I’m home sick today, coughing up a lung, and being completely bored. There’s a strange program on the arts channel right now of muddy wild horses, silent except for the classical music accompanying the footage. I don’t recognize the composer, but it’s a violin concerto. Now the horses are gone and I’m seeing terracing ala the Andes. Maybe this is the Andes. Except there’s a lot of sandstone that makes me think of Utah. Except that it’s too green for Utah–greenery growing on the sandstone. Well, I mean, too much greenery. Of course, I usually saw the Moab area in mid-summer, and who knows, this might be such a red rock desert in full spring.

“Scicilienne” and Ber… Ber-something by Fuare. They just put it up on the screen like a music video.

All that is to say: daytime TV when you’re sick and a captive audience, not so interesting, except to tell yourself stories. I’ll be less bored later when I pick back up the book I’m editing, Tiffany Trent’s book two of Hallowmere, By Venom’s Sweet Sting. But I’ve been too out of it up till about now to think about
anything.

Huh. The Discovery channel has a program on about how erasers are made. Who knew? It’s not the rubber of an eraser that allows it to erase, but the vegetable oil in the eraser–it allows the rubber to rub away, taking the pencil marks with it. Okay, you can learn a few things, too.

Anyway, I thought I’d join on the Shakespeare meme that

slayground 

found at Miss Erin’s.

Strike = I’ve read the play
Bold = I’ve seen or been in the play on stage / I’ve seen the film

COMEDIES
All’s Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Measure for Measure
Merch
ant of Venice (I think? It was in grade school, if so. I barely remember it)
Merry Wives of Windsor
Midsummer Night’s Dream 
Much Ado about Nothing (First Shakespeare I ever read, in the 4th grade, in an attempt to become the smartest kid in the world. Yes, I was a geek. But I loved this play and it’s still my favorite.)
Taming of the Shrew
Tempest (maybe)
Twelfth Night (definitely–both on stage and the movie, and loved reading it in college for a theatre appreciation class)
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Winter’s Tale

HISTORIES
Cymbeline
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VIII
King John
Pericles
Richard II
Richard III

TRAGEDIES
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida

Huh. I could have sworn I read a whole lot more, especially of the comedies, but most of it was during that 4th grade phase (I really did think that reading Shakespeare and the dictionary would make me the smartest kid in the world) in which I read and listened to on tape everything the library had, but didn’t really understand or remember anything except the garden scene in Much Ado About Nothing. I loved that, everyone trying to fool the others and sneaking behind topiary.

As

sarazarr

 just pointed out, the Utah Arts Council’s Writing Competition is open for submissions. For my Utah friends, this is a contest for your novels that have NOT been published. I am thinking of at least two different people I know who should be submitting their novels or collections of stories. And this year is the year for the young adult category.

I’ve never participated in Poetry Friday before, thing many children’s lit blogs do. I’m not even sure who started it–I just see it everywhere. But at any rate, my post about little cat feet made me remember that perhaps I might want to share just this one poem.

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, which is also where my mom is from and where that whole side of the family has lived since before Carl Sandburg’s day. We lived there several times when I was growing up. There’s even a Carl Sandburg College, a local community college. So I heard about Carl Sandburg a lot, but in an ironic twist, never actually discovered his poetry until I’d moved away and gone to college. This one is one of
my favorites. Probably because I love little cat feet.

If just because I loved watching Mikhail Baryshnikov dance when I was a kid, and because I love Vladimir Radunsky’s whimsical illustrations. From the sound of the text, Baryshnikov was more of an advisor than a writer, and Radunksy wrote much of it. So it makes me wonder if it’s not so much a celebrity picturebook as a picturebook by a picturebook artist that crosses arts disciplines to dance… does that make sense?

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6434786.html?nid=2788

But I have to wait until May to decide if it lives up to the possibilities I’m seeing in my head. That cover, though, interests me. And the idea of how arts education is so spotty sometimes that a child can grow up through all of school and never be exposed to any sort of arts–music, dancing, painting and drawing. I feel fortunate to have had all of the above growing up, and I know how well those arts gave me skills I transferred to academic performance (and all the studies about that sort of thing make me amazed
that the arts are cut from the curriculum in so many places…).

Then again, there’s also the idea that so many picturebooks are about dancing, so how is this one different? We’ll see.

(I say this as a reader, not an editor, because I don’t do picturebooks professionally.)

So the Dresden Files book #1 is becoming a good example of both good points and bad. While I love–love–the TV show, the book is giving me mixed feelings. I have only read 2 chapters so far, so you’re getting the benefit of my slow speed in my reactions between reading the first two pages and the next 20. I’m sure it’s wonderful–I’m just reading it at the end of every day as time permits, which it doesn’t really permit much of lately. And I look forward to reading more (though I must admit the prose is a little wooden in the intro dept right now, but perhaps that’s crime novel/hardboiled detective novel convention that I’m not familiar with–certainly the TV show makes those parts over into much more in the ironic postmodern dept.). The following is a minor issue that calls attention to something that writers might want to be aware of in their own writing.

Remember that “My name is Harry Dresden” paragraph I referred to earlier? Right in that same paragraph, the narrator goes on to say “I work out of an office in midtown Chicago.”

Nobody works out of an office in midtown Chicago, because “midtown Chicago” doesn’t exist. You would say, “I work in the Loop,” or “I work in Bridgeport/Lakeview/Lincoln Park/Pullman/Wicker Park/South Shore/Hyde Park” or any number of other neighborhoods. If you’re a Chicagoan (which I was, for two years, and am a native Illinoisan) you’d know this terminology, so I’d want Harry to know it. Or at least use the regional terms, like North Side, South Side, West Side, and the Loop. (No East Side, which would be Lake Michigan.)

If you’re going to set your fantasy in a contemporary real-life location, you still need to pay attention to little details like that so that readers familiar with that location won’t be thrown out of the story . In other words, don’t do anything that would severely challenge their suspension of disbelief.

With the Dresden Files, for me, the TV show is engaging enough and I already know the concept. I want to like the books, want to see how they compare . So I elide over geographical nitpickery, but it still niggles at me. And if I were reading a manuscript cold, it would bug me even more. Not enough to reject something just for that kind of error, but enough to make me wonder if the author has paid attention to other details and make me keep a sharper eye out.

Exceptions
There are many, many examples in both literature and film where geography is played with to serve the story. Certainly Jack didn’t walk Lucy home to Oak Park from the riverwalk on Wabash–a distance of at least 10 miles–in While You Were Sleeping. And, I might add, they were walking toward the lake near the Tribune Tower, which means they were headed the wrong direction anyway, east instead of west. It made for a prettier shot, I’m sure. And it works for people who don’t know Chicago, and even if you do, it’s still a good movie. Same for Sleepless in Seattle and a number of other movies.

So of course you can play with geography if you need to. However, just keep in mind that  especially when you use a location to provide flavor in your first few pages, and even later when you use locational details to establish setting, you need the little details to be accurate. If, in that paragraph, Butcher had had Harry Dresden say, “I work out of an office on the South Side of Chicago,” I would have happily continued on my way reading, without needing more specific detail about which neighborhood, because at least he used the right general term. He wouldn’t have called attention to the possible fact that he might
never have lived in Chicago. (He may have, for all I know–his bio doesn’t say one way or the other, just says he currently lives in Missouri.

I don’t care if you’ve never lived in a setting you’re writing in (though of course I’d rather you have at least visited, though sometimes that can’t be helped, especially with foreign countries). But if you’ve never lived there, be sure to do your homework.

Question
Any other examples where this kind of situation brought you out of the story? Anybody who this doesn’t bother? Why or why not? Can a good plot overcome bad geography? (I give a qualified yes: bad geography is an editable offense.)

*Despite being obviously filmed in Vancouver–sad that, because Chicago is an AWESOME town to see, and you should spend time there if you haven’t. Oh, and speaking of Chicago, is there today and tomorrow for Support Teen Lit Day for YALSA, so watch your local news on the 19th to look for an interview with her!