I just used the word hemi-demi-semiquaver in a sentence. In the plural. Along with concatenation. And "hyena." It may all be too much for one sentence to carry, but I'm so tickled with it that I'll let it stand for now.
blogs
Rewrite, rewrite
Just finished chapter 5, scene 1 of my final-but-one rewrite of novel Sister Mine. At the moment, there are seven chapters in all.
Here's a snippet, although I think I may have posted a version of this before:
His smile was wry. "There are two forty-year-olds in a parked car over the next ridge. One man, one woman. They're both divorced. From each other. Indulging in a bit of angry breakup sex. Neither one of them has made out in the back of a car since they were teenagers. They're mature adults and they know what's what, so they're using a rubber, but wait for it..." he held up a bony forefinger, looked up and to the side as though he was listening for something. "Ah. There it goes. The condom just broke."
"And what's going to be the result this time?" I asked him. "Birth, or death?" He was a two-way ferryman, after all. But sometimes it wasn't so much fun, getting a peek into Uncle's job.
"It’ll be birth. Two births, in fact. When she learns that she's pregnant, she's going to tell her shrink, who's going to go out that same evening and knock his girlfriend up. Bim-bam. And now a mile over yonder, a man has just beaten his dentist to death with a frozen fish. Happens more often than you'd think. It's a kind of ludicrous situation."
A day salvaged
Booklist; third starred review for The Chaos
My publisher tells me that the following starred review will be out in the May 1, 2012 issue of Booklist;
The Chaos
By Nalo Hopkinson
(McElderry; ISBN 9781416954880; April 2012; Spring catalog p. 86)
Award-winning author Hopkinson’s YA debut begins like the standard outsider-with-issues tale—well, mostly. Sure, 16-year-old, multiracial Scotch Smith is fighting with her best friend over an ex-boyfriend, and the ’rents are driving her nuts, but it’s those tar-black blemishes that the doctor can’t cure and her visions of floating horse heads that really worry her. Then the world is enveloped by the Chaos, and the story sails off into something weirdly wonderful. A huge erupting bubble absorbs her brother, a volcano rises out of a lake, and a smelly Sasquatch walks the streets of Scotch’s hometown of Toronto. As streetlights turn into giant yellow highlighters, grass turns to cheese, and Big Ben sings dirty songs, Scotch realizes that “everyone can now see the madness they all carry around with them.” Frantic to save her brother, Scotch dodges a toothed tar ball as she races around the city, assisted by Baba Yaga. Hopkinson, who grew up in the Caribbean, mixes Jamaican legends, fairy tales, and sheer imagination to create this wildly inventive story that also skillfully addresses essential teen subjects: change, race, identity, love, and understanding cultural differences. Labels are impossible here, so just hand this refreshingly original treat to teens eager for something completely different.
The Chaos is out!
The Chaos is finally out! To celebrate the occasion, Fantasy Matters asked me to do a book birthday blog post. I'm also doing a blog tour, courtesy Simon & Schuster Canada. My first "appearance" is up today on Emilie's Book World.
And do show your local indie bookstores some love! If you're going to buy the book, consider getting it from an independent bookstore in your location. There are more indie bookstores than I could ever list, but I've buried links to a handful of them in this post. To find your local stores in Canada and the U.S., try Indie Store Finder.
I made a book!
Mojo working?
Still working on the rewrite of Sister Mine. I got totally bogged down about a third of the way through in a tangle of contradictory plot points that I couldn't resolve. Each fix I came up with only created more contradictions. But a few days ago, while working on the plot knot in between panels at fogcon, I came up with an idea that seems to be working. I can tell because it's reverberating all the way through the rewrite such that I'm nowhere near as confused about the story. Paragraph by paragraph, it's now a matter of seconds for me to figure out what beats to put in, which ones to take out. I know there'll be other roadblocks ahead, but I'm so thankful to be past this one. For a while there, it was looking as though I wouldn't be able to fix it.
Fogcon was great. On Friday afternoon when I arrived, I went to register. I saw my friend Ian Hagemann in the dealer's room, so I poked my head in to say hi. He said, "How come there's a Nalo Hopkinson novel that I don't know about?" I had no idea what he meant until he pointed to the book table being run by the fine folks at The Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore. They had copies of The Chaos for sale! It's not even out until April 17! It was my first time seeing the finished product. Dave Nee of the bookstore told me that they'd contacted my publisher and said the magic words; "author appearance". Simon & Schuster promptly shipped them some books in time for my honoured guest appearance at the con. Here, courtesy the bookstore, is a pic of me and Ian, seconds after he'd introduced me to my new novel:
I have more to say about Fogcon, but right now there's that little matter of a novel rewrite that needs to be completed.
Sister Mine rewrite snippet
I'm up to p. 102 of the rewrite. Gonna take a break for a bit. I want to do some sewing and laundry, and I want to make some notes for Tuesday's class. It's the final class of the quarter. We have no more writing to critique. Instead, I'm going to talk about the professional side of being a pop fiction writer. I've asked the students to come prepared with questions for me. I know that they will; they are an extremely diligent bunch. I'm going to do some show-and-tell; rejection letters, acceptance letters, contracts, reviews, that kind of thing. I was thinking I'd be pretty free-form, but now I'm considering organizing the discussion according to broad subject headings.
A bit from the rewrite, and please respect my copyright;
Me and Abby, we didn't have exactly the same face. It was more like someone had dropped a funhouse mirror, cracking it into two related but uneven pieces. Abby's left eye was about 5 millimetres further away from her nose than mine was from mine; she and I had measured and compared once. The tip of her nose tilted ever so slightly to the right; near as she and I could tell, mine didn't. We agreed that she and I had pretty much the same mouth. Her right shoulder hunched a little, hinting at the mild scoliosis that skewed her spine ever so slightly to the right. The skin graft keloid scars on her from our separation operation were on her right flank and mine, of course, were on my left. And her right leg was the one that was shorter, where my legs were the same length. It was as though, in the womb, my body had been the lodestone that had drawn hers in. A head of boisterous dreadlocks concealed the tablespoon-sized indentation on the right side of Abby's skull, where no hair had ever grown.
Brain pan overfloweth
Writing synapses firing on all cylinders, ideas coming almost too quickly for me to write them down. I feel as though my eyes have turned inwards and are contemplating my own brain. Seeing new, textureful connections amongst elements of Sister Mine. Have been stopping every few minutes along my walk to haul out my notebook and scribble in it. I'm at the gym now, about to do a workout. I may have to carry my notebook to the treadmill with me.
