Who sees her as the bad guy? They’re two of the first terms you learn in the study of literature: protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist is the hero, the schnook at the center of the story, the innocent in the middle of a hurricane. It’s easy to sympathize with heroes. Everything seems to happen to them and they’re created to be someone you like. So it should be easy to guess who the antagonist is. That’s the “udder guy”, the heavy, the louse who antagonizes the hero. Actually, an antagonist is simply whatever force that opposes the hero but some opponents go out of their way to make the good guy’s life miserable. At any rate, it’s easy to see the tale from the hero’s point of view but when I was struggling with a story years ago I got some good advice from my husband. “Never forget” he said, looking over the rims of his glasses, “No one sees themselves as the villain.” Bertha Mason before she went to England..Doesn’t look crazy, does she? “No one sees themselves as the villain.” That observation holds incredible insight and it’s the mechanism that unlocked a horde of parallel novels based…
How often do you get to interview one of your personal heroes? The first time I saw Sue Ann Jaffarian, I was too afraid to even speak to her. She breezed into the middle of our low-key seminars one day, a bubbly, confident woman with a terrific smile. She talked about her work as a paralegal but I was blown away by her other career as a much-published novelist with editors, a fan-base and everything! Book-nut that I am, my mouth and brain slammed shut in the presence of this “sure-nuff” novelist. At least I had the presence of mind to pick up some of her books.Since then I’ve had a lot of fun reading Sue Ann’s work, particularly her series starring that plus-sized paralegal Odelia Grey (finally, a heroine that looks and thinks like me!) and the Granny Apples series set in Julian, Californa, a place near my grandparents’ home. Thanks to social media and a mutual friend or two, I finally worked up the nerve to (virtually) meet Sue Ann and she’s been kind enough to answer some of the questions I didn’t have the nerve to ask years ago. How nice can a real author be? I…
My friends and I like to debate the future of books and reading. (For us, this has more appeal than politics or football.) There are the pro-e-readers in the group who are looking to carry half of their libraries in their smart phones and there are the anti e-readers who are happiest with the traditional paper pages in their hand. I enjoy the debates but until recently I believed the only difference between traditional and electronic books was the carrying case. After all, they were both just printed words on a flat surface, right? Nope. When it comes to ebooks, words may be just the beginning. My favorite ereader has a nifty gadget: an incorporated dictionary that lets me highlight any word in the text I don’t know so the definition will pop up without me having to close the page. There’s an encyclopedia link there too. Very helpful. Now I’ve learned that someone has developed ebooks for little kids that have animated pictures mixed in with the text and links in the text (like my dictionary) that helps youngsters understand new words. Kids with the interactive and animated illustration books gained more in story understanding and vocabulary…
It’s funny how often SF writers predicted the future. Verne imagined exploring space and the ocean floor, Bradbury predicted earbuds and my favorite, Robert Heinlein foresaw the Cold War, the Internet and helped invent water-beds. Still the development Heinlein predicted that I enjoy the most was in his novel Time Enough for Love. In that book, Heinlein not only foresaw the development of the e-reader, he predicted the difference between the traditional “paper” book fans and the screen readers. However, I doubt if he realized how silly that battle would get. According to that source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, e-readers actually started in the 1930’s, long before the computer age (or I) was born and Project Gutenberg started digitizing texts 40 years later. Of course, the hardware wasn’t really available to the public then to make the data easily accessible but once personal computers and access to the internet became a common household item, the times began a changing. People began reading books on screens. Then eight years ago, Amazon upended everything by coming out with the Kindle, first as a standalone e-reading pad and later as a software app that allowed the user to keep and use an entire…
With the publication of this entry, I’ll have completed my first year of blogging. It takes at least twelve months to build any credibility with these things and this is what I’ve learned so far: First, blogging requires steady work and commitment and I can’t predict who will stick to it. I knew about the commitment going in and I wasn’t sure if I could keep up with that. More than 150 columns later I’m still not sure, but in that time I’ve watched some would-be bloggers give up and others stick it out. To create the possibility of eventually succeeding, the writer has to consistently post coherent, interesting work even when no one is reading it. Hey, that’s the deal: blogs are or should be a pleasure to read and since people equate this pleasure with leisure time, bloggers get read at leisure, a division of time that gets steadily smaller. If there are times when your best beloveds skip reading your post, it’s because they have lives of their own. In the end, I don’t think bloggers do this for praise or the money; we do it to put ideas into the universe. Second, it’s impossible to tell…