6 fun reasons to go to a library book sale

Books! Really, do I need to say more?

My county library had their semi-annual book sale this weekend.

In the weeks before the sale, they start storing the books behind a fence in the parking lot, and it looks like it’s about to burst.

If you haven’t been to one, it’s time to go.

Reason #1: The books are cheap

Paperbacks at .50 cents each; books that would run $20 at a bookstore going for $3.  Seriously, how can you resist with prices like that?

When you go though, bring your own bags.  Use those ubiquitous canvas bags everyone gives out.  They’ll hold up under the weight of all the books you put into the bag.

Reason #2: They may not just have books

My library sale also has maps, video tapes, DVDs, and music.  Some of the maps are quite old, from vacations past, but if it were needed for a story set in that time frame, it’d be a pretty good reference.

Reason #3: Unexpected Finds

I’m terrible with details, and one valuable resource that has helped me is a visual dictionary.  I found an out of print one at the library sale, then later went to the bookstore and got the newer updated one.  Very valuable discovery.

Reason #4: Research

I used to have an auction in my book.  It came out on revisions, but when I was looking for more information on auctions, I wanted to get an auction book.  New ones are expensive!  They can cost $60.00. I rooted around two separate library sales and found 15 year old auction books, one for paintings and one for coins.

Reason #5: Raises money for the library

I think every library in the country has suffered from budget cuts.  Even when I was in the military, Fort Lewis kept cutting the library’s budget.  It just seems like the bureaucrats don’t really think libraries are an important resource.

So you can contribute two ways: Clean out your bookshelves and give it to library and then fill your shelves again from the sale.

Reason #6: It’s about the books

Seriously, is there no better reason than this?

What’s the most fun thing you’ve found at a library sale?

More stuff to see:

• Books are better than chocolate.  Maybe.
• Things that happen to books
• When words strike back

 

How Many Women Characters Are in Your Book?

March is Women’s History Month, though I actually don’t like these types of events.  They exist because history and even present doesn’t always recognize people outside of a select group.  I remember one time, when I was in the military I was talking to one of of the NCOs.  He was African-American, and he lamented that it would be a long time before he saw an African-American President of the United States.  I told him that it would happen before a woman became President.

You know how that came out.

To look at the high levels of politics and management, and even to look at books, it doesn’t look like there’s many women out there.  I find far too many books where there’s only one woman character.  Even a book with 100 characters, and 99 are men.  How exactly is this reality?  It’s like history months.  We’ll recognize one to sell the books, and everything else will be status quo.  And by the way, we’ll put in skintight leather, too, because the men are the important readers, not the women.

Okay, that may not be accurate, but that’s the impression I keep getting.  And it’s made worse when the lone woman character tends toward masculine and immature.

I want my women characters to be smart.

I want my women characters to be savvy.

I want my women characters to be mature within range of their age.

I want my women characters not to be sex objects.

And especially, I want there to be more than one woman character in the book.

Is that too much to ask?

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My short story “A Soldier’s Magic” appears in the anthology The Darkness Within, available from Indigo Mosaic Publishing.  It features two women soldiers who have to make a tough decision to save a lot of people.  There are three women in the story.

 

Guest Post: The Lone Woman, or Gender Imbalance in the Action-Adventure Genre

Today, I have a guest post from Rabia Gale, who is also one of my WANA buddies.  She’s done a lot of posts on how women are depicted in fantasy novels on her blog and has a novella out called Rainbird.  Here’s her bio:

Rabia Gale breaks fairy tales and fuses fantasy and science fiction. She loves to write about flawed heroes who never give up, transformation and redemption, and things from outer space. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan and now lives in Northern Virginia. Check out her fantasy novella, Rainbird , or visit her online at http://www.rabiagale.com

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A few months ago, while watching an episode of Warehouse 13, something about the show began to bug me. It wasn’t until a scene with most of the characters on-screen that I realized what had set my story senses tingling.

There were too many women in the cast. Two female field agents, one female geek, one female psychic. Add the formidable Mrs. Frederic to the women’s side, and the two men were outnumbered.

Warehouse 12 did something right, for it exposed how I’m conditioned to expect far fewer women than men in my action-adventure. If the gender imbalance had gone the other way—as is often the case—I wouldn’t have been bothered at all.

I grew up in the 80s, so I’m no stranger to the Token Woman phenomenon in many of the cartoon shows I watched. From Cheetara in ThunderCats (no, I’m not counting the prepubescent Wily Kit) to the princess (what was her name again?) in Voltron (the planet version) to Arcee in Transformers: The Movie, these characters were mostly sidekicks and/or love interests. For young girls like me, desperate to find a character to identify with, they were often the only way to live vicariously in the worlds and adventures that captivated us.

As I grew older, female characters went from supporting characters to protagonists. However, the lone woman trope still persisted. It had morphed into the Special Snowflake Woman. She was the one female who dared to do a man’s job, usually by becoming a warrior or ruling the kingdom in her own name. This Special Snowflake Woman was different from ordinary women—often because she hated embroidery, dancing, or the vapid chatter of her female companions—and inducted into the company of men. Males were her teachers, friends, and companions.

What this trope did was  to set our heroines—and by extension the female reader—apart from other women. This trope—especially in fantasy—denigrates the majority of women, painting them as weak, stupid, and boring. It reinforces a male ideal of strength, and ignores the complexities of female relationships.

When we write so few women into our stories, we miss out on the opportunities for the tough, middle-aged female veterans to mentor young, starry-eyed swordswomen, for a queen and her daughter to argue over policy, for the tomboy to befriend and value the dainty girl who loves to embroider. We miss the opportunity to take a group of very different women and send them to pull off a heist, tramp through the wilderness, defend the village, or outwit the Dark Lady (*grin*).

You know, just like the men do.

 

When Words Strike Back, the Linda Edition

When I was in the army, my first duty station was at Fort Lewis, which is in Washington state.  Mount Rainer, the “floating mountain” is probably the most visible landmark — at least next to the Space Needle.

Think there’s aliens on that thing?

One of the things that always tripped up visitors was some of the names.  The area has a lot of Native American names like Seattle and and Tillicom.  Seattle is, of course, the big city where the airport and the Space Needle are.  Tillicom was off Fort Lewis and the kind of place where you would look askance at anyone who bought a used car there.

But the name that everyone had trouble with was a nearby city called Pullyup.

Most people look at the name and try to sound it out:  “Pulley Up.”

We knew instantly that they weren’t local — no mind reading necessary.  The correct pronunciation is “Pee All Up.”  Yeah, it doesn’t look like what it sounds like.

But, while I was laughing at visitors’ mispronunciations, I had one of my own, for the word “Potomac.”  It was actually because I’d only read the word, and it seemed like such a logical way to pronounce it …

Poe toe mac.

All because of Fotomat!

There are lots  of lists of commonly misspelled words.  Karen Reddick has a list of commonly mispronounced words, like people dropping the r in “Library.”  C’mon!  We like libraries.  We wouldn’t do that!

So fess up!  What words have you been horrified to discover you’ve pronounced wrong?

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Beam on over to my post The Subplots Made Me Do It on Unleaded — Fuel for Writers.

 

Books are better than chocolate. Maybe.

There’s a great scene in Tamora Pierce’s Page.  The story is about Kel, who is attending school to become the first female knight.  She declares war on other pages who bully students under the guise of “hazing” — and it’s kept the pages away from the library.  But after Kel and another page, Owen, survive a fight with the bully, the other pages realize: why not study in the library?  They head out as a group, with Owen happily chanting, “Books!  Books!”

Mmmm.  Books.

Definitely better than chocolate.

I go to the bookstore probably more than I should, and that’s in addition to what I get online.  I went into withdrawal when Border’s closed down and still wistfully stare at the building where an Ashley’s Furniture is now and wish for more places for books.

The one thing I really like about a bookstore is simply being able to walk through and scan the shelves for a book that catches my eye.  I’ve been known to sit on the floor to get at those delectable chocolates books on the bottom shelf. When Borders was still around, they had a new paperback table that was always my first stop.  The books were face up on the table, so I could see the covers and the titles.

* Whimper * No more Borders.

But I have my own frustrations with the bookstores, too.  Barnes and Noble is it, and they just throw thriller into the general fiction section.  But it depends on the thriller because if it has a crime, it’s probably in the mystery section.  And that isn’t helped by publishers who recategorize books in different genres because the genres are popular, not because the book actually fits.  Like the publisher who labeled a book as a thriller for someone like moi to pick — and discover that it was actually a romance novel!

I felt like I needed to get the cross and garlic.  I do not care for romance.  If I did, I could easily find the section in the bookstore.  I don’t need publishers to try to sneak it past me.  Puh-lease!  Respect the reader with the money!

This time, I picked up manga, because Mary Sue recommended some feminist books.  Yeah, yeah, feminist is kind of a dirty word, but in this case, it refers to books that present women as great characters and avoid sexism.   I picked up Sailor Moon, though I’ll admit it’s been a challenge reading it.  Manga is done from right to left, so I had to start at the BACK of the book, on the last page, with the upper right hand corner.  Grrr!  I keep catching myself flipping left to right!

What new books are you trying to for the fall?  Anything that’s not what you would normally read?  Tell!  Tell!

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My story “A Soldier’s Magic” has been accepted by Mosaic Indigo Publishing for their anthology The Darkness Within.  It’s a contemporary fantasy set after Desert Storm.  Two female soldiers have to make the difficult decision to kill a friend to keep a parasite from infecting the military world-wide.  The anthology is due out in September, so I will post more information when it is available.

Also, check out my article “Critiquing for Omniscient Viewpoint” published in Vision: A Resource for Writers.  The reason I did this article was because I’ve found hard to get anything in omniscient viewpoint critiqued.

 

What Books Are You Reading?

A fun meme for you:

1. What book are you currently reading?
2. What book is next?

Post your books below — and yes, you can definitely list more than one.  It was so hard to choose!  Here are mine:

Now: The Dig, by Michael Siemsen and Squire & Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce.  These last two I’m rereading.  All three are omniscient viewpoint.

Next: A tossup between The Lost Goddess (awesome cover!) by Tom Knox, Alpha Rising by G.L. Douglas, and The Secret Crown by Chris Kuzneski (also omniscient viewpoint).  The first two are new authors for me, and the third is one I’ve read and enjoyed.  Mostly.  We won’t discuss the ultra violent The Plantation.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

 

K is for Kiwi Fruit, Kumquats, and Surfers

I’m borrowing a technique that we used when I was in Toastmasters.  We’d do Table Topics at every meeting, which is an impromptu speech. We’re given the topic and have only the time to walk to the lectern to come up with a 2 minute speech.  Sometimes we’d get a topic that was so completely wrong for us was that the only choice was to shift it to another topic.  For the A to Z Challenge, K was simply a tough word to come with words for that felt like they were worth writing about.

Kinesthetic was my first choice.  That’s a hands-on learning style that a very small percentage of the population has.  Of course, I’m part of that percentage, which sometimes wrecks havoc with writing and learning things about writing.  But when I thought about what kind of questions I could come up with to ask, I couldn’t see how anyone would find it an interesting topic to comment on.

Knowledge was my second choice, and I was thinking I could do something on researching a novel.  Not how to, because I’m personally sick of how-tos.  Everyone does them, and often doesn’t say anything new.  But maybe something on being right-brained and struggling through research.  But there’s an awful lot of writers participating to the A to Z challenge, and this is probably going to be the default K word for most of them.  There’s a big crowd and I want to stand out.

Now that I’ve finished not talking about Kiwi Fruit and Kumquats … I’ve been reading a magazine called Transworld Surf.  The magazine has striking photos of surfers challenging the waves.  Most of the advertising is for boardshorts, which are knee-length, loose fitting shorts.   And then it hit me as I’m looking through this magazine.  Almost no women, except for one photo of a woman in a bikini, voted Miss January.  Don’t women surf, too?  Sometimes reading provides interesting questions.

QUESTION FOR YOU:  What are you reading?  What questions has it made you ask?

 

The Secret Journey of a Book

Books can sometimes go on adventures themselves.  When I was in Desert Storm, strangers back in the U.S. sent us paperbacks that could be carried anywhere, so the books traveled to foreign locations, and even witnessed war.  One came back with me, and I still have it.

And sometimes there’s something special in the book that makes it stand out on its journey.  Perhaps it’s something the last reader left inside.  I’ve found receipts, theater tickets, checks, notes, and cards.  But my most interesting book took a journey and came back, curiously, to the right person.

My uncle, Ernie Rydberg, was a writer, along with his wife Louisa Hampton Rydberg (my grandmother’s sister).  During the 1940s and 1950s, he wrote short stories and children’s books.  Then, they were called children’s fiction, but would probably range range from middle grade to young adult.  Ernie tried to make a living at it, writing over 400 shorts and reprinting them.  A writer could do that then because so many short story magazines were available.

I always remember seeing copies of the books at my grandparents house, copies from the author.   Lou, as we knew my aunt, was less prolific, primarily focusing on short stories and working with the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

Lou died first, and Ernie died in 1990.  With the internet, Ernie’s publications became available to me, so I started looked for them.  I bought some short stories in both magazines and anthologies — not sure we would ever have an accurate list of what he wrote — and his books.  Then I ran across a bookseller who had a book I’d never seen and described an inscription from Ernie.  No big deal.  I’d run into autographed books before, and had one to me.

But this one was different.  Ernie had signed to Wade and Maye Hampton.  My great-grandparents.  Wade had died in the mid-60s, and Maye in the early 70s– both in California.  The book ended up on the East Coast, with a sticky glued over the name part of the inscription.  The only thing I can imagine how it got there was that when Maye died, all her belongings were given away, including this book.  It probably looked unimportant and not a family heirloom.  Someone bought it and perhaps moved to the East Coast.  Or perhaps they gave it away and someone else bought it, and maybe it traveled.  And eventually it came right back to a family member because I bought it right away!

How I Stopped Buying So Many Books

I’ve always loved to read.  When I was growing up, I’d go to the library and get an armload of books and polish them off in a week.  When I was old enough to buy my own books, I went to the bookstore at least once a week and spend way too much money.  But there was nothing like finding a great book, and better still, a book that I wanted to reread again and again.  I’d eagerly pop down to the bookstore as soon as I heard that one of the series authors I liked to read and buy the hardback version because I couldn’t wait.

That start to change about 10 years ago, and significantly changed in the last few years.  Now go into a bookstore once a month, and sometimes I don’t buy anything at all.

It was because I noticed a trend — the overall quality of books was declining. Not just one author, but all the series authors.  As I writer, I think this was a combination of an aging series and pressures to produce a book a year, regardless of how good it is.

So I stopped buying hardbacks.  It wasn’t worth spending $27 for a hardback and getting a story that just didn’t work.  Instead, I waited for the paperback to come out.  At $5 a book, it wasn’t a deal-breaker to get a book that didn’t quite work.

Until the price went up to $7, and a new trend: The books all felt like the same thing.  I wasn’t getting anything different or exciting.  As writers, we hear that we have to write a story that’s different but not so different that it’s a risk in order for agents and publishers to consider it.  There’s not a lot of room in that to be different, and the result is the books don’t take risks that ignite the excitement of readers like me.

So now I’m a lot more picky, even for a paperback.  I don’t care for romantic subplots.  At $5, I’d get the book anyway if it looked good.  At $7, it’s a pass. If I see multiple instances of profanity in the first few pages, it’s a pass.  If it’s in first person, it’s probably a pass.

Enter ePublishing.  John Locke sells a million books for .99.  Suddenly all the writers are flocking to eBooks and selling their stories for the same amount.  As a reader, I usually pass on the .99 and free books.  These are often not ready for publication and feel more like the writer is hoping to cash in on John Locke’s success with a cheap price.  I like the $3.99 price range because I can experiment without feeling like I’m going to waste my money.

Price will influence me to not buy a book.  However, it will not influence me to buy a book.  I want better books.  I want to recapture the magic of finding buried treasure in book.

Have the changes in the book industry influenced what you buy?

 

#Reading Gifts for the Woman Who Wants #ActionAdventure

Sometimes it’s tough finding books that have a heroine part of the adventures — it’s even tough finding ones with men!  Action-adventure isn’t about having a major battle scene at the end of the story–it’s a major component of the story.  That being said, here are three books that women or girls looking for adventures will enjoy as a Christmas gift:

Green Rider, by Kristen Britain.  This was such a good book that it was an instant reread for me.  The heroine of the story accepts the duty of delivering a message for her country and ends up on her own with bad guys in pursuit. The author has three more books in the series, with the most recent one, Blackveil, just out.  What drew me to this one: The cover.  Girl on a horse, clearly running from danger.

Lady Knight series, by Tamora Pierce.  The main character wants to become the first female knight.  The series takes us through the different stages of the character going through training, all with action.  The third book in the series, Squire, is my favorite.  But I hate the new covers–they don’t convey a different image of the books than what they actually are.

Open Minds, by Susan Kaye Quinn.  Spotted this one through a cover contest.  The cover was a draw, but the title, not so much.   In a society where everyone communicates telepathically, the main character finds out that she has a talent for jacking minds — and uncovers a government conspiracy.  The book starts rough — too much repetition, but gets much better after all the setup.  This is the first book in a series.

Any titles you can recommend?

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Also check out my post on What Makes a Good Action Scene?