lot of other stories that have monsters and other beasties lurking in their pages, but I’ve noticed a rather big gap in the YA field: horror.

I broached this subject on a writing forum some time ago and got a lot of responses. People said things like “Well I thought the Creature X in book Y was pretty scary!” Well good for you, but way to miss the point. Just because a book has a scary beast in it, or a scary scene doesn’t mean it’s horror.

The Midnighters series by Scott Westerfeld is a good example. It might sound scary at first: a small group of teens have the ability to enter a hidden 25^th hour of the day populated by shadowy, shape-shifting creepy crawlies that eat people. But it isn’t horror. It’s action/sci-fi/fantasy or some weird crossbreed. But not horror.

Here’s a simple break down of what I think makes a good horror story:

· Ordinary, every day people as the protagonists. If they have super powers or are ex-Navy SEALs, it’s not scary. This needs to be somebody that could be ME.

· A monster of some kind. The monster could be a crazed killer in the woods, a literal monster, or something else. Just so long as it has a sense of other-ness to it that is frightening and alien. It could also be a disease or something abstract.

· The ultimate goal of the protagonists is survival, plain and simple. The focus of the book is not on romance, or saving the world, and getting the Macguffin or plot coupon. The goal is to not die horribly or get your soul eaten. That’s the pulsing, meaty center of horror, that primal, instinctive, pitiful cry of “God I don’t want to die.” Good horror latches onto that, sucks you in and makes you face mortality in the form of the characters facing theirs. See how easy it is to die? See how fragile you are? Look at how quickly things can go from a pleasant trip in the countryside to being hunted like dumb beasts by some unspeakable shapeless thing hungry for your guts.

· And finally, the scariest thing of all that should be present everywhere, a sense of the unknown. This could be manifested in the monster, the setting, other characters, whatever. Being left in the dark, not knowing, is scary as hell.

I’m not saying a horror story can’t contain other elements, or must contain all of these, but my favorite horror stories always have. I’m going to use a bunch of adult books now as example, because I honestly can’t think of any YA ones.

In Stephen King’s The Mist, the main character is a somewhat dorky graphic artist who lives by a lake with his wife and kid. They’re stuck with a bunch of other very normal people in a grocery store, with all kinds of otherworldly, flesh eating monsters waiting to chew them to pieces outside. The scare-factor came from the characters all being normal folks, people I could know, people that I could see parts of myself in, people I could relate to. The monsters were creepy in their own right, but what added to the fear was that nobody really knew what was going on. Nothing was ever fully explained. We got hints, vague ideas, but nothing solid. And the goal wasn’t to save the world, the goal was that the dad wanted to save himself and his kid, and maybe a few others. Escape, survive. Nothing else.

Let’s look at another master of horror: Clive Barker and his amazing novella, The Hellbound Heart. Barker goes for the deep, psychological, visceral terror, where a man’s fondest desire becomes his ultimate hell. The characters are all normal again, no super soldiers or psychic powers going on here, just weak, flesh-and-blood mortals. They’re pursued by the Cenobites, other dimensional “angels” with a penchant for brutal self-mutilation, and a hobby of blurring the line between pleasure and suffering. The main character, a nice young girl, gets caught up in all this bloody nonsense and is in serious danger of being condemned for eternity to unthinkable torment, and her only goal is to escape that. It’s a very grim, dark book as one might expect. Barker is big into the whole idea of horror at one’s body, what it can become, what pain it can cause, and that’s a very primal thing that he taps into early on.

H.P. Lovecraft got a fear of the unknown down to a science, but his fault is that he would leave too much unknown. In his book Danse Macabre (which I will liberally paraphrase here), Stephen King talks about revealing the monster behind the door. Before the door is opened, the audience is terrified, but when it’s flung open, they’re relieved. “Oh thank goodness, it’s only a 10 foot bug. It could’ve been a 50 foot bug,” or something. And if you put a 50 foot bug behind the door, well it could’ve been a 100 foot bug, and so on. It could always be worse. However, if you never reveal what’s behind the door, the audience feels cheated, and this is what Lovecraft would sometimes do. His monsters were so horrible they couldn’t be described, so he wouldn’t describe them. What Stephen King suggests in his book, and what I agree with, is to open the door a crack. Let the audience see the shadow of the monster, a quick glimpse of the beast, and let their imagination fill in the dark gaps.

Horror is a tricky business. It’s easy to make a story with guts everywhere, but that is almost never scary. It’s cheap and it’s boring. Psychological horror is tougher, but if all the horror is mental, it lacks that visceral, simple terror that the threat of bodily harm can instill. I’m honestly not surprised there isn’t much, if any, real, good YA horror available. Deciding where to draw the line with a younger audience isn’t easy, and no such line really exists in adult fiction.

Well, I’ve said enough on this for now. It’s a subject close to me, and I’ve got a nice little horror story I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year that I may revisit. But if that never sees the light of day, I sincerely hope that some talented author will fill the missing horror piece in the YA world.

Character & Plot

Have you heard the term “High Concept” before? It’s something that typically comes up a lot in queries and the discussion thereof. Really, all it means is that if you have a “High Concept” novel, you’ve got a really good, creative idea for a story. I’ve seen this term a lot on agent blogs where the agent in question will write “I am really looking for a good, high concept novel.” Which means “I’m looking for a good idea.”

No shit. Really? Agents like good ideas? So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years, I’ve been sending agents bad ideas. I really wish somebody had told me sooner. Thanks agents, that’s ever so helpful.

Smarminess to agents aside, having a high concept, or good idea for a plot, is just common sense. But here’s where I’m sure I’m going to piss some people off and get gasps of amazement and shock: the plot isn’t the most important thing.

That’s right I said it.

Let me clear something up before I go on: story and plot are not the same thing. The story is everything: the plot, the characters, the language, it’s all of it, the whole mess. The plot is the series of events that move the story forward from point A to B to C or possibly Z to Y to X if you’re into the whole flashback thing or whatever.

And plot is vital to a good story, but I don’t think it’s the most vital. Which is funny, because as little as a year or two ago I would have said “Plot first!” and beaten anyone who disagreed into a red pulp.

So what is the most vital then, in my own obscure, humble opinion? It’s character. Who’s riding this crazy plot train? Are they the ones steering it?

If a character or set of characters is interesting or engaging enough, I will happily read a story about them going to the grocery store and buying eggs. However, if characters are boring, flat, and unrealistic, they could be on a mission to save the universe from Satan and his alliance of aliens robot ninjas and I couldn’t give a shit.

Let’s look at The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. It’s a very simple story about a boy trying to figure out who killed a dog, and then later trying to find somebody. There is no high action aside from him getting on a train by himself, and he’s never in any serious danger. But the protagonist’s voice is so real, so engaging, and so wonderful that I, and many, many others, were sucked right in until the end. I finished it in a day I was so ensnared by Haddon’s character.

Now, look at something like The Revenge of the Shadow King by Derek Benz and J.S. Lewis. It’s got mythical creatures ripping into our world, poised to eat up humanity and make things generally terrible for people everywhere, but I didn’t give a damn the entire time because the characters are laughably bad cardboard cut-outs of the worst Saturday Morning cartoon I ever watched as a child. I was totally apathetic about what was going on in the books because the characters were stupid, boring, and cheesy in the worst way.

Now I know comparing these books is like comparing apples and oranges (and Haddon’s book isn’t even for the YA market either) but it illustrates my point: excellent characters will carry a relatively ordinary plot, but shit characters can’t save even the most thrilling of escapades.

I’ve got my claws out now and I’d love to rip into Benz and Lewis some more, but I’ll save it until they push out their next inevitable Grey Griffins series turd.

There’s the risk of writing a story that has nothing but character, and in which nothing happens, and those sorts of stories do exist. While I still value character more than plot, I will always hold plot up as another key component of any story. Characters are enriched and even more engaging when the events occurring around them are extraordinary. It’s fun to see what a well-fleshed out character will do when you throw a brain-sucking alien at him or her, or put them in the middle of the third world war, or something even more grandiose. I’d still be okay with watching good characters go to the store, but if the choice is between those same good characters going for groceries or fighting off super villains, my choice is obvious.

I’ll go into this more later, I’m sure, but that’s the bare bones of part of my writing philosophy for now. Take it as you will, internet.

Censorship vs. YA: Ultimate Fighting Smackdown XXXVIII

A friend’s recent blog post led me to this train of thought, so I’m going to ride on her coattails for today.

For as long as there have been books for kids, there have been nosey old women who probably need to get out more declaring what is and is not appropriate for other people’s children to read. That’s not fair, I’m sure there’s a lot of nosey old men out there too.

I’m pretty liberal when it comes to censorship in that I really hate it, find it creatively restrictive, narrow-minded, and generally stupid. While I’m not advocating we start putting hardcore XXX material in Dr. Seuss, I am saying that if the natural progression of a story involves sex, drugs, death, or one of those other taboo subjects that make aforementioned old women cluck their tongues and waggle their fingers, then it should be allowed and not squashed.

Allow me to illustrate:

In R.A. Nelson’s book Teach Me, main character Carolina falls for the hilariously named Richard Mann, her high school English teacher. Dick Mann falls for her too and the two of them proceed to do naughty things to each other. I didn’t really enjoy the book for several reasons: Carolina is an arrogant, snide girl who thinks she’s better than everyone, Mann is dull, and the conclusion is tacked on and hokey, but one of the main reasons was when and how the two lovers decided to finally do the deed.

There’s a lot of talk of unrestrained passion and forbidden love, etc etc. I’m inclined to think that a grown man willing to make out with his underage student in the back of his car wouldn't draw the line at just making kissy faces. Carolina and Dick do eventually consummate their relationship, but not until after Carolina turns 18, and Nelson is very careful and clear in pointing this tidbit out to the reader.

It just seemed to me like the characters had already thrown caution and societal norms to the wind. Mann is already risking his career and jail time just by getting to first base with Carolina. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? No, wrong. Mann and Carolina display uncharacteristic restraint by waiting until Carolina is nice and legal. Either Nelson is a total wuss, or an editor came in who was worried about what the local Censor’s Knitting Circle would have to say about this sort of thing.

The book still would have been predictable and otherwise irritating, but at least the characters would have made more sense. This is when I have an issue with censorship: when it ruins the flow of a story, the message, or the characters, and nine times out of ten it does just that. It’s also insulting to the audience by treating them like naïve toddlers or incompetents, which I’ve already expressed my feelings on.

Kids who are at a level to read young adult fiction probably already know about sex, drugs, and death. I was hearing about the latter two from my local D.A.R.E. officer back in second grade, and the former was officially introduced to me three years later, though I’d heard about it from some shady first graders ages before.

Censorship isn’t all bad, but I have a hard time coming up with examples of when it’s beneficial for a work of art, “art” being the operative word. If something is really a work of art, an expression, then a censor has no place messing with it.

Censorship isn’t always just about cutting out nasty swears or mention of drugs, and it doesn’t always come from an outside source. Sometimes an author can be their own worst enemy and decide to censor themselves. I’m a member of a message board that focuses on writing for youths ranging from pre-school to high school, and there’s always some good discussion going on somewhere.

However, the board’s population is mostly composed of moms and older women who write nice stories with cheerleader spies, or picture books about how important it is to share. Which is really great, honest. Those types of books are fine by me. But it means a guy like me with a somewhat darker, more mature style of writing is often at odds with the general consensus. One writer once said she felt it was our responsibility as authors to give our young audience uplifting stories that ended well and gave everybody hope and a smile.

Bullshit.

I wasn’t so blunt in person of course, but that’s some unrefined bullshit. My one and ONLY responsibility as an author is to tell a good story. Everything else is secondary. Conveying a meaningful theme, enlightening the reader, giving them hope for tomorrow, are all take a back seat to telling a good story. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War is a very good story that ends on a very low note. He didn’t fail in his responsibility as an author because his main character is seriously down in the dumps by the last page. Making everything sunshine and gummi bears because you feel you have to is a form of self censorship. Don’t do it.

If your story naturally has a happy ending, awesome. If your story is very much a gloomy affair, focusing on darker and more serious aspects of life, and you just feel compelled to wedge your Brady Bunch conclusion in there, stop. Think. Don’t stop yourself from putting in a sad or scary ending just because it’s sad or scary. That’s you censoring yourself and having it mess with the flow and feel of your story. The end result is going to be a sub-par narrative, and a rightfully pissed off audience.

I’ve had to do this sometimes. I’ll be writing something for a young YA or older middle grade crowd and think, “Maybe this is too much.” So I’ll ask myself, is it in character? Does it make sense plot wise? Is it gratuitous? If the answers are yes, yes, and no respectively, it stays, even if it makes me a little anxious or unsure. I may come back later and fix it, but sometimes I just have to stop worrying what my mom will think if she ever reads my stuff and go with it.

To sum up, censorship, from outside or within, eats shit on toast most of the time.

And Richard Mann is a hilarious name.

Fun With Agents: Lists of Clichés

Anybody who has glanced at getting seriously published knows that one of the best ways to do this is to get an agent. By the way if any one of you out there is thinking “No, the best way is self publishing,” then kindly slap yourself in the face because I can’t reach across the internet and do it myself.

Moving on, if you’re not familiar with literary agents, here’s the gist: they get about 15% of whatever a publisher pays you for your book and in exchange, they market your manuscript to some of the biggest and best publishing houses on the market, places that otherwise wouldn’t even give you the time of day. There are agents for every fiction and non-fiction subject and genre, from cooking Italian cuisine to sappy Victorian-era romances to sci-fi erotica and, of course, YA books.

Many of these agents, especially the newer ones, maintain blogs where they post submission guidelines, publishing news, and sometimes what their cat had for breakfast. I’ve noticed a trend recently among several agents. They’ve been posting lists of clichés they see in the submission letters they get, especially fantasy clichés.

In the past few years there’s been a bunch of interest in the fantasy genre due to things like the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, Harry Potter, and even that piece of garbage Eragon. So it’s really no surprise that the countless budding young authors out there would start producing fantasy manuscripts and step all over a bunch of familiar tropes and over-used clichés.

So here’s some of the more prominent complaints/observations I’ve seen on various agent blogs:

1. The quest for a magic ring or talisman that will save/destroy the world or aide/kill the Big Bad.
2. A mystical portal that leads between worlds.
3. A prophesized hero that comes along and saves everybody and their mum from total destruction.
4. Dragons.

Now, I will be the first to admit that those things are very abundant and often executed with all the grace of a drunk, retarded hippo in the fantasy genre. However, and this is my problem with some of the agents that post these lists, these things in and of themselves are not bad. Having a dragon in your fantasy book does not mean it is bad fantasy.

For the most part, I hate dragons. If something had a dragon on the cover I’d pass it up immediately and move on to something else. Until very recently I would have said anything with a dragon as its main feature was bound to be twenty kinds of shit, but then I picked up the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. It’s not YA, but it is a really wonderful, original series. Long story short, it’s historical fantasy focusing on the Napoleonic wars if there had been dragons around at the time and it’s truly fascinating, well-written, and engaging.

Now let’s look at a book series that contains all those cliché elements that agents so despise: Harry Potter. Magic talisman or object that saves/destroys etc etc? Check, in the first book, as well as the sixth and seventh. Mystical portal that leads to another world? It’s a bit of a stretch but Platform 9 ¾ fits this pretty well. Prophesized hero? You bet’cha. Dragons? Ye-up. But Harry Potter is great because Rowling is a solid writer who knows how to use character and pen a good story. She’s not perfect, but despite having a ton of familiar fantasy tropes littered throughout her books, they’re all really fun.

Now, look, I don’t mind if an agent says they don’t want to see those things because they don’t like them. I can dig it. Not everybody likes fantasy and that’s fine. But when an agent says “Don’t send me items X,Y,Z just because there are a lot of them,” that’s stupid and narrow-minded, and they’re cutting themselves off (and possibly the literary world at large) from some potentially awesome books.

But I’d even be okay with that if these same agents didn’t then ask for a different set of clichés in the same breath. I realize high fantasy isn’t the popular kid on the block right now. As far as fantasy goes, agents and publishers alike seem to be favoring the urban fantasy genre, stuff like Twilight, and Wicked Lovely (and on a somewhat related note, a lot of YA urban fantasy, most in fact, seem to be aimed at young ladies. A blog entry for later, perhaps).

Still, I’m flummoxed when I see an agent say “No more magic rings,” but then ask for a vampire romance in the next line. I’m not kidding. Do you, Dear Reader. Have any sodding idea how many YA books out there just have vampires in them? I did a little test yesterday while at Barnes & Noble. I went to the Young Adult section, and walked briskly past it. In that brief time span of perhaps two seconds, walking past and looking quickly over only one side of the YA book shelf, I counted five, FIVE, relatively new releases that had vamps as their main selling point.

And agents who say “No overused stuff please” are outright asking for this!

There’s nothing wrong with vampires, but if an agent is going to tell me they’re not overdone at this point I’m going to hit them with the combine works of Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice, and any one of the other dozens of works by vampire savvy authors.

So here’s what all this boils down to: There’s always going to be ideas in the YA world and beyond that are familiar, and yes, overdone. But for a good author, that doesn’t matter. A good author can take any idea and make it into a great book. So agents, please, dismissing ideas just because you don’t like them is fine, but dismissing ideas just because they’re familiar is really stupid.

By the way, a good agent I came across recently (and who rejected my recent query, but it’s cool, I can take it) who mentions these clichés but is still quite all right with looking at books that have them is Colleen Lindsay. She seems super nice and she mentions China Mieville as one of her favorite authors, so the lady’s got serious good taste. She’s also relatively new and building her client list, so if you’re a hopeful author like me, give her a shot.

Addendum: If anybody can tell me what the big draw for YA audiences is with vampire romance, I’d really appreciate it.

Addendum 2: The Sequel: By the way, I know I harped on one particular cliché, The Philosopher's Stone, earlier and that it too was used in Harry Potter. The difference is, Rowling is actually a good author, while Abalos is not.

Review Time: Twilight Series

Very recently I’ve been seeing mountainous piles of Stephenie Meyers’ latest book, The Host, taking up space in my local Barnes & Noble and looming over the other new releases like that damned obelisk from 2001. However, that’s a book for adults and I haven’t read it yet, but it seemed like a good excuse to review Mrs. Meyers’ other, more popular works, the Twilight series.

Now, before I begin, I just want to make a few things perfectly clear:

1) I haven’t read Eclipse, but after going through about 1,100 pages of an author’s work, I think I have a pretty good idea of how they do business and am entitled to an informed opinion.

2) I realize these books were not written for my demographic (that is, the twenty-something, embittered, shut-in male writer) so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.

3) I am protected against Edward Cullen fangirls by a wide array of internet deities, so don’t even bother sending me a message or posting how much dear Eddie could beat me up or whatever.

Okay, let’s get started.

I think the Twilight series is pretty good.

Oh, weren’t expecting that now were you? What’s this?! Mssr. Jay saying something nice? About a vampire romance for teenage girls? Yes, shocking I know. Settle your affairs and tell your friends and family you love them because we’ve clearly come to the end of the world.

Here’s a quick recap for those of you that are not familiar with the world of Twilight:

Bella Swan is a very clumsy girl who just moved to a really shitty town called Forkes in Washington state. There she goes about ingratiating herself into a new school, making new friends, and learning about the mysterious, appallingly gorgeous Cullen family, particularly Edward Cullen. Welp, turns out Eddie and family are all vampires, but they’re nice, honest. They only eat animals, never people.

Soon enough, Bella becomes infatuated with Edward, and he with her, bringing up all sorts of relationship problems that probably make your most tortured high school romance seem like a day at the beach. As Bella gets to know Edward and the other Cullens better, things mellow out a bit until a new vampire coven, a people-eating one, come to town and make trouble for Bella and her new beau.

That’s Twilight, the first book. New Moon continues Bella’s story and introduces a larger view of vampire society, some werewolves, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t want to spoil, Eclipse carries things on further, and the series is set to end with Breaking Dawn.

Twilight and New Moon are not paragons of literary fiction, but they are fun. And again, I am about as far from the target demographic of squealing adolescent girls as Christopher Paolini is from an original idea (that’s a really long way, FYI). I will accept a lot of bad things from a book so long as the end result is that I am having fun while I read it. I find this especially important for YA books because I think it’s very important that young folks should have fun while reading, thus encouraging them to read more.

I also greatly appreciated Mrs. Meyers’ new spin on the rather stale vampire mythology. Meyers’ vampires are a bit too perfect if you ask me, but they’re original at least, and that’s preferable to the Anne Rice variety of gothy emo whiners that sulk in corners and lament how freaking pretty they are or something.

Meyers’ first person prose is convincing and enjoyable and easy to read despite the mastadonic size of the books (New Moon is almost 600 pages long and I think Eclipse is longer). However, the voice is of a high school girl and at times it can become truly irritating (so it’s quite accurate then isn’t it, har dee har har), what with Bella’s constant swooning over how gorgeous Edward is. How much he looks like a statue of some pagan god of beauty. How chiseled his jaw is, oh yes and his abs, or his arms, and his dangerous eyes. I feel like I should turn in my man card for admitting I read these books, but then I already turned it in long ago for confessing a love for the Princess Bride.

And that’s my big complaint with Meyers’ writing. She goes on. Not just about Edward, but about everything. Her books are all these huge things you could beat a rhino to death with and they don’t need to be. Each of them needs to get on a book treadmill and shed some pages. You could easily cut out 100 or more pages from Twilight and not lose much of the story. Yes fangirls, I just said Meyers should cut out some pages containing Edward Cullen, deal with it.

Meyers establishes character, mood, setting, etc. with enough skill that it all registers with me pretty early, but then she keeps going. And going. Then she spends some time mooning over Edward, then she goes on some more. I don’t know who her editor is, but they need a solid blow to the head with On Writing, or Elements of Style or something.

But it’s still fun. And to repeat myself, this is coming from a grown man. I can only imagine what sort of rabid glee the young ladies this book was written for must possess. Actually, I don’t have to imagine. I had the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Meyer in person on a couple of occasions, both times she was surrounded by a mob of girls that looked like their heads were about to explode from an overabundance of joy, and to relieve the pressure they had to make these funny little “squeeeee” noises. I got a chance to talk to her, congratulate her on her success, and ask her a few questions. I think after she got over the shock of a man being familiar with her work, she was incredibly friendly and a genuinely wonderful person. I always try and separate the artist from the art, and enjoy or loathe a work of art on its own merits and not the personality of its creator, but it never hurts when the creator is super nice in addition to having made something fun and enjoyable.

So that’s my long ramble on the Twilight series. I know it’s sort of vague, but I’m trying not to spoil it for all the young men who should be reading it so they can pick up more chicks.