Authors Answer 4 – Dream Interview

Authors Answer 4.
I had one of the more specific questions, but I would like to ask the other question directed at the same author as well.

I Read Encyclopedias for Fun

It’s the final question of the first month, and it has been a big success.  Last week’s question had a great response from both the contributors and readers.  This week, I asked the authors a question about asking authors a question.

Question 4: If you could interview any author, who would it be, and what question would you ask?

Tracey Lynn Tobin

This is actually a tough one because, although I have several authors in mind, I don’t think I would want to meet any of them. You see, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to meet their heroes, because that’s how heroes fall from grace. Call me cynical if you like, but I think that if I met any of my favorite authors I would leave the conversation thinking that they were total jerks, or too crazy even for me to handle.

That said, if I had…

View original post 1,127 more words

Crossover Chaos Final

I said I was going to show that most things that had crossovers at all could all be connected to each other, so here we go.

Search Engine Terms

“divergent dystopia”, “tris anti hero divergent”, “divergent characters based on enlightenment” -Okay, I’m not sure what that last one had in mind, but it’s interesting how my very first non-test post keeps showing up in searches.

“anime challenge pets” – Okay, sure, I guess someone might search for that specifically.

“super robot wars og theme song” – Not entirely sure which one you meant, but here are the two most likely:

In keeping with the crossover theme of this week’s posts, here is ROCKS, the theme from the PS2 SRWOG games, in a decidedly non-OG video.

(Uploaded by doctorlatino123)

And here’s the full version of MAXON, the OP from the anime series Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector, with a crossover picture.

(Uploaded by Tatpiya Jirasakrojin)

“is project x zone canon” – I think so, but I didn’t go into much detail there.  This might get long.

Crossover Chaos: Types of crossovers

Television crossovers are the most analyzed, but other media have a tendency to take things even farther.

Using the broadest definition of crossover (and still excluding fanfic, obviously), there are surprisingly few separate groups of things that are in crossovers within small groups; depending on your definitions, everything that has a crossover at all can be connected to nearly every other crossover.

Other media can be more complicated about it than television tends to be, so before getting into comic books and video games let’s divide crossovers into categories:

Banned Book Week

Banned Book Week is almost over and I haven’t posted about it before now, and haven’t read anything this week that I’m certain someone has tried to ban. That’s kind of embarrassing considering how strongly I feel about censorship most of the time.

Matters of Taste

The daily prompts asks the question:

“When was the last time a movie, a book, or a television show left you cold despite all your friends (and/or all the critics) raving about it? What was it that made you go against the critical consensus?”

As I explained in detail in a previous post, for me it’s Divergent. The thing that bugged me the most was that it’s a dystopia, and yet it ends up portraying the authorities making it dystopian as the (relative) good guys.

I guess I need to trim down my novel

My current draft is 155,000 words. There are parts that should probably be cut regardless of length considerations, but I think I might have to cut more than I really want to to get it below the apparent maximum length for a first novel in the YA category (which seems to be around100,000 words). But I don’t think it will work splitting it in two. (In fact, what I have now is already the result of splitting up what I wasn’t entirely sure was going to be more than one novel until I’d written two chapters.)

“The World of Chance” and crocoducks

Years ago I read a piece of fiction called “The World of Chance”; apparently what I read was just a part of a longer novel, and I don’t remember all the details of the part I did read, but the basic concept was that a man starts to wish there was no God after some tragedy that he blames God for, and he gets his wish. But the “world without god” described makes no sense…and I mean that literally. It is “the world of chance”, meaning it is a world where impossible things are just as likely to happen as anything else. (And the impossible things are, by chance, all bad in order to promote the author’s view that a world without God would be horrible. Though, also by chance, the world was not completely uninhabitable for humans despite the fact that the vast majority of potential worlds would be, so it actually, unintentionally demonstrated something completely different.) In other words, it is a world defined not by the lack of a deity, but by the lack of physical laws.

Young adult books I like

Even though I think pointing out bad ideas is pretty important, I don’t want to be known only for what I don’t like. So since my last post was critical of a popular YA book, I thought I give some examples of ones that I do like. This list is by no means intended to be complete or even particularly comprehensive.

The Divergent dystopia

Dystopia isn’t really my favorite genre, but I can easily name ones that I like. What I definitely don’t like, however, is a dystopia that seems to forget it’s a dystopia halfway through.

(Contains spoilers for Divergent. Based solely on the first book.)

Now, let me start with the premise of Divergent. The implausible origin story believed by the people of Chicago is basically that after a big war, everyone suddenly forgot that cultures, religions, and nations can cause people to do things against their nature, and instead decided that the only cause of evil that they needed to worry about was flaws in human nature itself. And they divided into five factions that each blamed just one specific flaw; each faction devoted itself to the virtue opposite that flaw, again to the exclusion of all else. But children born into one faction are allowed to choose another when they turn 16.

So this isn’t the kind of dystopia that’s based on an exaggeration of current trends. (In reality, there is more criticism of ideas and organizations and less of human nature than there was in the past.) This in itself doesn’t necessarily make it a bad story, but I’m having trouble thinking of a dystopia that’s less socially relevant.