Still cat waxing-- I finished Skin Folk

I now have no idea what I'm doing with the story I'm currently writing. Yes, I will go back to writing it as soon as I finish this blog entry. After all, I wrote 700+ words yesterday that I will probably throw out today. That's ok though. I wrote them mindfully. As Elizabeth Bear says, if I break my best ideas, then the words I write count towards my million words of crap. The last story I finished took about 8 days with few wasted words. So, this will probably be one of those where I write 60000 words to find the right 4000. It's happened before. I'm not thrilled, but I'll get to the end of the story.

While I'm warming up, I figure I should blog about Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk, the latest in my "books by this year's Clarion [West] instructors" series. This book, perhaps more than any other I've read so far, makes me wish I'd gotten into Clarion West. (I'm exempting Elizabeth Bear because I already have her books sitting in large stacks in my home office.) Not every short story in Skin Folk is the epitome of brilliance. Maybe one or two of them I couldn't get through. I suspect I was just really tired, rather than the stories having any problems. The rest though... wow. Imaginative scenarios. Rich, deeply developed characters. Powerfully embroidered writing. I want to write like this. (Well, except that she's already doing it and I really need to be the best me rather than a knock off of Nalo Hopkinson. You know what I mean...)

I'm extremely curious how readers familiar with the cultures she writes about read her work. I'm not familiar with, for example, Trinidad at all, but she never loses me. Whatever it is I need to know to understand the story is always there, exactly when I need it. Do more knowledgeable people find that intrusive? I suspect that she's done it so well that they don't even notice. Anyway, I'm revising a couple of stories right now that won't make sense to most people unless I work in some knowledge of Chinese culture. It was a neat coincidence to be reading a collection where she solves the same sort of problem wonderfully over and over again. (Maybe some of what she does will sink in. We can only hope.)

I just started Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. After that, I will have read something by all of the Clarion [West] 2009 instructors at some point in my life. (Ok, not David Hartwell unless reading something he edited counts.)

Oh d'oh. Salt Fish Girl

It just occurred to me that I never blogged about Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai. (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about all the other Clarion [West] 2009 instructor books I've read this year. I certainly intended to blog about Salt Fish Girl. D'oh.)

My first impression reading it was, "OMG, this book was written just for me!" OK, that obviously isn't literally true. Still, this book struck me in a way that few other books have. (The most recent one before this was Elizabeth Bear's Carnival.)

In the case of Salt Fish Girl, it's probably due to her pitch perfect depiction of ethnically Chinese characters. There aren't enough of those in genre fiction. (I'm doing the best I can. Shut up.) By the way, if you can come up with a comprehensive list of detailed, complex, true-to-life depictions of Chinese characters in genre fiction, there aren't enough of them yet. (This is to forestall any list of so-called counterexamples. Yes, Salt Fish Girl is not the only book in the world with realistic Chinese characters. This doesn't mean that with Salt Fish Girl genre is now officially "diverse.")

The book is crammed with lovely, evocative writing. The sheer strength of text carries me through the weird in bliss. Really, she could have made anything happen and I would have eaten it up. It's a little disappointing then that in its last section that the novel loses some of its power. She ties everything up and rationalizes everything impeccably. The writing is still wonderful. Everything makes perfect sense. However, while she had the novel balanced between skiffy and magic realism throughout the novel, it didn't work for me in the final section. I suppose if I knew why, I'd be a better writer.

Part of it is, I suspect, that some things I didn't want explained, even if the explanation makes perfect sense and ties all of the novel's disparate threads together. Or maybe it's that I got a skiffy explanation when I'd wanted something less scientific-rational. (Actually, that alternative explanation, puzzlingly, is still there too at the very end.) I'm being vague to avoid spoiler, which makes this very hard to write about.

Anyway, Salt Fish Girl is a big, imaginative, ambitious work. If it didn't succeed perfectly for me, it certainly succeeded well enough that I'm glad I read it. I definitely look forward to whatever she does next.