The Bog of Lost Scholars

1. I’ve been able to read since I was two, and I have vague memories of some of the story books I read as a small child. But the first book that I really remember reading is Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, which I discovered at age six when I went to a neighbor’s birthday party. I ended up spending the entire party in the bedroom reading it. (For some reason I didn’t get invited to birthday parties very often after that.)

2. Occasionally books are permanently linked in my mind with the food I ate while I read them. The Narnia books will always be associated with buttered popcorn and cola. Ditto McCaffrey’s Dragonflight and chocolate-covered raisins.

3. I am a heretic: I believe that one can indeed own too many books. However, the exact number of “too many books” varies from person to person, and how many books you want to own is none of my business unless I’m your spouse, parent supplying your living space, or downstairs neighbor in a badly-built apartment. (However, if you own more books than you could conceivably reread in your remaining lifespan or keep tons of reference books that you never actually refer to [especially when you also have a high-speed Internet connection], I will not show a great deal of sympathy when you complain about your lack of space.)

4. It is impossible to read too many books.

5. For perspective — I currently own somewhere between 500 and 700 books. I could have quite a few more and not have too many books.

6. However, when I was married, our joint libraries contained over 4000 books (and we kept buying more), as well as 200 videotapes (and he kept buying more) and a few hundred CDs (and we kept buying more). We lived in a 1200 square foot house; it was crowded to the point where we had trouble navigating rooms and keeping stuff out of our child’s reach. For me, the books and media were worthless; I had to spend too much time worrying about them, too much effort organizing and manuevering around them, and not enough time enjoying them. When my ex moved out and took most of the books and videos with him, I found I preferred having space to living in a warehouse.

7. Speaking of warehouses, if you ever get the change to take a tour of an Amazon.com warehouse, do so. The operation is utterly amazing. Racks upon racks of books, scanner bars everywhere, database upon database to tell you where every single book/video/CD is at any time, or where every single order is at any time….. Just amazing.

8. A fiction book, to earn a place in my library, has to be one I both love and reread regularly. I generally don’t keep fiction that I don’t like, even if I have other better-loved books by the same author. Even if I check a book out from the library and enjoy it, I’m not buying it for my home library unless I discover I want to reread it. I deeply admire Guy Gavriel Kay’s work and Dorothy Sayers’s Wimsey mysteries, but I haven’t had the urge to reread them often enough to justify buying copies to replace the ones that went with my ex.

9. Though I do buy some fiction sight unread. Anything Bujold publishes will end up in my library. Ditto anything Brust publishes in the Vlad Taltos series.

10. The standards for a non-fiction book to enter or stay in my library are a tad lower than for fiction. I buy a fair number of needlework books, because I enjoy reading about and learning new techniques. I haven’t made Armenian needlelace yet, and may not get around to it for some years, but I love browsing the book. I am never going to teach myself Western Greenlandic, and I don’t browse the book very often, but it’s a great pleasure when I do. (And one of my story worlds has a planet settled by Inuit, so the book has some justification as a reference.)

11. I have worked for a publisher for ten years, and I have read maybe eight of our books cover to cover. (I’ve read the introductions to almost all of them, though, and large sections of many.)

12. I’m in the acknowledgements of nine of our books. (Google Book Search is my friend.)

13. Working for a publisher is the next best thing to being a published author. I still play a part in getting books and their ideas out into the world; the fact that I didn’t write them doesn’t matter that much.

14. Working for a university publisher usually means access to the university library. I have grown to like being able to check a book out for a semester….

15. The best thing about working for a publisher is being surrounded by unfamiliar ideas. Even though many of our books are on topics I’m not remotely interested in, I end up picking a teeny bit about the topic just by osmosis. And just knowing that particular topics exist is enough to expand my world, even if I still know diddly about the topic.

This meme’s been going around on LJ, so might as well be a sheep….

How to Recognize a Story by Me

0. It’s hard to find . I don’t actually write that much fanfic, and my original fic remains unpublished.

1. At some point in the reading, you will suspect that I drew a family tree for these people. In particularly egregious cases, you’ll wish you had it. (One of my problems with my space opera stories is keeping characters from thinking too often of their umpteen relatives that really have nothing to do with the story.)

2. Description, especially visual, will be relatively light.

3. People sit and talk to each other a lot. If I’m having a bad case of trait #2, people sit and talk to each other in a vaccuum.

4. Culture clash is likely to be an element in the story. (Book 1 is about how a character adapts to a new society; book 2 turns heavily on what happens when said character acts on her old society’s rules rather than her new one’s; book 3 is about a character with roots in two societies; one of the works-in-stall has a protagonist who’s living as an expatriate.)

5. Language is also likely to be an element. (Most of the characters in my space opera universe are multilingual, and there’s definitely status issues involved in who uses what language.)

6. Emotional tone will tend to be reserved. (Someday I’ll have to write a character who’s a total drama queen, just to see if I can do it.)

7. Religion is likely to be an element. (Most of my space opera characters are religious, in some form or other. My fantasy world, of course, has no shortage of deities.)

8. People raise their eyebrows a lot. Or have little distinctive hand gestures.

9. The villain, if there is one, tends not to be 100% evil. (Actually, the more I look at my space opera universe, the more I think the main villain of book 2 actually had a point, even if he went about it in a very wrong fashion.)

10. The viewpoint is usually tight third or first. (I can write a more distant viewpoint, but it’s really difficult.)