So. I’ll catch you up on more of the, er, New York City details later. For now, I have to get this book out of my system… a little.

I’ve just finished Sunshine by Robin McKinley, and it’s gotten me thinking about a lot of things, not the least of which is writing. But also of vampires, of characterization, first person narration, and the not-so-odd idea of obsessively needing to keep a library, for various reasons. (Not the least of which is because I am a voracious re-reader of books.) (Do I say ‘not the least of which’ a lot?)

I also find, in retrospect, that I write my blog entries and daily musings—but only about 10% of what I write fictionally—very much like Robin McKinley. It’s odd; maybe it’s because she was the first author who really floored me with stylistic grace, with the elements of capturing a character’s essence in text. She also has taught me how to use semicolons, colons, and emdashes—which I abuse profusely. (That was not a ‘not the least of which’!) I also fall back to parentheticals. Which she uses…a lot. Well, when she’s writing a quirky modern character, or when her narrator is feeling particularly ironic.

Sunshine was fantastic, but not for any one reason. I’d avoided it initially because it was (a) specifically McKinley for adults (Two words appear that are not age appropriate even for the most daring of YA editors, content aside); and (b) it involved vampires. But this time I picked it up, read every single one of the review blurbs, and was convinced that all this book was was McKinley taking up the reigns of a new horse and finding she could teach it a thing or two about equestrianism. (Oh! See that? I’m using absurd metaphors. You’d find the irony if you’d just read Sunshine, too.) What Sunshine ended up being was, well, shockingly original yet intensely familiar. A vampire fairy tale rooted in fundamental realism. (I love it—LOVE IT—when a narrator looks you in the face and tells you about his or her world without actually explaining anything utterly fundamental.

There are two ways authors tend to deal with the supernatural and fantastic when describing and laying out a world like that of Sunshine. Here, I’ll give you an example. Say you’re writing a story in which a character lives in a world in which Christianity exists, and that turns out to be integral to the plot. (Oh! Boy!) Say about 70% of the people in that world—locally—are Christian and the main character goes to church, and he/she’s a bit apathetic, but his/her mother is really obsessive and so he/she does it for her sake, even though the character’s got a crush on this adorable Islamic boy… yadda yadda. You can see why religion would play a role in the plot, right? But obviously wouldn’t BE the plot (that would be more about the character dynamics and world challenges, blah blah). The author—via the narrator—can either (1) assume you know what Christianity is, generally, so only tell you the details that are pertinent only to the main character’s peculiar situation (perhaps why the mother is obsessive and why the character is apathetic; maybe it’s the particular church, etc.), or (2) they explain to you what Christianity is. They either go back to the 300s and the Gnostics and give you the Byzantine/Roman adoption through the Dark Ages and the burnings of heretics and the Vatican and the Crusades and the converting of the British pagans and the seventeenth century religious wars and Puritans settling America… or they give you a piece of that whole thing—but they give it to you assuming you don’t know nearly enough about Christianity as they do so they simply must educate you so you can appreciate their storytelling (or history telling) genius.

Robin McKinley is the former. Even better—she drops thick globules of interesting things (slang, curses, hints of gods and a cosmic backdrop, personal histories, character quirks) so that you KNOW she knows—or suspects—this whole world’s details and minutiae down to the last atom, but she never downright takes you behind the painted cardboard set to show you the two-by-fours holding it up. And that, to me, makes it richer. Not knowing makes a story richer, not only because you can dream up the minutiae yourself as a reader, but because you can really fall into it and trust in the all-knowing power of the author. Because, to me, if an author is jumping up and down yelling, “I’m awesome! I’m awesome!” then clearly, they haven’t let you decide that for yourself, as the reader, and that reader’s decision is a power I like to have—and a power I would like to grant as an author myself.

Sunshine was so real to me because I didn’t know the back stories of every character—enough to understand their pertinence and personality, but not more than what our narrator could realistically know—and that there was no real point where the narrator truly broke the fourth wall, so to speak, and laid it out straight. Her tone was consistently flippant and a little half-mad (she talked to herself a lot) but that’s what made any foray at all into pseudo world-explanation bearable—because it was believable. And not all of it came at once. That’s what a lot of bad fantasy authors do (I am thinking of Terry Goodkind again)—throw a lot out at you all at once and expect you to keep that all in your head for the duration of the series. (That’s the other flaw; the 800-book series. I’m not so much a fan of the unending series. Yay, single self-contained novels. Heh. Personal preference…

What I particularly liked was McKinley did throw a lot out—in doses. First dose—a full slam into Rae/Sunshine’s hectic life at the coffee shop, as a baker, filled with details familiar to anyone from our world, so the sinking into the world is guided by gentle hands. Then, a healthy dose of thick characterization and situation-ing. (By that I mean presenting the situation of the main character and what got her there and why she should all of a sudden get dunked into a series of supernatural events. Sounds like screenplay, eh? Read my thesis; I discuss it as ‘stasis’.) Then boom, the no-mercy plunge into the new world. She gives us enough to understand the world but never a history lesson. She’s done this in The Blue Sword as well; a thick immersion into Harry’s life at the General Mundy before—plunk—into the hands of the Hillfolk. This way we as readers are rooted so firmly in the character’s own reality because of that steadying real world (or at least familiar and safe) introduction that we, like the main character, cling to that as we’re doused with all of the new and supernatural information and practically drowned by the series of events that follow.

Now, if there is any downside to Sunshine it’s that it lacks high consistent action—though believe me, I was not bored, ever. Ever. (By the by, I define ‘action’ as fighting, high adrenaline running-for-your-life cool cool stuff. Not that there wasn’t any—there was quite a bit—but it was, well, cast in a normal sort of light, as the whole book was.) A lot of the “happenings” were informational, or incidents and conversations—and believe me, conversations have to be the best thing to write or read for me, ever. I love that revelation of plot and character through dialogue. But unlike in Harry Potter, where Rowling has the convenient ability to pull Death Eaters out of her magic Death Eater maker and throw them at anyone she wishes—because clearly, there are an uncountable number of Death Eaters—McKinley doesn’t ever really use that Ultimate Villain of the World with Unending Henchmen to the same effect. (This principle is the same principle with Storm Troopers. It’s the evil henchman thing: so long as you’ve got a base world principle or world villain rooted in some terrible tyrannical plot of domination, you as a writer get an unending supply of henchmen to throw at your main characters. Think of the Bond movies.) Basically, I was expecting a vampire attack every ten pages, but no—retrospectively, thank the gods and angels, to use her (never explained in the book but often used) phrase—it was…classier?…than that.

Oh. And the climax was good. Even the “resolution”—I really always want to call it the “aftermath” in these genre instances, because, really. When you’re fighting vampires, there isn’t so much a resolution as a mess to clean up afterward, which I would prefer to call an aftermath—that was good. Really good. Though I find myself, like one of the reviewers in the front matter desperately wanting a sequel. SEQUEL! I just can’t not love that world. And characters. Oh, I’d go into further detail but. Well. You wouldn’t understand unless you’d read it.

By the way, I am finished with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—have been since the day it was released. Heh. Though I have a lot to say on it, I won’t really say it here. Who knows whose dreams might be spoiled?