Cats and a new vacuum plus final thoughts on 'And Another Thing'
The vacuum seen in this picture finally died on us. More or less anyway. Filters for it seem to have disappeared from the stores and the front beaters don't work well.
It terrorized the cats on it's weekly visit, Freya being the one most used to it, allowing it to get within five feet of her before she had to escape. Loki would go to high ground as soon as it was fired up and Danya would watch it from the kitchen chairs...
They were worried about the large noisy monster that chased them.
But we borrowed a canister vacuum for a quick clean up on the weekend. This canister vacuum has only a small footprint at the business end and a large blue tube that drags behind some five or six feet.
With the small footprint, Freya, Loki and Danya all tried to stand up to the Vacuum. To prove to themselves they were bigger and tougher then it and to drive it off. Loki and Danya both tried it first in the living room and escaped. Freya tried it next on the stairwell landing going up. She watched it approach up the stairs, as it cleaned each one in turn. As it got within a step of her she finally broke and ran past it into the safety of the basement.
Loki was the next cat. The vacuum worked on the landing itself and Loki watched it the whole time. As it started up the second set of stairs Loki awaited it at the top. It wasn't until it had finished the top step and was about to go onto the same level as Loki that she, in turn, ran. Ran right over my foot giving me a small scar for my trouble. Perhaps I deserved it for pushing as far as I did.
Danya watched as the vacuum did the bedroom and waited until it crossed the upstairs towards the computer room before escaping. She didn't want to be trapped in the same room with it.
I was heavily amused by their willingness to stand up to this vacuum end, which is louder then our old vacuum for sure. So the size of the thing generating the noise is a factor in their willingness to run, if not their actual fear.
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As for the book I was forcing myself to read, 'And Another Thing' the sixth Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book...
It is really bad.
There are over 500 entries on Fanfiction dot net
http://www.fanfiction.net/book/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy/ I'm willing to bet at least 50 of those are far better then this book.
ooooh ok...
I just randomly picked five of those stories there to start reading and found that I had got five really bad lemons... So perhaps not as high as 50.
Mental Bleach should be cheaper.
Anyway, And Another thing has all the problems I think of when I think of bad fan fiction.
1) The characters become simpler and more polarized towards the elements of their personality the author believes are important. The complexity of the character that drew you to their story is lost.
2) Random behavour for plot reasons is either lampshaded in an effort to make it amusing or desperately written around (often in a conversation between the character and their own thoughts) instead of scrapped and the story reworked to have the characters remain in character. The writer has a story that requires these plot actions and they will happen.
3) Old jokes return as Joke mark 2. Or sometimes just Joke version 1a. After all, it was really funny the first time someone said 'Don't talk to me about life' so it will still be funny when it comes up again right? After all humour is also hard to write, so recycling should be acceptable.
4) Character soup, in which all the minor characters from season 2 show up in the story taking place after season 5. Because season 2 was the best season evar! therefore minor one scene one joke characters can be pulled out and just tossed into the limelight and be excellent.
Character soup really becomes a problem when the characters are just pulled out and referenced by name alone, requiring you to hunt through your memory to who this person is and why, therefore, they are funny now. Or important now, or whatever the 'goal' the writer has of pulling them out.
5) I'm a bigger fan then you, therefore my understanding of what happened in the second book is the only way to read the second book. Some good authors allow for the reader to make up their own versions of how some scenes go. They tell you what the mindset of the characters were going into a meeting and then what was decided and how they proceed after the meeting but skip the meeting itself as it would be dull. (Lord of the rings? Take notes here eh?) This allowing the reader to fill in the pieces can also happen in other little ways, painting the scene with elements from their own life to make it complete.
If a season was done that way (like the way bricks don't, for example) trying to describe it in your fan fiction is nailing it down as fact. And if your fan fiction fact breaks with original source cannon we have a disconnect. A little disconnect that eats at the minds of the readers.
6) I'm such a big fan of this work I'll reference a bit from page 37 paragraph 3 of the original manuscript without explaining that is the source. Related to the character soup issue and the I'm the offical fan problems we have this. Which really eats me up when it is wrong. (The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy has three different versions that are cannon (four if you count the american movie) so using this at points Really Eats me up in And Another Thing) This offhand refence issue comes up a bunch. Mostly because the fan fiction author will have just finished reading the books and will be writing from that mindset. Their audience will not but they cannot step back from their story enough to see this problem.
7) Episodic writing becames an issue. This shows up as a problem in fan fiction for two reasons. A) Often the source material is episodic as well, so the urge to write every story into a nice self sealing loop natural. B) The writer is releasing each bit in a small chunk to their readers on the web, and they want each chunk to have it's own arc to make the readers enjoy it.
For And Another thing, these episodes are about 70 pages long and you can really feel them. In fact the last 70 pages bothered me so much from this very feeling... Or to put it differently the Author finished his story (to my mind) 70 pages early and then had to go in and add more details to get his book up to the 330 page count. Which make me stop and go back to check and yeah... Each two or three chapters follow their own arc in a way that feels fan fictionly to me.
8 Reset for the next author and or story at the end. The world requires that it be reset for the next go round. After all, you have to clean up the loose threads from your own story as no one else is going to and while you are doing that you might as well clean up the other details as well. It also lets you set it up for a sequal, after all the story will be right back to where you started yourself right?
And this book so clearly wants there to be another one after it. I smelt the setup for it coming about half way in (as part of the episodic issues to be honest, as everything was being reset behind the characters as they moved through the story) but to so clearly set everything back up at the end really bothers me.
There is one final problem to 'And Another Thing' that is unique to it over fan fiction and that is the use of guide entries. Douglas Adams did the british comedy writer thing of including footnotes to bang home a joke. Some people would read the footnote as soon as the marker showed up while others would finish the sentence or paragraph before glancing down. These footnotes were rare, averaging one a chapter through a book (I believe).
In this fan fiction they come up at least one every four pages... And not as a footnote but as a italiced paragraph (or two pages in a couple of events) going wildly off topic in an effort to be the surreal humour drive. Much like family guy in this recent season these offshoots become far more jarring then amusing, breaking the already choppy flow of the story even more.
They fail to work as they intended.
I'm not sure how this book was handed out, but I do know that it sold far more copies then it was worth. I really have the sick feel that at least one more book will be coming from the author here and not even I will bother with reading it.
Writing fiction in the world of another author is easier then crafting a world of your own. Writing with another authors characters and having them feel like the same characters is really hard. Writing in another authors world with your characters hiding under the names and crude labels of another authors characters is easier.
It just bothers me, as writing your own characters in your own world should be just a bit harder. Why not do that and save me the headache and the rage?
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