Ender Series

Well I'll admit it--I've been putting this one off. This is why: the guy (Orson Scott Card) won a Hugo Award for these books, and there was just a lot that I didn't like about them. And who am I to question his skill? Well, to be honest, I'm not really questioning his skill as much as I'm rebelling against the content of his books. Let me break this down into what I did like and what I didn't.

What I liked:

The first book (Ender's Game) was absolutely amazing. I love books about child prodigies and this one was both exciting and complex.

His intriguing writing style continued throughout all four books, creating a fascinating glimpse of the future.

All of his characters, not just the protagonist, were well-developed and kept me interested.

What I didn't like:

The subject matter changed from a child trying to fight through trial after trial in book one to a "this is why you should convert to humanism" in the remaining books in the series. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind discussions of faith (from atheism to polytheism) in a book, but this was horribly blatant and it was painfully clear that the only "intelligent" characters could possibly grasp the fact that the notion of a living god was just plain silly. Those who did express any faith in anything were plain psycho at worst and childishly naive at best.

The inconsistencies became worse with each book. Little facts didn't blend from one book to another and even by the last book, the inconsistencies started popping up just pages later. It was horribly annoying and it felt like Card expected me to either not have a good enough memory or just to enjoy the ride without thinking about what I was reading. This always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The protagonist, Ender, started out as this lovable, honorable kid who you just couldn't help but fall in love with. He did some things by the end of book One that would probably destroy just about anybody. The result was that the character was different and at times, pretty pathetic. It seemed that even Card couldn't stand him and found no way to help him move on from what he'd done, so he devised a way to (spoiler alert!!!) split him into three different people, kill off the original Ender along with one of the copies, and be left with the Ender he had always wanted. And once this was finally accomplished, the series ends abruptly with two happy marriages.

So I read them, and enjoyed them at times, but I'd be cautious about recommending them. The first book shouldn't even be included in the rest of the series, it's so completely different. So let me revise what I said: I would definitely recommend Ender's Game, but any recommendation I might give for the rest would come with a warning.

~Emily White

Wolf Moon-Chapter 1a

As promised, the first installment of my newest project. Enjoy!

Bubble gum. Every night as Chuck walked into his countryside home after a long day at the Pompeii salad dressing factory over on Willowbrook St. in the warm but struggling town just fifteen miles away, his daughter, Milene, would wrap her skinny little arms around his neck and smother him with bubble gum scented kisses. The smell of her recently brushed teeth was just another painful reminder that he had missed an entire day of his daughter's life.

He pressed his rough and scruffy beard against her plump cheeks and reveled in her squeals and giggles. He wanted to be home with Milene and his wife, who pulled him away long enough to press her rosebud lips against his forehead and tussle his grimy hair, but times were tough and the bank was on his ass, threatening to take his family home. He should consider himself damn lucky that the higher-ups were letting him work so much overtime, instead of moping about his lost time with his girls.

Chuck's wife, Jeanine, loosened Milene's iron-tight grip around his neck and picked her up with the little girl's bum sitting precariously on the sexy little curve of her hip. "Say good night to daddy," she said.

Milene tossed her bouncy brown curls behind her head and waggled her hand up and down. "Nigh' nigh', bye bye."

Chuck nudged her chin with his forefinger and kissed her one last time before Jeanine turned around and walked down the dimly lit hallway to Milene's princess pink bedroom.

He kicked his boots off onto the floor and shrugged out of his Carhartt jacket. The day had been a long one and he was ready to fill his belly with a good meal and sit back with his feet up. One thing was for sure-Jeanine could always be counted on to keep his food warm and tend to his needs when he came home. God may not have blessed him with monetary wealth, but his family was a good one, that was for damn sure.

A slow and deliberate stretch brought his back arching to the rear, the popping of his strained bones bringing a few groans past his lips. He straightened and walked over to the oven, opened the door and pulled out a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Not bothering to waste the time to grab a fork, he broke off a piece of the loaf and shoved it into his mouth.

"Bad day?" Jeanine's deep, but still very feminine voice penetrated the silence. It was always too silent in that house; his ears couldn't bear it.

"What makes you say that?"

"You always seem a little hungrier after a bad day of work." She raised up the fork she had been hiding behind her back. He took it with a smile and plopped himself down at the kitchen table.

"Eh. Same morons doin' the same stupid shit." He leaned over his plate with his elbow on the table and shoved more food in his mouth. "I ain't gonna take it too much longer. I work too damn hard to let those pipsqueek punks just outta high school come and boss me around, telling me I gotta do their work because they ain't got the smarts to figure out how to run their station."

She smiled and sat next to him, running her nails along his back. "You say that every year, but each time, you take the new guys under your wing and teach them the ropes. It's just not in you to not do something."

"Yeah, well." He shoveled more food in his mouth.

"I didn't get a chance to feed Betsy this afternoon. It's been so long, anyway, I thought you might want to check on her to make sure she's doing all right."

Chuck tore his attention away from his plate long enough to see the sparkle in his wife's eyes. She knew he hated that pig, but it was Milene's pet, so they didn't slaughter it with the rest of them. He had been sure it would freeze to death all by itself in that pen with no warm bodies to snuggle against, but the damn thing was resilient and refused to give up. The thought of going out in the cold didn't warm him any and he knew Jeanine was just giggling inside. It was her own warped sense of humor, but it was one of those things he had fallen in love with when they were younger and stubbornly defiant, daring the world to rip them apart, assured it would never happen.

Yeah sure, he'd feed Betsy, but he wouldn't do it with a smile on his face.

Check in next Monday for the next installment!

~Emily White

A New Direction

You may have noticed that I took a bit of time off for a while. I'm sorry to say that I certainly was not keeping up with my three posts a week. The reason was because I needed a break. I had hit a point with Aurumenas where I realized that I was too focused on getting all of my editing done in a month instead of making sure that the editing I was doing was good, or complete. Suffice it to say, I came to the conclusion that there was a lot to the story that I was just failing to put on paper. I'll admit it, I'm a light writer. I am NOT one of those people out there who over-write and then have to slash their novel to bits, eliminating unneeded melodrama. I usually visualize writing as a chess game; every move must count. But sadly, there were some moves that I just failed to use that would have made the novel as a whole really shine.

So, I'm going back over it and adding scenes. My worlds need a chance to grow and move the reader. These details have always been in my head, but I didn't quite realize that they weren't in the book. I assure you that I have plenty of room. The finished product (before my revelation) had under 70,000 words. Like I said, a light writer (especially when you consider most fantasy/sci-fi novels have over 200,000 words and publishers allow new writers around 100,000).

There are some other issues that I plan on working on in the book, but I want to save those for a future blog post. But I also wanted to mention that I have a new story idea in the works that I plan on actually posting on here in one page installments. So look for it every Monday.

And finally, I'm always interested in helping my fellow writers out there. If you have a blog that you want to advertise, email me with a blog post containing the kind of content that you would put on your own blog, along with a short bio and your website address. Fridays will be reserved just for you!

Thanks for your patience and continued readership! :)

~Emily White

The Victor in the War for My Attention

Can you blame me?

One of these days is not like another

I woke up this morning thinking about a few things. One, it was my birthday and two, woop-de-doo. I have two kids who have no idea that it's my birthday, my husband left for work before I even woke up, and I'm far too old to expect anything from my mommy. This day, for all intents and purposes, is the same as any other day except for one thing: I really want to feel special. Most days, I'm perfectly happy giving and giving of my time and attention to others, but today I feel deep down that someone should wait on me. But it's not going to happen. So I move on.

As always, though, my thoughts drift to how any of this could be relevant to my writing. And then I realized that none of my characters have ever known when their birthdays were. Which is very surprising considering I do tend to know mundane data that I never put in a short story or novel. But this kind of data doesn't seem very mundane at all. In fact, the knowledge of one's birthday is usually extremely important in determining your sense of self. "On this day I was born" and "on this day is when I became a part of humanity." And though I don't hold any weight to horoscopes and such, I do still believe that the time of year you were born helps to shape who you are, especially if you grew up in a region that experiences the full-blown changes of all four seasons. And yet, I've never once considered the time of year my characters were born or under what conditions they came into the world. So how can my characters possibly be seen as real people if they don't know that one little detail. Even people who don't celebrate their birthday still know on which date they were born, because it's important.

So I've resolved to give birthdays to each and every one of my characters from now on. The data may never make its appearance in any of my works, but I will know and so will my characters. And maybe today will turn out to be a little less mundane than it's started out as. Here's hoping! :)

~Emily White

Contradictions

One of the reasons my postings have been so sporadic lately is because when I start reading a book, I tend to do nothing else until I'm done. I've got this crazy notion in my head that I have to hurry up and finish it so that I can get on with my life, but what ends up happening is I ignore everything else while I'm trying to finish the book. Crazy, huh? And to add to that, the book I first started reading was the beginning of a series, so of course I have to finish the series first before anything else gets done! The good news is that I'm almost done. Only one and a half books to go.

But while reading these books, I've made a few observations. One of them is that whether on purpose or on accident, even the best authors have contradictions in their works. The books I'm reading happen to be a part of Orson Scott Card's Ender series, and the relay of information between one book and another is wrong! Just plain wrong! The particular contradiction I am thinking of concerns a character named Plikt. In book two, she was introduced to us as a rather stubborn student of Ender's who would not stop until she discovered everything about him. Well, after much research, she was able to discern half of who he was, but was completely wrong about the other half. At which point she was practically given a verbal beat-down by Ender's sister. This was a rather funny and exciting part because you spent the entirety of the book up until this point waiting for just this thing to happen. Well, when we get to book three where Card is reintroducing Plikt to anyone who may not have read any of the previous books, he describes her as having discovered (quite on her own) both mysterious parts of Ender Wiggin! Wrong!

As this series happens to be a reprint where Card was able to make any changes he feel needed to be made, I can only assume that 1. he didn't care about the contradiction and wanted it in there or 2. he just plain missed it, again. While option number one just plain irks me (I hate contradictions), option number two kind of worries me. It would imply that Card (and his editor) read these books thousands of times and never picked up on it. Never. And here I am, reading it for the first time and it becomes a glaring problem for me, not because Card isn't a good writer (he did win the Hugo Award), but because he took back a pivotal moment from one book and weakened the intensity of the relationship between Plikt and Ender's sister in another. And also, he turned Plikt into a different person through this one contradiction.

Again, my point is not to dis Card (in fact, I'll give a more detailed review when I finish the series), but to show my concern for my own work. Will I make such an innocent mistake in Aurumenas, thereby ruining a character for one of my readers? This is a concern. I can only hope that should my book be published someday, the collective minds of myself, my agent, and my editor will be able to find and snuff out any such irregularities.

How about you, readers? Anything in particular that you worry about with your own work? Or are there any things like contradictions that really irk you when you read a book?

~Emily White

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Yes, I took a small vacation from the internet. I spent some wonderful time with my husband and sons even though my twitchy little fingers kept trying to steer me towards the computer buttons. But I resisted! And now I am back, refreshed and ready to write.

Which makes me think of something...

It's around this time of year when most of us sit back and ponder what we expect of ourselves for the next twelve months. The news is usually full of special pieces covering the how to's of New Year's Resolutions. Well, me and resolutions, we ain't never got along. I rarely make them, and when I do, I never fulfill them. The reason is because I usually come up with something preposterous that if I could complete it, I certainly wouldn't have waited until the first of the year to start it. But this year, I'm going to try to be a full-time writer. I almost did it in 2009, but there were a few days here and there that saw some slacking.

I'd also like to make a few million dollars from a book deal and become Empress of the World. I've got good feelings about those two. I think they're going to happen this year. :)

How about you? Any resolutions this year? Feel free to share!

~Emily White