happy new year, you're my only vice

(post title credit to Camera Obscura, whose sweet "Happy New Year" has officially replaced Death Cab's mournful "The New Year" as the song most likely to spring to mind when mentioning this holiday)

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope this decade is off to an auspicious start for you all. Mine started as I hope to go on... listening to good music and working on a short story that was inspired by a song by another artist.

It's time for the second half of the year/decade in review: music. This was a banner year for concerts; I was fortunate to see so many of my favorite artists live this year. I can't choose favorites, so a brief recap:

Rhett Miller -- I saw the ever-awesome Rhett three times total this year: one solo acoustic show at Largo, a release-date event at the Grammy Museum, and then opening for his band The Old 97's, following a solo set by Old 97's bassist Murry Hammond. That was probably the best Rhett or Old 97's show I've ever been to (and I have been to quite a few), and not just because I got to be front row center. ;)

Lily Allen -- My first mainstream-pop concert in years. I must say, Ms. Lily puts on an excellent live show. Special bonus appearance by Lindsay Lohan dancing around the stage to a cover of "Womanizer".

Metric -- This show rocked my face off. I was slightly disappointed that they didn't play my favorites from earlier albums, but understood why -- they went for a very energetic show that fit the sound of their new album and had the entire crowd on its feet.

Camera Obscura -- I have never been so thrilled to find out that someone was playing in LA. They did not disappoint... the show was pure joy from start to finish. And they also introduced me to one of my now-favorite indie bands, the Sacramento-based Agent Ribbons, who have had a bit of an influence on my latest writing endeavors.

Hope Sandoval -- Hope Sandoval never tours. It has been eight years since she last released an album. There was no power on earth that could keep me from this show, or from giving up my spot in the front row. The dim light and grainy film strips playing behind the band created an appropriately eerie atmosphere for Hope's dreamy vocals. (Plus, the concert was at the Mayan, which has atmosphere to spare, as most of the old Deco-era venues do.) Opening act Suki Ewers was excellent as well; it was definitely unforgettable.

Lenka -- A tiny, wonderful show at Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. I suspect that in a few years I'll be telling the story of how I got to see Lenka in a room with just a hundred or so people before she got really famous. Added bonus: I arrived early, in plenty of time to see the incredibly talented Katie Costello, whose album I bought from iTunes first thing when I got home.

Lady Gaga -- What a way to end the year. All the elaborate/bizarre costumes and set pieces and choreography you would expect, with the added bonus that this lady has serious musical chops. Her performance of "Speechless" and the piano version of "Poker Face" halfway through the show was amazing. She reminds me a lot of early Madonna (I love 80s/early 90s Madonna), but I think she has a bit more versatility and doesn't take herself quite as seriously... I'm excited to see what she does next.

Most of my best concert experiences of the decade were among those listed above, but other highlights include seeing Coldplay on the Rush of Blood tour (my one noteworthy concertgoing experience before moving to LA), amazing seats for An Evening With Neko Case back in 2006, and the Rainer Maria show in 2005, with Papercranes as the opening act. Halfway through Papercranes' set, the crowd parted and Dermot Mulroney walked through the room carrying a cello, got up on stage and sat in for the rest of the set. Truly random, and truly awesome.

This was also a banner year for recorded music, but if I let myself babble on about all the artists I discovered and new albums that came out this year, we'll be here all month. I was going to do a top five of the year, and then a top ten of the decade, but when I sat down to do it I realized that it was impossible for me to narrow it down that much. And so... 25 favorite albums of the decade, in no particular order.

A Rush of Blood to the Head -- Coldplay

Turn On the Bright Lights -- Interpol

Alright, Still -- Lily Allen

Lenka, self-titled

The Stoop -- Little Jackie

Fantasies -- Metric

A Better Version of Me -- Rainer Maria

Grow Up and Blow Away -- Metric

Let's Get Out of This Country -- Camera Obscura

Too Far to Care -- The Old 97's

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood -- Neko Case

Sea Change -- Beck

From Every Sphere -- Ed Harcourt

Chutes Too Narrow -- The Shins

Is This It -- The Strokes

Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi -- Camera Obscura

It's Not Enough to Love -- Denise James

Extraordinary Machine -- Fiona Apple

Anyone In Love With You (Already Knows) -- Rainer Maria

Parachutes -- Coldplay

Strange Geometry -- The Clientele

Corinne Bailey Rae, self-titled

Waves and the Both of Us -- Charlotte Sometimes

Volume One -- She & Him

The Instigator -- Rhett Miller

Year/Decade in Review: books

It's that time of year again. Actually it's that time of decade again. :) Keeping up with the latest releases is often difficult with the size of my TBR pile and the length of some authors' backlists, and as my taste in genres changes, so I'm going to make this easy on myself and focus on books read for the first time, rather than published, during the period.

Top Five Books Read In 2009

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

This one came with a glowing recommendation from Chandra, which is pretty much a solid guarantee of awesome. And boy did it deliver. I accidentally started reading it at the launch party (peeked at the first page; got sucked in right away) and didn't want to put it down. And then work got in the way, but once the weekend came I read all the rest in one day. Beautiful, magical, amazing. If you read one book on this list, make it this one. And then join me in anxiously awaiting the sequel.

Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev

This is a truly delightful book about a girl who lives in a theatre populated by characters from all the plays ever written. There are hot pirates and Shakespearean faeries and badass blue-haired Bertie, who has grown up among the players. Go. Read. Love. The sequel (second in a trilogy) comes out this spring, so you won't have long to wait for more.

The Likeness by Tana French

Behold, the literary police procedural. This undercover-detective-story-with-a-twist (murder victim was using an undercover cop's old fake identity; cop goes undercover as the murder victim to find out who killed her) sounds like it could be just another potboiler, but the beauty of the writing and the focus on the protagonist's thoughts, feelings, and relationships with the suspects (the victim's housemates) elevate it far beyond the average mystery novel. In a strange way it reminded me of A.S. Byatt's Possession, in its unconventional approach to solving a mystery and in its focus on the inner lives of the characters.

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull

Why yes, I am horrendously late to the party on this one. :) Reading War for the Oaks was something of a shock to me, because this is what I write. This particular flavor of urban fantasy is something I don't see often outside of Charles de Lint's Newford stories, and it was a joy to discover that not only is there room in urban fantasy for what I'm trying to do, the genre was founded on it. Also, the book is just brilliant on its own merits. It's a classic for a reason.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

This is the kind of book I would have read when I was a kid. It's like Ellen Raskin and Daniel Pinkwater's books had a baby with genius-level IQ who can Save The World. Often when I read middle-grade books I think "I would have enjoyed this when I was nine"; my thirty-year-old self enjoyed this one just as much and will be reading the sequels as well.

And now, because if it's a year ending in 9 you have to do a decade list... Top Five Books Read 2000-2009.

Possession by A.S. Byatt

I own three copies of this book so I can lend it out and always have a copy on hand. It's my go-to airplane book and one of only three adult novels on my "comfort reading" list. I have the unabridged audio book, AND the movie version with Gwyneth Paltrow, even though most of what's great about the book can't be properly conveyed on screen. It's a mystery, it's a romance, it's an epistolary novel (in parts) and it even has whole great stretches of fake Victorian poetry. I get something new out of it every time I read it, which is at least twice every year since 2002.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

A bit too large and slow-going in places for frequent re-reads, this book is like very rich chocolate mousse... not something you want to have every day, but a special indulgence from time to time. While the whole sweeping story is well worth disappearing into for a couple of days, certain scenes stand out in my mind as some of the best I've ever read. This book also contains one of the most romantic-and-also-visually-stunning scenes I've seen in any form of media. (It's electric.)

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

The second of the three adult novels on my "comfort reading" list. (The third is Pride & Prejudice.) This book makes me miss college, which is difficult to do. And the supernatural elements are so subtly woven into the story that I didn't even pick up on some of them until the second or third read. Beautifully crafted and leisurely paced... definitely one for the urban fantasy canon.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Stardust was my first, Graveyard Book may be the strongest, and American Gods is the most ambitious, but Neverwhere is the one I love most.

The Gemma Doyle Trilogy by Libba Bray

Yes, it is cheating to put in the whole trilogy. Yes, I'm doing it anyway. Yes, I'm about to do my annual holiday re-read of these. Vividly written Victorian fantasy with strong female characters who are relatable/understandable to modern women while also not seeming anachronistic... these books contain SO many of my favorite things.

Next up on the decade in review: music, both live and recorded. :)

Don't think, just write!

If you are so inclined, head on over to Dreaming in Red, where I have contributed a guest blog on something important I've learned about process through doing NaNoWriMo :)

(Over 26,000 words at last count, by the way. Proper update after the post-Thanksgiving food coma wears off.)

NaNo NaNo

Yes, I'm doing the NaNoWriMo thing again. As I type this, I am over 7,300 words into NaNo '09 -- a follow-up to NaNo '08, in which one of that book's sidekicks takes center stage in her own adventure. This one has a very heavy musical influence... it's named after the song that inspired the protagonist's hairstyle*, the characters are in a band, and I'm having the most fun devising ways of working lyrical references and jokes into the story. This on top of the fact that it's about a band, so of course they're going to get into an argument over who they'd rather be, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.**

So far, I'm still in the building-up-to-the-big-adventure part, and taking my time to write my way into the story. I did this with NaNo '08 as well, rather than jumping straight into the action/sending in the pirates and ninjas; while probably half of those scenes were cut in my first revision, spending that time figuring out who the characters are and how they interact with each other was invaluable. This time around, I have a lot more characters with significant "screen time", so there are all sorts of animosities and alliances and past histories to figure out. These are turning out to be really fun characters to spend time with, so I'm excited to do more with them... and hope that that will help me push past the inevitable roadblocks that come along with writing a story that hasn't been heavily outlined. NaNo '08 had been a long time coming, but this one is maybe six months old... I'm sure it has a bumpy road to travel before it grows up into a nice shiny finished book, but I'm looking forward to the journey.

* "your purple hair looks good, I wanna comb out all the knots" - The Deathray Davies "The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower"

** Metric, "Gimme Sympathy"

interlude

Having finally found my writing mojo again after a notably lengthy period wherein dayjob, freelance and personal commitments threatened to consume me entirely, I have been working to finish some revisions on my novel before NaNoWriMo begins and I embark on the not-sequel. There's also much research left to be done for the not-sequel, so the next ten days or so are going to be action! packed! and full! of! adventure! Either that or I'm going to be spending a great deal of quality time with my computer. ;)

There will be updates during "Let's see how much writing Liz can squeeze in between work, more work, and sleep" Month, but in the meantime I share with you two of my current favorite things:

Losing Haringey -- Appropriately enough for this blog, a song that is actually a short story, written by Alasdair MacLean and performed by his band The Clientele.

All I need to know about writing, I learned from watching Gurren Lagann -- Simple but profound writing advice from the awesometastic Chandra Rooney.

city of angels (and faeries, and wizards, and...)

"Write the book you want to read" is common advice for writers -- and good advice, because I imagine it would be pretty miserable to spend weeks/months writing something that you wouldn't pick up in a bookstore yourself.  But this becomes even more important when the book you want to read doesn't exist... or it does, but you've already read it several times over! 

 

I've run up against this problem recently, searching for urban fantasy about Los Angeles. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of it, or if there is I haven't found the magic Google/Amazon keywords that will reveal it to me.  I'm not sure why this is... if it's because it's so bright and sunshiny here; because the "unreality" of Hollywood makes it too obvious a choice; because LA is so indelibly associated with crime/noir thanks to authors like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and James Ellroy and movies like Chinatown and Sunset Blvd.; some combination of the above or something else entirely.  This is unfortunate, because there's just as much fodder for non-crime, non-Hollywood-related stories in LA as there is anywhere else, and because I think the city gets a bad rap as superficial, lacking history, revolving solely around the movie business, etc.  Not to knock the great noir writers (if you haven't read Cain's Mildred Pierce, I recommend doing so at your earliest convenience, and if you like your mystery just a tad lighter, Robert Crais's Elvis Cole series is a treasure), but I would love to see my favorite genre feature my favorite city a bit more often.

This is what I've turned up so far, in print and on film; if anyone out there knows of more, please comment, and I'll keep the list updated for anyone else on a similar quest.

Angel

This is the show that made me fall in love with the Whedonverse, and I think it helped that I started watching it very soon after I moved to LA.  Whedon & Co. struck just the right tone when dealing with the city and maintained a nice balance of Hollywood-related and unrelated stories.

Barton Fink

Classic Coen Bros. weirdness about a struggling 1950s writer living in a run-down hotel.  The Angel episode "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been" (a personal favorite) seems to have a bit of Barton Fink influence.

LA Story

A magical love story, and an affectionate satire of the city and its residents in all their quirky glory.

The Twilight Zone, "The 16mm Shrine"

Sunset Blvd. as reinterpreted by Rod Serling. One of the all-time greats, featuring the amazing Ida Lupino.

Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, Let's All Kill Constance by Ray Bradbury

This trilogy would probably count as mystery/detective fiction as well, but with a liberal helping of Bradbury magic realism.  They feature an unnamed protagonist based on Bradbury himself, and adventures inspired by his life in Venice (CA) and in Hollywood in the mid-20th Century.  A Graveyard for Lunatics was the first one I read and is hands-down the best; its subtitle is "Another Tale of Two Cities", and it focuses on a mystery involving a very thinly veiled Paramount Studios and Hollywood Forever Cemetery.  Still one of my favorite books of all time.

The Weetzie Bat series by Francesca Lia Block

YA magic realism, and, aside from Bradbury and LA Story, the closest I've come to finding "grown up" genre fiction about LA that doesn't veer towards noir.

The Neddiad by Daniel Pinkwater

A middle-grade book about the adventures of young Neddie and his family, who have just moved to LA.  It's classic quirky Pinkwater, opens at the La Brea Tar Pits, and features midcentury details like the Brown Derby.  There's also a sequel, The Yggyssey.

Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, Karen A. Romanko, ed.

Found out about this yesterday and ordered it from Amazon right away; I'm looking forward to reading this collection of short fiction and poetry.

Works that I haven't seen/read myself:

Forever Knight

Another vampire detective.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Werewolves bent on taking over Los Angeles.

High Bloods by John Farris

A near-future involving a worldwide lycanthropy epidemic.

From the Internet hive mind:

Norse Code by Greg Van Eekhout

Expiration Date by Tim Powers

The Bible Repairman by Tim Powers

public accountability

No, I haven't forgotten about 50 Songs v.2.0... it's just been a busy couple of months, and ideas keep trying to write themselves, which is excellent, but not conducive to working on this project! I did actually draw the first song weeks ago, but as it was one of the ones that goes with an existing story and said story is still stalled after this long, I thought it best to start over again rather than continuing to spin my wheels. And so, the first prompt of the new project is "Sweet" by Denise James. If I don't have an update or haven't moved on to the next prompt in, say, two weeks, smacking me upside the head with a large trout might be a valid option.