Zodiac House: Ram chapter

[mrissa]

My superawesome Christmas cards arrived today (yay, palinade!), and I've addressed half of them this evening so far. Meep. I think I need to be done addressing now. I think my neck needed to be done maybe two dozen cards ago.

Ista and I took our walk in the heat of the day today: 14 F at 2:30 p.m. I put tights on under my jeans like I used to do all the time in college. Tomorrow if it continues the same, I will put gloves on under my mittens. I should have made tea when we got home, or cocoa, or something.

markgritter left for California this morning. I am feeling tired and a bit disjointed. I will sleep hard and early tonight; that should help. I am way behind on e-mail, so please do not feel unloved. Tomorrow will not be much of a catch-up day, either. Bear with me. Sorry.

So I was thinking of doing something silly, and -- surprise! -- I think I will. I've been working on Zodiac House, in which the main characters are solving magical puzzles with themes around the twelve elements of Chinese astrology. The Chinese Cultural Center's page on the Chinese Zodiac emphasizes that, "These horoscopes are amusing, but not regarded seriously by the Chinese people." Fair enough, although my direct reports from actual Chinese people vary considerably on this point, mostly along the lines of "totally not serious except for one unpredictable thing my grandmother does."

Anyway, so I thought, well, hey, I will make rambly lj entries for the signs whose chapters I finish. I don't write sequentially, so this may mean no posts on this general subject for awhile and then a flurry of posts. We'll see. But I'm done with the Sheep/Ram, so that's where we're starting. The CCC Ram page says, "People born in the Year of Ram are elegant and highly accomplished in the arts." Hey. Not a bad start for a book, huh? I gave up on elegance years and years ago. I am far too enthusiastic to be elegant. I am fine with this tradeoff. Some of you are elegant, and it's fun to watch. I am just too bouncy to stay there for long.

But...an elegant children's book? Well, maybe: in physics, we talked a lot about elegance in a rather different way, elegant theories fitting lots of data, applying concisely to many situations. And I think good children's books do that. I think a good children's book manages to be many things to many people, manages to be loved by a diverse herd of people for a multiplicity of reasons. Adult books do that, too, but children's books are trying to do so much in so little space, in so few words, that the range of inferrence is just huge. And I think that kind of potential range is a strength of the form, not a weakness; but it's a beast to get right.

Later the CCC page on the Ram says, "Sometimes clumsy in speech" -- we can revise that out in the next draft -- "they are always passionate about what they do and what they believe in." That? That we can do.

Comments

Elegant

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

For an elegant children's book, try Jan Pienkowski. He did a rendition of the KJV version of the nativity with gorgeous silouhette art and has recently released a smaller Christmas book with amazing lacy cut out pop ups. These books are amazing works of art.

Re: Elegant

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah. I am making a distinction internally -- invisible to the rest of the world, and for which I'm sorry -- between a picture book and a chapter book, categorizing only the latter as a "children's book." I should stop that.

I'm also working on another picture book text, this one called Birthday Party on the Moon, but it takes a very different skill set, and the illustrations a different skill set again.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Huh. There went that theory: I'm a Ram too, but I'm neither elegant nor highly accomplished in the arts (or in much of anything, really; I'm a dilettante by nature). Not deeply religious or timid, either.

But I do think you're right about childrens' books; the best are as good at 40 as at 6, but for different reasons. (6 and 60 would sound better but I don't have direct personal data for 60. I'm comfortable extrapolating to 40 because I don't think my tastes will change radically in that time barring brain injury.)

(Possibly my overuse of parentheses is part of that "clumsy with words" thing?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

To be clear, I'm not a Ram. This chapter is about Ram.

And yes, as good at 40 as at 6 but for different reasons, but also as good for 6-year-old #1 as for 6-year-old #2, but again for different reasons.

I think parentheses do not count as clumsiness, but possibly this is a self-defensive bias.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Except not even the best books work for everyone. But I do take your point that the best ones are good for different reasons for each fo the people they're good for.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, 6-year-old #3 or #47 might still hate it.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I like the children's book to physics analogy re: elegance. That's exactly the right kind of elegance.

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

Yah, totally not serious except when it IS.

Like the way I was told throughout my childhood and adolescence that I couldn't eat spicy foods (Mom would prepare bland stuff especially for me) because I was a Rabbit.

Or the way that Eleanor's $200-a-shot makeup buys were tolerated during adolescence because she is a Rooster.

Or my mother would explain her lateral move from plant cytogenetics to business/accounting (and her success therein) deprecatingly by saying, "Well, I'm a Monkey."

Or the rest of my relatives, at Kim's wedding, advising me to CROSS MY LEGS AND HOLD IT until 2 weeks after my due date to ensure birthing a golden Pig baby, because then we'd have financial good fortune.

*shakes head and just laughs*

[columbina.livejournal.com]

The Chinese Zodiac is handled about like the Western Zodiac - not taken seriously by anybody except during times like when you find out Mick Jagger's sign from watching Pop-Up Video and think, "Well, of COURSE he's a Leo."

(Except he is apparently just barely one, and this is all tropical and not sidereal zodiac anyway, and you know, I didn't really NEED to see all these Wikipedia pages confusing the issue.)

[palinade.livejournal.com]

Cards, yay! :D