Kirsten Imani Kasai - Blog

Tempted by E-Readers

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:04:22 -0800

I've been mulling over the idea of ereaders for several months, weighing pros and cons and coming up about 50-50, until today. Book buying isn't usually an issue for me. I've always been fairly content to buy used paperbacks from secondhand stores, library stores and trade stacks of books with my literary friends. Lately, however, my system isn't working. I don't see my friends often enough (I'm talking to YOU, dear B-1) to swap books quickly enough to match my appetite. Haven't borrowed a library book in years since realizing that I'm simply not grown-up enough to return them on time. The fines were a killer. There aren't any good used bookstores nearby--plight of the motherlovin' suburbs--and I am rarely able to get to the library store during the three hours it's staffed by genial senior volunteers.

I was staunchly pro-print. Books are tactile. You can dog ear the pages and write in the margins. If you drop a novel in the bathtub, you simply let it dry out and continue reading its rippled leaves. Finish a book on a trip and you can leave it behind in the plane's seat pocket for another traveler to discover. Best of all, books are desert island-proof--no batteries required.

Conversion has been a slow process. My right hand got tired holding up "The Girl Who Played with Fire." It was no easy feat to iron my hair while reading it, the book balanced on the sink's edge, a giant clippy holding it open. I finished the book and was hungry for the last novel in the series, but alas, it's only in hardback. I considered ordering a used copy online, but would have to wait a week to get the book. The ebook was also significantly cheaper than the print copy, but I wasn't yet swayed.

Anyway, it came to a head today. I went to Borders, determined to find a good book but scanned the shelves in vain. No Caitlin Kiernan or Jeffrey Ford. I searched for several other authors names and couldn't find their work. Emma Donaghue and Sarah Waters were in trade paperback only. I settled on Mike Carey's Vicious Circle.

If I had an ereader, I could have practically any book I wanted within minutes. Oh joy! Not to mention that writers get better royalties for ebook sales, a strong selling point. My books take up a lot of space--the big dust-magnet stack beside the bed, the boxes in the garage, the teetering piles on the bookshelves. People with Kindles say they love them, and there is that new 3G wireless version...but the Kobo has nice 'handfeel', the Nook has a big touch-screen (buttons seem annoying) and seems like a great value, as does the Sony reader (except for the 'flash' when turning pages). So tell me, if I'm going to take the plunge, which model is best? If you have an ereader, which one and what you love about it (and what's not so great)? If you're on the fence about it, check out the links below.

Tech Tarts: Choosing an EReader

B&N: The Nook

Sony vs. Kindle

Borders EReader comparison chart

Knowing when to speak and when to listen

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:50:54 -0800

The world is urging me to get down and wallow in its mess. World, you are not the boss of me! Have you forgotten who I am? I am she who dreams of sleeping on warm grass, the one who would like to live inside a little mole hole in the earth. The one who used to spend entire weekends in bed with her typewriter and landline, holding court in a tiny studio bedroom. The necessary-phone-call avoider. “Shunner of office parties” and “Disconcertingly often confused by dreams that feel like real-life memories.” Despiser of public linens and soft furniture. Fearful of discount hotel mattresses. Disturbed by sweater pills. Soaker-upper of cracking thunderstorms, inhaler of the coming-snow scent, savorer of tiny glasses of ruby port. Lost in the otherworld. Drowned by fantasies and falsehoods. Yes, I am those things and more. So when the world, confused by my love of theatrics and cocktail parties, insists that I further engage with it, we hit multiple snags. The modern social-media madness of networking and blogging and thrusting one’s self upon unsuspecting web passersby becomes arduous. The smiles and handshakes clatter like cheap plastic trinkets in a bin. Retreat becomes necessary, no matter how brief. Time to add tinder, stoke the fire and coax the coals to blaze. Each expansion demands retraction. I salve the friction burn with silence. A deep, still water must always return to its natural, glassine state of reflection after the distraction of surface ripples subsides.

Like this … listen …

Part 2

So that’s all I really had to say. But as I’m writing, I am thinking, “Even though I am writing, some may say that this post isn’t about writing. It’s about self-indulgence. Overwriting or, god forbid, purple fricking prose.” But that’s what I have to say today, and it is about writing and the nature of those who write (often introverted, neurotic, dreamy). It’s about needing to shut your actual mouth in order to hear what you have to say. It’s about enjoying all of the untold stories, the flash fiction of daydreams, that we tell ourselves each day in order to mold the jelly of passing time into something tangible and recognizable. It’s about knowing when to speak and when to listen, and then, what to put onto paper.

You Write Like...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:09:00 -0800

My friend posted this link to his Facebook wall yesterday along with a badge proclaiming that his writing style is like David Foster Wallace’s. Of course I had to rush off right away and try it for myself, with disappointing results. I entered sections of text from Tattoo and got Chuck Palaniuk. I did love Fight Club, the film, but I’ve never managed to get more than 30 pages into a Palaniuk story before discarding it. Sniffily, I repeated the experiment with a different passage and got Vladimir Nabokov. Another writer I’ve never “gotten.” Curious to see if the program would generate the same result each time, I entered text from Bleat and She Alone Can Move Me, varying from strictly prose sections to heavy dialogue, and was told that I write like Stephenie Meyer, Ursula LeGuin and Stephen King. With the exception of some of King’s earlier works (I devoured “Carrie” when I was a teen), more authors I haven’t read. I pasted in a few ‘graphs of a recent email to a friend and finally received the laudable “Your write like David Foster Wallace.”

The process left me wondering how many authors were included in the list of comparisons. How many were women vs men? Were there any writers of color? Any international writers? If the test compares your style to modern American authors, ok. The results left me tepid. I’d hoped to be surprised, even rewarded (“You write like Tanith Lee, Dorothy Parker and Anais Nin all rolled into one!”). I suspect that the program is a simple algorithm that analyzes keywords, sentence length and structure, and prose vs dialogue. How can we really write like other authors, even when we try? Though many genres seem homogenized, there’s always a distinct tweak to the style that differentiates it from other writer’s voices, for better or worse.

I suspect that this program was created by one guy–mid 20s-mid 30s, college educated, white, single or married but dreamy/drifty and vaguely unhappy, someone who doesn’t wash his jeans too often and probably sports a subtle affectation of scruffiness because A) he thinks it makes him look cool and hearkens back to some Beatnik ideal and B) it displeases his mother)–and comprises the sum total of his cultural and literary awareness. He has never read bell hooks, Kobo Abe, Jewelle Gomez, Chinua Achebe, Angela Carter or Kathe Koja. Maybe I’m just being snarky. Maybe I’m just creating another character.

By the way, after pasting this post in the analyzer, I’m told I now I write like Jonathan Swift.

Kirsten Imani Kasai

PS!

Hey! I’m going to be at Comic Con Saturday July 24, so I hope you’ll stop by and check out my panel (one of i09′s “don’t miss” events!)

Welcome to The Future: Are You Sure You Want to Stay?-
Speculative fiction authors discuss visions of the future, dystopian and otherwise. Authors include Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren), Alan Dean Foster (Flinx Transcendent), Cody Goodfellow (Perfect Union), Kirsten Imani Kasai (Ice Song), Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin (The Unincorporated War), Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), David Weber (Honor Harrington novels), David J. Williams (The Machinery Of Light), and Charles Yu (How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). Moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy.
When: 4:30-5:30
Where: Room 4

All Aboard the Pain Train!

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 09:07:18 -0800

OK, that really has nothing to do with my post. It was just a random Seinfeld moment. (Mandelbaum!)

When all this book stuff start kicking off in Nov. 2007, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep for about three weeks. Sleep deprivation turned a minor cold into a nasty sinus infection, which in turn wreaked havoc on my head-innards, resulting in total blockage and a lot of misery. Last Wednesday, my doctor, a very lovely and conscientious woman and her stellar OR team broke apart the little eggshell thin bones in my sinuses and snipped out the offensive tissue. Now, a very small man could probably go spelunking in there. It was a roller coaster week of evaluating the possible complications and trying to make peace with the idea of waking up blind or not at all, brain fluid leaking from my head, mysterious, unstoppable geysers of blood…I could go on. I’ve quite the imagination for gore, you know. I came home, woozy from anesthesia and promptly went to bed, where I stayed for three days. How lovely to have a valid excuse to avoid domestic tedium! I read, watched many eps. of Bones and slept and dreamed.

Doing nothing is creatively fruitful. While I was too weary to write, I spent much time thinking, a highly underrated pastime. It is one of my favorite hobbies, second only to drinking whiskey and eating cookies. We are afforded precious little time to simply sit and mull. What fun it is!

I’m ready to get back to work and pin down some of those ideas before they’re gone. The blank spot that is the two hours of lost consciousness is like a demarcation line separating before and after. Whatever writing-related agonies that manifested in my tissues over the past 3 years have been excised. A loop is pulled closed. There is a sense of something having been taken from me, allowing me to move forward less burdened. I’m not prone to sentiment or applying meaning to random occurrences, but a part of me is convinced that there’s something terribly profound in choosing to face death (however likely or unlikely the possibility), and its silent black nothingness.

Worries about what would happen to my next book flitted nervously about. We haven’t even begun the line edit yet. What if something terrible happened to me? Would Tattoo die too? Could I assign its completion and editorial duties to a friend or team of friends? It would be like selecting a godparent for my child. Would anyone be willing to take the responsibility? In the end, I convinced myself there was no need to be extra-morbid and adopted a very que sera, sera attitude about the whole thing, and here I am, alive to write another day.

I can breathe easy now, literally and figuratively. Let the line edit commence!

A Crime of Fashion

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 17:52:28 -0800

Robert Stanley was arrested in 1837 for being "Dressed Phantastically."

I do so wish I could see what he was wearing! http://ht.ly/20K3p

Something like this, perhaps?

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ICE SONG wins a San Diego Book Award!

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:47:49 -0800

Happy news!

ICE SONG won for Best Sci-fi/Fantasy in the Published Fiction category at Saturday's San Diego Book Awards!

My fellow Page a Day Writer's Group member and blogger,
Michelle Zive won Best Memoir in the Unpublished Fiction category for “Holding On and Letting Go: A Mother’s Story.”

Playing in my my head as I took the stage:

Evolving Technique, From Discovery-Writing to Structured Plotting

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:00:10 -0800

I used to be a "discovery writer." Oddly enough, I didn't even know there was a name for my writing style until just a couple of years ago, so far into my rabbit hole was I. Back then, I began a book or story on the strength of a head full of images, voices, snippets of plot and conversation, and then proceeded to weave them together, if a bit clumsily. This method creates a manuscript which requires much refining and retooling. It's perfect for Joycean stream of consciousness stories, less so for those that become densely plotted or depend on a solidly built new world. I think I got (mostly) lucky with ICE SONG.

Oddly enough, I didn't even know there was a name for my writing style until just a couple of years ago, so far into my rabbit hole was I. Back then, I began a book or story on the strength of a head full of images, voices, snippets of plot and conversation, and then proceeded to weave them together, if a bit clumsily. This method creates a manuscript which requires much refining and retooling. It's perfect for Joycean stream of consciousness stories, less so for those that become densely plotted or depend on a solidly built new world. I think I got (mostly) lucky with Ice Song, because I was following the traditional format of a fairy tale. But as I begin my fourth novel Asta Requited, and the third in the saga of Sorykah, the gender-switching Trader, I'm taking a new tack.

Deb Ayers introduced me to the Hero's Journey and Vogler's The Writer's Journey, which lit up my brain with a firecracker explosion of insight. Next, Claire Fadden shared Larry Brook's Storyfix concepts with the group. More light show displays. Then I really and truly understood the meaning, purpose and placement of the inciting incident, and plot and pinch points, hooks, archetypes, the classic conflicts and resolutions. As Eddie Murphy said, way back in '82, "You gotta have a hook!" Suddenly, the big doors of the writing temple opened, and previously vexing koans revealed their glorious simplicity. It was thrilling.

You want foreshadowing? Bam! You got it!
You want structure? Bah da bing! You got it, baby!

Asta Requited is going to be different. I'm a more confident mother/creator/writer now. I understand all the parts and their placement and will lay out my foundation in advance, rather than building the house first and then having to shore up sagging supports. It feels like more work to begin with a Hero's Journey worksheet and Story Structure worksheet (cheat sheets I made for myself), to outline and really peg out the high points, but, it's work I'd have to do anyway. This time, I'm mapping out the book. I know that my hook and foreshadowing go in the first few pages, if not paragraphs. I know (roughly) which chapters contain plot points, and the essential info needed there.

There's still plenty of freedom allotted for discovery-writing. I depend on and look forward to my characters taking charge of their own stories and surprising me. They just won't be running the show this time. It's a bit more challenging, since I'm not a terribly organized thinker and resistant to routine, but I have a new sense of comfort and certainty as I go forth. I may wander through imaginary foreign lands, but I don't need to get lost there. Sometimes, it's nice to have a map.

Caught in the In-Between

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:51:12 -0800

The nights feel weirdly empty without a novel to work on. It’s just this long strange stretch of time. Of course, I have plenty of work, but there’s still a hollowness, an echoing silence. The room is quiet, I’ve got a couple of beers in me (Newcastle, if you must know) and New Young Pony Club on the headphones. Music doesn’t drown out those blaring alarm clocks though. You know the ones. The Other Projects. As soon as I type “The End” (rather literally or figuratively), and set a finished manuscript aside, the alarms spring to life, each one ringing more loudly, shrilly and more insistently than the others, wanting to be heard.

Each story elects one character as its representative, and they stream forward like supplicants approaching the queen upon her throne, their arms piled high with offerings. We’ll let you talk about cannibalism & leeches, says one. Remember that scene in the country, those bare backs splayed across hot, sun-soaked boulders, prods another. Choose me, cries the memoir. I’ll hold your hair back while you purge.

How do I want to feel for the next year? What squirrelly set of emotions shall I choose to immerse myself in? Which sensations do I crave? What do I have the stamina for? Should I reward myself by writing something light and fun, or dive into the abyss and swim for the bottom?

Being between projects–it’s like being a spirit in limbo.I have to find my way back to the land of the living and shut off those damned clocks. To get there, I have to listen and answer the call of the story that most needs telling. Once I’m committed to the project, the hours will again have purpose. But until then, ice cream.

I think I can, I think I can: Making sense of dreams and jumbled narratives.

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:35:20 -0800

Passed a landmark today–another draft finished! This was a big and rather gory one, the remaking of Tattoo from a jumbled dream to a somewhat-more-streamlined and chronological dream. At least I hope it’s ordered enough to make sense to someone else. I admit that I have a problem with time lines. I don’t think in straight lines; I think in circuits, stars, snowflakes and fun house mirror images. There is at times, I think, too much of the dream world in my stories. In my dreams, I jump from character to character and scene to scene, loosely following some disjointed narrative. You know how dreams are. Like some strange, art house film that makes more sense to the director than the audience, even though they can get the gist of it.

So I’m trying to be more linear, I really am. That meant going back through the whole thing and untangling all my plot threads, a bit like carding wool, unpicking the knots and retying them. I thought I had it all worked out until I woke up this morning and remembered that it takes nine months to grow a baby. I’d convinced myself that the entire novel took place within one week. Carding, again. Stretching, shaping, cleaning. We move from spring to summer to fall. The book closes as the season turns, and hopefully, everything is at last in its right place.

The Earth it Bleeds for You

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:41:34 -0800

The Blood Falls at Taylor Glacier, Antarctica.

Makes me think of the demon Diabolo spewing out his gruesome vengeance in Tattoo.