The Lie the Hero Believes

I ran across the word pourri in my French reading. It turns out pourri means rotten, decayed, corrupt, etc. Pot in French means pot. Therefore a pot pourri is a rotten pot. Suddenly, potpourri makes sense.

I'm up to book 3 of the Hunger Games. One of the criticisms of it is that the male love interest of the female main character is emasculated. Let's see if that's true. In book 1 he's injured and cannot fulfill his role as a man. In book 2 he is once again injured and cannot fulfill his male role. Book 3 starts out with his having been captured by the enemy and thus unable to fulfill his male role. Yes, he's emasculated. He's basically cast as the helpless female who needs rescuing. Very Hollywood.

I mentioned last week that I didn't entirely like book 1. The emasculation thing isn't too much of a problem. The main character has to drive the story not a minor character. If the love interest was more realistic, the main character wouldn't be doing anything. She's far too weak and unmotivated as a person to be around strong characters. The author was forced to team her with weak companions. I hope it will make sense by the end of book 3. Maybe she'll find some kind of inner strength.

The main reason I couldn't get more into it was because of how the main character used the love interest like a puppet. In the story they're thrown into an arena of 24 combatants in a fight to the death. There can be only one. . .winner. The judges change the rules to allow people to team up in teams of two. As part of the rules, the combatants can receive rewards from sponsors. Once the main character and the love interest are teamed up, she figures out that if she kisses him or shows affection she gets a reward. From that point on she slashers on the kisses and hugs and cuddling, etc.

Before the combat started, the love interest declared that he loves the female main character and always has. So, he's with the woman he loves and thinks she loves him, too. She's only using him to get rewards from the sponsors. At the end of the book after they win and she's out of danger, she throws him away like a used, snotty tissue. Exchanging sexual contact for payment? I call that a spirit of prostitution. With all the Hollywood sex scandal stories lately, I'm not surprised they wanted to make that into a movie to teach children how it works.(For more on Hollywood's grooming of children, check out this review of the recent children's movie Show Dogs, a movie that was teaching children how to go to their happy place and let adults touch their private parts.) The prostitution angle in the book is a bit subtle. I've cut through the fluff and nonsense to call it like it is.

The other reason I couldn't get more into it was that the main character was dumber than a box of hammers unless the plot needed her to be smart for something specific. She kept believing lies and getting confused about the truth. One of the lies she made up in her head was that the love interest didn't really love her. She didn't have a good reason to believe that. All his actions were love and caring. Her reaction didn't make much sense. In writing there's something called the lie the hero believes. I think it goes back to Greek stories. The way it's supposed to work is the hero believes a lie until almost the end. Along the way a minor character knows the truth and keeps telling the hero the truth, but because of the lie the hero can't accept the truth. Right before the final battle with the enemy, he learns the truth for himself and uses the truth to win the battle.

If you've ever read a book in which the hero believed a lie until nearly the end, and I know you have, that's where it comes from. The problem is it almost never works. Very, very few writers can make the lie the hero believes believable. It nearly always makes the hero look like an idiot. That's why I don't use it in my books. It's annoying to read about a character who's being slapped in the face with the truth the whole book until it finally clicks at the end. What kind of a moron is that? And how often is the hero able to use the truth, an intellectual knowledge, as the means to win a physical fight? Hmm, hard to remember. I'm not saying I'll never use that device. It can be very powerful, but I don't like it. It almost never works. Ancient Greek literature is boring for a reason. I would have to find exactly the right idea for it to work the way it's supposed to. Maybe that could be a personal challenge.

 The water is still out. Next week could be the week.

Have a great weekend.

Still No Water

The water is still out this week. Between heating up the solar shower and collecting water from elsewhere, it's very tiring and time-consuming. The solar shower is hanging from the ceiling in my normal shower. I'm tempted to buy something like this shower tent, but that's a lot of money for a temporary problem, although it would make things a lot easier.

To work on book covers I need cold, running water to keep my paint brushes clean. I use acrylics. Cold water causes the paint to bead up and come out of the brushes more easily. Warm or hot water would make it runny and sticky. It takes a while to clean brushes. The most I can do until the water is fixed is brainstorm ideas and make sketches.

The other day I ordered the second Hunger Games book in French. While waiting for it, I thought I'd read The Maltese Falcon, since it was "only" 232 pages. It took over a week. The book has slang from the 1920s and possibly the decades leading up to then. Imagine all that slang converted to French. Some of it I could figure out. Not only did my dictionary not have a lot of the words, Google translate didn't know them either. Nevertheless, I was able to get through it. At some point I'll watch the movie with Humphrey Bogart. Maybe it'll be on Noir Alley one day.

I've started book 2 of the Hunger Games. The first few pages and a lot of chapter one were a breeze. The problem with book 1 was the translator's extensive use of the thesaurus. It's supposed to be young adult with a smaller vocabulary, but I had to look up tons of words I've never seen in all the adult-level books I've read. Are those books less "literary", or the did the translator go crazy with the thesaurus? I'm kind of thinking he went crazy. After the first little bit of book 2, the thesaurus came out. Even things like Alice in Wonderland or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea weren't like that. So far, looking words up for book 2 hasn't been as tedious as book one. Divergent, which I mentioned the other day, was much more readable. It's young adult, too, and feels more like what a YA book should be.

I didn't entirely like the first Hunger Games book, but that's something for a different day. Anyway, I'm kind of floundering this week.

Have a great weekend.

No Water

It's day three without water. The place I live has a well with a pump. It stopped working Wednesday. The landlord has no urgency to get it fixed. I thought something would be done right away, but now it looks like next week at the earliest. In the landlord's universe, other things come first. Fortunately, a while back, I ran across the solar shower. I got one of those from Walmart and a heavy-duty hook to hang it in the normal shower. When full, the solar shower weighs about 40 pounds (18.1437kg). I had to get the hook in the right place. Fortunately, I've had to replace part of the ceiling in the shower, when the landlord wouldn't do anything about it, so I knew right where a beam was. Water at room temperature is very chilly. I have to preheat part of the water enough to warm the bag up.

I've collected rainwater to be able to flush the toilet. It takes about 3 gallons(11.35liters). After the blog I get to go collect spring water to be able to do some laundry. Fortunately, I was in pretty good shape on that, when the water went out, but I'm going to need clean pants and such. I've had to buy water from the store by the gallon and by the 2.5 gallon container. The 2.5 one goes by the sink to be able to wash my hands and do dishes.

It takes a long time to collect water and do all these extra things. I could use a lot of prayer. It looks like it's going to be a long weekend.

Have a great weekend.

Cheaper Books

Back in the old days, when Amazon only sold books, I used to buy used, "like new" paperbacks there for one penny plus shipping and handling, which could be around $1.65 to $1.80. Not all of them were a penny, but a lot were less than a dollar. It was awesome. I could get 10 books for around $20. Then one day Amazon raised shipping to $3.99 per book, splitting the extra profit with the sellers. It became harder and harder to find books for a penny after that. Today 10 books cost more like $40 to $50 or more. I stopped buying nearly as much fiction, not that I was buying a whole lot before. I never bought 10 books at a time. It's just a round number. Amazon basically killed the fiction market for me. Then the Kindle came out, but a lot of books are more expensive for a digital copy than the print version. I can't justify spending $9.99 for a fiction book that costs Amazon about $0 to send. It's not worth it for something I can read in less than a day. Mostly I download free or cheap books. Rarely do I spend more than a penny per page for fiction. Non-fiction reference books are different. I'll spend real money for those but not for fiction that's gone in a few hours.

Now that I'm putting a lot of time into learning French, I need to do a lot of reading. It's hard to find cheap, digital French books on Amazon or paperbacks either that I find interesting or worth reading. There's tons of stuff from the 1800s, but... And they won't let me download books from Amazon.fr, because the world is divided regions, and I'm in the wrong region. It's absolutely insane the way the regions work. Tip: if you get a multi-region DVD player, you can buy all the foreign DVDs you want from anywhere in the world you want in any language you want, including English.

Anyway, I found cheap copies of book 1 of Divergent and Hunger Games. I finished Divergente 1 this week. I'd been keeping track of the price of book 2 hoping it would drop. The day I went to order it, it had doubled overnight. Plus shipping. I started on Hunger Games instead. Lately, I've noticed that Amazon doesn't always have the lowest price anymore like they used to. I went searching online for Divergente 2 and found something amazing.

Abebooks.com

You can buy used paperbacks on Abebooks.com starting around $3.37, including shipping. Yes, including shipping. It's like Amazon in the old days adjusted for inflation. They didn't have book 2 of Divergente that cheap, but I got book 3 for $3.64 shipped. I can wait for book 2 to drop. I also picked up the Maltese Falcon for $3.64. I've been wanting to read that for a while now, but it costs too much in English. In all, I ordered five books in French that I find interesting enough to read for $18.46 total. On Amazon it would have cost me at least $50 and realistically quite a bit more. For instance, I bought Prelude to Foundation for $3.65. On Amazon it's $17.73, including shipping. The ebook is $9.99.

Not every book on Abebooks is going to be $3+. Some of the things I looked at were $5+, but that was still cheaper than Amazon. And speaking of Amazon, I've read that they bought Abebooks. Let's hope they don't ruin it.

Have a great weekend.

Like the Rains of Venus

It looks like the rain is going away for a few days starting Monday. The forecast says three days with no rain. This is the third week it's either rained every day or almost every day. Some days it's rained before sunrise but been cloudy, making it hard to keep track. Sometimes, there's so much water dripping off trees it sounds like it's sprinkling, when it's not. When there's been some sun, I thought it was clearing up, but the clouds returned within hours.

Back in the 80s I read this Ray Bradbury story about a man living on Venus. The story was written before we knew what it was like there. All we knew for sure was it was very cloudy. The man in the story is going insane from the constant, torrential rain and incessant dripping. It never stopped. I've thought of that story more than once. I'm not a Ray Bradbury fan, but I still remember that one.

In winter, tree limbs break when ice piles up on them. Some have been breaking now, because of the water weight. There hasn't been enough time for them to dry out, and eventually they crack. Kind of like the man in the story. Trees have been falling, because the ground is saturated and has softened. Sometimes I'll hear something fall and wonder whether it was a limb close by or a tree farther away. I think it's trees.

Yesterday, I was caught in flash flood conditions on the road. In one place there was a hole in asphalt where water was gushing up onto the road. It was outside of town. I don't think there was a water line there, but who knows? It looked like runoff from the hill beside the road had pushed up under the road. The rain became too strong to see much of anything, and we had to pull over. Later, when going back that route, a crew was out where that hole was. A couple of other crews were working on power lines. I saw where a mudslide had crossed the road. That was kind of weird. The hill next to it was only partially collapsed. There was grass in vertical strips separated by strips of bare earth. Past that the Chattahoochee River had overrun its banks flooding fields. I saw a house by the river with water all around it and a low-lying road with water flowing across it, cutting people off from their homes.

When I started on this blog, the sun was out. It looked like no more rain for today. Then the thunder started. It's raining again.

Have a great, dry weekend.