Review: Dune

Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite the rabid nature of love that I pour onto this book, I will fully admit that it isn't for everyone. It was barely published in its time, and would never have a chance of being successful today. It violates so many rules of storytelling that I'm surprised Hemingway hasn't risen from his grave and thrown a yellow flag in protest. It treats every detail evenly, both important and mundane. It practically tells you word for word what is going to happen from the very beginning, leaving almost nothing for surprise. It's written in third person omniscient, which is a death curse to most regardless of the quality of the prose. And, perhaps most troublesome of all, it's dense. Far denser than it needs to be, requiring a hundred ten percent of your attention span.

The question must be asked: If Dune has so many fundamental problems, why do uber nerds like me love it so? The answer: It's complicated. Literally. Dune is so layered in its complexity that it's near impossible to write a proper review without going into deep philosophical analysis. It touches so many bases on religion, politics, ecology, and even invents some new subjects we didn't even know we needed. Much of the book could be taken apart and examined deeper for unexpressed meanings. And, unlike a David Lynch film, will actually have them.

That's the gift and curse of Dune. It can't just be read, it has to be absorbed. If you walk into this thinking its a cool read about deserts and giant adorable sandworms, you'll be sadly mistaken. It does have that, vast plains of sand and the cutest invertebrates in literature, but those are merely backdrops to a deep narrative of message and warning. That's the good news. The bad news is that most of that depth is buried between the lines.

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Review: POS: Piece of Sh*t

POS: Piece of Sh*t by Pierre Paquet
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It's difficult to rate a book that has unlikable characters. Even if the character is a jerk or just plain evil, they can still be likable in an engaging sense. It's even more difficult with this particular book because the unlikable character is unlikable by design rather than just shitty writing. So I tried to examine this book by other aspects than just the character. It was then that I discovered it wasn't just the main character that was unlikable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this book is the plot structure. It seems to have a habit of focusing on a specific story aspect and jumps from subplot to subplot without much connection or organic flow. Basically, it reads like this: something happens then, four or five days later, something completely unrelated happens. It's not really a story but rather a sequence of scenes that aren't tied together very well. It's so bad that the epilogue is used to conclude a common story thread rather than be an afterthought side story like it should be.

Like I said before, the main character is unlikable by design, but that doesn't change the fact he is unlikable. What probably bothers me the most is that a good deal of the shit that happens to him is his own fault. If anyone says, "How hard can (pretty much anything) be?", don't get into business with them. It's not just a comment against the book, but general life advice you should take to heart.

The art is serviceable, but I didn't care much for it. It tells the story well enough, but this book was obviously done on a budget. I'm not saying only big-budget books should get noticed, but poverty isn't an excuse for a lack of talent. That being said, my biggest problems are still with the writing, so I still would have liked this book if the art was the same but had a better handle on its structural issues.

I can't really recommend this book. Obviously. I'm generally a negative person, so I'll seemly shit on a book I actually like. But, that is merely nitpicking without taking in the overwhelmingly positive nature of it. This book, however, has serious problems with its ability to tell a story. I get its point, but, like a bad joke, just because you get it doesn't mean it's funny.

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So Many Frying Pans, So Little Fire

Did I get stuff done during the month of February? Kind of. The number one thing on my to-do list, at least as far as writing is concerned, is the writing sample for the conference in May. The due date is April 3rd and it's not 100% just yet. The query letter is in a good place, but the synopsis needs to be completely redone. There is also the first nineteen pages in which contains the first two and a half scenes. I did the first scene this past week for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

The first Pitmad event of 2019 is next week. For those who don't know, Pitmad is a writing event on Twitter where you use a single tweet to pitch your completed book. Agents use the hashtags to keep an eye out for tweets that interest them. Considering most people can't get a solid argument down in 280 characters, I don't understand how you properly convey an entire novel in that length, but it might be a good opportunity to hook up with an agent. I've already written the tweet I'm going to use, and it should be good enough to spark something. After an agent likes the tweet, I send them a query letter and/or a sample of my book. I'll probably never hear from them again, but who the fuck knows. Side note, I might do a separate blog entry if it's eventful enough to warrant it.

As part of the writing conference, an editor went through the sample before I send it off to the big wigs. Basically, the feedback was to completely redo the query letter and synopsis plus some notes to help the flow of my novel. The reason I did the first scene was there's going to be a meeting, unrelated to the conference, on the first page of my novel on April 6th. Since it's on the far side of Atlanta, I'm not a 100% sure that I'm going, but I needed to send my first page by today (March 3rd). Honestly, the editor's notes weren't super helpful. He had a bunch of stuff he wanted to take out, but doing so would have made my novel tone deaf. After editing that first scene, I might have used about 40% of his notes. That's a failing grade in most schools. Still, I shouldn't complain about anything that makes my novel at least a little bit better.

The new book(s) are on hold until I get that conference package ready to go. I also plan to start sending out queries again once it's finished. Most agents ask for the things that are in my sample, so I can't query until it's done. Once the package is done, and I start querying again, I'm still going to work on editing my first book. As for my third book project, tentatively titled "Thermal Kings", I will continue to write and rewrite that first chapter. I will also plot out the book and hope to have the entire thing planned out by NaNoWriMo. I'm not getting married this year, so I shouldn't have anything holding me back from doing it this year.

Poetry. Fucking poetry. It's gotten better but still isn't good enough for human consumption. I might have said that last month, but it's the truth. I still need a good rhythming rule. It's a process. I plan to release the entire thing once I get a few hundred poems done. I can't guarantee it'll be worth reading though.

Starting this coming month I really need to get back into my newer projects. It's been a while since I've actually worked on them. I've been stuck in editor mode for too long. Once I get the synopsis done, the rest of the package should be easy peasy. Colony Earth is going on hold until Variant War's next round of edits is done, but I'm really itching to get back into it. So that leaves Thermal Kings as the project in which I will actually write something. Here's to having something to report by the end of March.

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Review: The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This wasn't a book I liked, as much as I just tolerated until its end. It's not bad by any strong measure, but rather it just wasn't creative or interesting enough to warrant my approval. I'm sure there are people out there more familiar with the mystery genre that will eat this book up, and more power to ya, but it was just too average and long for me to really like. It's just another British book in the seemingly endless stacks of British books in the market today (or any day within the last two hundred years).

In a lot of ways, it tries to be unique with its narrative structure. But, if you peel back the superficial layers, you'll find it doesn't have that much going for it. It tries too much to the 'hosts' that the narrator doesn't act out as an actual character, but instead deludes a multiple perspective narration by keeping the voice in the first person. The book literally locks the narrator down in several parts by telling himself that he can't act outside the framework of the host body he is in. Rather than have a character take multiple views, it has multiple characters pretending to be one person. This book could have been completely rewritten as having normal multiple characters third-person narration, and very little would have been lost in the process.

(mild spoilers ahead, but most of it you learn in the first few chapters or in the book's dust jacket)

Maybe my problem with this book was that too much of it was contrived rather than creative. The narrator has eight different lives to solve a mystery. Why eight lives? Because that's how many lives the author created to fit the narrative into. There isn't a single mechanic/reason why it's eight. It could be three or twelve or five thousand and it wouldn't make a difference. It's eight because that was the scope of the author's vision. No more nor less. And having something that inorganic of a plot structure bothered me. Sorry.

Like I said before, this book isn't bad. The dialogue is serviceable, the secondary characters aren't too annoying, and the pacing is practical. It does get exposition heavy by the end. Though, since most books of this type do that, I can forgive it. It just isn't as entertaining nor enlightening as I normally hope for. The host body mechanic is a neat idea in and of itself, but it's just poorly used. Imagine having a cool mech suit that can fight giant monsters and dive deep beneath the ocean, but you only use it to commute to and from work. It's like that, except you just replace the monsters with people who would murder over rich white people problems. Bad isn't the word, it's just shallower than it pretends to be.

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