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Angela Korra'ti

Movies

So the Star Wars movies have been released in digital

… and I find before me a dilemma: do I want to commit to buying new copies?

For the longest time, the only copies of the original Star Wars movies we’ve had in the household have been the laserdisc release copies we have. Original trilogy–we do not own copies of Episodes 1, 2, and 3, because Reasons. So for purposes of this post, you may assume that by “Star Wars movies”, I actually mean A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

I have to admit, it would be cool to have versions of A New Hope and Empire that I could watch with a French language track. These are, after all, movies I know backwards and forwards, and it would be helpful to practice my listening skills to have versions that could deliver me dialogue in French.

BUT. Googling tonight to confirm whether these new digital releases were the Special Edition versions (all signs point to ‘yes’), I found something else that concerns me deeply.

Namely, they’ve taken the 20th Century Fox fanfare out of the beginning of the movie.

And that? THAT’S JUST WRONG.

Han says NO.

Han says NO.

The Verge reports on how John Williams wrote the Main Title theme in the exact same key as the 20th Century Fox Fanfare–but what they don’t say is the story Dara has shared with me tonight, of how they in fact re-performed the Fanfare. So the version you hear in Empire? The reason it sounds so seamless is not only because it’s the same key–it’s also the same musicians, in the same space, with the same gear.

I have in fact just re-listened to the soundtracks of all three movies, since they popped off my Not Recently Played playlist lately. And while I’ve had my share of beefs with the history of the movies during my adulthood, I have but to listen to that opening fanfare, leading right into the grand main title and the bright ringing of the trumpets, and part of me goes right back to being eight years old.

I grant you that people younger than me, who didn’t imprint on Star Wars at a very early age and upon the soundtracks as well, may not have fucks to give about this. But John Williams gave me the three pivotal soundtracks of my childhood–Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman: The Movie, and Star Wars.

Changing it like this is wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

I’m almost as cranky about this as I am about Han not shooting first. I’m still MORE cranky about Han, mind you–as y’all know, I played Han for two and a half years on Star Wars MUSH, for fuck’s sake. I love me some Solo. I am well and thoroughly of the opinion that making him not shoot first entirely wrecks his character arc, because it means way, way less that he’s heroic later if he doesn’t start from the place of being a badass rogue who’s been forced to learn to shoot first and ask questions later.

But I’m also a musician. I’m the flute player who daydreamed about being in an orchestra just so I could play things like the theme from Star Wars. (And who never had a more awesome time in middle school band than when we broke out the Raiders theme, I’m here to tell you.)

And this right here is the thing that may keep me from ever buying a new copy of the movies. Because hearing anything else at the beginning, just before “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, would never, ever be the same.

April 10, 2015 by
Publishing

A rant about book formatting

And oh yeah, one other thing I wanted to post about today: my current levels of frustration with badly formatted ebooks.

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about author Aliette de Bodard, and so I snapped up her Obsidian and Blood books from Angry Robot. The entire prospect of a trilogy set in the ancient Aztec Empire, combining elements of both fantasy and a murder mystery, struck me as too damned tempting to pass up. ‘Cause I mean seriously, how often do you get to string “Aztec-mythos fantasy murder mystery” into the description of a book?

Problem is, as I discovered when I delved into book 1, the ebook is very badly laid out. By which I mean, paragraphs that are barely indented, making it almost impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins–and in some cases, paragraphs that are split partway through. When I dug into the ebook to see what the hell was going on in there, I found that all the paragraphs were laid out as <div> blocks rather than <p>, and that what indentation there was was being done via two non-breaking spaces. Which was not done consistently, either. Every so often there would be none, and every so often three.

Which was a damn shame, because the book is quite good, or at least that’s been my impression on my attempt to slog through the initial chapters and follow the action. The layout though was frustrating enough to me that I went through the whole damn thing in Calibre and fixed the formatting, just so I could read it. I’m going to start over from the beginning now, with paragraph indents I can actually see, and give the story the attention it deserves.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this, either. One of Kat Richardson’s Greywalker books (about which I have enthused quite a bit in the past) had the deeply baffling problem of every single Q throughout the book being capitalized. ALL of them. At the beginnings of words and in the middle as well. This was hugely distracting.

Likewise the ebook copy I tried to buy of The Green Glass Sea–wherein the whole damn thing was italicized, because somebody forgot to close a tag at the front of the book. And then there was the superlatively crappy OCR job somebody did on Elizabeth Peters’ The Falcon at the Portal, wherein the accented characters in the occasional German word in the dialogue were broken. And even worse, the character Selim kept being called “Scum” in the text, because whatever they used to do the OCR conversion choked on his name.

My overall point here being: c’mon, publishers, do better.

I’ve got the technical chops to be able to get into a book and clean it up, so that I can fix a broken digital reading experience. Since I’m a QA Engineer in my day job, I understand HTML and CSS, and I know what to do to fix problems with them. But I shouldn’t have to. When I buy a book, I’m putting down my money for the expectation that I will be delivered a story that’ll entertain me for the span of time it takes me to read it. I should not have to crack open that file and spend several extra hours on top of the actual reading time, cleaning it up so that I can actually get back to what I paid for in the first place: i.e., the story.

AND: not everybody has the same skills I do. A non-techie reader has no recourse in scenarios like this but to either a) slog through a poor reading experience in the hopes that the story will outweigh the broken formatting, or b) return a clearly broken ebook and go buy print instead, if they really want to read that book. Which, okay, yeah, it’s another sale and that’s all good for the author and all–but it’s potentially still very inconvenient to the reader, depending on their book budget and whether they have any issues at all reading in print, e.g., vision problems or what have you.

Moreover, speaking as a small-fry digital and indie author, it’s deeply frustrating to me to see so much brouhaha over how self-pubbed authors are so often putting up badly formatted, unprofessional material–yet to turn around and see the big publishers still sometimes doing the same damned thing.

I beg you, publishers, take the time to quality-check your digital productions. Load them up on different devices to make sure they are actually readable. Hire people who know HTML and CSS and who can fix problems that arise.

And, fellow indie authors, the same goes for you. If you’re going the indie route, and you’re going to publish digitally, review your layout. If you don’t have the technical chops to fix problems, recruit friends who do. Ask your social circle who has what ereaders and who can sanity check your book for you on them. Yes, it’s annoying. Yes, it’s time-consuming. But it’s part and parcel of producing a book that makes you look like you know what you’re doing, and an indie author has to work even harder than a traditionally published one to hit that goal. So do that work.

Your readers, technically inclined or otherwise, will thank you.

April 10, 2015 by
Publishing

More on PuppyGate

I was wandering around the Intarwebz this morning, looking for further updates on PuppyGate, when I happened to visit Charles Stross’ blog and saw this earlier post of his, where he put up a reaction to the whole tiff over Clean Reader. What really made me giggle, though, was this remark:

It’s enough to drive anyone to drink, and indeed, “novelist” is right up there with “farmer” and “quality assurance engineer” in the alcohol consumption career stakes.

Me, I am both a novelist and a Quality Assurance Engineer! (I kid you not, this is my actual day job title.) It’s probably a good thing that I am not also a farmer, otherwise I would have to drink all the vodka.

And I gotta say, the whole PuppyGate thing–involving nomenclature which, from where I sit, is an insult to good puppies everywhere–has me wistfully eying the distinct lack of vodka in the house. In no small part because, as reported by James Nicoll and followed up upon by Dara’s post today, the Puppy Brigade is making no bones about being prepared to take down the Hugos if the current movement to vote No Award on everything wins out this year.

Lots of people with way more stature than me in the genre are speaking up on this–names like Scalzi, Martin, Wendig, Stross, Kowal, Hurley, and others. It’s also come up in discussions amongst the members of NIWA, since I realized, well, shit, we’re going to be trying to sell books at this coming Worldcon. Wherein tempers are likely to be running high. I warned NIWA last night that we might want to be on the lookout for this when we’re running our table in the dealers’ room, just in case any challenges arise to our ability to cordially and civilly sell our titles.

That I have to think about this at all makes me both angry and sad.

I don’t want the toxic politics of the broader U.S. culture to be infecting the genre I grew up on. I see a lot of cane-shakery from the Puppies about a loss of a sense of wonder in recent Hugo lineups–but y’know what stomps all over my sense of wonder? Knowing that there are people out there who are going to not only sneer at anything I write just because I’m female (and prone to writing heroines of color, women in positions of power, and queer people), but who will actively work to shout down anything I and authors like me try to do.

It’s enough to make me disenchanted with the publishing industry at large, and the US SF/F branch of it in particular. I’m a super-tiny fish that’s barely entered the pond–but I’m seeing pollution in the waters up ahead, and I seriously have to ask myself, do I want to swim there?

‘Cause right now, I’m thinking not.

I’m really hoping this particular oil spill can be cleaned up. I’m hoping that Wendig’s take on the matter is right and that SF/F (as well as society in general) will continue to move in a progressive direction. But right now the dinosaurs are still thrashing, and it’s very easy for tiny critters like me to get squashed.

And since that’s all bleak and everything, here. I think I need to close on a reminder of the joy of actual puppies, so here, have a pic of a happy corgi!

PUPPY!

PUPPY!

(Spotted on: PixGood)

April 10, 2015 by
Other People's Books

Book review: The Spymaster’s Lady, by Joanna Bourne

The Spymaster's LadyThe Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this one after seeing it lauded on Smart Bitches Trashy Books as a sterling example of an author portraying non-English dialogue very well. Since I’m a language nerd, this was highly relevant to my interests. Didn’t hurt that the plot sounded fun, either–I’m a sucker for the Napoleonic era in general, and this one was all about the spies. I’m finicky in my romance tastes, but historical is one of my go-to genres, and one of the fastest ways to get me to pay attention is to give me a plot involving spies.

In particular, we’ve got our heroine Annique Villiers, a.k.a. the Fox Cub, one of the most infamous spies in France. She starts off our story captured by some of her enemies, who have also captured a couple of British spies. She helps the Brits escape, only to find herself captured by them in turn. The Brits, you see, are every bit as eager as her enemies in France to get their hands on her–because Annique is thought to be in possession of the Albion Plans, a super-secret strategy for how Napoleon is going to invade England.

All very well and good, and at least out of the gate, we’ve got a lot of fun action as Annique, our hero Grey, and Adrian all escape France. But. I’ve got issues with how the story keeps telling us Annique is this awesome master spy–but actually showing us, on camera, a woman who’s continually thwarted by Grey and Adrian. Other characters keep talking about Annique’s intelligence–hell, even Annique herself remarks upon how clever she is a time or two–but what we see on camera is a woman who lets herself be captured twice by Grey. She also walks right into a trap set for her by her French enemies, and has to be rescued from same by the aforementioned Grey. Who, I might add, she does not recognize partway through the book, due to plot reasons that struck me as awfully convenient and kind of twee. (Suffice to say that I found the Annique at the beginning of the book way more interesting than the one we get halfway through.)

I’ve also got issues with the dubious tactics Grey and his people use to capture her, and how they treat her once they have her. Much is made over Annique’s evident youth, which, along with her on-screen behavior, contradicts this whole claim of her being a master spy. I’m not seeing master spy in her. I’m just not.

The last area I have issues with is the ending, and certain revelations that are made about Annique that I won’t get into because spoilers–but suffice to say that I found them actually a little disappointing, and again, ever so convenient.

And OH YES–others have commented on this, but I will too. The ebook edition has a spectacularly stupid cover, just a standard beefcake hero halfway through taking his shirt off. I very much wish that the ebook would have had the cover on the trade edition instead, the one with an actual woman on it, since that woman looked way more interesting and eye-catching to me as a character than your prototypical Yet Another Half-Shirtless Beefcake Romance Dude.

All of which, taken together, makes it sound like I didn’t like the book. Which is not precisely true. One big thing counterbalances all of the aforementioned issues, and that is this: I love, love, love the author’s ability to portray non-English dialogue in a story written in English. My ability to grasp French grammar is still pretty basic, but it is there, and I have enough of it to have totally heard the flow of the language in Annique’s dialogue whenever she was speaking French in the story. Even though her dialogue was written in English. It was all about the word choices and word placement, and it was a distinct pleasure to read. As an author with not inconsiderable interest in writing Francophone characters in the future, I’ll be learning from the book on how to do their dialogue effectively.

All in all, the things I didn’t like about the book are pretty evenly weighted by the glory that was Bourne’s language choices–and it all averages out to a not necessarily spectacular experience, but one which was pretty okay in the end. Three stars.

View all my reviews

April 9, 2015 by
Events

The Norwescon 2015 report, and what I learned running merch!

This year at Norwescon was a totally new experience for me, since I spent the vast majority of the convention attempting to sell stuff!

I got in a bit of a trial run with that last year, working with Brad and a couple other folks in NIWA to run our table then. This year I did that again, only this time I turned out to be one of the primary people working the table–because Lee French and I were the two at the table with actual Squares, so we were the ones ringing up transactions. Jake Elliot, Connie Johnson-Jasperson, and Madison Keller were also helping work the table, and we got in a pretty good groove going, engaging with folks. Luna Lindsey popped by periodically, but she was also on a lot of panels, so she was only able to check in every so often.

Here are a bunch of things I learned from that:

Continue Reading

April 7, 2015 by
Publishing

On how I will be voting on the Hugo ballot this year

For the first time since 2007, Dara and I will be going to Worldcon. We’ve come out of the mire of the financial hits leveled at us by several consecutive years of medical crap, and moreover, the convention’s taking place in our home state. We can drive to it. Even better, I and several other authors in NIWA are banding together to run a table there. We’ve got books. We’re gonna sell ’em.

The thing that makes me sad and tired and wary, though, is what’s happened with the Hugo ballot this year.

As y’all may remember, since Dara and I semi-regularly post about this, there’s a broad ultra-right-wing conservative clique within SFdom. They’ve been up in arms lately because the wrong things have been winning Hugos. And by “wrong things”, I mean “things created by women, people of color, and queers”. They’ve pushed back against this with an organized rush to get things they consider acceptable onto the voting ballot.

And the particularly vile part of this: they’ve reached out to GamerGate to pull them in on these shenanigans. All in the name of getting additional recruits for their declared war on “social justice warriors”.

(About that phrase, by the way: I’m now ranking “social justice warrior” right alongside “political correctness” on the list of phrases that set my teeth on edge. I’ve said before that if the first words out of your mouth on any issue are “political correctness”, then you are part of the problem. Likewise, I here and now state for the record that if you are the sort of person to dismiss progressives and liberals as “social justice warriors”, you are going to have to work very, very hard to get me to respect and take seriously anything you have to say. Do not bank on your success in that regard.

Besides, me? Totally a social justice healer. But I digress.)

Dara has written up a comprehensive post on the matter, and what attendees of Worldcon can do about this to cut this and future Hugo shenanigans off at the pass, in the name of trying to keep the award from becoming entirely meaningless. Her recommendation: vote “No Award” on any category overloaded with the nominees from the voting bloc in question.

I will be following Dara’s recommendations, because it is deeply disheartening to me to see SFdom becoming, more and more, a microcosm of the same “us-vs-them”, toxic tribalism that has infected US culture in general. If you’re going to Worldcon too and therefore have the ability to vote on the Hugos, I encourage you to consider doing the same.

April 7, 2015 by
Victory of the Hawk

It is Victory of the Hawk RELEASE DAY!

Victory of the Hawk

Victory of the Hawk

The Healer has proven her valor.

The Hunter has sought his vengeance.

Now the Hawk gains his victory–and in so doing, shakes the entire realm of Adalonia to its core.

The final book of the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy releases today, O Internets, and I invite you to check it out! If you’re the sort of reader who prefers to charge through a completed series rather than waiting for the next one to come out, you can now do so–and since Carina’s prices are quite good, you can read the whole trilogy on your device for about the cost of a paperback!

And if you have not yet read Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter, definitely do so before you read Victory of the Hawk. As always, all links to where you can buy the books are on the Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter, and Victory of the Hawk pages. And here are the primary links where you can get Victory TODAY:

Carina Press | Amazon | Nook | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play

Thanks to all who have bought and read the first two books, and I hope you all find this a worthy conclusion to the trilogy!

April 6, 2015 by