Here to Create

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde compares to nothing I’ve ever read before, in a way that was very welcome. I picked it up because I read Fforde’s Big Idea piece on Scalzi’s blog and liked his idea of focusing on what happens after the apocalypse. In fact, the characters just call it The Something That Happened and don’t know why their lives are different from the Previous. And they don’t know much about the Previous either, thanks to scheduled Leapbacks that remove knowledge and relics from the past, some of them as simple as multi-speed bicycles. I could go on forever about the worldbuilding, because it completely fascinated me.

I have to talk about the color specifically though. Color is everything in this world. People are divided into social ranks according to what colors they can see. Who they marry is largely determined by what their combined color ratings will do for their offspring. For instance, Eddie Russet, the protagonist, is a Red trying to marry into the Oxbloods, an old Red family that wants to increase their red percentage. It’s crazy-sounding, but with a little thought it’s not that different from marrying for money or some other kind of prestige.

Despite the fixation on color, Eddie’s world is very black and white. He lives in a rigid society that is completely dedicated to the Rules. He knows his duty and he does it, both as a member of society and as a young man looking for the best marriage. But he soon finds out that there’s a lot more underneath his orderly world than he ever guessed.  And he finds that he’s willing to risk more than he realized to find out the truth.

Shades of Grey is a meticulously constructed book that was a fascinating exploration of a very different kind of post-apocalyptic world and the decisions we face when we confronted with a shift in worldview.  I’m looking forward to the sequels, and I think I need to check out some of Fforde’s other work as well.

Update: Also, if you like the book, definitely check out the Shades of Grey website.  Barcoded animals! Lincoln green! You’ll just have to read the book to truly get it.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I have not forgotten yet again that I have a blog. I’ve been playing with the sidebar, see? —–> But more importantly, I’ve been working on other writing projects. Not, of course, on the ones I’m “supposed” to be working on, but that’s nothing new. I got a burst of enthusiasm and started editing my 2008 NaNovel about werewolves. Over halfway through, according to my spiffy new progress meter!

Also, I’ve committed to daily writing as part of Inkygirl’s 1000 Words a Day Challenge. I’ve already skipped two days, but I cheated and made up the word count a couple of days later, so don’t tell anyone, ok?

Most days, committing to a specific word count without a particular project goal helps me sit down and just start writing. It works even better if I do it first thing in the morning before my brain has woken up and started telling me I suck. It takes me about half an hour to an hour to blast out 1000 words of freewriting, which usually consists of mulling over elements of various stories. By then I’ve woken up a bit, so I move onto one of my projects.

It’s easier for me to work on a story when I’ve spent a while limbering up my brain. More importantly, freewriting gets me into the rhythm of writing. I might start with meaningless rambling, but one thing leads to another, and connections between things spark ideas I never would have had if I’d made myself get up and stare at a project file until I gave up and went back to bed. Writing is a muscle that gets stiff and easily tired when it’s not used. This daily challenge is my workout.

Thanks again to Inkygirl for the idea and the spiffy graphic! Complete information, including badges for 500 and 250 word challenges, are available on Deb Ohi (inkygirl)’s website.

If I had judged these books by their covers, I probably wouldn’t have picked them up, since teenage drama at a snobby boarding school isn’t usually my thing. But when I found out the boarding school was just a cover for an elite spy school, I took a second look. And I’m glad I did. I read each of Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls books straight through in one sitting as fast as I could get them from the library. And I will be adding them to my permanent collection when the book budget has recovered a little.

In order, the Gallagher Girls books are:

-I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You

-Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

-Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover

It’s hard to talk about all three books without spoiling any of them, especially since each book is full of twists and turns that teach these spies-in-training that the world is not always what it seems. It’s fascinating to watch Cammie, the narrator, approach her world with the skills she’s learned in her years at Gallagher Academy: martial arts, hacking, multiple languages, and other invaluable spy skills. And yet like any teenage girl, she’s often blindsided by her emotions.

Despite being the daughter of the school’s headmistress, Cammie’s specialty is being invisible. She’s known as the Chameleon because she can blend into her surroundings so completely that even her friends can’t find her. She’s also learned how to disappear at school by exploring the old building’s many hidden passageways.

Cammie’s voice is smart and confident, but also funny and very personal with conversational asides sharing her thoughts about boys or the current mission. Her training as a spy pervades her life, with parts of the text even being told in the form of a covert ops report, as well as lists that show Cammie’s ordered mind. Cammie has known for most of her life that she wanted to be a spy like her mom and dad, and it shows in the way she thinks.

Like Cammie, her friends at the Gallagher Academy think like spies, though each has her own background and unique personality. I love how real Cammie and her friends are, and yet how diverse. Each girl feels completely authentic, with her own very believable strengths and weaknesses. They may be taught to hide their emotions and think in terms of neutralizing threats, but even as their skills develop, the Gallagher girls remain very human, very accessible.

In fact, this is one of the themes that runs through the Gallagher Girls books: what does a spy give up in order to be the best she can be? The ability to be herself instead of one of her numerous “covers”? Honest relationships with people who don’t have a high enough clearance? Any semblance of a normal life? Cammie and her friends wrestle with these ideas and the hard decision of whether to pursue the life of a spy with all its dangers.

It’s no surprise that a girl surounded by spies-in-training and taught by ex-spies is also surrounded by secrets. Some of these are relatively harmless, though they might be classified. Others could cost her and her friends their lives. Cammie stumbles across both kinds in her quest to be at least somewhat normal, especially when it involves boys.

And yet Cammie and her friends address the mystery of boys like spies rather than like your average high school girl. In the first book, Cammie creates a cover story to tell her normal boyfriend. She and her friends hack into various government databases looking for dirt on him. And her friend Liz is working on a boy-to-English decoder. These twists on the usual teen-girl-obsessed-with-boy trope were a welcome change.

Things grow a little darker in the second book, with the danger more real than just a class exercise, and darker still in the third book, which leaves us and Cammie with more questions than answers. In fact, the question at the end of Don’t Judge a Girl By Her Cover gives me that anxious sort of itch that makes me wish I didn’t have to wait so long for the next book in the series. But I’m sure it will be worth waiting for.

The fourth Gallagher Girls book, Only the Good Spy Young, is scheduled for release in June 2010.

(The first book of Ally Carter’s new series, Heist Society, also looks pretty interesting. Out February 9, 2010.)

From the moment the main character wakes up on a slab in the morgue, Three Days to Dead by Kelly Meding had me hooked.

Evy Stone, a hunter of Dregs (nonhuman species like goblins, vampires, and weres), has been resurrected into a new body and has three days to figure out who killed her and why. She has no hope of living past the time limit, but she’s still intent on saving her city from the potentially horrific results of a planned alliance between the goblins and vampires. Not only that, she wants to figure out who killed the other two members of her Triad and framed her for their murders. With the help of the only person she can trust, her Triad’s former handler, Wyatt, she follows a trail of lies and deception to the truth, which is worse than anyone thought.

It’s a strange thing to play detective in your own life, but Evy’s reactions to her discoveries were well-balanced emotionally. Part of her is intent on solving the mystery, reacting to challenges as decisively as any kick-ass urban fantasy heroine, while another part is sometimes overcome by the betrayals and painful memories she discovers. These occasional reminders of Evy’s human vulnerabilities only increased my admiration for her courage and made me want to find out who had killed her and why. Helping the reader connect to Evy’s previous life are the vivid portrayals of human and Dreg minor characters, both allies and enemies. While the sheer variety of Dreg species were sometimes hard to keep track of, I appreciated the blending of traditional and fresh depictions of these fantasy staples.

With only three days to live, the story moves fast from the moment Evy wakes, the short time she has left emphasized by the countdown at the beginning of each chapter. So at first the romance subplot threw me off, as it seemed like too much of a distraction considering everything else Evy had to do in those three days. But the characters and their interactions were so real that I believed in their relationship with the help of some flashbacks that gave me a good sense of their prior friendship.

One of my favorite parts of this book was watching how Evy adapts to her new body. At first she flounders a bit with physical skills she’d been proficient with in her old life, and later she discovers her new body has some different feelings and abilities, which also take some getting used to. I liked this touch of realism and the accompanying entanglements of the life of the woman who had previously owned Evy’s body.

Three Days to Dead is very tightly plotted, with all the clues, whether they prove true or false, clicking together in a puzzle picture that grows clearer as the story progresses. Reading with my skeptical writer brain, I expected to find a few threads left unresolved, but everything wrapped up in a tight, satisfying way. It’s quite a feat to cram that much story into 72 hours, but I believed it was true to the way smart, determined Evy Stone would have lived, both before and after her death.

I haven’t read much urban fantasy beyond Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, butThree Days to Dead makes me think I need to read more widely in the genre. It’s a definite keeper, and I’m certainly looking forward to Meding’s next book, As Lie the Dead, out in summer 2010.

I can be pretty ruthless about books when I have to; I  just took about a hundred or so to Half-Price Books so I could actually see the rest of them on my shelves.  But I’m also sentimental about old favorites.

One of the series that I read over and over as a kid was the first half of The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny.  It’s had a significant impact on my writing and probably far too great an impact on my general life outlook, considering the cynicism of Corwin, the main character.  But I had never owned a copy, always checking them out from my hometown library, a precarious situation indeed.  So I was elated when I found The Great Book of Amber on Amazon, then horrified when it started falling apart almost immediately.

But finally, I have my very own copy of the first five books in two volumes, with the covers done by Boris Vallejo.  This is the edition I first found in my small-town library, the edition I fell in love with.

True, I never liked the cover when I first read the books.  The figure doesn’t look at all how I envision Corwin, though the lack of shirt is nice.  Also, Corwin wore black and silver rather than blue jeans and red.  And that largish knife is not how his sword, Grayswandir, is supposed to look.  But that’s ok.  Nostalgia is seldom about accuracy.

Thankfully, I like the books nearly as much as I did when I was a kid.  I was a little worried, as I’ve reread other old favorites and been saddened by cliched plots, poor characterization, and awkward writing.  But I still love the odd blend of high court language and seventies slang that is Corwin’s unique voice.  The typos are kind of painful, but I can cope.

Now all I have to find is good clean copies of the second set of five books, about Corwin’s son Merlin, and my life will be complete.