Dealing with Conflict in Writing (Or, learning how to be bad and good at the same time)

A few weeks ago I took my son to see Wreck it Ralph. Aside from being the only person in the theater to get the Final Fantasy VII reference, I really enjoyed it and I think Daniel did too. However, throughout the movie I noticed he would bury his face in my arm and whimper at certain parts. Not the scary parts, mind, but at the strangest places, like when Wreck it Ralph meets King Candy for the first time. Or right after Ralph and Glitch bake her car. Finally, I asked him what was wrong.

"He’s gonna get in trouble!" Daniel said.

"No, he’s not," I said. "See? Look. Glitch likes her car. You have to watch and see what happens."

"Oh," he said. "I thought she was going to get upset and yell at him for making an ugly car."

And that was when I realized something. My son wasn’t scared of conflict, per se. He was scared of people getting into trouble. When Ralph ran into Candy Land even though people told him not to, he was Breaking the Rules. Which meant he would Get in Trouble, and that made Daniel uncomfortable enough that he didn’t want to watch Ralph Get Consequences.

I get it, because I am very much the same way.

Maybe it’s a first-child thing, where we were always told we were the oldest, so we have to set an example for the younger kids to show them how to do things to go the right way. Maybe it comes from being a Christian, where we hold ourselves up to such a high standard, we can’t even contemplate doing something wrong before telling ourselves it’s sin. (I tell you that verse, whatsover is pure, whatsoever is holy, whatsoever is righteous…etc etc…has made my life as a writer a tightrope). Or maybe it’s due to conflict-avoidance, something I do at every chance possible.

I want all my characters to travel the least resistance. I want them to be happy. I want them to achieve their goals the right way.

But that’s not how stories work.

I’m working on a scene in Willow now where one of my characters lies to another character. I originally didn’t do it because, hey, this character is basically a nice guy, and I really liked him. But as I edited, I realize that he wasn’t doing what he was ordered to do, which was to break up a relationship between the main characters. Which meant that he would have to lie. It makes me squeamish, because there will be consequences from this, really bad consequences.  And the guy knows it. But he does it anyway, which will mean alas, this guy isn’t as nice as I want him to be.

But that also makes him more human.

I will admit, there is a small part of me that makes me want to bury my face whenever conflict or trouble or any sort of uncomfortableness rises in my stories. There’s that part of me that cries, if she does that, she’ll have to suffer the consequences. But if there is no conflict, there’s no growth either. Characters need conflict to learn. They need to test boundaries. They need to stand up for what they believe in, even if they’ll get in trouble for it. Wreck it Ralph wanted to be treated nice, so he went outside of his game to get a medal, which was against the rules, yes, but to him, it was taking a chance to get him some respect. He suffered some dear consequences for that, but he learned a lot about himself. And by the end, we were rooting for him to succeed. That what makes a great story.

As writers, we need to show the good and the bad, the angels and the demons, the unbreakable and the rule-breakers. It’s how we connect with the characters. If you struggle with it, just tell yourself, watch and see what happens, because sometimes (though not always) it all pays off in the end. 

You can also play chaotic evil characters in RPGs, which is what I’m doing. Which is not as easy as you think. Do you know how long it took to get up the nerve to steal something in Skyrim? I mean, sure, you can put a bucket over the shopkeeper’s head, but it’s the principle of the thing…

LaShawn’s list of 2013 Hugo Nominations Considerations and other awards stuff (alternate title: WADDYA MEAN I SHOULD’VE DONE THIS IN JANUARY HOW WAS I TO KNOW OHCRAPOHCRAP ::FLAILFLAILFLAILFLAIL::)

Yes, yes, I know it’s way way late. I know that we only have a week left to actually turn in nominations for the Hugos this year. And yes, I completely neglected to write this post at the beginning of this year, when everyone was putting out ALL THE ELIGIBLITY POSTS. But hey, better late than never.

I don’t have best novelette or novella because, well, I never got around to reading them. There are many other sites out there who list story nominations, so go google them.

Of course, I am a complete and utter dunce, so I missed the deadline to do nominations for the Rhysling award, which is a shame, because the only works I got published last year were poetry. Actually, that’s not quite true. Both were prose poems, so maybe they can be eligible for short stories. I’ll mention them just in case:

“All This Pure Light Leaking In” published in the 2012 anthology Dark Faith: Invocations, by Apex Publishing, editors Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon

and

“I Will Keep the Color of Your Eyes When No Other in the World Remembers Your Name”, published by Stone Telling Magazine.

And here’s what I’m going to be nominating for the Hugo awards this year:

Best Novel:

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin

The Straits of Galahesh by Bradley P. Beaulieu

Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Best Short story:

“They Make of You a Monster” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Damien Walters Grintalis

“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” in Lightspeed — Maria Dahvana Headley

Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Fan Writer

K. Tempest Bradford

N.K. Jemisen

Ferret Stimentz

Alex Bledsoe

Genevieve Valentine.

Best Semiprozine

Ideomancer

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Apex

Electric Velocipede

Daily Science Fiction

Goblin Fruit

Stonetelling

Related Work

Writing Excuses Season Seven

Chicks Dig Comics

Best editor short form

JJA

Maurice Broaddus & Jerry Gordon

Lynne M. Thomas, Jason Sizemore, Michael Damian Thomas

Graphic Stories

“The Situation” by Jeff Vandermeer and Eric Orchard

New Campbell

Damien Walters Grintalis

Best Fancast

Adventures in Scifi Publishing

Good luck to everyone!

Review: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed reading this. This book opened my eyes on the nature of culture. The culture of world. The culture of church. The culture of science fiction. And knowing that you must know culture in order to change it.

I was struck most by his four postures Christians use to respond to culture outside of the church: condemning, critiquing, consuming and copying, and found myself applying it on numerous occasions. For instance, Jon and I went to the mall were we went to a restaurant called Kato’s Cajun, which was based on the same restaurant as Sarku Japan, except all the Asian dishes had “Cajun” names. Jon went up to get a sample, and when he came back, he said, “The Cajun chicken tastes just like the Bourbon chicken.”

I then start grouching that sticking a ethnic name in front of a dish doesn’t magically make it so, but then I started thinking about it. Here I was, condemning the fact that mall food courts are slapping ethnic labels together and calling them fusions just to get people to eat their food. I’m critiquing that they think their customers are clueless enough not to know Asian cuisine from Cajun. But I’m consuming the food anyway because labels aside, it’s delicious and is (hopefully) better than eating McDonalds. And let’s face it, when I cook Asian dishes at home, I put my own spin on it, thus copying the culture of fusion cuisine.

I like how Crouch also intertwines how God uses culture in the Bible into how culture is so relevant today, and how we can work with culture instead of hiding from it. We’re not guaranteed to make any differences. But the mere fact that I’m writing a review (there are instances in the book that is delightfully meta) and putting it up for people to read does show that I can add my own voice to culture and thus, while not change the world, at least to touch it through my readers. Four omelets out of five.

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IV Arts & SALT 2013 (con) Report

So remember in my last post where I said I should go to a Christian con in 2013? Funny how I mentioned that….

A week after I wrote that post, I learned about a consultation that the organization I work for, InterVarsity, was doing to help support their arts ministry. Any staff who either worked with art students, or who were artists themselves, were invited to attend. I’ll report on the consultation in a bit, but wanted to write about the couple of weeks before the consultation.

You see, before I went, I experienced the worst imposter syndrome ever. So much so that I nearly did not go.

Not that this was visible to anyone. I told people I was going and they were excited. My coworkers thought it was a perfect fit. My husband thought it would be a good way to nurture the writer side of me in a Christian setting. Everyone felt I should go to this. And the fact that hotel and meal expenses were paid, I would have been stupid not to go. But I struggled with it. I really did. I really, really did.

There were many reasons, but the main one I want to write about here as that up to that point, I saw genre writing as separate from, “Christian art”. Seriously, when have someone gotten up in church to read a page from Harry Potter during the sermon? Well, uh okay, nevermind, apparently I’m at the wrong church…but that’s besides the point. The point is, the Christian arts seem to only promote those that are done corporately.

I remember last year, I learned there was an Arts seminar thing being held at one of the churches around here. I thought it was cool…until I took a look at the actual workshops. They had panels for worship leaders. Ones for musicians. They had an art gallery for those who painted. For writing, they had a “drama category for writing skits to incorporate into worship”….

…and that was pretty much it.

And then there was last year, where my small group did a study of spiritual gifts. My gift came up as (duh) writing:

“How do you plan to use your gift?” asked the leader.

I said, “Well, I use it a lot when I’m writing stories. I tend to put in a lot of faith elements–”

“No, I mean, how do you plan to use it for the church?”

“……………”

When writing is incorporated into worship, it’s more along the lines of spoken word/poetry that had to refer to God. I remember back at Urbana 09, I read an excerpt from “She’s All Light” during the black lounge open mic. All the other acts were pretty much gospel songs/spoken word/rap that was pretty much psalms. A lot of people liked my reading, true, but still, it made me feel sort of weird, like my science fiction story was the oddball out.

From my experience, singing, playing instruments or performing in drama skits, all worship skills, are valued higher in the church than, well, writing stories. Wait, let me change that–writing speculative stories. Granted, I could write and/or edit church bulletins. Heck, I can even write drama skits if I wanted to. At best, I can write worship poetry, and that’s a whole different set of neuroses. I remember a long time back, before I’d started writing, when a worship leader at our church asked me and my friend to write spoken word pieces to read during worship (because this was an awesome church that had the creativity to do that). This was before I started professional writing, and I had very little experience with poetry, so I pulled some stuff together from a journal and threw in a bunch of “God make stars, made mountains, is awesome, blahblahblah” sentences. And then I read it straight, because, well, it was poetry. It was okay. On the next song, though, my friend came up and read hers. She did spoken word. With attitude. And it was awesome.

And at that point, I realized–I don’t have a gift for writing spoken word poetry. I deeply appreciate it, moreso now than I did back then, but it’s a different set of writing skills altogether.

Here’s the thing. I love stories. I love wrestling with deep truth in them. I love tales of growth, tales of woe, tales that would have you on the edge of your seat. Even my poetry are stories–just in a different format. Stories are my way of having deep conversations with people disguised as narrative. Plus, my characters get to do awesome stuff. I just had one of my main characters in Willow do a flip off the side of a building and nail a bad guy between the eyes with a knife.

That…probably won’t hold up too well if that’s read before a sermon.

I’ve come to terms that my writing life, at least the story part, and my church life, would be pretty much kept separate. Notice I didn’t say Christian life–I’ve have many good conversations in fandom with atheists, feminists, what the church would consider “secular”. I also am quite blessed to work at an religious organization that has as many geeks as it does, so I’m not hurting for that. It’s just that with the actual church, I pretty much have to check my writer side at the door. And that was one of the reasons why I really struggled with going to the IV Arts conference. If it was just going to be a bunch of worship leaders there talking about church stuff, then I didn’t belong.

But luckily, it wasn’t that.To go to the conference, you either had to be a staff worker who ministered to arts students, or you were a staff worker who was an artist.And that included writers. Even genre fiction writers.So I went.

The consultation was two days, and was a more like a Christian retreat, than a con. The third day was called SALT, and was more of a day seminar, where Christian student artists met on Wheaton campus to discuss being an artist and Christian at the same time. I got to meet many other artists–graphic artists, filmmakers, opera singers, tap dancers, harpists, small theater actors, costume designers—all who worked in Christian and secular settings. And I even got to connect with a student who drove up from Urbana because she had written several fantasy novels, but haven’t sent any out yet because she’s constantly revising them. And she had never been to a con before. At that point, I think I went supernova, I was so happy. I dare say this was the first time that my InterVarsity staffworker side and my writing side intersected.

Of course I told her about Wiscon and Viable Paradise. Who do you think I am?!

So in the end, I’m really, really glad I went. It was exactly what I needed. And I came away with my creative meter/spiritual meter refilled. And it got me rethinking the question how do I plan to use my writing for the church? Part of it may involve blogging more about my spiritual journey. As for the church, perhaps I shouldn’t be thinking in corporate worship terms but in relational terms. I happen to know there are a couple of fans who like to play RPGs. I could start up a gamer group at our church.

After all, if there was one takeaway I got from the conference, it was this: artists are bridges between the church world and the secular world. Evangelism works both ways.

===

Edit: And it appears that the arts conference at that church I wrote about earlier is coming back again in April. Again, the workshops appear to be more worship oriented. Hmmm…should I go and represent anyway?

And before you say, “OHYOUSHOULDGOJARSOFCLAYWILLBE THERE”…um, I never was a fan of Jars of Clay. I heard their songs, and they’ve never really stuck with me, so, meh. And this does happen a week after Oddcon. I dunno…

The Next Big Thing – The Weeping of the Willows

There’s this meme post going around called "The Next Big Thing" where new authors answer questions about the books they’re working on. I’ve been tagged by Sofia Samatar back in October, and then tagged again by my VPXV classmate Blair MacGregor in December. So I am really, really late on this. But never late than never, hey?

1) What is the working title of your next book?

The Weeping of the Willows.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Different elements of the story came from different parts of my life.

When I was in college, I had a friend who had kept swords in his dorm room. Sometimes, we would stage  fake fights. From that, I got the idea of a black girl assassin.

Because of my Christian charismatic background, I wanted to write a world that explored the nature of prophecy. I combined that with the madness of the Greek oracles to come up with the concept of voices in my story. I also love growing herbs, and that’s where I got the idea of herbmasters instead of doctors.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Epic fantasy.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I doubt it would ever get turned into a movie, but I think an older version of the girl who played Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild would be perfect as my main character, Coren.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A black female assassin is assigned to kill a herbmaster, but becomes a bodyguard to his son, the prophesied destroyer of the world.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

When I finish it (and by God, it will get finished), I plan to send it to agents, but also to publishers. We’ll see what happens then.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Officially, I started writing this in 1992 and made it up to 15 chapters before I stopped in 1997. I picked it up again in 2004, decided I had no clue what I was doing, threw all those chapters out, and started rewriting from scratch. I finished the first draft in July 2007 and saw that I had enough for two books. So I broke them in half, and I’ve been in rewrites since.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Hm…probably the closest would be the Sun Sword series by Michelle West.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Over time, the story evolved to the theme of identity. What is identity? How can you claim identity when it’s been taken from you without your knowledge? What must you sacrifice to forge your own identity? In a way, the book mirrors my own journey as I wrestle with these questions.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Swordfights! Plagues! Talking trees! Politics! Meddling aunts! And lots of swears and oaths…

To be honest, I’m still in the revision stage, but I’m always posting updates here at the Café in the Woods. Feel free to follow me here, or on Facebook and Twitter if you want more timely updates.

Include the person who tagged you, and add other people if you like:

As I said, I was tagged by both Sofia Samatar and Blair MacGregor. I’m going to return the favor and tag my other VPXV classmate Veronica Henry, as well as fellow Madisonite Monica Valentinelli, and David Steffen who is one of the masterminds behind The (Submission) Grinder, an alternative to Duotrope.

Urbana 12 con report

Readers to this blog will know that I have two day jobs of sorts–besides being a speculative writer, I work in the HR department for a Christian non-profit called InterVarsity, a ministry on college campuses throughout the United States. Every three years, InterVarsity does a huge missions conference called Urbana (though it’s nowadays held in St. Louis, MO) where thousands of students go to hear speakers, attend seminars and get information of going into missions, whether overseas or in their own backyards. Because it is such a huge event, many campus staff come to serve at the conference, and that includes us in the national office.

I’ve never attended Urbana as a student, so I don’t know the full experience, but having been to science fiction cons for about four years now, I couldn’t help but compare Urbana to a gigantic con of sorts. I mean, I didn’t see a single person doing cosplay.  The entire conference was geared towards missions, which would probably set many of my non-Christian friends to twitching. And…no alcohol, so no Barcon, which would send many of my writer friends (myself included) screaming. Oh, and the job they had for me was working for Urbana.org, so I had the strange, disorientating experience of spending most of my time at the conference not networking, but writing.

But I learned a lot at the conference that I realized that I wanted to…no…needed to do a con report.

Urbana 12 had a huuuuuuge concom.
You think the concom at Wiscon or any other large con is big? We hire people to work on the conference a couple of years before the conference. And that doesn’t include the production staff, the set up crew, registrar, communications. This Urbana, they had a social media team whose sole purpose was to tweet, Facebook, tumblr, Hootsuite, the conference around the clock. Because I was with Urbana.org, I got to be backstage, so I was able to catch a small glimpse of the work done to put together the main sessions in the morning and evening. And that in itself was a small glimpse of the whole.

Views from backstage

 

Urbana 12 had safe spaces for POC.
When I served at my first Urbana in 2008, they had me working the BCM lounge (Black Campus Ministry). For four days, 6 hours per day, I would feed students, talk to students, play games and basically hang out. It was a lot of fun, though by the end of the conference, I couldn’t talk to people, I was so peopled out (I was not the extrovert I thought I was.)

In 2009, I went to my first full Wiscon and attended the POC dinner. When they were talking about the safe space that POC could go to decompress and have a safe place to talk about the Wiscon experience, I was like, dude, it’s just like the black lounge at Urbana!

Urbana had several lounges in fact–they also had an artist lounge, an international student lounge, and an InterVarsity Staff lounge. But still, the ethnic lounges (they had one for black students, Latino, Asian, and Native American) stood out to me as awesome spaces for people of color to sit, process, and hang out with other people of color. I liked how they were all next to each other, so you could visit them (and I saw a few non-ethnics wandering about as well). This year, the black lounge also had panels and roundtable talks of their own. I sat in on a roundtable about being black in an predominately white setting. Very interesting discussion–I wished I stayed longer. I also missed the open mic, the dancing, the games…

My only complaint is that I wish there was an easier way to get to the lounges. They were located in the Ramada on the west side of the America Center, and there was no quick way to get to it except go all the way around the block…which in winter, made for quite the trek. (Interestingly, the POC safe space for Wiscon was also in a hard to find, out of the way spot, but at least it was still inside the Concourse Hotel.)

Urbana 12 had a con suite.
That first night after doing registration, I was pretty exhausted, but my body had gone into con mode–which meant that had this been an actual con, I would go and hang out with other writers. And where else did all the writers go but to the bar–or if the hotel had no bar, some place where the writers could sit, drink, and bemoan the whole writing business.

But Urbana was a Christian conference, so there wasn’t a bar to hang out (not one I would tell you about anyway). However, there was the aforementioned staff lounge, so I went there instead, and found it to be comparable to a con suite. There was snacks. There were games. And there were plenty of writersInterVarsity Staff, bemoandiscussing campus ministry.

So the time I wasn’t working or wandering about, I hung out in the staff lounge. Got to meet new people, and I even learned how to play Dominion–which satisfied my geek fix.

Urbana 12 helped hone my writing.
So I was given a job at Urbana–helping out with line direction during registration, and helping out with the Urbana.org site. Since all that was involved with line direction was repeatedly yelling "WELCOME TO URBANA! IF YOU ARE A STUDENT AND PAID IN FULL, GO STRAIGHT! IF YOU HAVE NOT PAID IN FULL, GO TO THE RIGHT! IF YOU ARE AN EXHIBITOR, GO TO THE LEFT!" I’ll just spare my vocal cords and talk about the Urbana.org job.

I had the pleasure to work with Kurt Bullis and Mark Breneman on the Urbana.org website. This basically meant I got to put my writing skills to work mainly through editing and formatting articles and writing blurbs. I also got to perform and transcribe an interview, which I hadn’t done in years. And I pulled quotes from blogs to give to the social media team to tweet.

While working on Willow, I’ve been learning how to utelize placeholders in my writing. I used that to help me in writing the blurbs–when I couldn’t think of anything to write, I put down something I’d would like for it to say, like <some sort of description about Bibles here> and moved on to the next blurb–then I would rework it the next time I came back to it. I also had to write fast, which meant I couldn’t spend a few days working on something. I had to write fast, take a break, proofread, then give what I had to Kurt, who could use it as is or completely rework it.

It was an interesting process. I didn’t have time to make things completely perfect, so I had to make placeholders work for me fast. And that’s something I want to bring to my novel revision. So, in a way, Urbana helped with my writing skills. Also, as you can see, I know how to write headlines within an article now. WRITING SKILL POINTS GAINED!!

Urbana 12′s spiritual side
Urbana still is, though, a Christian conference, and one thing I don’t get from cons is nourishing the spiritual side of me. Though I didn’t go to any of the seminars, I did get to see the speakers in the plenary sessions and participate in the worship. And let me tell you, the worship was awesome. Not the average ‘let’s-get-a-guitar-and-sing-kumbayah’. It was worship in many different languages, with many different instruments. Very diverse, plus, doing it with 16,000 other people made it fun. They had drama pieces which ran from ballet to stomp dancing to rap. They also showed videos, which I may have taken part in.

I truly enjoyed listening to the speakers. And it also confirmed that I’m right where God wants me to be, though I am also being challenged on a number of things (most of what I’m still processing). And having communion on New Year’s Eve with 16,000 people was a phenomenal.

Plus there were other perks, but I’m not going to go into that.

So, all in all, Urbana 12 may have not been a con, but I got a lot out of it. And I’m not as exhausted or stressed out at the end the last Urbana (oh, a whole number of factors went into that). That said, it did make me eager to start working on my con schedule for 2013.

Maybe I’ll include a Christian con this year…

Review: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

For the first time I ever known in my entire reading life, a movie I’ve never even seen spoiled a book for me.

I didn’t know there was a book about Cloud Atlas until trailers for the movie came out, and even then, I hadn’t paid attention until people in my facebook stream started complaining about the yellowface, and then other people started defending the yellowface, and then more people said they hated the yellowface but understood why it was there, and that the whole issue of reincarnation muddied up the works, and meanwhile, I was like, “Wait..What the heck are you talking about about? What’s Cloud Atlas?” And everyone was like “Get it together, LaShawn. Go read the book.”

And so I did, because, hey, controversial movie, yadda yadda yadda.

Cloud Atlas is six short stories that span from the 1800s to the far off future. Each story has a reoccurring element–a person with a tattoo, a cowardly, stupid jerk, a chase or some sort of pursuit, and mentions of the previous story appearing in some type of form: journal, letter, book, etc. Each story also had a unique voice, which, in several stories, made it very hard to read. In fact, the Sloosha story was so unreadable with its futuristic native slang and apostrophes, I pretty much skimmed through the entire thing without reading it through. Which was a shame, because I would have loved to read it more indepth once I realized it was a far futuristic time setting, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. It also didn’t help that I was reading a “borrowed” ebook from Overdrive and I only had a 14 day window to read it–which sucked because instead of savoring it like I should have, I was under a time constraint.)

If I had discovered this book back in 2004 when it was published, I suspect Cloud Atlas would’ve blown my mind. And indeed, I loved the exploration of the privilege/unprivileged motifs, though the juxtaposition of the stories made the exploration a little odd sometimes. A bigoted coward unwillingly helping a slave, okay, I get it, but how does a young composer sponging off an older man compare to that? I think the author was exploring oppressed/freedom motif in all aspects, and in a couple of the stories, it felt like he was really stretching to hold on to that motif. The best stories that reflected it well was the Adam Ewing story (though it was hard to read because the Ewing was such a bigot, he made my skin crawl), the Luisa Rey story, and the Sonmi-451 story. In fact, I would have said that the Somni story was the best one in the entire book, but I can’t.

You see, the reason why I picked Cloud Atlas was because of the controversy of the actors appearing in yellowface in the movie. I wanted to know what justified them to do so. There are many good websites out there dissecting why it didn’t work in the movie. Suffice it to say, I’ve seen the pictures. So when I started reading Somni’s section, all I could see in my mind’s eye was the white men in Korean makeup. I tried to change it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t come up with my own picture of the characters. And it absolutely did not help that the ebook I was reading had the cover of all the actors right there.

It spoiled the story for me.

I wish I never knew about the movie. I know that the movie was supposed to be about reincarnation and characters transcending race, but that’s not what the book was about. The book was about how powerful people use their privilege to keep back people without power. The book is about how such privilege is abused, and how it goes deep: culturally, ethnically, racially. The movie took that and said, “yeah, screw that. It’s going to be what we want it to be. And we want all our main white characters to appear in all the stories. And to make sure we won’t get yelled at, we’ll do the same for our only two POC women. But the black guy? Nah, let’s just keep him in only a couple of stories. It’ll be too hard to put makeup on him in a different race.”

(And wait a second…isn’t the first story set it in the Pacific Islands? Why did they change it to black slaves then? Arrrrghhh…)

Understandably, I’m bitter.

But, really, what did I think of the book? It was okay. Not spectacular. There were times when I found the meta a little too grating for my tastes (but then again, some meta works for me and some meta don’t). I was reminded of my favorite short story Lull, by Kelly Link, who does a similar thing of a story within a story within a story, but she does it far better, in my opinion. I found the splitting of the stories in Cloud Atlas jarring–at times, I wondered if my ebook had loaded wrong. It wasn’t until I realized the characters were reading the previous story that the breaks were intentional (and this was one of the ways the meta failed). Also, I didn’t really empathize with the characters all that much. Adam Ewing was a bigot, Robert Frobisher was a leech, Luisa Rey was an idiot, and Timothy Cavendish was a jerk–though, to my complete surprise, I enjoyed his story the most. His was the only character who truly stood out, and though he was a jerk, his comeuppance, and his subsequent turnabout, was quite satisfying. The Somni and Sloosha stories…well…I think what I’ll do is wait a few years and try to read Cloud Atlas again without the movie cover on it, so I can form my own opinion.

So this gets 2-1/2 comet birthmarks out of 5. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to see the movie, but it feels like I’ve already have.

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