Love, true love

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Unconventional love of a cute couple:

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Unless something truly photogenic comes my way in the next week, I am declaring this the official photo of my 22nd not legal wedding anniversary, which is actually this-coming Friday. (Kelly and I decided to celebrate yesterday because I have a concert on Saturday the 22nd, which would limit my partying options a bit.)

We’d decided to knock off early and meet at the Opus Hotel, and a lucky break in the clouds convinced me I ought to walk to Yaletown via False Creek. It was such a good decision. I had a fantastic kingfisher sighting. I saw it catch a fish! And thanks to my iPod Audobon bird-identifying app, I was able to go “Hey, that bird’s a girl!” These things excite me. I arrived at our date in an extremely happy state.

Our destination was the incandescent Lupo Restaurant, on Hamilton Street. This is a lovely heritage home that’s been converted to a restaurant: we ate in a room with a cozy gas fireplace, and they treated us like princesses. Kelly had the proscuitto pizzetta, I had a mushroom pasta (it’s not on the menu I’ve linked to, sadly, but oh! it was to weep!).

There was steak and seafood and two glasses of prosecco–being me, that means I was quite tipsy!–and a Grand Marnier creme brulee at the end.

Glorious, wonderful food. I cannot recommend this place enough.

We cabbed home, watched an hour of crime TV, and toddled off to bed at the usual early hour. I felt thoroughly spoiled.

Pull my Leaper strings…

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Over on TOR.COM, I am close to wrapping up my favorite rewatches of Season Five of Quantum Leap, and have asked fans of the show for their picks. The popular candidates so far:

“Honeymoon Express”
“The Boogeyman”
“Deliver us from Evil”
“Last Dance before an Execution”
“Lee Harvey Oswald”
“Future Boy.”

There’s still time to weigh in… here is fine, but here is even better.

Meanwhile, back on Favorite Thing Ever, I tell you all of my love for Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans, while Kelly gives you two reasons to love opera.

Girl Who Played with Fire

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The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson was my second 2011 book. It was also my second experiment with borrowing an e-book from the BC Public Library system.

I find it hard to keep track of the titles of the Millennium trilogy books, but The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second. The first is a sophisticated literary novel and also something of a classic whodunnit, in the sense that there’s a killer, a number of suspects and a reasonable chance that the reader will work out, from the clues, the identity of the guilty party.

The Girl Who Played with Fire leans to being a straightforward thriller. There’s international cloak and dagger stuff afoot and the reader really doesn’t get enough information to put it all together on their own, before the big reveal.

Instead, Larssen plays an intricate guessing game with our emotions. As Lisbeth Salander’s various friends are forced to question who she really is and what she might be capable of, our own belief in her is subtly undermined. It’s a rather marvelous bit of sleight-of-hand, I think. Through the middle of the book I was torn between my writerly certainty that the plot would play out a certain way (and I was right) and a powerful “ARRRGH! NO!” response.

It’s a good book, an interesting one. Salander is an awesome heroine.

In related news, I’ve cobbled together a page containing all my Books Read lists since 2002. It’s long, stupidly long, but it means you can search for authors if you’re interested. Or search for yourself and give me hell for missing your last book!

Writing a Novel the Professional Way

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As of today, I still have one or two slots available in my upcoming UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course, which has the unwieldy name of: Novel Writing II: Writing a Novel the Professional Way. The course description can be found here, and this is the syllabus, subject to last-minute tweaks.

The weekly discussion questions in the syllabus should give you a good idea of how we’ll go about the workshop: I want to put your book under a microscope in a directed fashion, so each week we focus on a specific aspect of your storytelling: the setting, the prose, the characters, the plotting. The idea is to ensure that all the likely points of writing success or failure get looked at, with each book.

The other important thing to consider about me as an instructor is that I am friendly to all genres. Put in the simplest of terms: I don’t consider science fiction to be either superior to or inferior to something like literary fiction, or paranormal romance, or splatterpunk. I will read each book with care and respect, whether or not it’s something I’d buy for pleasure reading. I expect my students to learn to separate what they prefer–the stuff they like to read, in other words–from the issue of bad or good writing. This is more easily said than done. It takes practice… but I also think it’s important.

Someone always asks, so I’ll say up front: It is totally okay to register for Novel II without taking Novel I as long as you already have a good idea of what you’ll be writing. In other words, Novel I is essentially a book development class that takes you through the process of building the groundwork for a book: figuring out setting, choosing a protagonist, working through a basic outline of their journey. If you’ve done that and are ready to write fifty pages, or if you’ve written that much already and are ready to write fifty more, you can take this class.

I’m teaching Novel III next quarter… for that, you do need Novel II.

Needless to say, I’m not the only game in town at UCLA–there are dozens of great courses, dealing with the long form and the short, in prose, poetry and in screenwriting. If you’re looking for a course this winter, you can probably find something delightful and challenging in our catalog.

Let me know if you have any questions; I’ll be happy to answer them.