Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

Catherynne M. Valente

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.

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?)

Buying Habits: Brick-and-Mortar vs. Online

by 4 Comments

Bookshelves

I recently moved to a new city, and I’ve had trouble finding a solid brick-and-mortar bookstore (possibly because I know hardly anyone here, so it’s difficult to ask). Many of my book purchases have moved online, and I’ve had a great experience so far. Most of the books I order are pre-orders, and buying them online and having them shipped as early as the release date allows is a low-hassle way to get my books.

But I’ve realized that no matter how easy buying books online is, I buy different books, and in different quantities, when I’m in a physical store. Below are my findings about my different buying habits:

  1. Online I buy one book at a time. If I’m looking for The Rook by Daniel O’Malley, I buy The Rook. Online stores make this a very simple transaction.
  2. In brick-and-mortar stores I’m more open to books I’m not seeking. As an example, I visited my home town last week, and while at the local Barnes & Noble, I bought a book I’d never heard of, Myths of Origin by Catherynne M. Valente, because the cover caught my eye and the back cover copy intrigued me.
  3. In brick-and-mortar stores I buy more books. Especially if, while on my way to get what I’m looking for, I stumble across a book I’m not actually seeking (e.g. Myths of Origin).
  4. I prefer online stores for books I anticipate. Refer to my earlier statement about my pre-orders. If I know about the book in advance of the release date and it’s something I’m interested in, I buy it online. I’m guaranteed to get it faster than I would if I waited to go to a brick-and-mortar store.
  5. I prefer brick-and-mortar when I want to discover a book.

The last point is one I’d like to linger on. Online stores are easy, convenient, and have frequent discounts (I am particularly fond of the discounts I get for pre-ordering). But I’ve never found them compelling as a method of discovery, nor do I enjoy trolling review blogs and websites to find my next read (this is the method I often hear touted by ebook and online gurus). Discovering a book worth reading is almost as pleasurable as the read itself. With most books I “discovered” buried in the shelves of a bookstore or library, I remember what appealed to me first, what emotions I felt when I chose the book, whether the glue smelled uniquely appealing, and what rationale I had for purchasing it or checking it out in spite of the stack of books I already had in hand. I remember what was next to it on the shelves, and I remember those books when I next need to discover something new.

That experience, for me, has not been equaled or even approximated by the online buying experience. Despite all the doomsayers, some have predicted that brick-and-mortar stores won’t disappear, and I certainly hope that’s the case.

Given my thoughts and experiences, I wasn’t surprised when Digital Book World 2012 posted an article stating that ebook “power” buyers buy less than their print counterparts. I was surprised by DBW’s explanation for why—i.e., ebook buyers scout for cheap and free ebooks—though in retrospect it makes sense (especially because I still buy print books, so my experience doesn’t directly translate to ebooks). But in my experience with buying more books, and more unknown books, at brick-and-mortar stores, it makes perfect sense that online ebook purchases would generate less revenue.

Then again, maybe I’m a bizarre nostalgic offshoot who evolved an unnecessary need to smell a book to form a bond with it. What are your experiences with online and brick-and-mortar stores? Do your buying habits differ based on the setting? Do you still “need” brick-and-mortar stores to find your next read, or do you rely on other methods of discovery?