It used to be with a typewriter in a garret, but now the image of the writer is of the corner table at a Starbucks with laptop and latte. Pre-industrial writers locked themselves away in monasteries  Ok, not exactly the order of events but you get the picture–writers who get away from their homes and hide away to suffer the pains of writing in silence.

It may seem counter-intuitive that the coffee-house writer is locked away alone when they are surrounded by the hubbub of a busy place. Yet it is that hubbub white noise that protects the writer. In a crowd, one can actually be solitary and observing.

And even better, the coffee shop writer has some wonderful benefits that go beyond the easy access to snacks and drinks.  There’s no laundry to be done, or desk to be cleaned out, or pets that need petting, or any of the million of distractions that are hard to ignore at home.  Because at home, we have a limited amount of time to get things cleaned and organized and family to make happy.  It’s much harder to put those distractions aside when they are right there in your face demanding attention.

The coffee-shop writer does have other hazards that might not be there at home.  The food and drink that’s so easily available is expensive and generally not very good for you.  The wifi is generally just as ubiquitous and hard to turn off as at home.  You can’t control the temperature of the room, or the comfort level of the seating.  There will be days where the place is filled with screaming children, adults yelling into cell phones, people who interrupt your work to ask how you can possibly be working in this place, and the like.

Still, I like writing in coffee shops.  I don’t drink coffee and avoid the pastries, but I always try to buy something and am extra nice to the staff for the privilege of taking a table for a few hours.

This is a book I bought off reading the sample on my Kindle.  I’d bought it last July, and just hadn’t gotten around to reading the book yet.

The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson

I don’t read a lot of YA, but the sample was quite intriguing.  There’s explosions!  (As you might expect from the title).  I thought originally that it was steampunk, but it isn’t that kind of alternate history at all.  There’s certainly a lot of of technological changes, but not of the sort that fits the steampunk sub-genre.

The alternate history is different from what I’ve seen elsewhere.  The turning point is the Battle of Waterloo (here, Napoleon wins), and this causes a rippling effect on the political structure of the world.  Now, in 1938, Europe is unified and has conquered England, and Scotland is part of the Hanseatic League made up of the Scandinavian countries and assorted others outside of Europe’s rule.

Much of that is revealed only through snippets here and there as it becomes important to the story.  Some is never explained in any detail — I know Napoleon won, but not why or how.  I don’t agree with all of the leaps of logic Davidson makes about how the world would turn out.  While I love the idea of a Scotland that stays free because of its explosives factories, I’m not sure how that came to be, and it nagged at me in places that I didn’t know.

There are two other big world changes.  One, spiritualism is real (though often faked)–people can and do actually talk to the dead, including the main character.  This is handled really nicely and realistically.  For example, at the beginning of the book there is a seance.  But before the medium can start, she’s strip-searched to verify she literally has no tricks up her sleeve.

The other big change I’d like to talk more about but it would spoil some revelations later in the plot involving a group called IRLYNS.  This was both an incredibly cool (in an evil way) and also really hard element to buy.  The problem was that it isn’t explained enough for me as a reader to understand how it worked.  Almost was, but not quite.

You’ll perhaps notice I haven’t mentioned the protagonist by name.  That’s because sadly she was the least interesting thing about the story.  I liked Sophie well enough.  She was smart, but in the end she wasn’t active.  YA can fall into a trap between having the adults too distant or too controlling, and I think this story erred on the side of too controlling.  While there was certainly plenty in the middle that Sophie was the main force behind, the book’s plot consisted of a murder investigation and hidden political agendas.  That made it quite difficult for Sophie to drive the events, especially toward the end.  She manages to be present at the climax, but more though chance than choice.  This took away a lot of the tension and made the throughline seem more random than driving to an inevitable conclusion.

In the end, I did enjoy reading it for the setting, but the character and plot left me unsatisfied.  If you read books primarily for the former, go for it.  If you are like me, however, and read mainly to engage with a character, pass this one by.

A friend and I have a standing Sunday date–we meet at a local coffee shop and write for hours. We spend the time between bouts of typing discussing the craft, doing mini-critiques, bouncing ideas around, and other writerly behavior. It’s fun and productive. For her, this may be the only time she has to write all week. For me, while I try to keep going in between, I rarely get large solid blocks of time to use solely for writing.

Yet even this one afternoon is usually under fire. I need to go to the store, there’s laundry to be done, etc. This week, there’s a museum exhibit that ends on Sunday that I’d like to see and another friend (also a writer) to attend. But this is the problem, you see. There’s all kinds of shiny things in addition to chores and whatnot that want to creep into your life and steal that time.

This other friend, this other writer, wasn’t pleased that we couldn’t go on Sunday to the exhibit. She didn’t say it, but I could see her wanting to pull out the list of justifications. It’s for research. It’s just this once. This is the only day to do it. Etc.

But even he “research” excuse has a fatal flaw. It isn’t writing. It isn’t putting words on paper. That is what this time is set aside for–to write. And it isn’t “just this once.” Every week is a new challenge to this time, to keeping it for the purpose I want to put it to.

There are always going to be other things to do besides write. It is up to us to defend that time even in the face of cool things to do–and when faced with the challenge, to not give in to the excuses. Pen to paper, hands to keyboard, will get you farther than research will, even at the museum.

Because all the research in the world won’t get your story written.

The information blackout, that is.  Lots of websites joined in.  As usual, I’m late to the party, and I’m not actually going dark, but I would like folks to think about the importance of what is being done–it isn’t, as has been claimed, a stunt or a misuse of power.  It is meant as a sign of what will happen if SOPA and PIPA, in their current forms, will cause.  The abuse of power is what would happen if the power was given to big corporations without the sort of normal checks and balances laws require.

Closing down a website voluntarily is hardly an abuse of power.  Being able to close down a website because someone linked to someone who linked to a site that is black-listed because it violated vague rules?  That’s abuse.  As someone wise once said, “A vague disclaimer is no one’s friend.”

I actually kind of value the ideal hiding underneath SOPA/PIPA.  I want my intellectual property protected.  I want to be able to deal with people who steal from me, even if they live in other countries.  I want them held accountable.

But SOPA and PIPA aren’t about me, not directly.  They’re about people with millions of dollars, and legal teams, and the sorts of forces that I don’t have.  If I were self-published, I’m not sure SOPA and PIPA would even grant me the authority to do what a big corporation can do under the laws as written.

I admit it, I’m no legal scholar.  And I didn’t follow the brouhaha from the very start, thinking that it was mostly the normal sort of Internet over-reaction that happens on a regular basis.  Yet as I tried due diligence to track down the Other Side of the Story, which I always like to have, I have yet to find anything to convince me that the alarm is, if anything, understated.  SOPA and PIPA would be fine in a perfect world (one that ironically still has IP theft).  But our world isn’t perfect.  It has PEOPLE in it.  And people do dumb things, and malicious things, misguided things, and occasionally the right ones for them, that aren’t necessarily right for anyone else.

The big question of course would be:  will they stop piracy?  I laugh at that one.  Sure, if the Internet created intellectual property theft.  But fake VHS tapes existed long before the Internet existed.  Heck, you could probably buy pirated DVDs long before most people had really known what was up with that Web thing.  The Victorians had to deal with hacking on the telegraph.  Cervantes lamented back in his time about people pirating copies of Don Quixote and even writing bad sequels that make the fake Harry Potters produced in China look lucid.  (I’d look up facts and make links, but Wikipedia is blacked out.  Damn them and their abuse of knowledge power.  Or something).

Want to know more:  go to https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction

Ok, not really.  But I had a Sampler roundup that was eclectic for this week.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

I’d heard of this series before, but hadn’t read it.  Since the first one is on sale for 99 cents, I thought I’d give it a shot despite descriptions of it that made me wonder if it was for me or not.  I like the more interesting takes on urban fantasy in its current definition, but I’m also a little worried this will be on the too-gruesome-for-Jen end of things.  (I’m squeamish.)

The sample was fascinating.  A good example of how to get us involved and interested with a character.  Just the right amount of exposition so we kept up with what’s going on, without taking a long-winded way of explaining everything.  The voice is strong and I believe in the character.

I vote this as a buy, especially at the price.  It may end up being too squishy-bits for me, but for now, I’ll read on.

The Hedgewitch Queen by Lilith Saintcrow

I’d tried a Saintcrow several years ago.  I was, I admit, a little put off by her name, which seemed a little over-the-top.  Still, she seemed popular enough.  I picked up what I thought was the first in one of her series, but turns out it was the third (I think).  It had the infodump-the-past-few-books’-plots problem which drives me nuts about series.  (Mostly it makes for a worse introduction for a new reader by slowing things down, and annoys readers who’ve read the earlier ones.) It didn’t capture me at all.

Still, this one is also on sale (2.99) so I thought I’d try it out.

The first line is the kind that draws you in “If not for a muddy skirt, I would have been dead like all the rest.  Dead–or worse, perhaps.” (Ok, that’s technically two lines).  While the French names and such (I can’t yet tell if this is a faux Europe or a “real” Europe–is it supposed to actually be our world or an alternate one) is annoying (because I didn’t take French and get lost in what I’m supposed to pronounce or not), I find myself entranced by Vianne and her predicament.

The thing I like best is how, when she comes upon a horrific scene which may or may not be a murderer, she acts.  She’s absolutely terrified and panics–she’s not the sort of woman who has any experience with these things.  But she takes her terror and channels it intelligently, and does the one thing that’s right and will protect her.

The exposition is a little heavy at times, but it is necessary to get us into the world and just when it would put the story into a grinding halt, it pulls back and we get on our way.  The promise of the first (2) lines isn’t yet fulfilled, but it has done its job wonderfully.  It set up a weighty and ominous portent that keeps the otherwise light beginning from becoming too fluffy.

Most of all, it got me reading, kept me reading, and there I am at the end of the sample, dying to read more.

A buy!

Why Can’t Elephants Jump? by New Scientist

This is a collection of questions and their answers, from the Last Word page from the New Scientist magazine.  I’m a both a sponge and fount of random information, so I thought this would be a lot of fun.  I haven’t read the other books in this series, but it isn’t as if there’s a story to follow, so jumping in at any point is fine.

The formatting is annoying, however, enough so that I won’t read it digitally.  The questions are in italics, with the asker’s name in bold, then where the person is from in normal text.  Without any white space to separate it, the answer follows directly under that–actually, there’s several answers, all running right after one another.  The answerer’s name is also bolded, but everything else is in normal text.

Except that everything after the section header is also indented from the left about an inch.  An inch of my limited Kindle’s screen.  Also, the first paragraph of any answer does NOT have a paragraph’s first line indent, making it run flush with the location of the previous answer.

All in all, ugly.  Sorry, New Scientist but what looks pretty in print may end up cluttered on screen.  I may check it out again in hardcopy, but I so rarely read hardcopy nowadays that isn’t likely. It may not bother anyone else, and it looks like fascinating information, but there you go.