Imagining book characters - Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite [Billy Martin]

I loved Billy Martin's novels written when he was Poppy Z. Brite, but I always had an idea in my head of what the characters looked like.

If his hair was black, here's what I imagined Zillah, Twig and Molochai to look like:

And this is Steve. Fwoargh: 

Origami books

I saw some lovely pictures of crown binding origami books, but try as I might, I couldn't find instructions on how to do it. I did find instructions on how to make a blizzard book, though, and with some experimenting, I managed to work out how to do it! So after work today, I made these two little books as a test.
 

The little one is made of braille paper. The covers for both books are made from the endpapers of an old children's book about castles, and the inserts for both are from a book about badminton from 1972. 
 

The larger one's insert is made from the pages of the castle book, so there is a little bit of illustration and words. You can see the origami mechanism in the next picture.

The pages can all be removed to be written or drawn on, each one is held in by two folded triangles. So you just need to lift one of them up...

And presto! The page pops out. I think using a thicker card to make the insert would mean that you could store more than one page in each of the section. I will try this out.

I quite like the edges of the pages being torn, it gives it a nice homemade feel. They don't take too long to make, are great for using up bits of random paper that you might have in your stash, and they're cute too. Kind of a Victorian feel to them, not sure why. maybe it's because Victorians liked giving each other little folded love letters and stuff. I want to make a load of these - I'm currently building my stock of sellable things back up. I let my online shop on Folksy run out (the main reason was the way it was rapidly becoming more like Etsy, i.e. full of shit glued to other shit, those bloody octopus things, and necklaces of an Eiffel tower charm with a heart - meh), but I'm building up stock so I can have a little stall again. There's a few places in Cardiff that you can have a stall, I just need to make sure I have plenty of stuff to sell first.

When authors attack

Having enjoyed the recent meltdown of self-published author Jacqueline Howett, I found that this wasn't an isolated case. Author meltdowns happen not only to self-published or unknown writers, but big names too, like Anne Rice. Sometimes, like with Jacqueline Howett, the situation is funny; other times, like with Victoria Laurie and DeborahAnne MacGillivray, it gets a lot more serious. Laurie reported posters on Amazon thread to the FBI and MacGillivray allegedly hired a private detective to obtain names and addresses for a bad reviewer's family. Not good.

Laurie and MacGillivray both write romance novels, which I am not interested in, so I can't comment on how good or bad their writing actually is; never read and and never will. Howett's book, at least, may have sounded mildly interesting to some people; maybe something you'd have picked up to read the back of. Had The Greek Seaman been a printed book, and I had read the back, I'd have quickly put it back down again. The spelling and grammar of the back cover blurb make it very hard to read. From the Amazon page:
"Description to The Greek Seaman novel.

What is an eighteen year old newly wed doing traveling on a massive merchant ship anyways? Hadn’t she gone to Greece on tour in a ballet as a dancer? These are questions, Katy asks herself while traveling the high seas with Don her chief officer. However, little do they know a smuggling ring is also on board for this ride, on a blue diamond exchange and when explosions and threats to sink the ship also happen, they must try to save themselves.

Getting to know the smugglers, the Arabic and Pakistani deck hands and Don, the Greek Seaman is an exciting sea adventure with enough suspense and romance that will make you laugh and cry. It will take you on a voyage to experience the magnificent soothing wonders and beautiful scenery at sea, dolpins, flying fishes and takes you through storms and hurricanes where Katy finds herself navigating through it with a seasick crew. From Piraeus, Greece, your visit the ports of Lebanon and Libya and enjoy the exotic magic of the bazaar. The love between Don and Katy, in their ordeal at sea makes this a memorable story."

Description to The Greek Seaman novel? She makes a grammatical error on the second word that a reader will read before deciding to buy her book. That's just not good enough. When I read her first comments on Big Al's Books and Pals blog, I sniggered a little, but then got angrier and angrier as I read further down the comments. Some posters gave examples of poorly constructed sentences, such as:
"Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance."
and her response was: "...what I read above has no flaws. My writing is fine." I watched a YouTube video of her reading an extract of her novel, and I did feel sorry for her. When she reads it, it kind of makes more sense. She pauses, when reading, so the sentence is clearer, but neglects to insert commas into the written text. To me it seems that she is trying to write as she thinks an author should write. When speaking, one might say "Don and Katy watched Gino putting coffees down on another table" which doesn't sound particularly interesting, so she has tried to write it in an 'authorly' way - but it just doesn't work. If she had left well alone, none of this would have been emailed, tweeted or blogged by as many people as it has (me included!)
To the people who say that we should leave her alone, and that this is bullying, I say: no we shouldn't, and no it isn't. She started posting childish and defamatory replies which ended in her telling various posters to "Fuck off!" for that, she deserves everything she gets, and long may it continue. Other posters have pointed out that Al (of Big Al's Books and Pals) has grammatical errors on his own blog, and that he is a hypocrite. Tripe. Al does not charge people to read his blog, so he is entitled to write it however he wants to, bad grammar or no. He is not a hypocrite.

I feel very sorry for Rebecca Black, who some have compared to Howett. I don't think she should have been subjected to such vicious attacks - she's only a kid. Don't get me wrong, I think the song is utter shite, but it's no worse than many songs being played on the radio at the moment, by older, and supposedly wiser, artists.

I will continue to watch this train wreck to see what Howett does next. I think it's appalling that family members posted 5 star reviews on Amazon, and are continuing to do so. That's another reason she deserves all she gets.

Edited: I've been reading more and more blogs saying everyone should lay off Howett, or talking about dogpiles: "Seriously, it’s one thing to righteously smack someone down when they’re giving you a hard time. It’s another to join in on a dogpile. Dogpiles are for cowards and for fascists.
And it’s completely another if you’re a famous author with a million followers to feed that dogpile. For real, NEIL GAIMAN? I’m defending some poor crazy lady from NEIL GAIMAN?"
All Gaiman did was point at Howett's behaviour and say "don't do that". When someone suggests this to the blogger they respond "The more power you have, the more careful you have to be. I can write a whole couple of paragraphs trashing Neil Gaiman, and not have to worry that I’ve harmed him in any significant way; for someone with a million and a half readers, even pointing to something like this can constitute a kind of cruelty." I would agree with the blogger if Gaiman had written somethign horrible about this woman, but he didn't. He pointed at her on his Twitter page. People seem to forget, this is the internet. Everyone can look at it, and comment on anything on it, as much as they want. What Howett did was done on a public forum - it's like she came into a café where I was enjoying a coffee, and screamed in my face. If Gaiman wants to do the same thing, that's totally allowed. It's the internet. It's public. If you don't want to discuss yourself on a public forum, you make a choice not to go to that public forum and discuss yourself.

Man alive!

Book meme

I've got some time free today, so I thought I'd catch up on some book memes (all nicked off other blogs/sites). Feel free to join in, I'd love to see what your answers are.

What is your favourite:
Work of historical fiction?
The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill

Piece of comic writing?
Any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books that has Gytha Ogg in it; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Work of poetry and/or book of poetry?
OMG, too difficult, too many! I recently re-read Mark Doty's My Alexandria, and got a lot more out of it than I did when I was eighteen.

Essay?
Lady Love Your Cunt by Germaine Greer

Science fiction novel?
Neverness by David Zindell, A Scanner Darkly By Phillip K. Dick, Rogue Planet by Greg Bear (which I think was a huge influence on James Cameron's Avatar); The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

Fantasy novel?
Any Tolkien; all Terry Pratchett; Robert Holdstock's Mythago Cycle is a big influence on my own writing

Romance novel?
Berta La Larga by Cuca Canals

Book about food?
Food For Free by Richard Mabey

Epistolary novel and/or novel in diary form?
Dracula by Bram Stoker (not too sure I've read many, to be honest. I loved Adrian Mole when I was a kid, but Sue Townsend's books about him being in his thirties are just plain boring)

Murder/crime novel?
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite

Work of classic fiction ?
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Horror novel?
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, genuinely scares the hell out of me!

Biography or autobiography?
I'm not really one for biographies, but I did enjoy Mozart by Peter Gay (so much so that I bought Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life by Professor Robert Spaethling straight away)

Work of children's literature?
Harry Potter, obviously; Hobberdy Dick By Katharine M. Briggs; The Tree That Sat Down (and The River That Stood Still and The Mountain of Magic) by Beverley Nichols; The Hobbit (of course); I also love Rupert the Bear

Piece of young adult fiction?
I Am David by Anne Holm; Toby's Lie by Daniel Vilmure; The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick (the rest of the series is pretty damn good too)

Short story?
Ping by Samuel Beckett; Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad by M.R. James; Pastoralia by George Saunders

20th century novel?
Queer by William S. Burroughs, heartbreaking; The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by JT Leroy (or whatever her real name is) - I don't care that she made it all up, her writing is superb, and I appreciate what she was trying to do. The whole JT Leroy literary scandal says a lot more about us as readers, than it does as her as a desperate writer. Think about it.

8 questions

Questions from Annekata (go and look at her lovely, lovely blog)

1. If you could have a dinner with a famous person (alive or dead) who would you choose?
There are so many people both dead and alive that I would love to answer for this question! Alan Turing. He's the father of computer science, and sadly he killed himself because society was so against homosexuals at the time. A great man, and we share the same birthday.

2. Where would you have that dinner?
There's a lovely little restaurant on the Rue de L'Eglise in St Généreux. It hasn't got a name, or a menu - you just get whatever they decide to make that day. Six courses of good French country cooking, vin compris. C'est magnifique!

3. What book written (in the last 300 years) had a real influence on your life?
There are many books that have influenced my life. Here are a few, in no particular order:
Folk Music by Sheenagh Pugh, and
Kirstie's Witnesses by Sheenagh Pugh
Berta La Larga by Cuca Canals
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling (yes, really)
1984 by George Orwell
The Poems of Max Ehrmann
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (it was after reading this, and all his other novels in quick succession, that I decided to concentrate on being a writer)

4. If you could live anywhere, in any time, what place and time would that be?
I like living now, and where I am, is that weird? I'd like to visit loads of different times, I'd love to be a hunter-gatherer living in Wales in the Neolithic (is that when hunter-gatherers lived?); I'd also like to go and visit the 1700s, just so I could wear some fantastic clothes! There are also so many turning points in gay history that I'd like to visit - being a young man paired with a strong Roman warrior as my teacher; learning Polari and visiting underground gay clubs when gay culture was still being created, also seeing it being decriminalised would be amazing; I'd also love to go back to June 28th 1969 to be part of the Stonewall riots.

5. What season would reflect you best?
Autumn. Cold, sunny days made for scarf-wearing, long walks, fruit-picking, blankets, knitting, making dens, hot tea, baking cakes, warming stews, game pie, blackberries, gloves, Halloween/Samhain, fires, fireworks, lots of soup and reading stories. That's me.

6. What do you wear when you don't want to think about what you wear?
Boring. Jeans, t-shirt, sneakers.

7. What does craft/making mean to you?
Literally everything. All the creative stuff I do, whether that be writing, sewing, painting, pyrography, knitting, crochet, sculpting, soldering, drawing, folding, sticking, is a part of who I am. I make, therefore I am. Lolz.

8. If you project yourself into the future. Is there anything you would like to achieve in the next 2 to 5 years?
I want to get one of my novels published. I'm over halfway writing one, and about a fifth of the way through the other.

Book meme

Nicked from Sheenagh Pugh (but it's okay, she nicked it first)

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

The Hobbit

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?

Current read: Troll Fell by Katharine Langrish, because I needed something easy after...
Last read: David Zindell's Neverness books.
Next Up: The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren, because I've been promising Nina I'll finish it for ages

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?

The Time Traveller's Wife, put it down after about 20 pages

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't?

Ooh, I dunno... Crime and Punishment, War and Peace

5. Which book are you saving for "retirement?"

See above

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

Never! If a book is any good I'll wait, if it's not I'll get rid of it. I'm not one of those people who have to know what happens, if I don't like the book or the characters then I don't care what happens to them

7. Acknowledgments: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

I like them

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

Lol, great question! When I was about 8 I'd have said Frodo or Tolly (from the Green Knowe books by Lucy M. Boston), when I was 15 I'd have said Nothing (from Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite), but who now? I'll have to come back to this question

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

My tatty copy of Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea reminds me of a lovely holiday in Cornwall when I was 7 or 8.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

I once bought a black, leather briefcase in a jumble sale for 5p when I was 6, and when I got it home I discovered a book hidden in a pocket inside - Eva Ibbotson's Which Witch? A book I love and still read.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

Yes of course

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite

13. Any "required reading" you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

Nope, it's all still awful. Step forward Jane Austen. I also disliked William Golding's Lord of the Flies when I was in school and, if anything, it's become even more disturbing.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

I once found a beautiful and very old bookmark in a book about table-rapping from the 1800s

15. Used or brand new?

Used if they are old, new if they are new

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

He's alright, I've read a few of his books but found myself skimming quite a lot

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

Yes, but only once. Interview with the Vampire the film is way better than the yawnfest that Anne Rice wrote

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

I won't get started on Lord of the Rings! One that made me quite angry was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. They got rid of really good bits, and replaced them with special effects-laden bits that totally underwhelmed. A pity, as the book is rather special

19. Have you ever read a book that's made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

In the Hounds of the Morrigan, there is a description of a meal that sounds delicious. Mushrooms cooked on a hearthstone, hot soup with butter floating in it "like a thousand golden suns", and fish cooked in their skins on the fire.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you'll always take?

Michael has introduced me to some fantastic books that I would never have found otherwise, and Nina has been spot on every time so far; my book taste is most like my newphew Bryn's though, we like similar stuff!

Books books books

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - well, not complete, but a lot of them!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - I'm sure everyone intends to read this at some point in their life
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - I agree with Stephen Fry when he said (of The Da Vinci Code) "Complete loose stool water. Arse-gravy of the very worst kind."
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - I bought the books in a charity shop, but haven't got round to them yet
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - makes me cry like a girl
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Last day

In work for three weeks. Whoop! New Zealand here I come.

I'm so nervous about the flight that I've had to go and get valium. I'm also taking my Nintendo DS, 6 books, magazines, sudoku and a notebook. Should keep me entertained for 23 hours!

I'm planning to update my blog, my flickr, my twitter, my facebook and all my other geeky online versions of me, so this isn't the last post yet... unless I die, but I'm not planning to.

Hwyl fawr am y tro
Xx