NPR had a nice editorial on Indian mangoes today and how much more awesome they are than any other mango.

Apparently, the US has finally agreed to import Indian mangoes.

If you listen to the audio, you’ll get to hear vendors in India selling mangoes. It made me all nostalgic. I haven’t had a good Alphonso since I last went to India in 2006 (one of the few benefits of visiting India in the summertime). I can still taste the sticky sweet rasa (juice). Mmm. I’m going to have to go to India Plaza while I’m up in Phoenix next time and see if I can scout out some mangoes–and hopefully I’ll be able to afford them.

(I have a picture of when I was a year old and visiting India for the first time. I’m covered in mango pulp and juice, literally from head to toe, with a huge grin on my face. So this is a life-long love affair with mangoes. )

I forgot to post this earlier in the week. I went to see UP, the new Pixar movie, with John on Sunday. I highly recommend it. However, the story was surprisingly complex and deep, probably something that would be lost on younger children. I’m not saying that younger children wouldn’t like it–I mean, it has talking dogs and colorful, huge birds –but the story was definitely enjoyable for the out-of-elementary-school crowd (something that I felt Aliens vs. Monsters lacked). There were a few times that it tugged at the heart-strings and I got all teary-eyed.

Pixar’s on a roll. There was also an interesting trailer from Disney, where it looks like they’re trying to recapture that “old Disney feel” with princess tales or whatever. It’s basically the Frog Prince, but set in Louisiana. It looked interesting, but I kept thinking, They could do that really well…or it could be considered really bad. Dumbo crows, anyone?

Great galloping stars, Borders, stop sending me coupons. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t afford it and yet the temptation is too great! Do you love hearing me gnash my teeth in need? Is that it??

(Yes, I’ve already picked out the book I’m buying with this coupon. It’s an urban fantasy set in Hyde Park, Chicago. That’s like my old haunt, yo! How could I not resist?…)

I am not happy with my Muse right now. She refuses to cooperate and thus I have been staring at “Morgan” on-and-off the past few days and getting…pretty bad prose. After knocking my head against my desk for a while, getting some OJ, having a lemon cookie, realizing the lemon cookies taste awful (that’s what I get for going with price and not quality), knocking into the Stealthy Attack Desk of Doom and remembering that I still need to install the lock I bought for it, looking at the bathroom and wondering if I should clean it, deciding against cleaning for today…

…after all of that, I finally succumbed, went meekly back to my chair, and opened up “Tayce.”

Happy now, Muse?

On the plus side, I pounded out some wordage — about 2,000 words. It’s interesting how I’ve redone the beginning of the story — well, truthfully, a lot of my ideas of changed. This is what happens when you’re forced to take a 7 month hiatus on a story (and since my ideas tend to change a lot if given the time and inclination, it’s also the reason why I’m loathe to work on anything besides “Morgan”). The first chapter of “Tayce” used to begin with a visit to the graveyard and a pushy ex-boyfriend. It now begins with Tayce walking back home from the grocery store late at night with a bear claw, 409 cleaner, and a tin of ground coffee. She ends up getting stabbed twice by a deranged man known only as the “bus stop stabber.”

Now, you may be scoffing…but that’s from real life. Well, maybe not the grocery trip, but the bus stop stabber is quite real and, as far as I know, still at large. Anyway, it worked for my purposes, so into the story he went.

I went to see the new Star Trek movie with John and a friend of his today. I only saw one guy in a Kirk T-shirt (didn’t even have the pants or the boots!), which was disappointing. Where’s the people with Spock ears and Klingon heads? There was more dress-up when the Star Wars movies were being re-released in theaters. Tucson, you have let me down.

Anyway, I’ll keep this post plot-spoiler-free, even though I’d REALLY like to mention some stuff. *sigh* The things I do to avoid being pelted by rocks. Anyway, I will warn people: this movie is an action flick with great special effects and really loud noise (at times to the point where I winced), so there’s something to be said about watching it in theaters. However, don’t go in there expecting much more than action flickness with the usual action flickesque plot (yes, I just added two different suffixes to “flick”).

STAR TREK, the Old Crew vs. New Crew:

(Huh, New Spock looks really hot in that picture)

The first 20 minutes sucked butt. Personally, I think all the back story at the beginning could have been cut in half, or maybe even explained in flashbacks or Vulcan mind meld (hey, they do it later on for exposition). Basically, until Kirk decides to join Starfleet, it’s just one cliche after another. Kirk’s rebellious, we get it! Yeesh! By the time he finally did get onto the Enterprise, all I wanted to do was sing him the “Daddy Wasn’t There” song:

But the cool factor went up significantly once everyone was aboard the Enterprise. There were a few good fight scenes and a really funny moment involving Kirk and McCoy (although there wasn’t enough McCoy for my liking ).

The bad guy is pathetic and a complete write-off. His motivations have been done time and again (think Khan but not half as good) and they never explained how a guy who was a miner on a mining ship somehow got the ability to travel through time — or even had the scientific knowledge to do that, since he said he was “just a hard worker making an honest living” before he went all evil and shit.

Yes, the plot involves time travel, but it actually is done in a very interesting way without MOST of the usual paradoxes that hurt people’s brains. (There is one, but in the interest of non-spoiler, I won’t mention it, although I could SO make a masturbation joke) They use what I call the “Back to the Future Time Travel” where basically every time someone goes back in time and fudges with stuff, it creates an alternate dimension. So, while this is a restart of the Trek mythology…it isn’t really. Somewhere in another dimension, Kirk is still the guy portrayed by William Shatner with an alternate history because the baddies didn’t time travel and change things. As a result, some stuff in this new timeline is really interesting, especially if you’ve watched the Star Trek series.

This first Star Trek basically is a prologue to the new series (if they make more, but I think they will). It gets everyone aboard the Enterprise and it gets Kirk into the position of captain. There’s a lot of winks for fans who have seen the original series. Kirk and Spock start off as enemies but end as friends (almost like a romance novel. Do I sense a Totally Heterosexual Guy Love moment? Yes, yes I do). Vulcans are even more like space elves, so be warned. If I had to choose who got the most screen and story time, though, I’d say Spock. We really get to see his struggle with his human self versus his Vulcan self and some really interesting things that pound home the fact that, yes, this ain’t the Star Trek of our moms and dads. Some other things that happened in the movie:

• The laser beams (er, I mean photon torpedoes) still make a pew pew sound.
• Spock gets more action that Kirk!*
• Red shirts still die first, and in really stupid ways
• Kirk is still a horn dog. WE GET IT ALREADY.
• New Scotty may be the best actor out of all of them, but then it is the Hot Fuzz guy
• Chekov still can’t say his “V’s” (if anything, they’ve made his Russian accent even more pronounced)
• And the federation council’s police force are scary, faceless people that refer to everyone as “citizen”
• The aliens (and space) look much more believable. Amazing what 40 years will do to a special effects department.

* Yes, Spock gets more action. In fact, that whole subplot was really sweet. But, it’s definitely a change. Spock? Liking vagina? REALLY? In the original series, the most interest he ever showed was to Kirk.

Final Verdict: I liked it. It was a good action flick, even if the first 20-or-so minutes sucked. While it didn’t bring anything new to the genre, it was entertaining. I think I even liked seeing it in theaters, because it had that “big action flick production budget,” so seeing it on a big screen was fun.

Every author has probably heard, sometime, that good stories are “made up of characters, not plot.” In fact, when I was getting a degree in Creative Writing, this was the whole argument the teachers had as to why genre sucked while lit. fiction was the bee’s knees: genre apparently only survived on plot, foregoing characters.

From the opinion of someone who has read plenty of lit. fic. and has found 60% of it pretentious and boring because it ignores plot development to the point that it just seems like a bunch of characters doing random things that are “intense” and “dramatic,” I always disagreed with the whole “plot last, characters first” way of thinking. I think plot and characterization need to be mixed together in equal parts to make the perfect story. A good plot allows for the characters to do something and gives meaning to the changes the characters go through during the story. However, if you don’t have good characters, you don’t care about the plot.

I have trouble with making a good plot. I have good ideas, but I find that I usually have a saggy middle (and no one likes a saggy middle ) in my stories. I also find that characterization is difficult for me; I don’t know where to add the interactivity between characters that really makes them pop out of the page. The silver lining is that this can all be fixed with revision.

Does anyone else have similar problems with plot and characterization? What techniques do you use?

The Dante Valentine series by Lilith Saintcrow
Dark fantasy/sci-fi/romance

Review: There are five books in this series and I finished them all quite quickly (the only reason it took me this long is because book #4 was pretty difficult to find in stock at Borders or B&N, so I had to order it through Amazon.com). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Dante Valentine series, probably because it’s very different from anything out there right now. There are no vampires, werewolves, etc. — there’s demons and various magic-users like Necromances, Vaudins, nature mages, etc. The world is believable and well-built. It’s set in in a gritty, noir-esque future which made me think of Blade Runner. My only complaint about the world is that Lilith Saintcrow falls into the trap of “spruce it up, ’cause it’s sci-fi, yo!” For example, soda is referred to as “sodaflo” and in one scene in the first book, Dante ties someone up with something that acts and looks exactly like rope…except it’s not called rope. Now, every time I read something being given a “sci-fi name” just because, I’m going to refer to it as “schrope.” Why these items have special names and how they are different from their present day counterparts is never explained, and it gets annoying at times.

Also, I would have enjoyed some background on the history of the world. We’re told there was a war that, essentially, overthrew the Christian faith and brought back the ancient gods from Egypt, Greece, etc. However, we’re never given any background on how this happens or why. I’d've like to know — nobody believing in a Judo-Christian god is a pretty big thing.

But, these are minor complaints. Lilith Saintcrow’s strengths lie in her ability to pace her action scenes, which were drool-worthy. I wish I could write action scenes with as much heart-pounding language! Also, Japhrimael and Dante’s relationship never veer into the sappy. I never once rolled my eyes. From the reviews on Amazon.com, this seemed like something other people complained about — usually followed by, “Why does Japhrimael even like Dante? She’s a bitch!” — but I understood Dante’s struggle and it’s something that isn’t explored enough in fantasy novels. She’s human (or at least born human) and has lived in a human society while Japhrimael is a demon and has been stuck in Hell, they aren’t going to see eye-to-eye. The romance subplot, as a result, oftentimes involves one of them doing something against the other’s wishes or moral code, and then both of them having to find a common ground again. It was realistic and it wasn’t like what often happens, where heroine/hero throws their personality to the four winds as soon as they fall in love.

…that should be a rule of life. Last night, I dreamed that I was writing. It was so life-like, I remember the sound of the tapping keyboard. When I woke up and checked the file for the story, I was really confused for a moment because I remembered typing stuff. I had to mull it over for a moment before it dawned on me that the characters I was typing about hadn’t actually been done in the story yet, they were just stuff in my head. So, it had to be a dream.

When I told John the dream, he said, “That’s kind of sad.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. When you start dreaming about your mundane, real life, you know you need a vacation…or something.”

In other news, I’ve DVRed a few episodes of this new show called The Unusuals. It’s a crime-drama on ABC. It seems the thing for TV shows nowadays is to have weird, quirky characters. Bones, Chuck, Dexter, etc. It’s a nice change, but I gotta wonder how long it’ll last before it gets old and I’m saying, “Oh look, another weird character because of XYZ who’s saying strange things”? As it was, a few times someone would say something in The Unusuals, I would think, Does every character have some form of Tourette’s? No one in real life would actually say these things out loud.

But, The Unusuals has some really nice dialog between characters. For a crime-drama, it doesn’t spend much time or attention on the actual crimes, and they are usually mundane things with weird twists (like a woman who wants to steal everything for her wedding). I like the characters. I mean, a detective with a brain tumor who refuses treatment and as a result has nothing to fear — yet has survived three near-death experiences (much to his confusion). His partner is a man whose father and grandfather have died when they were 42, and he’s in his 42nd year and afraid he’ll die too.

Anyway, I dunno if it’ll last longer than a season. I think I’d like it to. It also got me thinking about dialog. What makes good dialog? I think it’s not just that the characters have something interesting to say; there’s a kind of rhythm of good dialog, a back-and-forth that seems to bounce off the characters’ tongues. Lately, a lot of my dialog has been sounded flat to my own ears. I don’t know how to make it better though and most my efforts lately have been icky. Writing really good dialog is a talent.

I also just realized that that was a really long segue to talk about dialog. Oh well.

So, I really like my desk. It is an executive style desk done in black with a cherry wood looking top. I found it at Office Max on sale, so it was very affordable. Considering my last desk, which I loved a lot, had finally disintegrated after 10 years (it used to be Dad’s, and it was the size of a dining table. It had so much space, but usually took up one whole wall of any room) I was glad for a new one. And this one had drawers and a door that hid what was meant to be a CPU area. I put in the optional shelf instead because my CPU would get hot in there and I’ve had a computer break from overheat before.

So, that CPU area door is held on by a magnet. Except the magnet is way too small and faulty to adequately hold the door closed. As a result, while I work on the computer, that door will silently open halfway and I won’t realize it. I’ll get up — and walk smack dab into it. I have a bruise people!

I’m thankful I’m not a guy, because there’s been one time that it could have been very painful if I had been.

It’s kind of creepy how silently the door will open. Kind of like every 1980’s ghost movie I’ve ever seen. No furniture rearrangement, dripping blood walls, or backwards letters in mirrors, though. Nor have I stumbled upon any Indian burial grounds.

John’s solution is to look before I walk. Yeah right, like that’s ever going to happen — let’s be honest. My solution is buy one of those door security hook thingies and make sure the desk knows who’s the boss.

And yes, I know…in the words of a friend, “Furniture problems AGAIN?!” I don’t know what it is. Maybe I need an exorcist.

For the last few days, I’ve been banging my head on a scene. I just need to figure out how to begin a conversation without it sounding weird and awkward (although, at this point, I’m considering just letting it be weird and awkward. Conversations can start out weird and awkward, right?). The annoying thing is if I can just make this conversation work right, I get my candy bar scene (it means the scenes you really want to write. The saying “candy bar scene” is from Holly Lisle).

John and I went to see Aliens vs Monsters on Sunday. It was “meh.” It had a few cute moments, but when all’s said and done, it wasn’t anything special. I’m guessing that people want to do what Pixar are doing with their films, but they aren’t quite getting it. And I don’t know why something like Monsters Inc. is better than Aliens vs Monsters. Although it might be because Billy Crystal is funny. Anyway, it was cute but definitely “worth renting” cute and not “worth $7 matinee price” cute.