review: how to write science fiction and fantasy by orson scott card

I don't usually read craft books. I love language, but for some reason, books about how it works just bore the brain right out of my head. But I needed one for school and I'd read some of Card's stuff before, so I thought, this is as good as any, right?

It was. I'm so glad I wasn't disappointed. There aren't as many books specifically for sf / f writing as there are for writing in general, and I wanted to read one of them first, and this was a good choice. It's a little outdated, at least in the copy that I have, but it's clear, conversational, helpful, and it goes over a lot of the specific problems, shorfalls, common mistakes and details that a person writing genre has to think about.

Recommended.

I got this book because I'm sort of a sucker for the off-beat diet books, but this one is actually really smart. Not long, not complicated, but written by someone almost entirely outside the food / diet industry and loaded with facts about the basic things that influence how we eat: plates are bigger so servings have gotten bigger, and the real thing we need to do is relearn how to see what a real serving looks like and put it on a decent-sized plate to get out brains to think it looks like a real meal and not a skimpy mess.

Brilliant.

The only thing I found wrong with it is that there's not a single mention of seconds and slowing down your eating-- you should definitely eat smaller portions, but you also shouldn't eat three platefulls of them, and you should eat slow enough that while your brain is telling you you've had enough, your stomach has time to agree so you don't keep eating forever, despite the smaller plate size. It's the freest and most reasonable "diet" I've ever seen. And it's mostly about how culture has messed up all the comparisons, not at all about how food has gotten worse for us (even though it has) or how we all have become weak and stupid (which we probably haven't, mostly).

Highly recommended.