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So, recently I finished re-reading Making Money, the 36th Discworld novel, by Terry Pratchett. I have read all of them, some of them more often than I can remember.

I’m a bit sad that in my mind the best part of Making Money is that the list of Discworld books on the first pages includes those for younger readers as part of the main series, rather than on a separate list. People going “they are children’s books, so they’re not Discworld book” were a kind of pet peeve of mine, while this novel just fell flat, to the point that I took a break to re-read a 50 volume manga series between chapters.

There were a few bits of impressive or funny descriptions, sure, and I did finish it, and maybe it’ll grow on me if I re-read it more often. For now at least, it just doesn’t click.

Mr Bent’s sermon-rants about gold at the start put me off, and the idea (suggested on the backcover an by Moist von Lipwig in the text) that he might be a vampire does not gel from the start, considering that that would be the first vampire not admitting to being one in how long? The entire series?
Gladys, the golem with a crush on her boss, the abrasive Adora Belle Dearhart, Moist’s old associate with the denture troubles, the Leonardo-with-a-narrower-specialisation, the generic slightly mad scientist and interchangable Igor, the utterly pathetic bad guy Cosmo… No-one in this book caught my sympathy or interest, which is sad.

As to Moist, in Going Postal his crazy stunts to revolutionise the mail system were fun to read. In Making Money, the things like breaking into his own office at the start make sense as something to show he doesn’t deal well with routine, but, well, compared to his last book, his later actions seem rather boring, at least if you already have a basic idea of how money works despite not being backed by gold.

What comes to my mind when comparing those two books is how mundane Making Money is. Paper money is something we all are used to. There were some bits of description that tried to create a sense of wonder about how a penny would “turn into different things” depending on what it was exchanged for, but for me it just didn’t work. Money is something practical and lacks the “magic” and personal touch of the written word that, in form of letters, drove Going Postal.
Superficially, the cabinet and the golems added some magic to Making Money, but it seemed rather tacked on rather than integrated into the story.

In summary, Making Money seemed to me mostly like a mix of “let’s write about how money works” and “let’s modernise Ankh-Morpork” with story sprinkled on top, rather than the (admittedly very high) quality of storytelling that I love so about other books in the series.

Denise never had taken to reading, much to her father’s chargrin. His claims that books were magic that could take you anywhere did nit impressed her, and she only read fiction when she could not avoid it.
When she inherited her father’s estate, she did not know what to do with the books, but the smell of paper and dust awoke nostalgia, accompanied by curiosity. She unlocked the one bookcase with doors and ran a finger tentatively over the spines, cracked leather with gold lettering on most. She pulled out a small volume, opened it in a patch of sunlight, and started reading.
When she suddenly stood in ankle-deep snow, wind cutting through her summer shirt, she realised the “magic” part had not been a figure of speech.

*points at title* That’s a children’s book (9+) by Derek Landy, a sequel of one I liked a lot, so I picked it up when I spotted it on the shelf in a local bookshop.

The backcover blurb reads, “You know how it is – you think you’ve saved the world, and then ANOTHER evil villain turns up with an unbeatable monster and starts breaking things. Oh, yes, and you’ve got a skull for a head. A thirteen-year-old girl for a sidekick. And no clue what to do…”

Now, while the weird prevalence of very nearly every damn book dealing with saving the world is getting on my nerves a bit, the first book’s writing style made up for that. That blurb also suggests that Skulduggery Pleasant is the protagonist, which would have been nice. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.

Playing with Fire takes place about one year after its prequel, and Stephanie is a mage in training and the skeleton detective’s junior partner. She is the protagonist, and the title character of the series is a supporting character only.

As to the plot, some evil mage was sprung from prison and now tries to revive some kind of Frankenstein Monster which in turn will call Lovecraft-style elder gods back to our world.

In short, this book lacks everything that made the first one interesting.

The great dialogue that was the reason why I liked the prequel was nearly entirely absent, being genuinely funny in maybe two or three places, and otherwise coming across like annoying bickering rather than amusing banter. Unless dialogue was outright dropped and replaced by action scenes with far, far too many “and”s in them. Top it off with over-the-top gore I thought I didn’t have to endure in children’s books.

Neither was there a mystery, or any surprising plot twists. It was pretty clear what was going on from the start, and when information was needed, it was only a question of going to a particular person who had it, all very linear.

On top of that the more interesting plot threads (I’m thinking particularly of Stephanie’s reflection, a double summoned out of a mirror to take her place at home and school while she’s off adventuring, possibly growing into more than a mere reflection) are left dangling for the sequel(s?). I do not like books that cannot stand on their own, and I really dislike obviously deliberate sequel hooks.

Well, that was money wasted, and I definitely won’t buy the next part.

Skulduggery Pleasant is a fantasy/horror/adventure children’s book.

The setting is modern day, with sorcerers and at least some magic creatures hidden in the corners, and the main characters are Stephanie and Skulduggery Pleasant. She a twelve year old girl who inherits a house and strange business. He is a skeletal-undead, sixgun-toting sorcerer detective. They fight crime. More precisely, they try to find out who murdered Stephanie’s uncle. Occasionally they commit crime, too, but who cares?

The real action starts when Stephanie is almost killed by someone breaking into her late uncle’s house in search for something. Mr Pleasant saves her, and what with him having blown the door off the hinges, she attaches herself to him for protection and curiosity. The case develops from “let’s try to solve a murder” to “we gotta save the world!”, including, super-powerful magic items, ancient evil cultists and whatnot.

It takes some suspension of disbelief, particularly when it comes to “wait, who in their right mind would drag a 12 year old girld into a break-in when the guards are vampires who definitely are NOT pacifist and sparkly?!”, or that one big point in favour of paper-golems may be that they are easily destroyed. On the plus side, at least the book addresses the question of what the parents think of their daughter going off adventuring, by providing a double.

The plot has some nice twists and there are interesting characters to be met – and some of them besides Stephanie are female, too.

What really makes the book enjoyable for me is the dialogue – quite a bit of banter. I forgive a lot of shortcomings, including the few tropes this one employs, if a book is fun to read.

Well, I posted my favourite bit, with the missing front door, already, so have another little sample.

“They’re vampires,” Skulduggery said. “The Vault has vampire security guards.”
Stephanie made a show of poking her head out of the window and looking up at the sky. “The sun’s still out, Skulduggery. It’s still bright.”
“Doesn’t matter to them.”
She frowned. “Doesn’t sunlight kill them? Doesn’t it turn them to dust, or make them burst into flames or something?”
“Nope. Vampires tan, just like you and me. Well, just like you. I tend to bleach.”

Maybe not the best, but pretty short.

All in all, enjoyable entertainment I’ve re-read already.

There is a paragraph from Chris Baty’s book No Plot? No Problem! going round on LJ in meme form.

“Before you sit down to write a novel, you make a list of everything you love to see in novels. When you write your own novel, you should put the stuff from your list in there. Then you should make a second list of everything you hate to see in novels. When you write your own novel, you should make sure none of the stuff from that second list creeps in when you’re tired.”

I’m not immediately planning to write a novel, but anyway…

Likes

• Language that’s fun to read. Banter. A narrator or viewpoint character who doesn’t take things all that seriously. I liked Raymond Chandler’s stuff on that alone, and love it in Discworld, Vlad Taltos, Bartimaeus, Vorkosigan…
• Weird aspects/concepts. It can go too far when the story-world is all out wacky and nothing else, but if it’s just some elements, or the story is somehow else “anchored” so I can relate to it, it’s great. Examples:
  A magic orb circles the Empress of Dragaera. It protects her from harm, enables her subjects to use magic – and also enables them to check the time “telepathically”, and changes colours according to the empress’s mood.
  Skullduggery Pleasant is a sixgun-toting, undead sorcerer detective.
  In The Warrior Apprentice, Miles Vorkosigan builds a space mercenary fleet of respectable size with himself as commander in chief – by accident.
• People I can root for. Being good, at least for a given value of good… For example, so, yeah, Vlad Taltos is a murderer and gangster boss, but he does pay the family of his underling crooks if said underling gets killed in the line of duty… Also, see first Like.
• Well-developed, strong characters who happen to be female are a plus.
• Antagonists I can sympathise with, or whose motivations I can at least intellectually understand. This does not include “being evil is awesome!”
• Friendship. Loyalty. Trust.
• Optimistic basic mood.
  Despite how often I’ve heard them compared, that’s the difference I see between Discworld (“hey, even Death is on our side!”), which I like, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (“Humanity sucks, has always sucked and will suck as long as it exists.”), which I did not like at all.
• For fantasy settings including magic (which in itself is a “like”): Creatively used magic. “Whoever can fling the biggest fireball wins” is boring. Oh, and magic used for useful things, too, rather than only destruction.
• A bit of information on how magic works/what rules it follows feeds my inner geek. <3

Dislikes

• “This story mostly exists to carry a MESSAGE!” Worst example I encountered being Lord of the Flies – the version I read had a preface which gave away the ending to explain its symbolic meaning. Disgusting.
• All characters are male, apart from the trophy bride(s) (e.g. Ocean’s Eleven or Lord of the Rings). Or female characters only existing for the benefit of male characters (and/or assumed-to-be-male audience).
  For fantasy races: males are monstrous, or at least unattractive, females attractive by human standards.
• Strictly/overtly patriarchal societies, unless they’re depicted as ridiculous (e.g. in Ethan of Athos) or otherwise criticised in the story. I already live with being considered a second class person, I don’t need to have that shit shoved into my face in my escapism.
• Villains. People who consider themselves evil and are proud of it, and/or are evil because they like being evil… It’s insane or stupid, and on top of that lazy writing in all instances I encountered so far.
• “All X are good, all Y are bad”. Or generally splitting the world into good and bad.
• Doom and gloom and nothing else. For example starting off a story with a list of the hardships a character went through in their life so far will most likely mean I don’t read the rest, unless the tone is un-serious enough to cancel it.
• Male dwarf considers human woman (or elf attractive by human standards) gorgeous. Different species should have different standards of beauty, and I can think of three instances of that particular constellation offhand, making it way over-used for something so stupid.
• “You are the Chosen One of the Prophecy, so you must do this to save the world, even if you have no idea whatsoever about anything.”
• Gushy romance making up most of the story.
• Detailed sex scenes. I really don’t need to know how and how often which tab goes into which slot.
• Sloppy writing and inconsistencies. For instance saying outright and showing through multiple examples throughout the book that technology stops working or breaks as soon as anything magic comes near, but having a major magic ritual accompanied by background music from a CD player. Writing like Wolfgang Hohlbein.

I realise that the “dislikes” list is way longer than the “likes” list. My impression is that I have more relatively specific “hot buttons” that will annoy me, and mostly wide “likes”.

A small addendum to the “all characters are male, apart from the trophy bride(s)” dislike in the case of movies or comics, rather than prose: Men come in a variety of different shapes and ages, but women are all young, slim, “conventionally attractive”, as if made in the same plastic doll mold.

I have less trouble liking a story without any female characters in it (even though that is likely to cause some annoyance, unless the cast is extremely small) than ignoring cardboard-cutout female “characters”, or women inserted for male readers to drool over, or other nonsense like that.

Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-27426-8

As the title suggests, a book on drawing animals. Ken Hultgren was an animator for Disney, the former showing in poses and walk cycles, the latter in some of the “carricature” examples.

Ignoring the preface, here we have 134 pages full of black and white illustrations, with a few explanations thrown in. Quite many of the example drawings are shown as one roughed in and one finished version.

After 18 pages of general notes (the division of the body in three parts, rule of the thumb for placement of eyes and ears, boxing in forms, examples for simplified skeleton and mannikin frames, “mood and feeling”, “use of line”, and some examples of textures you can achieve with a brush) the book is divided into “chapters” of very varying length devoted to one animal or group of animals each. Nearly all of those have action poses like leaping, and a page or two on carricaturing the animal(s) in question.

The first one, “The Horse Family”, goes over 29 pages into most detail, starting with how the different parts of the skeleton are made up and fit together, the assumption being that the reader will be able to apply the same methods to other animals without being walked through all of the steps again. In addition to random action poses throughout the chapter there are sequences on leaping, kicking out, trot and canter. For a bit variety from the “generic horse” there’s a page on draft horses and zebras each, as well as a double page on colts.

The 20 pages of “The Cat Family” is mainly devoted to lions, with a page each on Tigers and Domestic Cats.

“The Deer Family” (including stags and fawns) is covered on 9 pages including sequences of walk and jump. It only shows a “generic deer”, no note on different species. By contrast, the later chapter “Dogs” of the same length has only a page of random sketches for general information, followed by one or two pages each with sketches of a particular breed. “The Bear Family” and “Elephants”  are similar in page count, with the elephant chapter being noteworthy for a for the species unexpected variation of poses (albeit none “leaping”).

Five pages spared for “Cows and Bulls”, four for “Kangaroos” (including a jump cycle), three each for rabbits (and a hare which wasn’t labelled as such), foxes, pigs and warthogs, and gorillas, two for giraffes, and camels (both, like the elephant, sadly lacking any information about pace, their main or only gait), and a single page on squirrels.

The book is capped by a 7-pages chapter on “Composition and Animal Grouping”.

I was slightly disappointed because the title implies more variety than is actually shown; “The Art of Mammal Drawing” would have been more accurate. The “The X Family” chapters are more concerned about showing (presumably) commonalities, rather than going into details of differences between species.

There is nothing like the staple of how to draw humans books, the figure divided into head-heights, so you need to be able to see or measure the proportions from the examples, or photos or models.
On the other hand, I think the many examples of “roughed in” mannikin – simplified skeleton and/or basic shapes – next to a finished image can be very helpful.

In my eyes the greatest strength of the book are the dynamic poses, and particularly the running and jumping sequences.

Considering the low price, this for me was worth it.

I came across a blog entry, How Often Should You Publish? by a published author, I’d like to comment on. Of course I’m speaking from a reader’s perspective.

The idea that the publishing speed should be right for the fanbase I can see – say, I stopped reading Sluggy Freelance because there was too much too fast being added to for me, but obviously it’s great for enough other people to make it a really popular webcomic.

But as he says in his key assertion, “you don’t publish unless it’s good”, there is objectively publishing too much. My “favourite” example is Wolfgang Hohlbein, a German fantasy author who seems to publish 7 or more books a year. The problem is that the quality suffers. To avoid anything that may have to do with taste, here are some examples.
In one book hailed as “his most ambitious novel”, one of the secondary characters for a few chapters is incorrectly referred to by the name of an entirely different character that died in the prequel. Offhand I remember one other scene which didn’t make sense until I figured out in one sentence he’d used the wrong name of the two characters involved.
Another was a six-part series, and at the end of one book one of the characters was catatonic, and the rhetoric of the other sounded like getting him out of it was the big quest-thing for the next volume, but at the start of that next book the poor sod was just a bit under the weather.
His last book that I gave a chance on one page said “she ran towards the forest, where she could get away since she knew every single tree”, and five pages later “she had never entered the forest, only walked along its edge”.

Re-reading and editing a manuscript before sending it to a publisher certainly is a good idea, even if it takes time.

Turning back to webcomics, the fun part is that there (among amateurs, of course), one piece of advice is to start your first project even if your art and all sucks, because the practise will help you get better, and not doing it means you probably won’t get better.

I should take that to heart.