On reading and writing dirty

Oscar Wilde said something to the effect of when discussing the act of love, you have two choices: the language of the gutter or the language of science.

I encounter this often, in reading and in writing. I'm a lover of words, and I love nothing more than how words -- just words -- can turn me on. But I admit there's a distinct point where you cross the line from sexy to silly.

Case in point: In Zane's Buck Wild book, some of the words she used had be rolling my eyes. Mainly because people don't talk like that, but also because some of the words were just ... stupid. The body parts she talked about may as well have been plastic for all the heat they carried. What was supposed to have been hot quickly devolved in to hokey.

I like my dirty book-talk to be a bit ... humid. I mean, if the words do their job, they (and I) should be humid, which is defined as "containing or characterized by perceptible moisture especially to the point of being oppressive" and I'll add "but in a good way."

Zane's Buck Wild characters had none of that. They had the sex without the sensuality, which sucked.

I'm conscious of that when writing love and sex scenes (which are, in fact, two different things). And, going back to Wilde's words, I skew a bit more toward the gutter, depending on whose point of view I'm writing from. "His"/"hers" can be as sexy as "mine" and "me."

But, funnily enough, "vagina" is never sexy.

Books: The Lightning Thief: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1

I admit it: I'm a sucker for books set to become movies. Nothing makes me want to read a book more than hearing it's about to be butchered by somebody determined to bring it to the big screen. (OK, so some movies have done justice to their literary origins. And, then again, some distinctly have not.)

Add to this that I'm an impulse buyer who likes interesting packaging, and you can work out how I ended up with a paperback copy of The Lightning Thief: Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book 1. (Oddly enough, I also dig young adult fiction, so that's a factor as well.)

Story
The story goes down like this: Percy Jackson is a 12 year-old "troubled child" with dyslexia and ADHD who finds it hard to concentrate, sit still, learn Latin, control his temper and not get expelled. (When we meet him, he's in the sixth grade at the Yancy Academy, his sixth school in as many years.)

Percy almost gets killed a few times, discovers he's a demigod (the half-human son of a Greek god), tries to stop the obliteration of Western civilization and has to deal with one heck of a dysfunctional family.

Potter parallels
I'm starting to think it make be difficult these days to find a coming-of-age Y.A. adventure story without a few Harry Potter parallels. The Percy Jackson series has its fair share:

• Young, misfit boy discovers his inner awesomeness. Percy learns special and there are other people like him right around the same age Harry did.


• It takes a trio to save the day. Percy's pals include another demigod's daughter known for always having a plan and a mythical woodland boy-creature who has a good heart, loyal to friends, and ambitious, but is kind of a big lug.


• Other worlds have bad guys, too. When Percy makes his way to camp (the safe place where the other demigods train to attain their best demigod-ness), he runs afoul of Clarisse, daughter of the war god and her siblings, thus casting our series' Malfoy and Slytherins.


• Being dead isn't necessarily permanent. Let's just say the little-bit-less-than-completely-dead Titan Kronos is Percy's Voldemort

Read and learn
Since Percy is pretty much the last person to know he's part Greek god, he's got a lot of catching up on family history to do.

Percy's first-person narration breaks down the Greek mythology in manageable chunks. The story of Kronos and his kids becomes something like "Kronos was scared that his kids would overthrow him so he ate them all. But Zeus tricked him into eating a rock and got him to barf up all his brothers and sisters." NIce and simple, if gross.

Author Rick Riordan also makes Percy such an authentic character in such a well-told story that while rooting for him, you find yourself trying to help him. Even though I haven't tackled Greek Mythology since college (at the most recent), I was searching my brain to remember everything I'd ever read about mythology to figure out who was related to whom, why the kids from the Ares kids were suck bullies, and who Mr. D, the director of Camp Half-Blood, really was and why not being able to drink wine would be considered a punishment ...

Nit-picking
I have only one complaint. Well, one and a half. Percy is 12 years old when we meet him. For the most past, he talks like a 12 year-old, which makes the story fun to read. And because of that, it's a little like hitting an unexpected speed bump when a kid who's been talking about "the deep pit" or "the huge hole" suddenly breaks out with "the chasm." That raised the Editor flag for me. It just didn't seem like something Percy, or any other sixth-grader, would say. I fully admit that I'm nitpicking on that score, but I figure if I noticed, then it's noticeable, right?

The half-complaint is names. Percy, Annabeth and Grover are fine. But Chiron? Hephaestus? Um, what with the who, now? Nothing interrupts the flow of a good book like tripping over a name. But, that's what the online version of Merriam-Webster English dictionary is for. You can hear the words spoken. And now I (re)learned how to pronounce the names of the Greek gods. So that's why it's only a half-complaint.

In or out?
Books: I am definitely in! I breezed through the 300-odd page Lightning Thief and The Sea Monster, the second book in the series, in just under two days. I started The Titan's Curse this morning. I would have finished it, too, except I had to go to work.

If you're a Potter fan, check out the Percy Jackson books. You'll find the same morals about being true to yourself, and the importance of love and friendship, and you'll also find yourself firing up your computer to Google the gods because you really can't let a comment describing World War II as "a battle with Zeus and Poseidon on one side and Hades on the other" go by un-Wiki-ed.

Movie: Well, yeah. I guess. I mean, there is all sorts of potential for crazy CGI monsters and huge Hollywood-sized blockbuster water works. But, you know what? It would be wicked cool if theaters brought Book 1 with special PJ blue popcorn! And if they ponied up for ballpoint pens? Maybe a Yankees cap and reed pipes? That would be sweet! Like, really.

(Read the books!)

Books: My first Sherlock Holmes mystery

That's not entirely accurate since I read a big book o' 37 Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which also included two novels.

Somehow I'd gone though high school and college without ever reading a Holmes mystery, and admittedly, it was Robert Downey Jr.'s turn as the famous Baker Street detective piqued that my interest in the books. But it was definitely worth the wait.

Knowing the Holmes mysteries were not originally intended to be read back to back, I will set aside my nitpicking on minor annoyances such as repeating phrases. While seeing the same phrases over and over was slightly irritating, it also created a consistency, both with Doyle's writing and Holmes himself. As a new reader, I gained a trust in author and character that lead to a full-on belief in their ability to give me an "ah-ha" moment based on an obvious point that I had missed. While reading the Holmes mysteries, I was able to be Dr. Watson for a couple months.

Reading the Holmes mysteries also taught me something about myself as booklover. Or more accurately, a novel-lover. In general, the short mysteries wound down too nicely me. Instead of meeting a shady figure two chapters in who would become the villain, Holmes deduces a young woman -- whom we meet fleetingly -- was taken by the dashing scoundrel -- whom we never meet -- whom her brother played cards with at his club. Instead of "ah-ha!," I was left with "o-kay?"

It was just too convenient. I allow for the answer to the riddle being only Sherlock Holmes can see, but sometimes I found the answer happened entirely away from the main story in a way that no one could have seen. This serves to further the mystique around Sherlock Holmes, and I can see how this would be doubly true a century ago. But in the CSI age, and after my own 20-plus years of reading, there was an element of the fantastic present in how Holmes knows everything.

That said, I was surprised by how modern the stories are, in science as well as subject. "The Adventures of the Five Orange Pips" in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes addresses racism and the Klu Klux Klan in the South. "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," a story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, involves a young mother with a mixed-race child. Also, I would think nothing of reading a 2010 mystery in which the detective was an occasional cocaine user, but somehow it was scandalous reading about it in a story from 1901!

Movie vs. stories

Now that I've read the Holmes mysteries, seen the 2009 movie and a few of the movies starring Basil Rathbone, I can see how Downey's Sherlock could grow up to be to Basil's Sherlock, with his boxing and drugging and overall stubborn rebellion behind him. Jude Law's Dr. Watson could in no way decide to Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson, who seemed to be good-naturedly clueless.

In or out?
I'm definitely in, to the extent that I can be, of course, with no new Doyles/Holmes mysteries forthcoming. but I did come across a compilation of Holmes stories "retold" by contemporary authors. I may check that out.

Books: My new thing

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