Growing up in the 1980s means that I can't remember when I first heard of Stephen King, because everyone had heard of Stephen King. I know I giggled with recognition and delight when I saw the shirt that Sean was wearing in The Monster Squad (1987). By that point, I had already seen the "Gramma" episode of The New Twilight Zone (1986), and Creepshow (1982; I didn't see the theatrical release, so you can stop freaking out about what kind of movies my family took the four-year-old to see). Stephen King was my background radiation. Bruce Banner got Gamma Rays. I got a baseball fanatic from the state of Maine.

(Had someone told me when I was eight that Stephen King loved baseball, I might have learned to give a damn about the game. Clearly, the universe missed a bet.)

The first really serious piece of writing I can remember doing was a twelve-page essay, when I was nine, explaining to my mother why she had to let me read Stephen King. It had footnotes and a bibliography. I slid it under her bedroom door; she bought me a copy of Christine from the used bookstore down the street. I had already read Cujo and Carrie illicitly, sneaking pages like other kids snuck looks at dirty magazines, but Christine was my first ALLOWED Stephen King. I devoured it. And then, like a horror-fiction-focused Pac-Man, I turned on the rest.

Stephen King, without ever knowing who I was, helped me through some of the hardest times in my life. I read IT all the way through a court case that seemed like it was going to destroy everything I loved, forever. I was nine. My grandmother bought me his new hardcovers every year for Christmas. I bought tattered paperbacks with nickels I had hidden in my pillowcase, where no one else could find them. I skipped meals to buy more books. I read them all, over and over, and I endured. He taught me that sometimes, dead is better, things change, and you own what you build. He taught me to read if I wanted to write, and to love the words, and to never be ashamed of loving whatever the hell it was I wanted to love.

In a weird way, Stephen King gave me permission for a great many things, and since those things are integral to who I grew up to be, I have to say that he, through his work, was just as big an influence on me as any other adult in my life.

He taught me you can get out.

Today is his birthday; he was born in 1947, and he's still writing today, which I appreciate greatly. I may never meet him, and that's probably a good thing, as I'm not sure I'd be able to speak English if I did. But I surely do appreciate the man.

Happy birthday, Stephen King.

Thank you.

I will now reveal a little secret: I don't like numeric rating systems. Actually, let me rephrase that: I hate numeric ranking systems. Unless we're talking about something completely objective, like "did 2 + 2 = 4 in this equation" or "did this wolverine do a satisfactory job of clawing off your face," they lose a major component of any rating: a view of the person who's doing the ranking.

These are things I really, really like: studying viruses. Horror movies. Collecting weird old knives I bought at flea markets. Monster High dolls. X-Men comics. Candy corn. My Little Ponies. Talking about dead stuff. Snakes. Octopi. Coyotes. Watching television.

These are things I really, really dislike: sports. Serious romances, the kind where someone gets hit by a car or catches a wasting disease and I wind up sobbing into my ice cream. Shopping for shoes. Bratz dolls. High heels on small children. Coconut. Mango. Bell peppers. Going to the dentist. Dishes. Leeches. Clowns. Most shoes that are considered "fashionable." Watching the news.

Now here's the thing. None of the things I like are inherently better or morally superior to the things I dislike. Nor is the opposite true. My little sister loves shoes (although we both hate and fear clowns). Her room is a shrine to shoes. She finds the fact that I own between two and four pairs of shoes at any given time faintly horrifying, although not as horrifying as the fact that I wear them until they are literally falling apart before I'm willing to break down and buy more. If my sister and I were asked to give a one-to-five ranking to the same shoe store, you'd see one of the two following combinations:

Seanan: "This store carried one style of shoe! It was so easy! 5 of 5 stars!"
Seanan's sister: "This store had no selection and no style. 1 of 5 stars."

...or...

Seanan: "Oh Great Pumpkin it was huge and confusing and I was there for hours and I HATED IT. 0 of 5 stars."
Seanan's sister: "So many shoes! So many styles! Best shoe store ever! 5 of 5 stars."

It's the same store in both cases. It's not changing to suit our rankings. It's either a store that sells one kind of functional shoe (my ideal), or a great many kinds of fashionable shoe (her ideal). The problem is that we wandered into the wrong stores, and our current critical dialogue only seems to have two settings: "it was good" and "it was bad." "It wasn't right for me" is nowhere in the equation, and that's sort of a problem for me.

What does "3 of 5 stars" mean, anyway?

Also—and this is, I fear, unfixable, because the internet is big, and we're all coming from different social and educational backgrounds—we have no common understanding of what "good" means. For me, ranking something 3 of 5 should mean "it was good, I liked it, I will keep the book/may watch the movie again/enjoyed the meal." For some others, ranking something 3 of 5 means "it failed in every substantial way, but the words didn't slide off the page when I shook it, so I guess I may as well give it something."

For some people, 1 of 5 means "it wasn't available in the exact format and language I wanted it to be in, exactly when I wanted it," or "the main character didn't get with the guy I liked in the last chapter, so even though I liked the rest of the book, it sucks." It means too much sex, too little sex, and, in the case of one review that made me want to throw the website across the room, not enough rape (thankfully, this review was not of one of my books). For others, anything below 4 of 5 means "this book is not worth my time."

This lack of standards is why I had to stop keeping up my Goodreads page. I found myself giving inflated scores to everything, because I had no way of explaining that from me, 3 of 5 was a really good rating, and I didn't want to be the one who hurt the ranking of a book I really loved. When I realized I was giving dishonest 4s and 5s, I walked away. It wasn't fair...and yet, giving 3s, when most people seem to view anything below an aggregate 4 as a bad book, also seemed unfair. I had given up context for convenience, and that didn't work for me at all.

The problem with "it's not for me" becoming "it's not for you."

"I bet you'd love to criticize that, wouldn't you, you critics! But you can't."
"It's not for you."

—Penny Arcade.*

One of the issues with saying "I don't like a numeric rating system, it's too arbitrary because it doesn't tell you anything about the people spitting out the numbers" is that sometimes, people hear that as "you can't criticize this because I didn't write it for you." That's bull. I can criticize my sister's taste in shoe shops as much as I want, and I can tell you for a fact that they didn't build that shoe store for me, or for the other people like me in this world. They built it for her, and for the people like her. And yet, at the same time...

There's a book I really love called Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures. The word "gross" is used in the cover text of the edition I have, several times. The cover shows a super-magnified blood-sucking mite, staring at you, thinking about whether you might have some blood available for sucking. It is not a book that drapes itself in pastel colors and tries to trick you into thinking it's about unicorns. And if you go and read the reviews on the various numeric review sites (Amazon, Goodreads, etc.), the low reviews are almost universally going either "it was icky" or "it was full of science and also icky."

It's a book about parasites, written by a scientist, as part of a popular science series. If you don't like a) parasites, b) being a little grossed out in the pursuit of knowledge, and c) science, it's sadly a fair bet that this book? Isn't for you. Even if you're a critic, it's not for you. It's for the people who like parasites, being a little grossed out, and learning about science. Does this mean you can't criticize it? No. But it does mean that I wish there were some option for saying "this book was not my cup of tea, I made a mistake when I picked it up" that was not "1 of 5 stars icky book is icky."

Why book bloggers counter this trend.

Part of why I love book bloggers is the meatiness of their reviews, even the terse ones. When someone says "I didn't like this book, 1 of 5," they follow it up with a substantial why. They let me see their love of shoes, dislike of bell peppers, and love of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. They show me their biases, and by doing so, their review becomes relevant to me. Yes, even when it's of one of my own books, and even when it's negative. Because nothing in this world is perfect for absolutely everyone. Some of the best reviews I've read, of both my own books and the books of others, have been negative. It's seeing why that matters, and seeing what else the reviewer has listed in their like/dislike column.

Because that's the other thing: a lot of the time "it's not my cup of tea" becomes "I won't give bad reviews, and you shouldn't, either." When I see a horror movie that's a bad horror movie, I say so. I just don't review it the way I would review a comedy, just like I don't review a comedy the way I would review a musical. I would never call Glee a bad show because people break randomly into song—it's a musical! But I've been calling some episodes bad episodes, because the character choices don't make sense, and the entire current season is based around something that isn't supported by the show's canon. If something is bad, say so. But we need to say why it's bad...and admit that sometimes, the problem isn't the thing we're reviewing, it's us.

I do think we need to remember that "this isn't my thing" is a column on the good/bad metric. I am currently slogging through—and yes, I mean that—the latest Stephen King novel, 11/22/63. If you know my tastes at all, you know that he's my favorite author. I'd read his laundry list. And that's why I'm still reading this book, rather than chucking it across the room. It's a time travel story about trying to prevent the JFK assassination, and I. Don't. Care. That happened so long before I was born that I can't imagine what the world would be like if JFK hadn't died, and thus basing an entire doorstop of a novel around trying to keep him alive just doesn't do it for me. Is it a good book? Objectively, it's written with the same style and skill that King brings to all his books. All the reviews I can find are fantastic.

And I still don't care. This book is a good book. It is well-written and well-researched. It is not for me. Something I love very much—maybe even something I've written—probably isn't for you. And that's okay.

It'd be a boring world if we were all of us the same.

(*Yes, I love supporting my points with old Penny Arcade strips. Around here, that's just how we roll.)

1. I have done mailing! Very nearly all the mailing, in point of fact; the only things that are a) paid for/contest prizes, and b) still in my possession are Lu's posters (trying to make sure I didn't double-pack them) and seawench's ARC (returned by the post office, only just got confirmation that it was safe to ship a second time). So there is no mail waiting for me to do something with it! I dance the dance of joy.

2. Since this weekend is the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show's fourth appearance at Borderlands, my mother's been cleaning my house from stem to stern, to get it ready for company. This, naturally, upsets the cats. Thomas has been expressing his displeasure by sulking in the kitchen and knocking over the trash can. He doesn't seem to understand that neither of these behaviors is going to do anything beyond getting him scooped and scolded.

3. Having assessed my current stress levels and their effect on my ability to get things done, I have taken a major step toward reducing them. Namely, I have set aside the to-be-read pile, turning my back on all those beguiling new stories and unfamiliar authors, and have picked up my dearest, most faithful literary companion: I am re-reading Stephen King's IT for the first time in well over a year. This is seriously the longest I have gone without reading this book since I was nine. So yes, it will be sweet balm for my stressed-out soul.

4. Safeway has two-liters of Diet Dr Pepper on sale for eighty-eight cents this week. This, too, is sweet balm for my stressed-out soul, but in a different way. A more hyperactive, I CAN SEE THROUGH TIME, kind of a way.

5. Still on the New York Times bestseller list. I check every day, just to see if I'm still there. Call it part of my monitoring routine against dimensional slide, and let it go. I feel like I should do something to celebrate, like another round of book giveaways or something, but that's going to have to wait until my capacity to cope catches up with the rest of me. Say around next Tuesday, at the current rate.

6. I am the Rain King.

7. Last night's episode of Glee made me happy the way the show used to make me happy in season one, and that was a wonderful thing. I'm glad I bought the soundtrack before the episode actually aired; it let me get used to the original songs the way I am to the covers, and assess the performance on the show based on the actual performance, not on "WAIT WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SINGING." It's a thing.

8. Last night I dreamt a detailed remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, updated for the modern era, without sucking righteously. It was scary and strange and really awesome, and it says something about my psyche that I still don't think it was a nightmare. Sadly, I woke up before the end. Stupid alarm clock.

9. The bigger my cats get, the more I realize that I need a bigger bed. Which means I need a bigger bedroom. Which means I need a bigger house. Anyone know where I can find Dr. Wayne Szalinski's shrinking/enlarging ray?

10. Zombies are love, be excellent to one another, and party on, dudes.

There is a review of Feed in the October issue of SciFi Magazine. This is a major newsstand glossy, produced by the media group that ones the SyFy Channel (you know, where I spend much of my time). The cover story is about Resident Evil: Afterlife. Inside, there are stories about Haven and the new season of Eureka.

And then there is me.

A review of my book. In this magazine.

Sometimes this business of writing continues to astonish me. I know, I know: I worked hard, I worked for a long time, this isn't all being handed to me on platters by magical ponies from the moon (which is really a pity, as I would love to catch me some magical moon ponies of my very own). I don't sit here feeling like I'm getting things I shouldn't have...even if I do occasionally wonder when I'm going to wake up from this astonishingly detailed linear dream.

My book is reviewed in a magazine that includes a review of a Resident Evil movie and a television show based on the works of Stephen King. If there was any actual question of whether or not I may have accidentally sold my soul at the crossroads, this pretty much answers it.

Good thing I keep a fiddler around, huh?

Golly.

( Click here for review goodness.Collapse )

Yesterday, I was demonstrating to a friend of mine (who finds my fascination with ASL charming, if odd) that I can now sign "Behold! For now I wear the human pants!" My grammar is a little wonky, but I'll be seeing Judi in a few weeks, so right now I'm just working on getting the signs committed to muscle memory.

A Deaf gentleman about my age saw me signing, and got very excited. He came over, and signed, "You know ASL?" (In the case of signs that I don't know myself, but whose meaning was evident from context, I'm including them to form actual sentences.)

I signed back "A little." Emphasis on "little."

He asked what I knew...so I showed him. Around the time I hit "working in a mine for our robot overlords" and "did I say overlords? I meant protectors," he started to look, well, dubious. Like there was a chance I thought I knew some ASL, when really, someone was messing with me.

Then I signed "The Turtle can't help you."

His eyes widened, and he proceeded to finger-spell "IT?" I nodded. He made an "S" sign, followed by a gesture like putting on a crown. I nodded again. He got even more excited, especially since now he knew I actually understood my messed-up assortment of signs. He had me teach him "robot overlords," and he taught me the sign for "weird."

ASL and Stephen King: bringing the world closer together. The best part is that, for once in my life, I can legitimately say that the Turtle did help us.

10. I will be on a plane for San Diego in a little over twenty-four hours, on my way to the San Diego International Comic Convention. The SDCC is one of my favorite conventions, because it is, for all the chaos, really remarkably relaxing. I go, I smile, I speak, I shop. And shop, and shop, and oh, yes, shop. I love flea markets, and the SDCC dealer's hall is like the world's best combination of "the comic book store" and "the indoor flea market." Only this flea market has an artist's alley. Life is good.

9. As part of my preparation for San Diego, I took my mother for a pedicure last night. (There's logic here, I swear. The logic is largely "I didn't want to walk home after getting my nails done.") Neither of us is much of a pedicure girl, but sometimes it's nice to just let somebody attack your heels with a pumice stone. Besides, I have super-cute shoes for the parties in San Diego—kitten-heeled green Italian leather—and they require having super-cute toenails to go with them.

8. Alice woke me up five minutes before my alarm by kneading the hell out of my hip, and then throwing herself down across me like a fuzzy blue blanket possessed of most imposing puffiness. This was far, far more pleasant than being woken by the actual alarm could possibly have been, and made hauling my carcass out of bed much easier. After the Blue Team decided to let me get up, that is. Between the two of them, I really don't get to do much that my cats don't approve of.

7. Next up in my reread of the collected works of Stephen King: The Stand. This is one of my five favorite books of all time. Just having it in my purse makes me happy. (Not as happy as IT, which is why IT is slated for rereading at the end of August/beginning of September, but surprisingly close.)

6. According to this week's new releases list, the next volume of the collected hardcover Creepy comes out tomorrow. (Ironically, I won't be able to pick it up until next week, since, well, San Diego, but just knowing that it's on the trucks makes me happy.) These books are basically my childhood in handy, easy-to-shelve form, and their very existence enhances the universe incredibly. I am a happy girl.

5. Rosemary and Rue comes out in forty-one days. Forty-one is the thirteenth smallest prime number. (The next is forty-three, with which it comprises a twin prime.) It is also the sum of the first six prime numbers (2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13), and the sum of three primes (11 + 13 + 17). I love forty-one for being prime, and I love Wikipedia for knowing all this crap.

4. I have a hula hoop! And when I get home tonight, I get to use my hula hoop! I get to stand in the front yard and hula like I've never hula'd before. Well, actually, just like I hula'd last night, only maybe a little bit better, because I've had more practice. I can't take my hula hoop to San Diego, so I have to get my hula in now, while I still can.

3. Rebecca has BPAL waiting for me in San Diego. Specifically, Rebecca has a fresh bottle of Bad Luck Woman Blues (basically my signature aromatherapy calm down Seanan, you can't unleash the pandemic perfume) and a bottle of the new Zombie Apocalypse scent. I am a lucky girl.

2. I have season one of Leverage on DVD. Tonight, I will sit on my couch, ink art cards, and watch con men, thieves, and grifters as they do their con man, thief, and grifter things, and my cats will purr, and the DDP will be cold, and the tomato sandwiches will be incredibly drippy and get all over the damn place, probably causing at least one incident with my art supplies, and life will be good.

...and finally...

1. I am healthy, I have a cute haircut, I have orange toenails, I have a book coming out in less than a month and a half, I have wonderful friends, I have beautiful cats, and I'm about to take off for the world's biggest comic book convention. Life doesn't suck.

How's by you?

My favorite book in the entire world -- the comforting, reassuring book that I return to over and over again, because it makes everything better for as long as I'm reading it -- is IT, by Stephen King. This probably explains a lot about me. I've read IT at least once a year since I was nine, more frequently two or three times a year, because when I'm stressed, I want familiar things around me, and my definition of 'familiar things' includes scary evil clowns. (My grandmother had a clown collection. I lived with her for a while, and it's a miracle I never took a hammer to her curio shelves. When she passed away, all the clowns went into boxes, and I never saw them again. I do not miss them, although I sort of wish I knew where they were, so as to remove 'under my bed with knives' from the available options.)

Because I re-read this book so frequently, I've actually managed to imprint on a specific edition, like a baby duck imprinting on a fire-breathing hellhound as its mother. I must have the 1985 paperback edition, or the words are in the wrong places on the page, and the book feels wrong to me. Yes, I recognize how absolutely bizarre this is. It doesn't change the fact that they re-paginated in later editions, and things just don't look right.

It's been getting increasingly hard to find copies of IT in my preferred edition, maybe because it's a twenty-four year old paperback that wasn't all that well-bound to begin with. I've been hoarding them with increasing desperation, knowing that the well is getting closer and closer to running dry. I had fourteen copies, at last count, after giving one to Vixy for Christmas. Well, I found a cardboard box on my porch this week, sent from Merav in New York. She's pretty good about telling me when things are perishable, so I let it sit for a few days before opening it.

When I did open it, I laughed myself dizzy. Because inside were seven -- yes, seven -- copies of the correct edition of IT, all neatly stacked and waiting to join the pile. Between her and Joey (who did something similar at my 'hooray, we've sold the first three Toby books' party), I may finally have sufficient copies of IT to get me through my lifetime.

My friends are very strange.

This fascinating article in the Baltimore City Paper talks about the books we loved when we were twelve, and how they never ever leave us. It opens with a quote that really resonates with me:

"A girl I once caught reading Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: "You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old." I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniably true."

I have found books that I love every year of my life. I am a person who reads, I've been a person who reads for almost my entire time on this planet, and I go through a lot of brand new books every month (often to the chagrin of my budget). And yet...

The books I go back to, the books that comfort me when I feel bad, the books that lift me up when I'm feeling down, are largely books I encountered between the ages of nine and twelve. I'll go up one level on that, since that was also the period of my life where Xanth and Dragonlance reigned supreme: they're the books that emotionally moved me between the ages of nine and twelve. Tailchaser's Song. The Last Unicorn. IT. The Stand. War for the Oaks. There are others -- oh, there are others -- and so many of them source back to that same stretch of time.

I'd argue that you can fall in love with the way an author uses language, as much as a specific use of language, and that it's also at its most powerful when it happens between those ages. Hence my total inability to get over my love for Stephen King (not that I really want to). Hence the comic geeks of the world and their insistence on viewing whichever death of Jean Grey happened during their 'imprint years' as the only real time she died. (Personally, I'll take any of her deaths, as long as she promises to stay dead.)

I'd be curious about how universal this is. But is strikes me as being something that's very true for a lot of us, and somehow manages to be practically invisible at the same time. Pretty cool.

My writing has just been compared to early Stephen King.

I can now die happy, content that I have actually done what I always wanted to do with my life.

So, y'know. And stuff.