Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

Kristy S. Gilbert

Leaflet Review: Railsea by China Miéville

by Leave a Comment

I apologize for the hiatus—I know it’s been a while. The good news is that I’ve haven’t been posting because a series of exciting adventures have struck: the whole pregnancy thing (only five weeks until the little guy comes!), moving back to Utah from Texas, and starting graduate school are just a few of them. Because of all the adventures, after the next three book reviews (this one included), I’m only going to post once a week, on Wednesdays, instead of the Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule I used to have. Now, speaking of adventures, here’s a look at China Miéville’s latest work: Railsea.
Cover for Railsea by China Miéville

On board the moiletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death & the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-colored mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it’s a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a kind of treasure map indicating a mythical place untouched by iron rails—leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

A Unique Spin on Classic Stories

As you may have guessed from the book description, Railsea bears traces of Moby Dick in it, only instead of hunting a great white whale, the crew of the Medes is hunting an ivory mole (the captain is certain to inform anyone who thinks otherwise that Mocker Jack is not yellow). But as I read, I found that the actual plot line bears a stronger resemblance to Treasure Island. Young Sham longs for adventure and finds a bit too much of it along his way.

However, as one would expect of Miéville, although the book draws on these classic stories, it has a texture and a feeling that is all its own. The dingy, polluted atmosphere of the world of the railsea permeates the book and makes it settle into your mind even when the scenes are on the lighter side. The worldbuilding is in depth and shows itself in everything from the way the world’s inhabitants think about dirt and water to the way the words appear on the page (the word “and” is never used, only the ampersand). Railsea’s world is, well, not necessarily a delight, but certainly a unique draw for the book. (I can’t use delight because that implies sunshine and butterflies, but between the polluted cloud of the upsky and the bizarre mutations it causes for airborne creatures, you find little of either on the railsea.)

A Lackluster Main Character

Although the setting was compelling, I found it difficult to read Railsea quickly (quite the change from how I felt about Embassytown). This was largely because the main character, Sham, didn’t particularly interest me. He is a young boy without much direction in life: he longs for some kind of purpose, but since he doesn’t know what he wants, he simply drifts from task to task and from event to event. That attitude doesn’t really change until at least halfway through the book, and by that time I’d failed to connect with him. This stands in stark contrast with Avice from Embassytown, who was a self-proclaimed societal drifter, but who was compelling anyway. However, like Avice, Sham changes a lot over the course of the book, and his growth is realistic. He just isn’t as compelling.

Final Thoughts

Outside of the main character issue, I think the book was particularly strong. I enjoyed the stylistic prose quirks—the self-aware narrator, the asides about storytelling, etc.—even when they interrupted the flow of the narrative. Speculative fiction is prone to info dumps, and many people hate them (myself included) as a general rule. But in Railsea, Miéville selectively info dumps in a few chapters, never taking more than a page or two at a time. The voice is so compelling that the info dumps don’t feel like info dumps, and the timeouts from the main plot were some of my favorite parts of the book.

Content warnings: Some violence, though it isn’t trivialized; some language, though nothing you wouldn’t hear on TV; drinking; sideways conversations about sex, but no sexual scenes.

Pack Rat Perks: Why Keeping All Your Ideas Comes in Handy

by 4 Comments

We all have a lot of ideas. Not all of them are good ideas, and many get junked. But for writers and other creative types, if you can find a way to squirrel away even your bad ideas, you can earn some serious benefits.

Analogy Time

Two young women playing water polo
I’m #4, with the white cap. I don’t know #7’s name, but I’m sure I made her life miserable during that game.

Permit me an analogy. I’m in the middle of my first pregnancy (the first trimester of morning sickness is why I fell off the grid for several months). I also desperately need to exercise, and I currently live in the middle of West Texas, so I’m doomed to day after day of temperatures above 100 degrees. A simple solution: go to the pool down the road and swim laps to my heart’s content. Unfortunately, that means finding a swim suit that accommodates my five-months-pregnant, penguin-like silhouette.

However, I swam all through high school, played water polo for four years, and lifeguarded and taught swim lessons all through college, so I’ve gone through my fair share of swim suits. Buying one I’ll only wear while pregnant is an expense that would irritate me. I’m also a bit of a pack rat, so I don’t think I’ve thrown away more than two of the suits I’ve owned since age 15. Most of the suits are either semi-translucent (or transparent) and/or have tears at the seams. But I’ve never been able to feel good about throwing a suit away, so I keep them stashed in a mesh bag in my closet.

Having all those less-than-ideal suits around has paid off: when I combine two or three semi-transparent and semi-worn-out suits, the result is one fully opaque suit that has room for my current belly. Chlorine, here I come!

Writing Application

The same principle applies to writing ideas. Even if one isolated idea can’t carry its own story or essay, that doesn’t mean it’s useless. Be a pack rat: Stash the idea in a writing notebook, type it up in a random note file on your computer, or even write it on a slip of paper and bury it in a Mason jar. If you can find a place to stash your ideas, even your bad ones, you can’t lose.

Worst-case Scenario: If the idea doesn’t ever pan out, you’ve still created a habit of recording your ideas and inspirations. That means that when you do have ideas that will pan out, you already have a system set up to capture them.

Best-case Scenario: You later realize that the idea wasn’t so bad after all, and if you tweak it just so, you can write something brilliant.

Middle-of-the-Road Scenario: If you put two or three less-than-complete ideas together, you could very well end up with something stellar and adaptable. Pieces of ideas are easier to adapt to new circumstances and requirements than complete, fully formed story or essay ideas (just as partially worn-out swim suits are better at accommodating huge body changes).

So come up with a notebook, file, or container for your ideas and start a being an idea pack rat. Even if that pack-rat system is just a mesh bag in your closet, you may be surprised at what you’re glad you held onto.

Leaflet Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

by 1 Comment

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own MakingSeptember is a girl who longs for adventure. When she is invited to Fairyland by a Green Wind and a Leopard, well, of course she accepts. (Mightn’t you?) But Fairyland is in turmoil, and it will take one twelve-year-old girl, a book-loving dragon, and a strange and almost human boy named Saturday to vanquish an evil Marquess and restore order.

Not since Oz has there been a land—or a cast of characters—so rich and entrancing.

My last review was about a collection of Catherynne M. Valente’s shorter novels, and in this children’s novel, Valente retains her unique voice and mastery of language, but infuses it with veins of humor and whimsy. Where the other novels I reviewed are not books I would recommend for light reading, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is something you can curl up with and enjoy along with a cup of hot chocolate.

Fairyland imitates a Victorian-style children’s novel, complete with a separate narrator character. However, the narrator and the novel’s circumstances have a modern flavor on the sly. The book consists of a series of small quests—retrieving a witch’s spoon, finding a magic sword, and freeing good friends from imprisonment—but they all flow together into a nice plot arch overall.

My favorite part of the book was probably A-through-L, the Wyvern whose father was a library (making him a Wyverary, to be more exact). He’s kindhearted and quirky, and he takes huge pride in his vast knowledge of all things that start with the letters A through L (he hasn’t had a chance to study the rest of the letters yet, though his siblings have the rest of the alphabet covered).

Ell, as September calls her Wyverary friend, is fairly typical of the rest of the settings and characters in Fairyland. Everything and everyone has a few targeted things they’re really good at, but they’re also specifically limited in interesting ways. Marids grant wishes, Leopards fly on the winds, and furniture over 100 years old comes to life. But Marids must be wrestled within an inch of their lives before wish-granting, some Leopards aren’t allowed in Fairyland, and most furniture has a pretty poor attitude after 100 years of abuse at various human hands.

And through it all, September goes from being a Somewhat Heartless human child to a Hardly Heartless hero with a host of Fairyland friends. All before her airplane mechanic mother notices she’s missing or her soldier father comes home from the war in Europe. For a twelve-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, not a bad first visit to Fairyland.

Cover illustration by Ana Juan.

How to Name a Hero, with Alex Bledsoe

by 1 Comment

Author Alex Bledsoe

Today’s post comes to you from novelist Alex Bledsoe. He has been a reporter, editor, photographer, and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Today he’s the proud author of  the Eddie LaCrosse series, the Memphis Vampires series, and The Hum and the Shiver (the text of which I reviewed here, and the cover of which made my list of favorites for 2011). His website is AlexBledsoe.com.

A character’s name is one of the most important things the writer has to discover. The way a name sounds, the way it looks on the page, even the way it’s spelled can make the difference between forgettable and archetypal. Sometimes the name seems inevitable, while for other times, the character may go through a half-dozen before finding one that fits.

Ian Fleming took the name “James Bond” from the author of an ornithological guide lying around his Jamaican home, because he wanted a bland, forgettable name, one perfect for a spy. Indiana Jones (originally “Indiana Smith”) was named, not after the state, but after George Lucas’s dog. In both cases the names already existed in other contexts, but the writers recognized that they fit their fictional characters. The same thing recently happened to me: in my upcoming novel Wake of the Bloody Angel, I realized author Rhodi Hawk’s name perfectly suited a character. I changed the spelling, and of course asked if the real Rhodi would mind. Luckily for me, she was delighted.

Sometimes you can work with the wrong name for a long time without realizing it. Margaret Mitchell’s heroine was called “Pansy” until almost the last minute, when she changed it to “Scarlett.” Luke Skywalker was originally the far more martial “Luke Starkiller.” In my own case, my hero was named “Devaraux LaCrosse” for over a decade’s worth of unpublished drafts, until I was suddenly struck by the idea that he needed a normal, everyday name and he became “Eddie” for his debut, The Sword-Edged Blonde.

Many heroes have names that conform to a system. In Superman mythology the initials “L.L.” are far more prominent than they would be in real life: Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, Linda Lee. I mean, really: what are the chances of one guy having two girlfriends, and an arch-enemy, with the same initials? The absolute master for naming within a system was undoubtedly J.R.R. Tolkein: for example, the people of Rohan are expert horsemen, and so their names (Eomer, Theoden, Eowyn) incorporate “Eo,” the Anglo-Saxon prefix for “horse.” In my novel Dark Jenny, the setting and many of the characters were based on Arthurian legend, so I sought names that evoked, even if only tangentially, their origins. Lancelot, for example, becomes Elliot Spears (lance, spear, get it?); Morgan becomes Megan; Guinevere becomes Jennifer, and so on. I kept a couple of names as-is, but used them as surnames with normal first names (“Bob” Kay and “Ted” Medraft).

And on occasion, the naming gods simply smile on you. The characters in The Hum and the Shiver were named with very little forethought, with the only criteria being that they had to have Celtic origins. But it turned out that the names fit the personalities better than I ever realized. The protagonist’s name, Bronwyn, means “dark and pure.” The impulsive youngest child is named Aiden, which means “fiery.”

But the real master for names, hands down, just celebrated his 200th birthday. Charles Dickens came up with names that both sounded great and conveyed their bearers’ personalities: Ebenezer Scrooge, Noddy Boffin, Bob Cratchit, David Copperfield, and Martin Chuzzlewit, to name just a handful of his best known.

There are as many approaches to naming as there are characters to name. I’m currently working on a novel that takes its basic plot dynamics from Shakespeare, which of course means I can raid lists of Shakespearean names. Another work in progress takes place in a particular geographic area, so it’s off to find out what family surnames are found in that area. One day, I might even create a character as archetypal as James Bond or Scarlett O’Hara. Heck, maybe I already have, and I just didn’t get the name right.

If you appreciated Alex’s post, be sure to pay his blog a visit.

Double Roundup: 2/5–3/9

by Leave a Comment

Catherynne Valente: Work Is Never Over: On Publishing and Its Many Faces

I posted a review of some of Valente’s work earlier this week, but I also found some of her blog posts well worth the read. Valente’s opinion on the “divide” and “revolution” in publishing these days is especially worthwhile because she’s done a lot both ways. She sells most of her work through traditional publishers, but her novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland was the first novel to win the Andre Norton award without being traditionally published (although it is now available traditionally). In this article she talks about how the work of publishing is never over, regardless of your path, because art is never easy. Her links to previous posts are also worth your time.

Natalie Whipple: 10 Things I Wish I Would Have Done Differently

Author Natalie Whipple shares her list of what she wishes she could have told her earlier self. In many ways this short article is a perfect companion to Valente’s: Whipple essentially wishes she would have focused more on art and craft than business, and Valente is saying all the business sense in the world won’t make the art any easier.

In keeping with the theme of these two posts, I’m not going to post any more industry news from the past two weeks (there’s plenty out there: lawsuits and investigations and new releases, oh my!). Instead, I encourage you to pick up your writing and instead of thinking about how you’re going to sell it, market it, and pitch it to readers or publishers, just think about how to make it beautiful. I’ll be back with more industry stuff in a week or so.

Leaflet Review: Myths of Origin by Catherynne M. Valente

by 1 Comment

Myths of Origin by Catherynne M. Valente

New York Times bestseller Catherynne M. Valente is the single most compelling voice to emerge in fantasy fiction in decades. Collected here for the first time, her early short novels explore, deconstruct, and ultimately explode the seminal myths of both East and West, casting them in ways you’ve never read before and may never read again.

I found this collection of short novels the last time I visited a city with a decent brick-and-mortar bookstore. I’m glad to have been introduced to Valente’s unique voice and style, and I have her children’s novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, waiting for me after I put this volume back on the shelf. Because this book contains four novels, I’ll tackle each one in a mini-review and follow up with general comments.

The Labyrinth

A woman wanderer, a Maze like no other, a Monkey and a Minotaur and a world full of secrets leading down to the Center of it All.

The Labyrinth is Valente’s first-ever novel. Before trying her hand at long-form fiction, she was mostly a poet, and that prior experience flashes its colors in the prose of this short novel. The language is beautiful, the structure dizzying and mazelike. However, this focus on poetics is also something of a flaw: the book doesn’t feel much like a novel. I felt validated when I read that Valente, looking back on her work now, considers it a “two hundred page poem with no columns and [her] whole heart.” I recommend The Labyrinth if you crave gorgeous and innovative uses of language and myth structures, but although I read it in a day, it isn’t exactly a quick read.

Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams

An aged woman named Ayako lives in medieval Japan, but dreams in mythical worlds that beggar the imagination … including our own modern world.

This is the novel in this collection that I found most interesting of the four. It’s also the least linear. Ayako dreams herself into myths from various cultures, from the Sphinx-and-Oedipus story to Babylonian creation myth, and the way all the myths weave together into Ayako’s life experience, and how Ayako weaves into them, is elegant. Because it is the least linear of the novels, it takes a little time to get a firm grasp on the story, and once you do the Sphinx dream will find a way to throw you off periodically.

The Grass-Cutting Sword

When a hero challenges a great and evil serpent, who speaks for the snake? In this version of a myth from the ancient chronicle Kojiki, the serpent speaks for itself.

Where Yume No Hon is nonlinear, The Grass-Cutting Sword is the most linear in the collection (that isn’t to say it’s strictly linear, but it’s much easier to grasp the basic flow of events). In this myth the Japanese god of storms falls from heaven and sets out to kill a monster that has devoured seven young sisters and is about to eat number eight. What I found most interesting in this book was that each sister got her own moment in the spotlight: her character, her desires, her motivations for putting herself in the monster’s way, etc. Frequently stories that involve such repetitive disasters go light on differentiating the characters in each one. That is not the case in The Grass-Cutting Sword.

Under in the Mere

Arthur and Lancelot, Mordred and le Fay. The saga has been told a thousand times, but never in the poetic polyphony of this novella, a story far deeper than it is long.

I’ve read a lot of Arthurian spinoffs; I’ve read a lot of Arthurian originals. Valente’s Arthurian novella is not necessarily a retelling of the Arthurian cycle, nor is it a retelling of a particular tale. Instead it is a collection of character portraits that reinvent the basic frames of the Lady of the Lake, Kay, the Green Knight, Dagonet, Lancelot, Balin & Balan, Pellinore, Galahad, Mordred, Bedivere, and Morgan le Fay. As a different way of approaching and interpreting the well-used cycle, I loved it. However, because it is, like the other novels in this volume, linguistically complex, and because it lacked an overarching plot beyond the general Arthurian cycle, it took me some time to get through. I typically read a character portrait or two in isolation and came back for more later. I don’t think my enjoyment suffered because of this.

Overall Comments

The novels contained in this collection are beautiful. For that reason alone I recommend it. But I don’t recommend it for light reading—these aren’t exactly breezy beach reads, but they aren’t meant to be. If you want something linguistically innovative or structurally experimental, pick up this collection or any one of the individual novels. You won’t be disappointed.

Content warnings: Adult topics dealt with in an adult fashion, so don’t go handing them to small children. Not that I think you would after the review I just gave.

From This Reader’s Shelf

by 3 Comments

Today I’m going to take a timeout from being a Serious Editing Professional and let you in on a secret: most every editing professional is a hopeless, passionate book lover. Don’t let them fool you with their comma-tinkering, fierce plot critiques, or official-sounding titles. Many of them are astute, professionally trained, and incredibly skilled, but underneath those things, they’re enthusiastic readers. I’m no different.

To give you a peek at my reader-life, today I’m going to share a look at my bookshelf. This is a special bookshelf: it’s transient. I’m in the middle of a months-long visit to an Air Force base, but since it’s only months long instead of a year or more, my husband and I left most of our books in my parents’ shed in Utah (thank heaven for their free space; we stole plenty of it). Here are all our books, minus books of scripture, those in foreign languages, and those I’m currently reading.

Kristy G. Stewart's Bookshelf

The Breakdown

Some of these books are titles Mr. Stewart and I have acquired since arriving here: you’ll see both Thief’s Covenant and The Rook, books that have only come out since the start of the year. There are also some necessary work-related books: the two most recent versions of The Chicago Manual of Style (or as I like to call it, BOB, for Bright Orange Bible); Eats, Shoots & Leaves; Editors and Editing; and Rewriting (which is the most useful book I’ve ever found about academic writing). Not shown is the APA publication manual.

Seven of the books directly draw on folklore or collect folktales. Yes, I read both the tales and the commentary included in The Classic Fairy Tales (edited by Maria Tatar). That’s the black book between Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Best-Loved Folktales of the World.

There’s only one book of poetry (prose is more my speed). Unless you count my Poe collection, which has both poetry and prose.

Yes, I have a complete collection of Poe covered with creepy red decor. I also have a less-complete collection packed in my parents’ shed.

Genre-wise, there’s biography, YA, dark fantasy, satirical fantasy, science fiction, horror, war fiction, nonfiction, and instructional books on screenwriting and typography. There is also a whole host of classics, but they’re contained in that sneaky little eReader on the bottom left, hidden beneath Billy Collins. (I don’t love my eReader, but I love that it carries my classic library for me.)

The books that are horizontal on the bottom of the shelf are books I brought because I am frequently set upon by sudden impulses to re-read them, so I couldn’t bear to leave them. Included in that list is Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, one of my favorites in his repertoire, which is also hidden in the eReader. If I had a hard copy, I would have brought it.

I haven’t read four books on this shelf: John Adams (I just haven’t been able to sit down to a page commitment that big since we got here), the Dean Koontz books on the right (recent acquisitions from my father-in-law), and The Hundred Dresses on the top left (a recent acquisition from my mom).

Kristy G. Stewart's "Currently Reading" Stack

In addition to that abused shelf, I have three books that I’m currently reading or am about to read. They migrate through the house with me, from kitchen to couch to bedroom and back. One of them (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland) just arrived today, and it’s hard to make myself wait to open its covers. I probably won’t hold out much longer.

If you could only bring one shelf’s worth of your books with you on a months-long expedition, which ones couldn’t you do without? Do you ever read more than one book at a time?

(Rules: Saying “I’d get an e-version of everything and just take my Kindle” doesn’t count unless you really do have your entire library on your ereader. In which case, if you only had a shelf’s worth of memory on your ereader, which files would you keep?)

Weekly Roundup: 2/18–2/24

by Leave a Comment

SFWA: 2011 Nebula Award Nominees Announced

If you read speculative fiction, you should check out this year’s nominees for the Nebula. If you go to the announcement on the SFWA website, you’ll not only be blessed with a complete list of nominees, but you’ll also get links to where you can purchase the nominees, or (if possible) to where you can read them for free. I’m currently reading one of the novella nominees and I’m loving it. (Also of note, Embassytown is up for best novel. You can find my review of Miéville’s most recent release here.)

Rachelle Gardner: 13 Ways to Impress an Agent

Agent Rachelle Gardner spills the beans on how to impress an agent … or a publisher … or a reader. Admittedly, not everything on the list will impress a reader, but most of them will. The ideas  apply no matter which route you intend to take with your publishing career. Rachelle’s advice applies to both fiction and nonfiction writers, and she marks her distinctions between the two.

Jim C. Hines: Who Controls Your Amazon E-book Price?

A little more advice that can apply to those who want to self-publish and those who, for the most part, want to go traditionally. Jim Hines uses both publishing routes for different projects, and he wants anyone who’s self-publishing anything (backlist titles or new works) to keep their eyes open when it comes to who sets the prices on their work. Hint: Amazon is in the business of making Amazon happy, not necessarily making you happy.