Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

I will now reveal a little secret: I don't like numeric rating systems. Actually, let me rephrase that: I hate numeric ranking systems. Unless we're talking about something completely objective, like "did 2 + 2 = 4 in this equation" or "did this wolverine do a satisfactory job of clawing off your face," they lose a major component of any rating: a view of the person who's doing the ranking.

These are things I really, really like: studying viruses. Horror movies. Collecting weird old knives I bought at flea markets. Monster High dolls. X-Men comics. Candy corn. My Little Ponies. Talking about dead stuff. Snakes. Octopi. Coyotes. Watching television.

These are things I really, really dislike: sports. Serious romances, the kind where someone gets hit by a car or catches a wasting disease and I wind up sobbing into my ice cream. Shopping for shoes. Bratz dolls. High heels on small children. Coconut. Mango. Bell peppers. Going to the dentist. Dishes. Leeches. Clowns. Most shoes that are considered "fashionable." Watching the news.

Now here's the thing. None of the things I like are inherently better or morally superior to the things I dislike. Nor is the opposite true. My little sister loves shoes (although we both hate and fear clowns). Her room is a shrine to shoes. She finds the fact that I own between two and four pairs of shoes at any given time faintly horrifying, although not as horrifying as the fact that I wear them until they are literally falling apart before I'm willing to break down and buy more. If my sister and I were asked to give a one-to-five ranking to the same shoe store, you'd see one of the two following combinations:

Seanan: "This store carried one style of shoe! It was so easy! 5 of 5 stars!"
Seanan's sister: "This store had no selection and no style. 1 of 5 stars."

...or...

Seanan: "Oh Great Pumpkin it was huge and confusing and I was there for hours and I HATED IT. 0 of 5 stars."
Seanan's sister: "So many shoes! So many styles! Best shoe store ever! 5 of 5 stars."

It's the same store in both cases. It's not changing to suit our rankings. It's either a store that sells one kind of functional shoe (my ideal), or a great many kinds of fashionable shoe (her ideal). The problem is that we wandered into the wrong stores, and our current critical dialogue only seems to have two settings: "it was good" and "it was bad." "It wasn't right for me" is nowhere in the equation, and that's sort of a problem for me.

What does "3 of 5 stars" mean, anyway?

Also—and this is, I fear, unfixable, because the internet is big, and we're all coming from different social and educational backgrounds—we have no common understanding of what "good" means. For me, ranking something 3 of 5 should mean "it was good, I liked it, I will keep the book/may watch the movie again/enjoyed the meal." For some others, ranking something 3 of 5 means "it failed in every substantial way, but the words didn't slide off the page when I shook it, so I guess I may as well give it something."

For some people, 1 of 5 means "it wasn't available in the exact format and language I wanted it to be in, exactly when I wanted it," or "the main character didn't get with the guy I liked in the last chapter, so even though I liked the rest of the book, it sucks." It means too much sex, too little sex, and, in the case of one review that made me want to throw the website across the room, not enough rape (thankfully, this review was not of one of my books). For others, anything below 4 of 5 means "this book is not worth my time."

This lack of standards is why I had to stop keeping up my Goodreads page. I found myself giving inflated scores to everything, because I had no way of explaining that from me, 3 of 5 was a really good rating, and I didn't want to be the one who hurt the ranking of a book I really loved. When I realized I was giving dishonest 4s and 5s, I walked away. It wasn't fair...and yet, giving 3s, when most people seem to view anything below an aggregate 4 as a bad book, also seemed unfair. I had given up context for convenience, and that didn't work for me at all.

The problem with "it's not for me" becoming "it's not for you."

"I bet you'd love to criticize that, wouldn't you, you critics! But you can't."
"It's not for you."

—Penny Arcade.*

One of the issues with saying "I don't like a numeric rating system, it's too arbitrary because it doesn't tell you anything about the people spitting out the numbers" is that sometimes, people hear that as "you can't criticize this because I didn't write it for you." That's bull. I can criticize my sister's taste in shoe shops as much as I want, and I can tell you for a fact that they didn't build that shoe store for me, or for the other people like me in this world. They built it for her, and for the people like her. And yet, at the same time...

There's a book I really love called Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures. The word "gross" is used in the cover text of the edition I have, several times. The cover shows a super-magnified blood-sucking mite, staring at you, thinking about whether you might have some blood available for sucking. It is not a book that drapes itself in pastel colors and tries to trick you into thinking it's about unicorns. And if you go and read the reviews on the various numeric review sites (Amazon, Goodreads, etc.), the low reviews are almost universally going either "it was icky" or "it was full of science and also icky."

It's a book about parasites, written by a scientist, as part of a popular science series. If you don't like a) parasites, b) being a little grossed out in the pursuit of knowledge, and c) science, it's sadly a fair bet that this book? Isn't for you. Even if you're a critic, it's not for you. It's for the people who like parasites, being a little grossed out, and learning about science. Does this mean you can't criticize it? No. But it does mean that I wish there were some option for saying "this book was not my cup of tea, I made a mistake when I picked it up" that was not "1 of 5 stars icky book is icky."

Why book bloggers counter this trend.

Part of why I love book bloggers is the meatiness of their reviews, even the terse ones. When someone says "I didn't like this book, 1 of 5," they follow it up with a substantial why. They let me see their love of shoes, dislike of bell peppers, and love of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. They show me their biases, and by doing so, their review becomes relevant to me. Yes, even when it's of one of my own books, and even when it's negative. Because nothing in this world is perfect for absolutely everyone. Some of the best reviews I've read, of both my own books and the books of others, have been negative. It's seeing why that matters, and seeing what else the reviewer has listed in their like/dislike column.

Because that's the other thing: a lot of the time "it's not my cup of tea" becomes "I won't give bad reviews, and you shouldn't, either." When I see a horror movie that's a bad horror movie, I say so. I just don't review it the way I would review a comedy, just like I don't review a comedy the way I would review a musical. I would never call Glee a bad show because people break randomly into song—it's a musical! But I've been calling some episodes bad episodes, because the character choices don't make sense, and the entire current season is based around something that isn't supported by the show's canon. If something is bad, say so. But we need to say why it's bad...and admit that sometimes, the problem isn't the thing we're reviewing, it's us.

I do think we need to remember that "this isn't my thing" is a column on the good/bad metric. I am currently slogging through—and yes, I mean that—the latest Stephen King novel, 11/22/63. If you know my tastes at all, you know that he's my favorite author. I'd read his laundry list. And that's why I'm still reading this book, rather than chucking it across the room. It's a time travel story about trying to prevent the JFK assassination, and I. Don't. Care. That happened so long before I was born that I can't imagine what the world would be like if JFK hadn't died, and thus basing an entire doorstop of a novel around trying to keep him alive just doesn't do it for me. Is it a good book? Objectively, it's written with the same style and skill that King brings to all his books. All the reviews I can find are fantastic.

And I still don't care. This book is a good book. It is well-written and well-researched. It is not for me. Something I love very much—maybe even something I've written—probably isn't for you. And that's okay.

It'd be a boring world if we were all of us the same.

(*Yes, I love supporting my points with old Penny Arcade strips. Around here, that's just how we roll.)

Everyone has what my friends and I refer to as "narrative kinks": those storylines, themes, tropes, and motifs that really get you cooking as a reader, a writer, or both. (Note: despite my use of the word "kink" here, there is nothing inherently sexual about a narrative kink. Ask any small child what kind of story he or she likes, and you'll get a much clearer, more honest picture of what they want out of a story than you will from most adults. We start forming these tastes from the second we understand what stories are, and while they may shift, refine, and totally change over the course of our lifetimes, we always have them.) Mine are pretty straightforward; years of writing fanfic helped me hone in on them like a mosquito going for the one inch of skin that doesn't have bug spray on it, and now I know exactly what they are, where they are, and how to spot them when they come into play.

A few of my preferences:

* Mermaids! I love mermaids. I've been thrilled by everyone enjoying the glimpse of the Undersea in One Salt Sea, because wow did those chapters feel self-indulgent. I could have written a whole book just explaining how the social structure of the Undersea functions. Someday, if I get a good enough excuse, maybe I will.

* Evil twins. Yeah, I know, it's a Patty Duke cliche, and I don't care. I love me some evil twin action. Blame my early exposure to All My Children and move on.

* Mathematicians and scientists in leading rolls. I think math is sexy. Science is basically my favorite thing that isn't the Great Pumpkin or my cats. It's pretty rare to find a book of mine that doesn't have at least one of these character types represented. (Ironically, Feed didn't need a scientist because I was the scientist, with all that delicious virology kicking around.)

* Alternate universes and timelines. Yes, I love breaking continuity and seeing what happens when it's put together in a new shape. Enough so that sometimes people have to hold me down and take the hammer away, since otherwise, I'll just keep smashing things. My one regret about prose as a primary medium is that it's hard to pull off alt-universes in most prose settings.

* The malleability of death. Look, I grew up on X-Men comics, soap operas, and horror movies. I enjoy playing with the elasticity of mortality, and finding ways around things that seem permanent. You can't cheat, but watching your dead girlfriend's robot replacement come to terms with the fact that she's really a brain in a jar delights me.

...there are more, but you get the idea.

One of the interesting things about knowing and being at peace with my narrative kinks is that I get much, much pickier about how they're used. You can't just raise the dead and expect me to be happy; I want it to make sense within the rules of your universe, hang together internally, and be fair to the character you've just brought back. If you're going to have a lead scientist, they'd better be a scientist, and not a magical knows-everything widget that can somehow apply every field of science KNOWN TO MAN to whatever situation they happen to be in (Winnifred Burkle, I'm sorry, but I'm looking at you).

If you're going to do an alternate universe, I expect you to think it all the way through. Yes, all the way through. One of my favorite shows rebooted their continuity two seasons ago, and while they made the usual assortment of flashy surface changes, they didn't consider all the ramifications of those changes. The fact that at least two of the characters involved didn't tear down heaven and earth looking for a way back to the original timeline was incredibly disappointing to me. (Shawn says this is because I over think these things. I point you, again, to my list of narrative kinks. These are the things I am programmed to over think!) Basically, I want stories that will give me what I want, but really commit to giving it, not tap-dance around going all the way.

Also, often, narrative kinks are a lot like salt or bacon: a little can go a long way. I adored Marvel's House of M alt-universe, but I would have been annoyed if it had replaced the main Marvel Universe completely (even though it was an awesome setting, and I want them to do more with it). I'm enjoying the current season of Fringe, with its re-imagined continuity...and at the same time, I find myself restlessly demanding the original timeline back, because I invested a lot of time and emotional attachment in those characters, those relationships, and every delighted "oh, it went like that over here" is followed by a "...wait, does that mean that this other thing didn't happen?" So sometimes, getting what you think you want out of a story isn't ideal.

And this is why I have proofreaders and editors who don't share my narrative kinks. They may encourage me to put more foxes, or talking animals in silly hats, into the narrative, but they'll help me avoid the story turning into a stew of "things Seanan wants to play with."

What are your narrative kinks? How do you feel about their use, and how do you react when they get overused? What narrative toys would you rather never came off the shelf again? Enlighten me!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I read a lot of urban fantasy/paranormal romance. I mean a lot. Given that I read fast enough to get through a 300-page novel in a day, easily, and am currently trying to race through my to-be-read shelf like I'm being pursued by wolves, I'm basically binging on the stuff. I'm going to need to spend six months on Urban Fantasy Weight Watchers after I finish my current read-through, during which I'll be allowed nothing but bad mystery novels and non-fiction about things that make you die (diseases, parasites, Australia). This means that I am sensitive to tropes in UF/PR the way I'm sensitive to tropes in lousy horror movies.*

The majority of urban fantasy is written in the first person. I fight the monster, I open the door to the creepy crypt at the bottom of the hill, I try not to summon a snake god to Thanksgiving dinner. This creates a feeling of absolute immediacy, while also creating a feeling of safety, since most first person narrators are reasonably guaranteed to survive their stories. (I consider, say, Rose Marshall an exception, since she's already dead. Maybe this explains why she gets shot so much.) It also limits the perspective of the books. When you're reading a Toby book, the only information you'll get is what Toby has to give, and that information will always be filtered through her particularly Toby-esque way of seeing the world.

Third person gives you more leeway on the will she/won't she question where surviving is concerned, and also creates the option to provide the reader with additional information. Sure, the protagonist is bound by their own perceptions, but the author gets to play with omniscience. This is both good and bad, and the varying degrees of third person omniscience is a topic for another day. Suffice to say that sometimes this distancing serves the story very, very well.

I have just finished reading two third person urban fantasies, neither of which will be named here, because I'm looking critically at structure, not trying to compare-and-contrast their plots or the quality of their writing. In the first, the author took advantage of the third person structure and hopped from place to place, now following the villain, now following a secondary character, now returning to the primary protagonist. The omniscience was kept to a minimum, since otherwise, the plot would have turned boring for the reader; this is obviously pretty tricky, but the writer handled it well. I don't think this book could have been written in first person, and the tense never bothered me. It was a third person book because it needed to be.

The second third person urban fantasy stuck to an extremely limited perspective, following the protagonist at the exclusion of all else. At no point, did we get information that she didn't have, which made waiting for her to catch up occasionally a lot more frustrating than I expected it to be. I'm used to being forgiving when my UF/PR protagonists are a little slow, because I'm used to being so deep in their heads that I can see why they're not making the intuitive jumps that I can make. I know how they think. In the absence of that knowledge, I kept waiting for the heroine to be smarter than I was, and I kept being disappointed. It honestly left me wondering why the author didn't stick with the first person perspective that's standard in the genre. It would have been the same story; it would even have been a stronger story, because the immersion in the heroine would have made it much more urgent.

Choosing a story's point of view can be difficult, but I find that usually, I can tell which they need to be by looking at whether the story would even be possible in a tighter perspective. And I try to keep things as tight as possible, for the immediacy. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.

So how do you feel about perspective? Does first person keep it tight and immersive, or is it off-putting and overly familiar? Does third person make things mysterious and flexible, or is it distancing and remote? Or does it even matter if the story's good?

Thoughts?

(*If the movie starts with people in the water, it's either an evil sharks movie, an evil alligator movie, or a sea monster movie. If you see a shark within the first five minutes, it's not an evil sharks movie. Etc.)

I am a media consumer; I consume media. I watch more hours of television a month than is probably strictly healthy (especially given how much of it is "reality" television). I go to the movies an average of once every three weeks. And as for reading, well...let's just say that there's a reason the city I live in considers my house to be a library, rather than a residence. (The cats appreciate my reading habit, as it causes me to build many interesting stacks of books for them to knock over. The housemates do not, as it causes me to build many interesting stacks of books for the cats to knock over. There's no pleasing everyone.) My interests are broad and easily modified to suit the type and quality of the work at hand. If you're looking for someone to consume your media, I'm probably your girl.

All this media consumption, however, comes with a price, and that price is a tendency to notice—and sometimes be bothered by—trends. Most recently, it's been an unexpected consequence of that old fairy tale saw, the happily ever after. You know the one I mean. Where they meet and kiss and marry and run off to live forever and ever in unchanging bliss. At least until the sequel, where she dies and he remarries and the new wife is horrible but luckily their daughter is beautiful and smart and looking for a husband, and...

Yeah.

This seems to have created the belief that once a couple hooks up, that's it, it's over, no more fun, no more fantastic adventures, no more anything but a rapid excuse to break them up. They can get together for good at the end of your story, but dude, once they're together? The happy ever after kicks in, and your options are "breakup" or "death." And it's not limited to the shows and stories aimed at a female audience, since we're supposedly the ones who are only in it for the smootchies; most of the relationships in male-targeted media meet the same end, which seems weird to me. After all, once you're together, you have access to regular sex, and you don't have to do all that sentimental "building a relationship" stuff. Maintaining, yes, but building, no. And yet only the sitcom couples who were married before the show started (or got married in the premiere) seem to stay together.

As Dave Davenport once said: "Where do I want to be in five years? Sleeping with a homicidal maniac, or sleeping with a homicidal maniac who occasionally cleans my toilet?"

I find this trend deeply upsetting. I mean, maybe this is my romantic streak showing through, but I like to believe that once I have invested in the relationships of fictional people—fictional people who were, in many cases, willing to spend years flirting and falling and feinting toward finally hooking up—that maybe I'll get some of the payoff. Not three episodes or one volume of the writers realizing they never figured out how this would work beyond "sweaty kitchen sex and SCENE" and breaking them up in a prefunctory, often utterly silly way. You sold me this relationship! It was for sale, and I wanted it, and now that I have it, I don't want a factory recall! By the time most fictional couples hook up, I am sick and fucking tired of the longing looks, the swooning sighs, the silly banter, all of it. I want them to get it out of their systems, settle down, and get on to telling whatever larger story they used to lure me in in the first place. What I don't want is another five seasons of sighing and swooning. What I don't want is the sort of breakup that could be resolved with thirty seconds of conversation and maybe a flowchart.

Romantic tension is awesome. But seriously, people! So is having a lasting romantic relationship! Where can I find the Nick and Nora Charles of today? No, really, where?

It doesn't help that, again thanks to the fairy tale structure, things get rushed like whoa as they try to give the media consumers "what they want." And yeah, we're a filthy-minded lot; we want Character A and Character B naked and sweaty five minutes after they walk in. But we're willing to wait if you'll promise to give us something that lasts for more than fifteen minutes. Promise me four seasons of Veronica and Logan making out after every successful case, and you will have my full attention for the four seasons it takes to get me there.

This is why I take my time. This is why I let my characters figure out what they want. Because I refuse to take it away from them just because I never bothered to consider the long-term consequences. And no, I don't believe that romance only belongs in the happy ever after.

I want my Nick and Nora.

Broken, by Kelley Armstrong.
Spectra, paperback
480 pages, dark urban fantasy/supernatural romance, werewolf party people in the house
Currently in print

( In the sixth installment of Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series, we do something we've never done before: we return to an earlier narrator. Elena and the Pack are back, for what may be their most dangerous adventure yet. Click here for details. )

Industrial Magic, by Kelley Armstrong.
Spectra, paperback
560 pages, dark urban fantasy/supernatural romance, everybody loves a witchy girl
Currently in print

( In the fourth installment of Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series, we go back for a second Paige in my favorite narrator's story. Definitely do not read this book, or this review, without first reading the third book in the series. For details on the continuing adventures of Paige Winterbourne, witch, click here. )

Dime-Store Magic, by Kelley Armstrong.
Spectra, paperback
448 pages, dark urban fantasy/supernatural romance, welcome to the witching hour
Currently in print

( Welcome to the third book in Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series, when we finally hook up with our second awesome narrator (in what will become a long string of awesome narrators) and get a look at more of the supernatural world. This is a decent starting point for the series, although I still recommend starting with book one. For details on the adventures of Paige Winterbourne, witch, click here. )

Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong.
Plume, paperback
448 pages, dark urban fantasy/supernatural romance, werewolf-centric awesome
Currently in print

( Is it possible for the only female werewolf in the world to ever find a way to balance what she is with what her human upbringing tells her she should want to be? Can she forgive the man who bit her in the first place? And what kind of body count are we talking? Women of the Otherworld, book one, is ready to answer all these questions and more! Click for details. )

Smoke and Shadows, by Tanya Huff
DAW, paperback
416 pages, urban fantasy
Currently in print

Smoke and Mirrors, also by Tanya Huff
DAW, paperback
416 pages, awesome urban fantasy haunted house
Currently in print

Smoke and Ashes, still by Tanya Huff
DAW, paperback
416 pages, urban fantasy with cough syrup
Currently in print

( Do you like wizards? How about vampires? How about living shadows, haunted houses, demons, and network television? How about urban fantasy? How about really excellent writing? If you answered 'yes' to any or all of the above, I think you'd like to click here and learn a little more about the adventures of Tony Foster. Three books, no waiting! )

Goblin Quest, by Jim Hines
DAW, paperback
352 pages, crazytrain fantasy
Currently in print

( What happens when you look at the classical fantasy quest -- with its heroic princes, dangerous wizards, stoic dwarves, and untrustworthy thieves -- from the other side of the dungeon? How do you define 'monster' when you're the one raiding the dungeon? It's a hard question; there are some hysterical answers this way. )