And Now For Something Frivolous

I was just reminded of a Getting-to-Know-You game I’ve played and I thought it would be fun to do it here.

If you were a car, what would you be? Not what car would you buy. What kind of car are you?

For instance, I am a rusting 1970 Ford Truck. I’m not pretty, I don’t go in for a wax job or reupholstering – ever. I don’t take crap, but I’ll do my best to perform my job. Give me an oil change now and then and put gas in the tank and I’m good to go. And go.

And go.

What car are you?

Backspace Competition

I’ve got my entry for the Backspace Competition ready to go. I’m a day ahead of myself, but if I don’t get it mailed tonight, it won’t get out at all.

I wonder how many competitors I’m up against? Probably the known writing world, considering how many times the competition arrived in my inbox.

Well, just in case you’re interested, I think I’ll post my first and second pages. I won’t bore you with the majority of the query letter, although I think it’s damn good. Here’s the gist of the story:

When Liu Jie vows to serve his Emperor, the Son of Heaven, he embarks on an epic journey where ghosts are guides and heroes are traitors. Jie endures the brutality and anguish of war before facing his greatest fear: Must he sacrifice his family to save his empire?

And here are the first two pages. Feel free to make suggestions. 🙂

MOURN THEIR COURAGE
By Victoria Dixon

Chapter One

In the Ron Empire, wars did not erupt over cups of rice wine, which was why Liu Jie and his family stopped at the Peach Orchard Inn. It was a meager tamped-earth structure, but he did not care. Traveling was too stressful in these times. They wanted rest.
Despite his guard’s protest, Jie dismounted and opened the inn’s courtyard gate himself. The cold, flaky metal felt good and solid after hours of nothing but leather and horsehair under his fingers. His wife and son’s litter passed inside and Jie helped Mei and Shan out of the stuffy sedan chair. A breeze blew the smell of earth and peaches through the courtyard and all three of them breathed deep. Together, they entered the inn.
To his right, several men gathered around something mounted on the wall. It was an unrolled silk scroll and it caught and held his attention. The weave of the ivory fabric was intricate, and the Imperial Chop blazed like a crimson brand in a corner. He read it in a glance.
The Son of Heaven requires the aid of all men, as sons might come to their father. Rebels assault the people and threaten the capital. All districts report.
Jie took a step toward the scroll and stopped, hands clenched.
Beside him, his wife read it and blanched. “No,” she whispered.
“We knew it would come to this, Mei,” Jie said.
“I’d hoped-“
Jie nodded and took her hand in his for a quiet moment. When servants brought in the family’s luggage, Mei followed them past garish red pillars and up the stairs. He knew she wanted to avoid the noise of the tearoom and the implications of the notice.
Their son, Shan ran outside to play in the last rays of sunlight. Jie bought a cup of rice wine and sat at an empty table. He contemplated how to respond to the summons. Servants lit paper lanterns and the tearoom filled with more men who crowded the notice.
A group of boisterous young men sat at a nearby table and a game of sixes commenced with a clatter of dice.
The voices and noise blended into a monotonous drone. When the innkeeper brought him a plate of dumplings and a set of chopsticks, he barely tasted the food. Instead, he used the chopsticks and wrote plan after plan in the congealing sauce. He abandoned every scheme as impractical.
He did not have enough money to fund a campaign against the rebels. I may have no choice –
The inn door slammed open and Shan rushed inside.
Bemused, Jie smiled as his son looked around the room as if all the demons of hell chased him. After all, he is eight.
Then Shan’s wide-eyed expression found him, and Jie knew something was wrong.
“Papa, come outside, quick!”
“It’s dark outside, Shan. There’s nothing to see.”
“There’s a body!” Shan said. “A dead boy is in the garden.”

Reviews for a friend

Check these out and yeah for Laura Manivong!

Children’s author Uma Krishnaswami wrote a nice length write up on “Escaping the Tiger,” by Laura Manivong. It is due out in 2010. Here’s the link: . And also:
The Newbury Award winning author of “A Single Shard,” Linda Sue Park also weighed in on “Tiger.” http://lsparkreader.livejournal.com/61626.html.

Where do you to find ideas/themes that hold you in their grip?

Thanks to Jeannie Lin for tonight’s blogging question. I’m researching for agents and future plots and not finding either. The agent is something I’ll have to workout for myself, but where do you go to find the notion that will not let you go?

The heroism and sacrifice of Romance of the Three Kingdoms cried out for a fantasy treatment. I couldn’t (still can’t) stop until it’s seen publication. But even though I’ve found several areas of Chinese history that I find intriguing, no other subplots, acts of love, heroism, etc have jumped out at me and shouted, “You must let me tell my story!” I will continue to look, but I’m interested in what other folks do at times like this.

A Disturbing Article and Its Comments

I just read a post on Book Blogs and I’ve included the link in my title if you’re interested. While the article itself is interesting and merits reading, I’m horrified by the resulting comments.

The article is by Guy Gavriel Kay who is obviously a hero of mine, so I’m biased. What he states is a no-brainer to me as a writer:

“What is at work today is linked to a general erosion of the ethical value of privacy and a parallel emergence of a widespread sense of entitlement to look at – or to make use of – the lives of others….

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace … all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to – certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art – novelists are buying into it wholesale….

Here’s the New York Times on Oates’s, Blonde: ‘If a novel can’t deliver Monroe’s beauty … it can give us her interior world.’ What has happened when a reviewer suggests that a novel gives us the true inner world of a real person? This is nonsense, and it is pervasive. Novelists are both caught up in this trend and even making of it something of a cause. Listen to Bruce Duffy, author of The World As I Found It, a novel about Wittgenstein. This is from the Afterword: ‘I was disgusted – no, outraged is the word – that to some, Wittgenstein’s life was clearly considered off-limits …’
Disgust? Outrage? Surely this is the language of entitlement. Admitting of no possible alternative, no intrusion, no … loss. Do we want to forbid such writing? Of course not, but shouldn’t we at least consider, be aware of, what we might be losing when these fictions and the worldview that underlies them become widespread?
What I’m suggesting is this: what we see in these fine works – and they are fine works – along with countless inferior ones, is a dramatically expanded perception of entitlement, and of eroded privacy, of a piece with other aspects of our time.”

(I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him.)

Anyway, to me, his point seems a no-brainer, right? Yet the majority of the commenters believe his premise is wrong and that they do have the right and even the duty as writers to fictionalize (and therefore marginalize) the life of a real individual. They seem to feel the only problem with doing this is the potential for a libel suit.

What ever happened to the writer’s responsibility to write truth? (Yes, even in fiction, maybe especially in fiction, one must write about truth.) I do not believe that in order to find universal truths in fiction, one must state that our works of fiction ARE reality. That’s absurd. To say that Braveheart is really the story of William Wallace is the untruth and I’m happy that the writers of that movie did not state such a thing. Unfortunately, writers no longer feel as much compunction and now border on telling lies about reality and calling that real.

I’m rambling now. I’ve been awake for over an hour and have nothing but this blog and my disturbed state of mind to show for it. I guess even rambling about ethics and entitlement is better than not discussing it at all.