The Desert Mermaid

Buggrit. I hate it when I charge headlong into a book only to find out it’s the third in a series. Whatever happened to book covers that helpfully told you that the title you were holding was "Book 3 in the wildy awesome Sorcerizer's Sidekick series!" or whatever?

At least this book has a page listing the other books in the series. Is it just me, or is that tradition falling by the wayside?* How am I supposed to know if The Sorcerizer's Shadow comes before Dragonbloodsword of the Star Throne or after it? It's not like it tells you on the cover, for chrissake. I am reduced to making educated guesses by publication dates. And hell, without a page like that, I don't even know I'm missing Book Two, The Sorcerizer vs. Samson, The Silver-Masked Man.

Thank god for the internet, I guess. And thank god for libraries that actually have the first books in series. That makes it a little better.


*And for God's sake, knock it off with the red-thing-on-black-background, tormented teenager, and abstract book covers! I want a splash illustration with lots of shiny colors and so much activity it looks like the book is showing you all the scenes at once, dammit! DON'T TELL ME I MISSED IT BEFORE I COULD PUBLISH MY OWN BOOK, YOU BASTARDS.

What? Driving to book club amidst a delicate April shower? Sure! Let me just KNOCK THE FOOT OF SNOW OFF MY CAR AND SWITCH TO 4-WHEEL DRIVE, and I'll be right with you!

Once again, it turns out that being an alleged grownup who plays with dolls is helping me at work! Last time it was because I was the World’s Greatest Mannequin Dresser;* this time my experience doing silly photo stories will come in handy. See, the Liberry will be doing a bunch of stuffed animal parties over the next few weeks, in which kids drop off their stuffed animals and the critters have Liberry adventures all night and we take pictures, and then the kids watch the show and we give the animals back and tell the parents they may want to wash the beloved ball of plush before they do anything else.

And, as reigning photostory champion, well, I have volunteered to help make up and photograph silly scenarios. Anyone have any swell ideas?

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Speaking of such things, I got the dolls all set up for XMas! It is too dark to take pictures now, though.

Now only Daja needs an XMas outfit, because I just made one for Loke (and HOT DAMN my sewing skills are getting better) and then somehow wound up with four more for her anyway.** Daja will probably get a shiny over-robe for her current shirt and pants combo, if I ever get my ass in gear enough to make it.

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This may also warrant a trip to Dumb JoAnn’s, which is the little JoAnn’s closest to us. They call these smaller branches the convenience stores, except that Dumb JoAnn’s was recently remodeled into a Terribly Inconvenient Store. You can’t see a damn thing in there anymore, and there is no way for two shoppers to get around each other when they meet in an aisle, and for some reason they’ve started doing the take-a-number thing when they cut fabric and have a huge loudspeaker so they can say “NOW SERVING NUMBER 74” as loudly as possible in a store the size of a 7-11. This is weird, because we could hear people calling just fine. We just can’t get to them, because we are lost in the Unsolvable Craft Shit Labyrinth. I think I caught a glimpse of a Minotaur, trailing pipe cleaners and fabric bolts, with chunks of Sculpey matting rough fake fur, roaming the aisles last time I was there.

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I actually cooked dinner tonight! Tasty rosemary pork with applesauce, whole wheat noodles, and peas. I am totally unmotivated to cook right now, but when I do it is AMAZING.

I have Plans for cooking tomorrow, too. You will get to hear all about it if things go as planned.

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I should be playing Epic Mickey right now, but I DO NOT OWN IT.

Ditto the Donkey Kong Game, which I believe is officially titled OMFG DKC.

Instead I’m all up ons buyin’ Xmas presents for everyone else. Isn’t that just the saddest damn thing you ever heard?

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The cat has fallen in love with my Xmas surprise to myself. (WHAT? I was just trying it out!) I did not expect that at all.


*No, seriously, all the other ladies at the store complimented me on my unsurpassed technique in putting clothes on dummies.

**eBay is friend to children everywhere doll nerds! I just got a huge lot of clothes from the golden days of iDolls FOR CHEAP, yo! I wasn’t even sure that stuff actually existed!

Dammit, why aren't phones and number keypads set up with the same configuration? Makin' my office work take twice as long as it has to.

Following up loosely on my last entry, I finally came up with a perfect way to describe Urban Chick Lit Fantasy: It's not so much Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as it is Sex & the City & Mothman.*

Yeah, it's another subgenre that irritates the hell out of me, but I really can't take the high road on this one because I am a fan of Tamora Pierce's pioneering genre of Law & Order: Special Pigeons Unit myself. I just can't deny my visceral reaction to pretty much any form of Sassy Chick Lit, and when they start snagging stuff I like, such as magic systems, I get territorial.


*Although unlike the other remixes done purely for gags, I feel that the addition of Mothman would be a serious improvement on that Let's Go Shopping And Be Horny bullshit.**

**Unless it's Mothman Prophecies Mothman. "Richard Gere, is your refrigerator running?" should not be a giant urban legend hellmonster's entire repertoire.

Uh, guys? Did I miss the memo on National Smell Bad Week? Or is it just that I’ve gotten lucky in the last two days with Smoker Guy,* Dirty Diaper Baby, and Man Wearing Essence of Urine?

Seriously. SOAP. It will not kill you.


*Special Note To Offended Chain Smokers: I would just like to apologize for hurting your feelings when the cloud of yellow smoke you trail around triggers my allergies. I realize it’s terribly selfish and rude of me to have an involuntary reaction in which my nose runs and my eyes glue themselves shut, and you of course have every right to get all huffy and tell me to mind my own damn business while I lunge for the tissue box. I only hope you can forgive my gross social faux pas.

An Open Letter To Disgruntled Authors

Please quit hammering on about how your characters are like your children. I realize that your characters are important to you, with a bond that cannot be understood by outsiders, but dammit your simile’s just inaccurate. I have read your books. I know what you do to those poor dopes. Your book is not a nurturing environment.

Therefore, when I hear you say they’re like your children, it makes me want to call child protective services.

C’mon—you can come up with a better comparison. You’re writers. I’m sure you’ll think of something.

COWORKER: (pulling books out of the book drop) Aww! Amelia Bedelia! I loved Amelia Bedelia as a kid!

AMELIA: Really? People liked her? I have always hated her with a fiery passion intense enough to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium.

COWORKER: Aaahowwwwa!* You don’t like her? Why not?

AMELIA: Well, for one thing, we’re talking dumb as a bag of hammers, and I’ve never been patient with the type of idiot who takes language so god damn literally.

COWORKER: I thought she was funny!

AMELIA: Fair enough. But, perhaps more to the point, you probably didn’t have every single grownup who knew your name think it was clever and cute to call you “Amelia Bedelia.”

COWORKER: … I really can’t argue with that.


Ah, the indignities suffered upon small people because grownups thought they were being cute. Good thing I had The Other Amelia with which to distract them. That story was more interesting, anyway.


*I have never been able to correctly render this noise, but you all know it—it’s the sympathetic sad noise a girl makes when you, say, kick a puppy.

I am exceptionally grumpy today! The reason is long and complicated and you don’t really want to hear the whole thing, but basically I have been kicked off of the Wii because Dad felt a burning need to futz around with his beloved giant Entertainment System Of Doom. I could care less about the Entertainment System Of Doom,* but I’m bitter because back when he was setting the thing up, he installed the Wii permanently in its matrix about two hours after I asked him not to. And this is exactly why I made that request.

So I’m trying to not be grumpy, and rather focus on the fact that some of my Christmas, Round 2 packages—bought with my aunt’s Christmas money, donchaknow—came absurdly quickly, and I now have all three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, tea, books, and a new dress for Laurel. And I’m also working intermittently on Torn World, and reading a book on the many horrible ways space can kill you. I should be set for activities for quite a while … the reunion between Iroh and Zuko alone should afford me a good hour of rewinding and crying like a girl.

But I still wanna play Mario.

Happy New Year, dudes!


*An attitude that baffles Dad to no end, because he’s one of those people who actually uses features on his sound system. In the Philosophy of Dad, he who does not use every possible permutation of the multisource surround-sound digital enhancement PC-DVD-Blu-ray-TV-Star Wars player**-video game console-two DVR-Picture-Inna-Picture features leads an unsatisfactory, hollow sham of a life. This in turn baffles someone like me, whose philosophy is whatever I’m watching should take less than ten minutes to buffer, and sound should play in both headphones.

**A relic of the mid-’90s, the Star Wars Player is our laser disc player. We have exactly one thing on laser disc, which is the entire Star Wars Trilogy. Don’t even ask about the Betamax.

For some reason this week’s Discussion Topic seems to be the nature of Literature. From one of my friends’ frustration with someone trying to write a Great Book where nothing happens to the world’s most boring character* to the Publisher’s Weekly decision to make their “10 most important books of 2009” be a bunch of navelgazer books By Middle-Aged White Guys, For Middle-Aged White Guys, And Frequently Starring Middle-Aged White Guys, with stops in between for stories on creative writing classes that do not feel genre fiction “counts.”

I’m not sure why it’s all coming at me at once, but believe me, I get that frustration. I’ve been frustrated with Great Literature since high school, when pointing out that it was actually quite stupid was not met with the same revelation the citizens had when the small child pointed out the emperor was naked.** I simply got told I wasn’t seeing the whole picture.

The whole picture was a parade of books by what appeared to be some extremely self-important people. And this week it hit me—that’s the trouble with so much Great Literature. It was written to be that way, by people who thought they were the deepest fucking bastards ever to pick up a pen.

I hate books like that, books whose primary motive is to blow your mind with how amazingly brilliant the author is. The books I like, which I have been known to describe as “good despite being Great Literature,” are the ones that got there themselves, without the author pushing it along as a testament to their own genius. They’re the books where the author seems to be really having fun, to be telling the story because it’s a story and not because it’s got some deep meaningful meaning. It’s why I like Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend but not Great Expectations. It’s why I think Faulkner, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and especially Thoreau were such pompous blowhards. It’s why I love me some genre fiction, fiction where even self-important authors like Ursula K. LeGuin*** don’t forget that they’re writing a story and not just some extended metaphor.

It’s why I want to be an intelligent hack. I’ve worked hard to learn how to write a real story, not just a monument to myself. That seems to be the way to enjoy life, and to have your characters do the same—something that seems lacking in the drabness of self-important writing. And hell, I’d be more willing to read it—and despite the perpetuation of snobbery, I’m betting I’m not the only one.


*Okay, let me just say it: there is no such thing as an Everyman. It’s impossible. Quit trying, because your attempts just lead to a completely uninteresting person.

**There was a terrific version of the story where at the end, instead of everyone having a good laugh at themselves, the mother quickly shushes the boy and apologizes to the emperor, and the kid goes through life believing that he really was some moron who just couldn’t see the clothes. I can’t remember who wrote it, but I found it hilarious.

***She can wax pompous, but she also does much less navel-gazing than your average non-genre writer.