A Visit to the Past

In honor of the 10th anniversary of the original airing of “Welcome to the Hellmouth” and “The Harvest,” back on March 10, 2007 I checked out a couple of Buffy the Vampire Slayer books from the library.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the novel tie-ins by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder, and have found others entertaining, even when they weren’t Golden&Holder-quality.  Visitors is one of the shorter books in the series, and it was a fun, quick read.

As always, Sunnydale is a magnet for demonic activity, and in Visitors that activity comes in the form of the korred, a demon that dances its victims to death.  Keep in mind that this book was released long before the original airing of the musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling,” featuring a demon with a similar modus operandi.  The korred wants Buffy as a victim, thanks to her super Slayer energy, but it spends a lot of time stalking her and giggling before it gets up the nerve to try anything.  Side plots involve a band of student teachers taking up residence in the library (“Does this look like a Barnes & Noble?”) and everyone’s favorite guest character, Ethan Rayne, dropping in for a visit. 

Visitors is a flawed book, and I am going to enumerate those flaws.  But before I do, I want to establish that it is by no means a bad book.  It sets out to provide some quick entertainment for Buffy fans, and it succeeds at that.  The character voices, while not spot on, are close enough to satisfy the reader needing a Buffy fix.  The plot adheres to all the show’s conventions.  It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It is far from bad.

Visitors suffers primarily from the biggest problem with any TV tie-in: the characters are safe.  I knew the korred wasn’t going to make Buffy dance to death and then eat her.  I knew, because I knew the show went on well past 1999.  I knew, because authors of tie-ins aren’t allowed to kill major characters.  The absence of real danger hurts every tie-in, not just this one, but it stayed especially present in my mind with this book for some reason.  Because of this, I never got very invested in the story.

Visitors also makes poor use of Ethan Rayne.  I don’t know that I’ve read a Buffy tie-in or fanfic that didn’t involve Ethan Rayne randomly showing up for a bit of chaotic fun.  I put him in my own fic as an agent of Drusilla, so feel free to call me a hypocrite.  He’s always tragically underused and the resolution of his story is always murky.  If you’ve got trouble, you’ve just got to have Ethan, haven’t you?  He makes things so much more fun.  His presence in Visitors was absolutely unnecessary.  He followed the korred around and not much came of it.  He didn’t even interact with the Scooby Gang much.

The final flaw I want to mention is one that won’t bother most people, but bugged me immensely: the sheer wrongness of the use of student teachers in the book.  The student teachers are set up as a sort of side-villain, sketchy because of their constant presence in the library, funny because they all seem to have a crush on Giles.  Having been a student teacher myself, I found this element of the story entirely implausible, and it really took me out of it, in the same way someone in the medical profession might have trouble watching House, or a forensics specialist might complain about CSI.  Student teachers at a public school would not go by their first names.  They wouldn’t gather in the library and ogle the librarian, most likely.  They would teach class every once in a while.  I could go on, but as I said, this is a relatively minor point.

In sum: Visitors is good if you’re looking for a quick, fun read with some good Buffy-style one-liners and a typical Monster of the Week plot.  If you’re looking for a deeper examination of the show’s themes or Whedon-quality writing, however, I suggest you pick up one of the other tie-in novels.  Perhaps something by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder.  Just a suggestion.

Book: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Visitors (Affiliate Link) Author: Laura Anne Gilman and Josepha Sherman Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment Original Publication Date: 1999 Pages: 176 Age Range: Middle Grades/Young Adult Source of Book: Library

The Second Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge 📚

It is a strange quirk of being a teacher that there are days when you aren’t allowed to go to work, even if you’d like to.  June 8 is one such day for me; Monday, June 11 and Tuesday, June 12 are Teacher Workdays, but Friday, June 8 is a vacation day and I’m just not allowed to go in.

This works out brilliantly because it means I can participate in MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge!  Won’t you join me?

Here are the rules, copied and pasted from MotherReader’s entry:

Here are the basic guidelines to start. I am open to suggestions if you’ve got them, or ask me questions so I can establish a related rule. Here goes:

  1. The weekend is June 8–10, 2007. Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. Start no sooner than 7:00 a.m. on Friday the eighth and end no later than 7:00 a.m. Monday. So, go from 7:00 p.m. Friday to 7:00 p.m. on Sunday… or maybe 7:00 a.m. Saturday to 7:00 a.m. Monday works better for you. But the 48 hours do need to be in a row.
  2. The books should be about fifth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine, especially if any adult book bloggers want to play. If you are generally a picture book blogger, consider this a good time to get caught up on all those wonderful books you’ve been hearing about. No graphic novels. I’m not trying to discriminate, I’m just trying to make sure that the number of books and page counts mean the same thing to everyone.
  3. It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. If you want to skip sleep and showers to do this, go for it (but don’t stand next to me). If you want to be a bit more laid back, fine. But you have to put something into it or it’s not a challenge.
  4. The length of the reviews are not an issue. You can write a sentence, paragraph, or a full-length review.
  5. For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. When you write your final summary on Monday, let that be the last thing you write that day, so for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak.
  6. Your final summary needs to clearly include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading/reviewing, and any other comments you want to make on the experience. It needs to be posted no later than noon on Monday, June 11.
  7. Sign up in today’s comments. You’re welcome to post the challenge on your site to catch the bloggers that come your way but don’t come mine. Point them to today’s post to sign up. On Friday, June 8, I’ll have a starting-line post where you can sign in to say you’re officially starting the challenge.
I’ll work on some prizes for most books read, most hours spent, and most pages read (if it isn’t the same winner as most books read). Last year I allowed an alternate, personal goal challenge, but this year the logistics of that might kill me. If you want to play along, but not really do the Challenge, that’s fine, but no prizes. I’ll have a 48 Hour Book Challenge Solidarity Post to list your personal weekend book challenges.

I’ll post the rules again as we get closer, to incorporate suggestions or to answer questions that have come up. So how many books do you think you could read if you devoted a weekend to the task? Ready to find out?

Author Interview: Sonja Foust

In Sonja Foust's debut short story, _Love in Shadow_, a tomboyish fairy named Shadow realizes she loves her boss, Lon.  Five years ago, Lon's wife was killed by a band of fairies.  Shadow feels immense guilt for what her people did, and has trouble reconciling her guilt and her love.  (Read the full-length review.)  NOTE: "Love in Shadow" is an adult romance, with content that would earn it a movie rating of PG.  Language and sexuality are both less intense than in many YA novels, such as Holly Black's Tithe.  I would be comfortable recommending this story to any reader age 14 or up, and mature readers younger than that.

Sonja recently joined me for my very first author interview here at lectitans.

What's the first story you remember ever writing?

I think I've been writing stories since I learned how to write. To me, it always seemed like a practical application of that whole writing thing. Probably the earliest things I wrote were these epic poems in iambic pentameter (before I had any idea what iambic pentameter was) all about our Barbies. My sister and my two brothers and I would set them all up in the living room and write a long 30-verse or so poem about what they all were doing and then perform it for my parents or whatever other victims might have been around. My mom STILL thinks it's hilarious and she'll tell anyone who will listen all about her children's elaborate playtime.

Why did you decide to make the fairies in "Love in Shadow" wingless?

Originally, there were no fairies in "Love In Shadow." In fact, "Love In Shadow" was a futuristic sci-fi at its birth. That wasn't working for the story, so I put it in a historical setting. As I'm lazy and don't like being historically accurate, I eventually decided it would be a fantasy instead. Since it was a fantasy, Shadow had to be a fairy, duh. (I don't know exactly why. She just did.) But I didn't want to do the same-old same-old fairy thing, and I needed another device to add conflict in the story, so the wingless fairy seemed like the way to go.

Shadow is a fish-out-of-water in two ways: she's a fairy among humans and a tomboyish woman in "proper society."  Would you describe a time when you felt out of place?

Um, how about most of my life? Seriously though, I've had quite a lot of experience feeling out of place. I won't even mention the hell that was middle school, because I'm pretty sure middle school just sucks for everyone.

Right after middle school, the summer before my freshman year of high school, my family moved from one coast (California) to another (North Carolina). The culture shock was something, especially for a socially inept 14-year-old. But I decided that 9th grade was my opportunity for a fresh start, and that idea was my life preserver.  I held onto it with all my might. When I'd come home after a tough day feeling like I'd never ever make any friends, I'd remind myself that this was my new beginning and I could be whoever I wanted to be and I would be that person again tomorrow. It was tough that first year, but eventually I found a lovely group of friends and began to feel like I had a place again. The last two or three years of high school were awesome because of those great friends. I made a lot of happy memories in those years.

Having a place is wonderful, but the lesson I learned was that sometimes it's GOOD to be out of place, because then you get to make a new and better place for yourself.

Let's play Casting Director.  If "Love in Shadow" were being made into a movie, what actress would you cast as Shadow?  Who would you want to play Lon?

Hands down, no question, Julia Roberts would be Shadow. I've had her in mind since the very beginning. She's one of my favorite actresses, and she does "spitfire" so well.

Lon's a toughie though. There aren't a whole lot of "tall, dark, and handsome" types in Hollywood right at the moment. Colin Farrell might be a good match, if he could manage not to be so smarmy for a while. 

The whole time I was reading "Love in Shadow" I imagined Nathan Fillion as Lon.

Nathan Fillion would indeed make a good Lon. Good call.

The prejudice Lon's relatives have against fairies is similar to many prejudices apparent in the modern world.  How do you think fantasy settings affect authors' and readers' interactions with universal themes like prejudice?

I think fantasy is a great way to explore touchy issues in our society. One of my favorite examples of this is Star Trek: The Next Generation. That series touched on so many modern issues like sexism (including GLBT issues), abortion, racism, war, and capitalism, and since they did it in a fantasy setting, they could get away with saying a lot of things no one else would say. Some episodes were VERY thinly veiled allegories for current events. The fantasy setting gives a little bit of distance from the actual situations and lets you think about the issues themselves without all the baggage from the specifics. It's a great vehicle for expanding your universe to include ideas you might not have thought of if they hadn't been presented in such a clean, unattached way.

Can you tell us more about your other works?

Both Lying Eyes and Home are "finished" manuscripts. Both need quite a bit of editing before I send them on their next set of rounds to editors.

Lying Eyes is a story I wrote last year about a student learning to use her psychic abilities, with the help of a local (super sexy) police officer. It's a romantic suspense, which is my all-time favorite genre to read AND write. I'm working on tightening up the characters' motivations to make them more believable and to ratchet up the tension.

Home is actually the first full-length manuscript I ever completed. It's about a pair of high school sweethearts who find their lives colliding again in their early thirties. I'm fascinated by reunion stories, probably because I feel like I've changed so much since my younger years, and I wonder how my old friends who haven't seen me in a long time would feel about me now. The manuscript needs a fairly major rewrite which will affect plot points, so it'll be a while before it sees the light of day again!

Writing is so much about editing, and that's something I'm learning the hard way. "Love In Shadow" sat in my unfinished manuscript drawer for years before I gained the right set of skills to turn it into something publishable. I hope it won't take years for these other two manuscripts, but I'm beginning to accept the fact that editing is a LONG process!

My next story, which isn't up on my website yet because I haven't written a blurb for it yet, is an 11,000 word short story, tentatively called "In a Cat's Eye." It's a paranormal romantic suspense set in my old home town of Redlands, California and it involves a sexy shape-shifting were-cougar. I'm going to start pitching it around to some editors this week, so I've got my fingers crossed that it will get picked up and into the pipeline really soon! Keep checking my website for details.

Do you feel like your degree in English prepared you to be a romance writer?  If so, how?

My knee-jerk response is, "Ha!" I had to overcome a lot of English-degree-induced prejudices about the romance genre in order to become a romance READER, let alone a romance writer. For some reason, English professors as a whole seem to think that anything with a happy ending does not count as literature. In fact, they claim, anything with a happy ending turns the reader's brain into a silly, sentimental pile of mush. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not true. My brain is significantly less mush-like since I started reading romance novels because, oh my, I've discovered that I actually ENJOY reading again! So hooray for romance novels and boo for uppity types who scoff at the romance genre as a whole.

That said, my English degree DID give me a base of knowledge that has been most helpful in my writing. It's hard to be deep and meaningful if you've missed some of the classics like Homer and cummings and Hemingway and Shakespeare and, yes, even the Bible.

Plus, now I can claim that I am actually using my degree, unlike so many liberal arts survivors.

What are some of your favorite books?

Oh my goodness, there are so many. If you're looking for a tear-jerker (and I mean soul-clenching sobs tear-jerker), go with The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. If, like me, you can only handle about one of those tear-jerkers every year or so and you've hit your quota, anything by Sabrina Jeffries is a sure-fire winner. My most recent favorite of hers is Only a Duke Will Do, but when her next one comes out, that one will probably be my new favorite because I fall in love with all of her books as soon as I read them. If you're looking for a good, old-fashioned, whodunit suspense with a heavy dose of romance, try Carnal Innocence by Nora Roberts. The one and only Nora is my favorite suspense writer, but then, she does EVERYTHING really well.

Your birthday is coming up in just two weeks.  How will you celebrate your first birthday as a published author?

Wow, thanks for remembering! I'm going to be 26 this year. I'm sure I will spend a great deal of my day marveling at how lucky I am to be doing what I love to do (WRITING!) at such a young age. Sure, I've got a long way to go-- someday, I want this writing thing to be a full time gig-- but I'm on my way and I feel so blessed!