J. Libby's Blog

85K words in. I'm challenged and surprised. I like the Briar book better than I thought I would on the days when I don't hate it for being difficult. I love writing and I hate writing, and it fulfills me in a way that a lot of other things don't. I am perpetually amazed that I indulge in such a fucking hard and stressful hobby. How ridiculous ...

The novel is coming together and that makes me anxious and happy all at once. This has been a really long time.

"Maybe I just fight because I don't know where I belong." - Natalia Kills, 'Devil's Don't Fly'

Fall, I've discovered, is the beginning of writing season for me. If such a thing can exist. Imagine. Seasons of writing. It's a pattern, the burst and then the lull. The somnambulant haze of the summer months when all I really want to do is play in the sun. I run wild in bare feet and short skirts, with the sun on my legs and my shoulders. The citrus-vanilla scent of sunscreen and the tender sting of burnt skin. That's what I know. Car windows down, no AC, driving the freeway and blasting songs about escape and being in love. Feet still bare, dusty now from the peddles and the brief moments when I step out of the car and I've forgotten my shoes in the back seat.

In the summer, I drink icy beer and tangy margaritas, chilled wine with cheese and honey and mustard. I sit on patios and beneath awnings and watch the kids flirt and dip around each other. I wear spaghetti straps and flavored lip gloss so that my kisses will taste like grapefruit or cupcakes. Sometimes my dress has no straps at all and I am content with the smear of chapstick on my lips.

Fall is when I want to write. When it starts getting cool outside and the days are shorter. The long nights make me yearn for stories and characters and bridges from beginnings to endings. I want good stories and to sleep in and to stay up late. Luckily for me, Fall includes November and November is a writer's month. NaNoWriMo for 30 days and the IWRY Fic Marathon. And then there's Yuletide in December and the months and months of Winter and Spring. Months that are perfect for bundling up and snuggling down and reading. Writing, too, because one cannot happen without inevitably leading to the other.

I'm drafting. NaNoWriMO and IWRY. And maybe something special for Christmas. Maybe. There's so much possibility. It's October, weeks past the Equinox. Officially, the sun and moon say, it is Fall.

SuperLoop fall readings schedule. Go check out some AWESOME poetry written by an amazing woman and poet!

Thursday, September 25
How to Build a Fire: Storytelling
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 pm

Friday, September 26
New York University Alumni Reading
New York, New York
5 pm

Thursday, October 9
Bright Hill Literary Center
Treadwell, NY
7 pm

October 25-26
Texas Book Festival
Reading TBA

Friday, November 7
Brooklyn Poets Reading Series
Brooklyn, NY
7 pm

Now available for free at all major e-book retailers! All This and Love, available from Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Kobo, iTunes Store, and Smashwords!

I finally cracked my laptop open and I have all of these unfinished pieces that I don’t even remember starting:

An inter-steller Sleeping Beauty story that I just barely recall. There’s a circus and a witch, and Sleeping Beauty has become a sideshow attraction.
She had dreamt the world into near ruin, once upon a time. That is why the man has come.

Impossibly, the start of what I remember was going to be a romance novel:
Counting stars and mistakes from last year and the year before that, and five years past makes Kat want to cry. Her eyes burn, but she hates crying. She’s not a pretty crier. She is queen of the ugly face cry, so she steals herself, buries her nose into the fuzzy warmth of a heavy blanket and breathes deeply. In and out and in again. Controlled, deep, and she shakes her head to clear her eyes and the melancholy fog in her brain. Leaning her head back against the chair she goes back to counting stars, the streak of the Quarantid meteor shower, determined to enjoy it because she called out Friday just for the opportunity. And now she’s sitting here, the reluctant and sleeping Lilla at her side, staring at the sky.

A million and one bits and pieces, starts and finishes to the Briar story …
Briar dreams of Mary Angel with cellophane wings, her skeletal beetle arms and bent, too long fingers reaching and gathering. Curled beneath her wings, crouched low and hunched over, she spins silk from the regurgitated blood and viscera scooped from the body stretched at her feet.

Something about werewolves. Clay’s story; it started with a birth.
He would swear, later, after the shock wore off, that she growled. A low animal sound deep in her throat right before she lunged up off the ground, her mouth wide, and snapped at his face. Her teeth clacked together hard as he jerked back. All he recalls is an impression of teeth, elongated canine, and something shifting beneath her skin, something wrong in the bones of her face.

The boy jumped back hard, slamming into the shelves behind him, a rain of bows and ribbons falling around him in a flurry of color. The woman was heavy and slow with her pregnancy and just like that she was back on floor.


*sigh* What to do?! OMG … what to do …

Hiya! For any of you wondering, I had my main account (lolawantz) merged with my author account (J_Libby). Makes the managing of these lists SO MUCH easier. So, I am not some random new person. It's me, but in different clothes.

I hope you enjoy the reviews, the few that there are, and perusing my massive reading list. And if you haven't already, feel free to add a review of my short story collection, All This and Love.

Have a great night!

I wasn't going to do it, but I love poetry too much not to. There's a tiny bit of back log, but I've got three poems up to celebrate National Poetry Month over on Tumblr:

dragons, dragons everywhere

Much to my surprise, there is a contingent of readers who are decidedly unhappy with the way that Suzanne Collins's Mockingjay closes out the Hunger Games trilogy (Thank you, Goodreads forums, for the heads up!). There is much ado made about romantic pairings and Katniss's choice between available love interests, the killing of much loved characters, Katniss's behavior post-Revolution, and the brevity of the epilogue. The ending of the Hunger Games trilogy was, for me, perfectly apropos and beautifully executed. To many people, not so much.

From what I've read on the forums, much of the brouhaha seems to stem from a disconnect between authorial intent and reader expectation. In other words, some people didn't get what they wanted. As Abraham Lincoln said, "you can only please some of the people some of the time," or something like that. Mockingjay (and that highly contested ending) was, for me, the perfect ending to a story that, at its heart, is about life, family, loss, and sacrifice. It's also a story about war and its associated price. Collins doesn't sugar coat the meaning and, although there is a happily ever after, she doesn't put a bow on it. And neither should she. War is an ugly, dirty thing that is at its heart completely destructive. It serves a purpose and may even be necessary, but Collins never takes it for granted that there isn't an impact on everyone involved.

1. On Peeta and Gale: Real or Not Real
Katniss herself tells us why Peeta and not Gale, and it is a reasonable. logical choice.

"That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that."

Without calculating the damage that the parachutes did to Katniss and Gale's relationship, the entire series has been building up the differences between Gale and Peeta who are about as opposite as they can get. Katniss's mirror self, Gale is about fighting and winning by any means necessary. He is blood thirsty in a way that Peeta never is, and that not even Katniss is. Part of that, I believe, is the due to the fact that Gale never took part in the Hunger Games. Always distanced from the reality of killing to survive, Gale lacks the intimate experience of being hunted and being forced to hunt the innocent. He never gains the knowledge that Katniss and Peeta have:

“Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?” says Peeta. “It costs everything you are.”

Gale has an agenda, freedom for Panem, and that agenda is very black and white and allows him to line up enemies and allies very easily in his head. Peeta and Katniss have lost that ability to see everything in black and white. The Hunger Games has changed the way that they parse threats. In her agreement with President Coin, Katniss demands that all of the Victors be pardoned. All of the Victors include anyone who sided with the Capitol and may have tried to kill Katniss herself. The point is that they are as much victims to the system as she is. Katniss has learned to see shades of grey.

Gale is also a reflection of Katniss's anger and defiance. If the first Hunger Games had played out traditionally (one winner, Katniss goes home, the world continues to spin on its axis), Gale would have been a valuable partner in a word where survival means food and material resources. Without the immediate threat of physical harm, Katniss and Gale would have survived well together. Managing survival was the function they served within their families and it was what they did together. In the changing world post-revolution, that kind of survival is no longer necessary. As damaged as the Victors are (a damage that Gale doesn't experience until Mockingjay), the balance that Peeta provides to Katniss really is the better option. She needs a partner who is a foil and not a refection, someone to modulate her responses and soften her edges. Peeta's world view has always been very different from Gale and Katniss's. Those are the kinds of relationships that tend to work best. A couple made up of individuals whose parts are complimentary, not identical.

Although, I love me some Gale, the connection that Katniss had built with Peeta over the course of the series was, to me, a stronger and much deeper one. They had a shared lived experience that Gale would never be able to fully understand. Of course there's the argument that she was wishy-washy, constantly going back and forth between Peeta and Gale, but I don't think that's true. I think that Collins sets it up pretty early on where this is going to go. I, personally, wasn't surprised by the ending. Although The Hunger Games shows us a very ambivalent Katniss initially, by Catching Fire it is very, very clear how much she values Peeta. Gale, I think, was always her best friend. It could have grown into something more, but Collins did not tell a story where that was ever going to happen.

2. Prim and Finnick: you cannot brace for sudden impact
The thing about war is that there is always a price, and it is a price that both sides pay. Let's call it Collateral Damage: "deaths, injuries, and damage to the property of people who are not in the military that happens as a result of the fighting in a war (merriam-webster)." A grossly simplistic way of describing it would be: in war, shit happens.

As cold as it may sound, and as horrified as both me and La Femme Nikita were by the idea, collateral damage is a very real part of war. And it's a part of the revolution that Collins does not turn a blind eye to and does not sugar coat. The senselessness and completely unexpected nature of death among people on the periphery occurs. It occurs in real life. It would be an easy throw away for Collins to write off minor characters or even nameless/faceless characters. How many of us really thought about the woman that Katniss gunned down as she and her unit came through the apartment walls in the Capitol? Except as a shocking example of how deep into a war they have come, and how much Katniss has changed, I didn't worry too much about her. But, she was also collateral damage. She was eating a sandwich or something, curlers in her hair when her apartment gets hijacked and she gets shot in the head. Poor dear. Definitely not her best day ever. It was a shocking death, but the real payoff in terms of making sure that the audience really understands the destruction that war enacts, are the deaths directly connected to Katniss. The characters that we have become attached to and built relationships with: Rue, Mags, Finnick, and Prim. Katniss mourns these characters, and because she does, so do we.

I've read arguments that Finnick and Prim's deaths were so unnecessary, so pointless. But then, that's exactly the point, isn't it? War results in unnecessary and pointless deaths. With our drones and targeted computer strikes, war and the human toll are disconnected in our consciousness. Until someone shoves it in our face and reminds us that those blinking targets on the computer monitor are actually people, we forget.

3. "whole body tragedy": Katniss and PTSD
That leads me to zombie!Katniss.

First, keep in mind that The Hunger Games is written in 1st person. Everything that we experience is filtered directly through Katniss. What she understands, what she experiences, how she interprets her experiences all shape how the reader experiences the story. The close of Mockingjay gives us a drugged, shell shocked Katniss living in the heart of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Prim's death is then buffered by a period of time during which Katniss has been in a coma (possibly medically induced to allow her body to heal safely) and drug addiction (and let's not pretend that she is anything but a budding morphling addict).

PTSD is no joke, and Katniss exhibits signs of it from Catching Fire on: the dreams, her waning appetite, her skittishness, and the constant hiding in small, safely enclosed spaces. She is not doing well. By the third book's close, Katniss has lost everything. The ending is devastating and Katniss's retreat makes perfect sense. Imagine, after all is said and done (volunteering as tribute, winning the Hunger Games, helping the rebellion), she fails to keep Prim alive. It's a slap in the face and a punch in the gut. The series comes full circle and in the end our raison d'etre dies anyway. Prim was our catalyst, she set the events of the series into motion and, at least in the beginning, everything Katniss did was on behalf of her sister. But in the end, despite everything Katniss has done, Finnick is dead, Twelve is gone, and Prim dies anyway. I don't think that any one of us would have taken it any better than Katniss does. She had fair reason to completely loose her shit and check out of reality.


4. 30 Days Without an Accident
The end of Mockingjay, to me, is a quick wrap up. The story has been told. Peeta and Katniss survived, Panem is freed and the revolution has changed the world. The story could have very easily ended with that closing scene in which Katniss finally admits her love for Peeta. The epilogue is just a little cherry on the cake and is a sign of hope for the future. Knowing what the Hunger Games entail, I can not imagine that Katniss would ever have agreed to children had the revolution never happened. I don't think that Gale would have been able to talk her in to it. The children's names are irrelevant at this point. Their day to day lives are irrelevant. That Katniss has given in to having children at all is indicative of her love of Peeta (which is a progression for her), but also of her hope for the future and proof that she has come to peace with the past. The tragedy and heartbreak are still there. Haymitch once told them that they would never get off the train or out of the Arena, and even with the downfall of the Capitol there are ways in which they are still trapped.

“Peeta and I grow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me."

The Hunger Games is about consequences as much as it is about all of those other things I listed before. The creation of Panem and the institution of the Hunger Games were a consequence. Suppressing a people will ultimately have negative consequences because people will only stay down for so long. So, it's all cyclical and even Plutarch Heavensbee isn't so naive as to think that one day this all won't happen again. It is the nature of the beast, so to speak.

The Hunger Games was a phenomenal series. It incorporated social and governmental critiques, commentary on pop and celebrity culture, war, and a rather slick rumination of sex and gender roles. I loved it. I loved the ending even if it was hard and sad. The book was more realistic and thus more impactful because of the realism. I understood the ending. I understood the why. Because the sweet always comes with the sour, and you can't have everything. A gorgeous, gorgeous read, and I hope that one day those readers who were so disappointed with the series close will go back, re-read the books and maybe realize that the ending was exactly as it needed to be. Because as George R.R. Martin tells us: "Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends." Ending the Hunger Games any other way would have been pandering, inorganic, and completely out of character for the story told. Instead we have a rich, complex story with a rich, complex, devastating ending written by an author who trusts us with the truth. I can't ask for more.

Publishing All This and Love was a butt load of work. From writing the shorts to formatting the manuscript and uploading to Smashwords and Amazon, it was a job! And I’d do it all over again. In fact, I plan to. My first project is a full length novel set in the universe from the Briar short "this, too, like water and memory". I’ve had the idea for the book for a while, but navigating the details of the story and cracking Briar, as a character, has been hard going. I couldn’t get my brain wrapped around her and how the story I wanted to tell needed to happen. "this, too, like water and memory" was a way for me to explore the character and it helped alot, but now I’m running into the challenge of writing a much longer piece of fiction.

I’ve been writing short stories for a while and one thing that I have always had trouble with is formatting for longer stories. Writing tips and tricks are a dime a dozen around the Interwebz, but GOOD writing tips and tricks are rarer than a hippograph.

Well, maybe I should take that back.

Read the rest on Tumblr.

Three years later and I finally finished it. A good, although psychologically difficult read. Full review is up at my other Goodreads account (under lolawantz). You can also check here: on Tumblr