Flowers and relief

[mrissa]

Happy May Day, Communists, pagans, Joseph Heller fans, and people who like little baskets of goodies! Last year I was missing May baskets. This year I still am, but I'm pretty worn out, to the point where I pondered doing one for Mom now that she lives close, and decided not. I made a cake for her and Dave's birthdays. Cake is good.

Airport runs, bah and humbug.

We had a good weekend, I think. markgritter and I took his parents to Minneapolis Institute of Art's annual Art in Bloom event. It was very cool. They invite flower-arrangers to pick out a painting or sculpture or other objet d'art from the MIA collection and do a floral arrangement to interpret, reinterpret, or complement it. One or two were terminally lame, but most of them were interesting at least, and some were spectacular. We're definitely going back next year.

I also started reading swan_tower's Doppelganger, and it is with some relief that I note: I like it! It's not that I doubted swan_tower's writerly powers in specific. It's that whenever you know someone -- particularly when you don't know them all that well -- and you read your first example of one of their novels...well...it's nerve-wracking. You don't know whether you'll be able to say something nice or whether you will have to remain conspicuously silent and not pick up the sequel when it comes out. All sorts of people are nice, sensible people who seem like they have reasonable notions about writing, and then you pick up one of their books, and oof. And when the book is already published, there's nothing you can do about it -- when it's unpublished, you can gently suggest that having a Southern Baptist character kneeling before a crucifix and praying the rosary is not really the thing, or that a sentence may not need quite that many adverbs. When it's published, all you can do is wince and check the spine, wondering who edited it (and feeling fairly sure you can name at least a couple of people who did not).

But swan_tower is not in the wince-cringe-change-the-subject category, and while I'm not yet done with Doppelganger, I can tell you that I'm eager to see what happens to the characters, and that I would recommend it to high-fantasy readers. Yay! It is not a rule that people I like must write books I like, but it's a good thing when it does happen.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

<lol> If you think it's nerve-wracking reading a friend's novel, it's much, much worse having one's novel read by friends. All the moreso because I'm managing to hold on to a sensible awareness that no book can be to everyone's taste, and furthermore that one reader's original world or engaging characters can be another reader's standard fantasy or two-dimensional cardboard cutouts . . . but it's much harder to keep that awareness and take the criticisms in stride when it's a friend who thinks your setting or characters are crap. (Which actually hasn't happened to me yet -- any friends who feel that way have been very quiet around me -- but tell that to my writerly ego, which, like all such egos, is prone to paranoia and insecurity.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I can imagine, yes! I have fear and trembling when I send a novel manuscript to people for critique, and published novels are orders and orders of magnitude more people and can't be changed...oof. I'm glad you haven't had much problem yet, even if you can't be quite comfortable yet, either.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've mostly gotten over critique-twitchiness, since the people reading my stories these days have been reading them for some time -- and besides, I can always hide behind the defense of "well, it isn't polished yet." But the publication thing . . . yeah, so not over that one.

[laurel]

My folks went to Art in Bloom yesterday and I almost tagged along, but Kevin and I were wiped out (we've been moving furniture and stuff this weekend-- okay, mostly Kevin's been doing that). My folks usually go to it and for some reason I think my Mom may have participated one year (she and I both have done lots of flower arranging).

Kevin has never been to the art institute so I plan to take him over there one of these days and give him a proper tour.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the whole thing. One of the things I like about MIA being free is that I don't feel that I have to see every last little thing even if I'm all museumed out. We give a donation when we go anyway, so it's not like there's any actual financial difference between it and a non-free museum from our perspective. But psychologically, I like knowing that if I feel dissatisfied with my MIA experience, I can always go back with no additional cost.

But this really means there are a couple of areas I have to explore yet.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

OK, so, I've been wondering, on and off, and I just realized I have no idea why Joseph Heller has any connection to May Day.

Why does Joseph Heller have etc?

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

nevermind!

Google to the rescue. May 1, 1923.