Scott Westerfield, more Animals in Stories, Editing, and a Secret Photograph of the JD Field Writing Process

What's your favourite Potter animal? What would be your Patronus? Or your Daemon? What's your favourite Scott Westerfield animal?

I've talked about the appeal of animals in kids books before. It's interesting that it doesn't seem to cross over to YA books that I've seen. There's something about the play of imagination necessary to see the world through the eyes of an animal that maybe stops as we grow up.

Westerfield is my latest discovery. I've just read leviathan.

It's BRILLIANT. Recommended to everybody. It's a re-imagining of the events at the start of the First World War, seen through the eyes of a teenage girl and a teenage boy who get caught up in events. It's fast-paced and action packed, but that's not the best bit.

The best bit is that the Germans have armies of gigantic, walking war machines, while the British have fabricated animals by blending their DNA together. There are enormous, armoured elephantines, and ferocious wolf-tigers. There are jellyfish filled with helium that float into the sky. Best of all is a whale as big as a village, that produces hydrogen in its guts, and floats through the sky like a gigantic airship. This is the best thing ever.

If you've read The Water Book you'll understand why. If you haven't, then read the Water Book. It's free at BARNES AND NOBLE. That's got a whale, and imaginatively depicted animals, as well.

Fortunately Westerfield's work is such compulsive reading that it won't be keeping from my editing for much longer. I've printed Levels 4 onto 70 A3 pages.

Here it is, with the corner of my new noticeboard. The corner has a note about the stories I'm going to write AFTER Levels... I'm currently on page 35 of the edit, scrawling arrows all over everything, and crossing stuff out. Crossing tons out. Lucky I've got plenty more to add, so when it finally gets to you you're not going to feel short changed...
  

Another Week, Another Distraction, Bernard Cornwell's Winter King, and Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak

Three weeks ago I went to London for the weekend. At the end of the trip, with two hours until I had to take the tube to Heathrow Airport, I finally achieved my goal of visiting a bookstore.
I bustled from Victoria Station, past the back wall of Buckingham Palace and through the beautiful, green dampness of St James's park, to the grand shops and mansions of Piccadilly.
Drizzle fell constantly. I didn't care, I was going to a bookshop.
In the end, though, I didn't go to a bookshop, I went to two bookshops. The first was Hatchards, in Piccadilly. It's the oldest bookshop in the UK, on five floors, and it looks like this.

 I bought a copy of Idylls of the King Publisher: Penguin Classics, and a history of the Kings of England (exciting stuff). More importantly I roamed around their five floors, got recommendations from their lovely staff, and browsed through all kinds of fascinating little nooks and crannies.
And then, from there, I went up the road to Waterstones Piccadilly, ANOTHER five floor book store. What an embarrassment of riches! it used to be a department store called Simpsons, and it's huge.
Here I bought this:

Because I thought it would be interesting to see a historical representation of the King Arthur years.
It turned out it was more than fascinating. basically, in British history, there's a 500 hundred year gap, after the Romans left, and before the Normans came, when we know NOTHING that went on. While the Romans were around they wrote letters about people, and drew maps, and recorded battles, and accounts. Then they went, and everybody pulled their palaces down to make pig sties, and let grass grow on their roads, and stopped recording anything.
It's like there's an invisibility cloak over the whole time. A cloak that Cornwell attempts to push aside. He makes a real historical time fascinating, and quite dreadful, and the characters amazing.
Recommended.

Buying shares in Cassandra Claire, The Hunger Games, Emma Watson and JK Rowling Dress Contest, and Lord of the Flies

The Hunger Games. Current flavour of the month, or at least until they bring out the first of the Mortal Instruments movies.

Let's pause to think about that, for a moment. Outside of teen paranormal fiction fans, Cassandra Claire is a bit unknown. JK Rowling is a billionaire megastar. it's not going to be long before they will be mentioned in the same breath, then Claire will be famous for having out-Rowlinged Rowling. She's got two series on the go, with more to come. the potential is galactic, if you know of any way you can buy shares in Cassandra Claire sell all your shoes and gettem!

But anyway, the Hunger Games. A dystopian YA thriller, without any paranormal elements, but lots of death and suffering. It's about kids at each other's throats, running around in a forest setting traps for one another. At school everybody in the UK has to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies, about a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island, who descend into savagery. I didn't like it. I was in the Scouts, and I wanted to believe we would do better. Hunger Games gets around this issue by having the kids FORCED to fight one another, then Suzanne Collins, the author, gets around it a second time by having her heroine, Katniss, somehow - more by luck than judgement - never actually have to hurt somebody who's nice, or who doesn't deserve hurting.

I liked that, it made the story easier to read, but somehow it's not completely buyable.

The other slight downside is Katniss. Though she's a great heroine, especially in contrast to the typical female lead in YA books (think Isaballe Swann) in that she's resourceful, independent, tough, smart and brave, she's also a bit odd. Her response to incredibly intense situations is often muted, and her response to the first romance, ever, in her life is weirdly cold. I didn't get it.

As far as downsides, go, those are it. The world created is believable, tangible, scary and captivating. The characters are rounded and interesting. More than anything it's exciting, man is it exciting. Twists, turns, twisting back again, turning over, then just when you think everything's going to be okay it twists itself all around in a loop again.

Solid recommend, and I'll be writing more about this next week...