Pop Culture Primer: Songstress

Warning: I'm about to get rambly as I sort out my thoughts, so please disregard the forthcoming word vomit that is about to occur.

As most of you probably already know, one of my many useless talents is my incredible ability to retain information on celebrity pop culture. I have yet to meet someone who surpasses my recall ability in this department. I would also say that I maintain a healthy attitude towards the allure of celebrity--that is, I am perfectly aware that the people we see in our magazines and televisions are public "brands" and by no means "real" people. A new blog I found recently (http://www.annehelenpetersen.com/) has some very interesting posts on celebrity culture with an academic spin--take a look if you're interested in this sort of thing. As a starter, there was an interesting one about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs and how a musician's reputation is affected differently than say an actor's.

The analogy I've often used in regards to EP is that I've let it simmer on the back-burner for the last six years, occasionally tossing in a juicy idea or two and letting it stew for a while. Since I've brought it to the forefront of my life these days, I've had to do a lot more mental grinding regarding how I plan to approach things. In particular, one aspect I've been thinking about lately is the idea of celebrity, boiled down to the premise that Rory is placed on this pedestal of stardom within the social sphere of Eden.

The inspiration behind Rory came from many female singers I admired in my teenage years. Her eccentric fashion and physical attributes were markedly inspired by Olivia Lufkin, who in turn has been greatly influenced (and introduced me to) by the legendary Bjork. Her fierceness and forthright personality was inspired by Garbage's Shirley Manson, who never seems to be afraid to say exactly what she means--a quality I desperately wish I had when I was in high school. Her wild charisma and stage presence were inspired by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

These were the women I looked up to as a teenager: unique, confident, powerful. And, I've come to realize something else: none of these women truly relied on their sex appeal to sell records. One quote from Shirley Manson struck me in particular:

"I am not a sexy woman, I'm not beautiful, I'm not a sex kitten, I don't flirt with people, yet I've been tagged more of sex symbol than women who truly are and I that's solely because I don't reveal too much: people are curious."

Something else that Shirley Manson commented on caught my attention. In an interview, she talks about how the female pop singers these days seem declawed and defanged, compared to the female singers that came out in the 90's. I was still in elementary school in the nineties and paid little attention to pop music at the time, but her words got me thinking about the most prominent female pop stars today: Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift. How I feel about the public personae of these ladies could take up an entire post on its own, but for the purposes of what I'm trying to do here, I'm going to focus on one person in particular.

 
There's something about Rihanna. Ever since she went all good-girl-gone-bad and chopped her hair for "Umbrella," I haven't been able to look away. It's a strange phenomenon, because I am her polar opposite in so many ways. I have always stubbornly refused to smoke, be it cigarettes or weed. I rather prudish with my personal life and would never be as forthcoming as Rihanna has been about her sexuality. As Hachi once put it, I am the sheep in wolf's clothing--I may look intimidating, but I'm as goody-goody as it gets. Yet despite all this, I've managed to retain a weird fondness for Rihanna. She's cultivated this aura of unapologetic impenetrability that's sharp and wicked in a similar vein to what drew me to Shirley Manson. Yeah, I was dismayed when she reunited with Chris Brown, but I wasn't angry--nor did I lament on her "stupidity" or whatnot. Because what I saw was a young woman just three years older than me, whose brain told her to leave but her heart told her to stay. I can think of all sorts of girls around me who've fallen into this trap--but their choices weren't magnified and dissected in the gossip coliseum. I'll grant that there are things I don't necessarily look positively upon--like her tendency to show up late to her own shows. But hey--I don't know her, and it's none of my business (unless I'm paying a ticket for her show, perhaps).

Anyways. I've been thinking long and hard about how I'm gonna depict Rory's fall. It's kind of awful, in that I feel like I'm purposely throwing one of my children into the path of an incoming vehicle. But I'd already decided a long time ago that Charlotte and Rory's stories take on opposite trajectories. The idea that has been gaining the most traction recently is built on the idea that we have a tendency of building up celebrities and then tearing them down. Some people manage to maintain a veneer of impenetrability--think Shirley or Rihanna. Others become crushed by the weight of stardom--and in this case, exuding that permanent mask of confidence becomes more than Rory can handle. 

Dandelion

Cinderella boy

You've lost your shoe 

Cinderella boy 

Your coach awaits 

A sun makes shadows 

All over your face 

As you sit 

Naked and blue 

Into me 

-- “Blue” by R.E.M. featuring Patti Smith

Lunar incantations dissolve into the concrete sidewalk. His fragile words bloom in the cold air, vaporous dandelions carried off into the December night. The winged seeds tangle into her long dark hair, seeking fertile ground to penetrate its roots through her scalp. The truth is, the weeds have already burrowed into her core, strangling everything else that once vied for her attention. He has consumed her, a brain parasite altering her behavior and accelerating her demise. There is no conscious thought in her head as she leans into him, brushing her lips against the dewy frost of his cheek. The electricity is immediate. She jolts, a heated flush prickling her skin, and meets his gaze with a stillborn breath. They are two storm-battered ships, drawn towards each other by the promise of refuge, a beacon of rosy light in the tumultuous darkness. She closes her eyes as the negative space disappears. With a fiery crackle, they melt into one.

Progress Report No. 2 / Book Report: Eleanor & Park

Update on my personal life: to my pleasant surprise, I have received interview invites for three medical schools in October. I now need to figure out a manageable balance between preparing for these interviews and maintaining a habit of writing.

In regards to my writing progress, I decided to try a completely different approach since my last update. I decided to try a more extreme version of outlining that involves summarizing each storyline from beginning to end. I've only been working on Charlotte's so far, but it's had some surprising results so far. I've completely nailed down her backstory with Storm (who has since been renamed... for reasons that I'm actually very excited about), and now I'm figuring out the details of each of the three interviews she conducts with Her Highness. Occasionally, I still run into some mental roadblocks, but I've since developed a way of countering it--by picking up a book and reading. Which leads me to my newest book report:

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Like many of the other books I've been reading recently, Eleanor & Park is one that I'd been hearing lots of rave reviews about. I was intrigued for a number of reasons: 1) Gayle Forman wrote a blurb that mentions "punk rock" and "true love" -- two elements that are totally up my alley; 2) serious high school contemporaries are also my thing; 3) Park is half-Asian. When's the last time I ever read about a male protagonist who had any trace of Asian heritage in him? (Answer: NEVER)

Well, I read this book really fast. I'm a notorious speed-reader, but this was much faster than normal. I have a confession to make: I skimmed the middle. I found myself wanting to skip ahead to the end. I even considered putting the book down at about 40 percent in, which is a rarity for someone like me who usually plows through in one sitting. Here are some talking points about the story, which might help elucidate why I reacted towards this book in such a way:

1. The Romance
FYA rated the swoon scale for this book a perfect ten. If we were talking about only the first third of the book, then I would agree--the scenes on the bus when Eleanor and Park start developing feelings for each other were adorable and really captured, in my opinion, how intense your five senses become when you're a teenager with a crush. I think Rowell managed to write the hottest chaste-hand-holding scene in all of English literature.

But for someone like me who prefers her love stories with a slow torturous burn, the build-up for Eleanor and Park's relationship moved too fast. After they got together, which happened less than halfway into the book, I grew disinterested in all the "I-love-yous" and "I-miss-yous" and the typical teenaged sweet-talk. After that, I couldn't tell where the story was going to go--and hence, I started losing interest. Perhaps I'm more plot-driven than I imagined myself to be, but I skimmed ahead partly because I began wondering, "So... now that they're together, what's next?" The family storylines of Eleanor and Park were intriguing, so I thought maybe Rowell would chase after those tails... but in the end, there really wasn't any true closure for Park's issues with his father nor Eleanor's problems with her dysfunctional family. 

And the ending. Oh, the ending. Maybe I'll come to a different, more enlightened conclusion after I think about it a little longer, but at the moment I can't understand why the story had to end the way it did. Specifically, why Eleanor couldn't be bothered to stay in touch with the guy who freaking drove her across state lines to help her get away from an abusive stepfather. I know she's more emotionally timid than Park, but that still doesn't explain to me how she could go from being so in love with the first boy that ever really looked at her to completely ignoring his letters and never calling. This is the type of behavior I see in shoujo manga all the time, and it drives me nuts. I can understand cutting off ties as a self-defense mechanism, but since the book barely describes any of the aftermath, I can't tell what Eleanor gained from this behavior at all.

2. Race Issues
I do have to applaud Rowell for creating two leads that are almost exotic species in YA literature. I have rarely ever come across a heroine like Eleanor who hails from an extremely poor family, and I was also duly impressed that Rowell was brave enough to write about a character with a complicated ethnic background. These facets are what made Eleanor and Park interesting people that I wanted to know more about.

However, given that I am fairly well-versed in the cultural and social issues of Asian-American identity, I think Rowell did manage to touch on important points but, overall, didn't execute Park's racial identity quite as well as I would have liked. I appreciated the part where Park points out to Eleanor that Asian men suffer negative stereotypes, and that the only Asian-American celebrity with a positive connotation is Bruce Lee. However--and maybe this is just me--I couldn't help but wonder about the fact that Park was associated so strongly to his Asian-ness throughout the book. I could understand the characters around him forgetting that he's also half Irish-American, but I couldn't quite understand how Park never brought this up at all. The book seemed to imply that Park inherited more of his mother's Asian features than his father's, but I think it would have been insightful to catch a glimpse of how Park feels about his blended looks. Because let's face it--Park is not just Asian. He is of mixed ethnicity.

Moreover, culture is different from race. There was a lot of talk about race in this book, but I hardly got any sense of culture. This hones in on one of my major issues with this book--Park's mother. Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan are painted as this wonderful true-love couple, and while those two were probably my favorite characters in the book, I felt the picture was painted too perfectly. Mrs. Sheridan had to leave behind her entire family in Korea in order to marry in the United States--specifically, in OMAHA, NEBRASKA. I've never been to Omaha, but having heard stories about my parents' graduate school years in Illinois, I can assume that there were few, if any, Asian supermarkets in the area back in the 1980s when this story takes place. I have no gripes about Park's parents still being passionately in love with each other, but I do take issue with the fact that the story glosses over how difficult it must have been for a Korean woman to immigrate to a place with hardly a trace of her native culture and homeland. And even if she had managed to replant certain elements of Korean culture into her new home, Park never mentions any Korean elements in their home, other than a line about his mother cooking liver for dinner. Again, I'm not expecting to hear about Korean traditions maintained in the Sheridan household, but in the complete absence of any mention, I would have liked at least a line or two addressing why his mother became so Americanized.

Overall: This book had a lot going for it. People have been crying out for more diversity in YA literature for years now, and I was really happy to see that this book has been receiving so much acclaim. However, I can't deny that I was disappointed in its execution--particularly with the racial/cultural issues with Park and his family.

I can't remember if I mentioned this on an earlier blog post, but one of the major changes I made with EP is an emphasized focus on the racial and cultural background of the characters. Culture was something I became very interested in during college, and it's spilled over into a lot of my work since. Aurora, Rhys, and Patrick all now have very specific ethnic backgrounds. Rhys, in particular, has changed a lot from the way I wrote him back when I was a bumbling high school student. Reading Eleanor & Park helped me gain a better sense of how I need to tackle these cultural issues adequately.

Progress Report No. 1

Over the weekend, I forced myself to sit down and write essentially two days straight. It was incredibly tiring--mentally but also physically, in that my shoulders remained stiff even on Monday. I cleaned up much of the Prelude opening but started running into trouble with the second half--the last scene between Rory and Rhys before her death.

The general advice I've seen from literary agents and editors is to cut out prologues completely. I suppose the Prelude counts as a prologue, but thus far I've been reluctant to kill off this darling. I am especially fond of the opening scene in Ecstasia. I would be more willing to part with the last playground scene, but then I run into the problem of how to set up certain events in the future. Moreover, I kept a bunch of the poetic imagery I wrote in the past but was having a much harder time reworking the dialogue--especially since it's a scene that occurs after all the crazy stuff blows up, and I still hadn't really thought about how Rory would feel about Rhys after all the crap she goes through. Would they have reconciled and tried to recover a strain of friendship? Would the brokenness have been irreparable, so much that their conversations would turn chilly and cold?

Anyways, so when I realized I'd run into a hindrance I didn't know quite how to tackle yet, I decided to skip and presumably return to the beginning later, once I had a better sense of the overall final product. I started working on the Overture and essentially deleted everything from the original draft I'd written six years ago, minus the Madame Butterfly scene. (Damn, it's been a long time!) I wasn't doing too bad--managed to write about six pages (roughly 2,500 words). But then I took a break Sunday evening, and when I went back to reread it objectively on Monday, my angry perfectionist kicked in and made me miserable.

I've read enough essays and advice to know that the first rule of first drafts is to not be afraid of shitting all over the page... but sigh, it really does eat up at your confidence. I read somewhere that when Joss Whedon writes screenplays, he writes all of his favorite scenes first. Maybe I should just do that instead.

Indulge Me One Moment

I know I've been ranting and raving about the books I've been reading for like the past ten blog posts, but since I have no one to share my post-awesome-book-syndrome, indulge me for one second.

I had put off checking out Days of Blood and Starlight for weeks now, even though I'd been dying to get my hands on that book ever since I finished reading its predecessor (Daughter of Smoke and Bone)--mainly as a motivation for me to get my ass moving on my secondary applications. Well, I finally made the trek all the way to the East library for the sole purpose of borrowing this book, and this evening, I essentially inhaled this book without even leaving my chair.

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I've loved a book series this much. You know, when you finish reading and you just want to go back and savor the whole thing again. It's as if Laini Taylor took all of my favorite ingredients and mixed everything together to create a beautiful sugar-spun confection that I can't help but devour in one sitting.

I don't know if the second book in this trilogy is better than the first. I think I might actually give the first book a slight edge. But Days of Blood and Starlight is still a very good "middle book," given how the second book of a trilogy usually winds up getting the short end of the stick. I think the writing was a little more awe-inspiring for me in the first book than in this one. But there were definitely some punches I was not expecting, and the craziness that happened at the end really made me stop and go, WHOA.

The last book is going to be released next April. Birthday present for myself, woot woot.

Also, I'm still thinking about print vs. digital books. I read DoSaB and DoBaS from physical copies that I had borrowed from the university library, but I wonder if I would have felt as attached if I read them on my Kindle or phone. Actually, for my own purposes, let's make a list of what I've been reading this summer:

Sophelia's 2013 Summer Reading List (in no particular order)

1. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (e-book)
2. Howl's Moving Castle by Dianne Wynne Jones (e-book)
3. Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas (e-book)
4. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor (print)
5. Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor (print)
6. Adaptation by Malinda Lo (print)
7. Bitter Melon by Cara Chow (print)
8. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by April Summers (print)
9. The After Girls by Leah Konen (e-book)
10. Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys (print)
11. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (print)
12. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins (print)
13. Sticks and Stones by Emily Bazelon (print)
14. You Remind Me of You by Eireann Corrigan (print)
15. Nobody But Us by Kristin Halbrook (print)

I think there are a couple more that I missed, but fifteen is a clean number. So we have four e-books and eleven print books. It's an unbalanced sample, but I do have to say that I still loved Jellicoe Road, even though I was reading it on my Kindle. I guess I generally prefer reading print if I can, but I've grown fond of Amazon's Kindle Daily Deals. 

Book Report: Crown of Midnight

EP Update: currently working on the Prelude, revised the opening scene last night

I'm starting to feel like my blog is becoming more and more of a book/TV/movie review machine. Not that I'm necessarily writing reviews for other people to read. I can count on one hand the people I know who are likely even following this blog. I guess for me, this is more about keeping track of what materials I've been perusing through and analyzing what I like and don't like about these stories.

Before you dive into this post, I recommend reading this article on Paper versus Pixel regarding how we choose to read: http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/paper-versus-pixel

And now, without further ado:

Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas

Last summer, I wrote a post about the relationship I have with the Throne of Glass series. S. J. Maas was a Fictionpress legend back during my middle school/early high school years when I stayed up all night reading these stories. I didn't actually read the original "Queen of Glass", but the fact that a FP legend was breaking into publishing was significant for me. If S. J. Maas could do it, then maybe it would be possible for the rest of us to make that dream a reality.

I eagerly bought Throne of Glass on its release day last year. Though my book report seems actually pretty positive when I read it in retrospect, truthfully I felt kind of disappointed. I couldn't shake off the lingering thought that so many elements of the story reminded me of other fantasy stories that had managed to pull it off more effectively. I think the biggest issue was, I had hyped it up so much in my head that in the end, neither the characters or plot truly made me think WOW HOW DID SHE THINK OF THAT.

Well, I wasn't ready to give up on Celaena just yet. So I continued to follow the release of the second book, Crown of Midnight, but with less intensity than before. I noticed that Crown of Midnight was garnering a lot of good reviews, including a starred review from Kirkus. The general consensus was that this book was much better than its predecessor. Intrigued by this, I purchased the e-book yesterday and finished it in one evening.

The reviews do not lie: this book was much better than the first. From the very first chapter, Celaena was a lot more dynamic and active, which I had sorely hoped for in the first book. There was much more at stake in the storyline this time around, which kept me on my toes.

But what's baffling me right now is... as much as I wanted to love it, I still felt ambivalent about the book.

//SPOILERS AHEAD//

Alright, I'm gonna sort out my thoughts, so feel free to disregard everything I write below.

I've been thinking about this since I finished the book last night, and I've come to the conclusion that I still don't have a good grasp in Celaena's motivations. In the first novella, she frees slaves on moral principle, which triggers a series of misfortunes that land her in a labor camp. Yet throughout most of the first book, she flaunts her status as the kingdom's greatest assassin and seems to have no qualms about her murderous past. Then, she becomes generally reluctant to murder through most of the second book--but why? Did I miss something important? And about the slave thing--how can you be against slavery but have no problem with killing? Is the issue about freedom to choose how you live? I can't figure it out.

The love triangle took an interesting turn in this book. To my surprise, I started liking Dorian more than Chaol in this book. Seems like I just have to root for whoever doesn't get the girl. Chaol's storyline is a lot more intense this time around. He finally gets the girl, but I was very puzzled by my immediate reaction, which was along the lines of: Eh? Why do we have this development so soon? I'd suspected after reading the first book that Celaena and Chaol were probably endgame/OTP, but given that this Throne of Glass series is supposed to be six books long, I had assumed S.J. Maas would spend more time heating things up with a slow burn. Well, this throws a wrench into my predictions.

Chaol betrays Celaena in a way that I think is very in character with his personality--so kudos to S. J. Maas for crafting this part well. But that's the writerly side of me speaking. The readerly side of me was expecting to be all devastated and NOOOOO, but this didn't happen. Instead, I couldn't help but draw comparisons between Chaol and Akiva from Daughter of Smoke and Bone, who both make a decision that winds up leaving one of their lover's closest friends/family dead. Akiva's betrayal punched me in the gut far more than Chaol's. Akiva actively killed Brimstone, Karou's father figure, whereas Chaol became indirectly responsible for Nehemia's death by not sharing crucial information. I know it's not fair to compare these two books, but I can't help that I just finished both recently.

I guess this is the crux of what I'm trying to say: Laini Taylor took a greater risk with Akiva than S. J. Maas did with Chaol. For me, it paid off. How on earth are is Karou going to forgive Akiva for what he's done? Hell, how are the readers ever going to forgive Akiva? From a writer's perspective, to a certain degree you want your readers to fall for the love interest as well. If he's too perfect, than people will accuse him of being Edward Cullen, but adding imperfections also runs the risk of creating a character people don't like or care about. To tell you the truth, I didn't like Akiva that much. But his betrayal left with so many questions that I was dying to know what was going to happen in the next book. With Chaol.. I actually liked him. But I didn't feel my gut flip inside-out when Nehemia died and Celaena went berserk on Chaol. (Actually, I was ambivalent about Nehemia as well, so maybe that's part of the problem.)

Despite all this, I do wonder where S. J. Maas is taking this story and how she's planning to develop it over the next four books. Part of the fun of being a reader who also likes creating her own stories is that I often try to predict what will happen. I've been thinking about Chaol and Celaena's parting, and I came to the conclusion that if I had been the one molding this story, I probably would have taken a Basara route and forced the two onto extreme, irreconcilable, opposite sides before they ever slept together. Tear them apart by having Chaol choose his loyalty to the king (whom he owes a lot to) over his love for her. She becomes the princess of the rebellion; he becomes the king's second-in-command and is ordered to crush her. Have them meet on the battlefield and see what happens... mwahaha. (This is assuming they're endgame, which they could very well not be... who knows at this point?)

Anyways... in summary, I just felt very apathetic the whole time I was reading this book, and I can't figure out why. Was it the book's problem? But with so many stellar reviews, maybe the problem was just me and my personal tastes. Or was I just in a strange mood yesterday? Does it make a difference that I read a physical hardcover copy of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, whereas I was reading Crown of Midnight on my phone via Amazon Kindle app? Does reading from a digital format make you feel less engaged with the story?

I wish I had someone I could discuss all this with, but just like I have no music friends, I don't have book friends either. :[

Finallly Finished

And now my real work begins.

---------------
 upcoming -- my thoughts on the sequel to Throne of Glass: Crown of Midnight