[fiction, instead of lies]

For these guys, it started with Weeatabix.

Well, not really. Weeatabix is some kind of British cereal [and why is it that so many of the cereals from the olden days sound like some kind of mechanical invention or cleaning product? I mean, Weeatabix? Shreddies? Ruskets? I somehow imagine robots. But I digress. Badly.] that looks like hay bales, and as every company in the world seems to do, they had a contest — in this case, it was a straw (hay) bale contest, in support of British farming. £5000 went to the winning farm, and basically all they had to do was create art.

These mammoths are the winning design by farm folk Nikki and Paul Grant and David Sharpe, and were a big hit for obvious reasons. They won the money, and celebrated, I’m sure, and that will probably be a great story they can dine out on for years.

People frequently ask me how I come up with ideas for stories. Truthfully, it’s a question that gets posed to every author, and I will join the chorus in saying that I don’t really know. A lot of stuff churns through the subconscious and leaks out in dreams, but few of those ideas ever hold up to the rigorous light of day and the process of writing and revising (okay, that worked for Stephanie Meyers, but I’d have to ask what she’d been eating before going to bed). I have a suspicion that everyday life is what gives writers most of their fodder. Like Nikki Grant’s mother, who found the whole Weetabix art contest inspiring. She’s now written a children’s book about Mambo the Mammoth. (For obvious reasons he can’t be Manny, though he looks a lot like the Ice Age cartoon character.)

Mambo has a Facebook page, even.

Sometimes just being on the sidelines while something happens is enough to fan a creative spark. Wonder what that spark will be for you?

Some of the titles of the books just now on my coffee table/trunk: The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930, by Charles Tilly, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was poisoned at home, work, and play, by James C. Whorton, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy, by David Gentilcore, and on reserve Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination, by Ian Blumney,

Oh, but this is way too much fun. If you can get your hands on a copy of The Arsenic Century, do. It’s one of the most engaging nonfiction reads I’ve dug into in awhile. Fun, fun, fun, and all in the name of work! Woot!

I love my job.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends.”
                                                     ~ Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

And the real truth is, wherever you go, there you are.

Greetings from the Writing Bunker! I’m pulling ahead with my middle grade WIP, and having fun with it, and still pondering how to get everyone out of the jams I put them into in my YA SFF novel. It’s a lot harder than I thought, to have High Adventure going on. People spend a lot of time being chased and running away, I notice.

You might notice that I have a “in case you need book report fodder” note on the right hand side of the page now. That’s because I’ve been asked for another interview, and one of the interviewers first questions was, “What are your books, and what are they about?”

–??!!???!!

No, seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

So, to avoid feeling humiliated and/or taking a flamethrower to well-meaning but basically disinterested people who have been assigned to interview me, I’ve gathered some information to which I will point those kinds of interviewers so they don’t have to actually talk to me, if they’re inventive. I think I can safely declare us charter members of a newly formed Mutual Disinterest Society.

Bah.

In mid-July there was a lot of chatter going on – at least on this side of the pond – about a series of books written by Enid Blyton. The publishers and the estate of Enid Blyton are going to update the language in the books from Archaic British English to Modern British English, in hopes of exciting a few more readers and widening the readership of a series of books, most of which were first published in the 1940′s, and contain pejorative phrases like “dirty tinker” to describe travelers or gypsy people, and “an awful swotter” to describe someone who liked to study and read.

The furor was distressing to me, because so many people raved about “preserving” this series, and the language of the time, and how awful it was that the books were losing their special, uniquely British touch to be bowdlerized into the ordinary and the average. While I understood the preservationist point of view, and the fact that the books reflect the values, language and social mores of a bygone era, and that Children Should Be Made to Read Up, and Great Literature Ought Not To Be Brought Down To The Common Level, the fact remains: living, breathing kids in the now could use more good books (and I view Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, with its racist, sexist and classicist language as “good books” with only the most skeptical eyes) to read, and the publisher, of course, wants to make more money, as do Enid’s heirs.

The mindset of “children should read up” reared its ugly head again recently when I read a discussion of The Novel: An Alternate History – Beginnings to 1600, by Steven Moore. This is a massive and allegedly scholarly tome, being deconstructed by a thoughtful, well-spoken woman, but the book itself and her subsequent blog post is not the point — what the author says in his introduction is what struck me.

“Do you want to know a secret?”
“Literature is not for everyone… when it comes to fiction, there’s a democratic assumption that anyone with a basic education should be able to read and enjoy any novel… Hence some feel it is reprehensible to write a novel beyond a high school reading age. … Why this bleeding-heart concern for ‘the mass of readers’, ‘the common reader’? They have more than enough to satisfy them, as the best-seller lists indicate; most of the publishing industry caters to their tastes. Why this intolerance for the minority of readers with a different textual orientation who prefer an alternative kind of fiction… Such fiction is challenging and unconventional, granted, but the fact that it’s not for everyone doesn’t make it elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed. It’s simply not for everyone.”

That really both blew me away, and really grieved me all at once, because I AM that “everyone” who was not raised and polished to special literate status, who didn’t study Greek mythology or Roman Classics or histories or Shakespeare, even, until college, or anything which would have propelled me along toward the shining towers of the Ivy Leagues. I AM that everyone, that nobody to whom Moore directs this, sneaking around the edges of what Other People read and thought, and how Other People lived, and sampling bits and pieces of that through literature.

How else was I supposed to become? And he thinks to criticize me for being the common reader!? Really? If you are not tied with a silver bib and fed Plutarch with a platinum spoon, how else are you supposed to arrive at these Big and Lofty Thoughts and ideals he espouses as especially for that “minority of readers”?

Perhaps what bothers me more is that there are people who found his statements obnoxious on the surface, but somehow true at heart. They felt critical of his tone, but indicated that literature which “pandered” to our “escapist childhood instincts” should really be avoided, and that we are a world of indiscriminate readers who need to elevate and raise ourselves, or else we get what we deserve in this world — the low, the inauthentic, the common and the trashy.

Or, you know, popular culture.

Read UP, children of the world! Be better than you are, be more worthy of the literature you’re supposed to love…

Mr. Moore attempts to justify the deliberate manufacture of a work which is only accessible to a few, not to make the work better, but simply to engage in an exercise of writing which somehow says that the people who read the work are better. This, to me, is “elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed.”

Imagine that the language being discussed in these works wasn’t the language of archaic Britain, and wasn’t language “beyond a high school reading age,” but was something like African American Vernacular English – or as it was called when I was an undergrad Black American English, or BAE. It’s not for everybody, certainly. Nobody panders to people who would read works written in dialectical English primarily used by inner city African Americans, certainly not the mainstream publishers. Would people be concerned about preserving a work (by not altering it), if it were written in “ebonics?” (Remember all the hysteria over that?) Would they find the work “elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed?” Would they feel the need to defend the language used?

Hmm.

Something to think about this breezy Wednesday morn. Or not. This one might give you a headache.

Intrepid librarian Jennifer at Now Taking Requests, passed this picture of some WAC’s of the 6888th Postal Battalion along to me, which she took at the America at War exhibit at the Museum of American History. Thank you, Jennifer! This is a truly awesome picture, and one of the rare ones. It’s obviously posed — people who actually work don’t stand around beaming at each other, usually — but it’s still so great of a find. Especially cool is the example of their uniforms; check out the sand-colored, belted “utility” outfit, in which the WACs worked in when it was cold – which it was, most of the time, in England. I wish I had made it to that exhibit. Oh, well. Next time!

After a busy morning, a few of the usual suspects met for lunch in the food court above the exhibit hall. Kelly Fineman, Tricia Stohr-Hunt, Laura Purdie Salas and Tech Boy scarpered off to find out if anything was good, while I dropped my bags and sucked down as much water as I could. To my surprise, Kelly came back with Laurie Halse Anderson in tow. (Kelly is friend with just everyone, which makes attending a convention with her awesome.) She sat down and proceeded to chat with us about anything and everything, and in the course of that desultory conversation, she passed along some good advice.

Laurie mentioned that when she first wrote Speak, everyone thought, “Ooh, awesome. We can expect more of the same.” Well, if you’re a L.H.A. fan, you know what came next — the riveting, can’t-put-it-down-ugh-gross Fever, 1793. Her publishing house — after all the praise and awards heaped on Speak — was not thrilled. First a gripping YA novel, and now a kind of middle grade novel that has the phrase “Bring out your dead” in it? The publishers could just not see it. Fever was repeatedly rejected, and Laurie had to change houses in order to have it see the light of day.

And of course, once Fever debuted, I’m sure her original publishing house must have been kicking themselves, as it was a critical and commercial success, and it’s been turned into a stage play, I understand. But the real point is that Laurie learned it was easier for publishers to “get” her if she divided her work — her straight YA novels go to one publisher, and her MG historical fiction goes to another. (The Zoe picture book she describes as “pure silliness,” and it doesn’t exactly fall into any category, but who knows? Maybe she’ll write another and start a new grouping.) Thus the publishers don’t feel like they have to worry about whatever novel follows a spectacular hit like Speak. Laurie’s “brand,” or what have you, is safe, at each publishing house.

As my editor has passed on two novels now, since MARE’S WAR, and has indicated that they need to be of a certain “caliber” in order to follow Mare’s path, I’m wondering at the wisdom of continuing to pitch things to her which are not specifically a.) historical b.) stories which include grandmas c.) stories about a single character who faces specific odds and achieves, in her own way. I am very much aware that people love, love, LOVED Mare, and while I enjoy writing historical fiction, I’d like to write all kinds of things — frankly whatever bubbles up in my brain. I don’t like the idea of branding — although the ladies at Shrinking Violets came up with a good discussion on it recently — and realize that maybe there’s another “home” for my novels which include dual protagonists, siblings, guys, and, um, aliens. (Okay, no aliens. Yet.) I’d like to bounce this off my agent, and see what he thinks.

Right then. Back to battling jet lag (it’s a lot harder coming back five hours than coming back eight, for some reason. Travel in the winter is easier.) and considering how to get back to work.

Sometimes beauty exists only in shadow.

“As an author, I write to that broken place in myself, knowing that I wasn’t alone then, and all of the things I was struggling with haven’t been resolved – which means there are oodles of teens still battling those very same issues, and still with no validation or acknowledgment of their struggles.”
- Neesha S. Meminger, author of SHINE, COCONUT MOON

Last month, author Sarah Mlynowski did a bit of Twitter PR for her new novel Gimme a Call, and challenged YA authors she knew to tweet a message to their high school selves. The answers she received were amusing, poignant, and thought-provoking. Colleen’s feature this month at Chasing Ray’s What A Girl Wants takes the question a step further: which books did your high school self need to read?

I thought it amusing that none of us listed a Francesca Lia Block book, none of us mentioned Franny & Zoey, and none of us mentioned and Judy Blume or Norma Fox Mazer. Maybe that’s ’cause we were already reading those during our senior year?

What would you send back in the time machine to Sixteen/Seventeen-year-old you?

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

Ach, Ginny, Ginny. You slay me with your first lines.

(For your edification, that was from Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. I’m meant to be putting books AWAY, not reading them, but you know how that goes. Frankly, it’s why there are books beached on the reefs of every small table, stair and window sill of my house; the tide never stops.

Ah, books. Make. Me. So. Happy. Never mind the tide, may I never stop wading in the sea.

Pax to you.

The coast near St. Andrews, Scotland, taken one fine evening from a train as we crossed a looong bridge. Lovely light, no?

The prompt today at Sunday Scribblings is “pilgrimage,” and that’s what I did this weekend.

Those of you who participate in the WBBT/SBBT know that sometimes you JUST LOVE an author, so the format of the Summer/Winter Blog Blast Tour enables you to ask them to talk to you — about their books, about their lives, what’s playing in their iPod, and what authors they’re reading. Barring MotherReader’s unfortunate restraining order¹ for the Mo Willems incident(s), (*!!!*) most of us keep our fangirling and stalkerish tendencies under wraps. *cough* You’ll be gratified to hear that I have taken stalking to a whole new level! Wonderland had so much fun interviewing her for WBBT this past November that yesterday I stalked author Elizabeth Wein all the way to her change ringing rehearsal at an ancient cathedral, and then to her house! And she’s very, very funny!

Okay, it was supposed to be a short visit — as in, I’ll just hop a train early in the morning and bring her a few goodies from the United States. After all, those of us who live abroad have to keep each other in Hershey’s, right? But the short visit turned into two meals and a 12-hour tour of Perthshire, conversing on a whole wealth of topics that continued until literally minutes before the doors on our eight o’clock train closed.

Of course, there were the whole “Liz Is Trying To Kill Me” episodes, which included a dizzying spiral stairwell that was exactly as wide as my shoulders — and getting more narrow as it rose, a river so high she called it a “death trap” and wet rocks slicked with moss, but I bribed her with 20 pounds of candy to let me live, and so we went home. We will just draw a veil over how dorky I looked crawling up the rocks on my hands and knees. Yes. Drawing a veil. Now.

Ahem.

To conclude: real life authors are lovely people, and should you have a chance to meet one in his or her own home environment, they will often feed you, and let their children take blurry, close-up pictures of you. It’s a lot of fun. (Pictures to follow; Flickr is uploading at the speed of a wheezing asthmatic camel in a sand slide.)

It’s the 78th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition! Submit your children’s or young adult fiction! The reading fee is GRAND PRIZE: $3,000 cash and a trip to New York City to meet with editors or agents. Writer’s Digest will fly you and a guest to The Big Apple, where you’ll spend three days and two nights in the publishing capital of the world. While you’re there, a Writer’s Digest editor will escort you to meet and share your work with four editors or agents! Plus, you’ll receive a free Diamond Publishing Package from Outskirts Press.

Entry Deadline: May 15, 2009.

The most fun about this contest is that it’s open to everyone. Check out the small print at Writer’s Digest.

1. We all know that’s a joke, right? RIGHT!?!?↩

Over the weekend, the Poetry Princesses launched back into the fray with work on the sestina project we started six months ago (oy!) and were talking about a certain excellent poem, which is rich in imagery and feeds the senses. We discussed the uses of language in poetry — specifically, some language which could be described as evocative and “salty,” which might raise brows and produce blushes. It was a good conversation, as we spoke of our strengths and limitations in terms of language. I didn’t add much, but it was good to be a part of the circle.

I’m always in awe of the Princesses, because they’re so very real — in ways that I am not, and fear that I can never be. It seems that I am not yet grown up enough to get past the way I was raised, the voices in my head are still ones belonging to my parents and other adults — and I don’t yet see myself as tall enough to escape from their shadows. My writing struggles — like a worm on a hook — to escape. I feel sometimes that I’m standing in the stirrups, cranking back the reins on a runaway horse, which is pawing the air and doing its level best to throw me off and pulverize me. I hold back, I hold on, I censor and edit myself, and I fear that not only can I not do that, but that I can never be a great writer because of it.

A conundrum, in a way. But a necessity in another way.

Our talk about language got me thinking again about the conversation I had with my S.A.M. about a year ago, in which he exclaimed in frustration, “#$%&%! Let the character’s swear!” It was actually a pretty hilarious moment, as far as that goes, but I could not take his otherwise good advice. It wasn’t how I was raised (oh, that again), and it also seems in many ways as big a linguistic shortcut as dropping brand names in a manuscript.

(Now, I’m blogging about this because I’m thinking it through — please don’t jump down my throat and criticize what I’m saying. I really don’t care if or by what you swear or not. I’m just thinking “out loud,” here.)

I remember reading a very popular book a couple of years ago that got a lot of Cybils kudos, but we discussed it in terms of, “Wow, great story — wow, that’s a lot of language.” We went round and round about whether or not it was realistic to the setting (it was), or the ages of the characters (it was), but even having drawn those conclusions, a few in the group had some serious qualms.

Some print reviewers drew some of the same conclusions, and actually alluded to the idea that language and setting together were just iconic earmarks, a kind of hipster in-speak that meant less than nothing. The book received very mixed praise — which probably didn’t mean that teens didn’t read it — and we went on to the next book…

– but that incident stuck with me, and I’ve mulled it over for quite awhile.

Do some words seem to carry with them a kind of cachet, a kind of …intangible attitude? Does a character using profanity automatically allow us to assume other things about them — class? Religion or lack, race or ethnicity? I am not sure — and as long as I’m not sure, I want to use other words to allow readers to come to their conclusions about the characters I write in different ways. I don’t want assumptions or to use characterization shortcuts — unless that’s deliberately what I’m after. So many people have written that unless you’re disturbing the universe with your work, you’re not truly writing… that you’re not being real.

This is how it’s been explained to me: Using profanity in one’s writing is like… not ending a sentence with a preposition (English Major Nerdom Alert). You really avoid going there, if you can, but there are some times — especially in dialogue — when this makes the speaker sound overly stiff and clunky — that you simply have to recalibrate the sentence, or you’ll end up using it. What you’re talking about must be more important than how you talk about it. Surely if how you talk about it gets in the way, there must be a problem…

Are there times when you absolutely positively have to use vulgarity or profanity? Probably not. BUT…

As I write, the universe remains undisturbed. I cannot yet figure out how to disturb it, and keep true to where I’m at…

The Guardian had a piece today on Angry Arthur, by Hiawyn Oram, and the illustrations of Satoshi Kitamura. This book is part of “Get Glasgow Reading” this year for the 0-5 set, and it’s all about tantrums. The illustration really matches the fury of Arthur. Speaking of illustrations, via Chicken Spaghetti, the NYT has already chosen their 2008 Best Illustrated book list. A whole ton of them are Cybils picks. Yay, us.

The pink-tressed Laini (whose name I’m rather partial to!) is holding grudges in a way that totally makes me laugh — I have to admit that even three years on, I’d go in and FIND that waiter — which is probably a really bad use for a time machine).

Ooh, ick… Bookmoot’s been sick! She’s had an –ectomy or an –oscopy. Yikes! Go and wish her well while she’s on drugs and won’t remember! She might spill something good…

Book Evangelist Jen Robinson is guest blogging at ShelfSpace, which is part of ForeWord magazine. She talks about giving the gift of reading, and her number two suggestion in how to give kids the gift of reading really resonated with me:

2. Let the children in your life see that reading is important to you. Mention it when you encounter something interesting in a book or a newspaper. Turn off the TV, and let kids see you reading for relaxation. Bring books for everyone when you travel on planes. Listen to audiobooks in your car on road trips. Clutter up your house with books and magazines and newspapers. Demonstrate a culture that values reading, all types of reading.

I know too many people who only read TV Guide and don’t understand why their kids don’t just pick up the reading habit — and a habit of excellence in their schoolwork — just by osmosis. Go, Jen. Well said.

Like me, Sara’s always a little leery of books with big buzz, thus her enthused review of Graceling has gotten me on tenterhooks to come HOME and get some BOOKS already. This is killing me!

And on a personal writing note: Just got word from Secret Agent Man that my next book, MARE’S WAR, is being shopped to the UK, and is being offered to fifteen (!) houses. That seems… a bit… extreme to me, but here’s hoping something good comes out of it.

It was a buzz, and today it’s a launch. YA for Obama is a ning group started by “best-selling young adult authors,” according to a Condé Nast blog, who are concerned with creating a place for the under-18′s in the democratic process. Their goal? To get Mr. Obama elected.

It’s a social-networking site, and it’s open to everyone, even, curiously, people who don’t support the election of Mr. Obama, and sentient cheese life forms. Those best-selling authors include Holly Black, Judy Blume, Libby Bray, Meg Cabot and of course, the group’s founder, Maureen Johnson. There are really cool things on the site, including a link to The Living Room Candidate, which is a collection of scary political commercials since the dawn of televisions, and other spaces to discuss issues such as race and energy and how the economy is impacting people right now.

From many angles, this site seems pretty innocuous. I mean, it’s social networking, and we all like the social, yes? There’s a kind of sanguine bubbliness in the videos and posters, the slogan suggestions and the posters (and an eye-scalding overuse of the word “awesome”). Everything has a fun, positive vibe.

Except.
I’m not sure it IS positive.
I wonder about whether this site constitutes “undue influence” upon the young people at whom it is targeted.

Undue influence is about taking advantage of social position to influence someone to do or think something against what their will. It’s about using one’s authority to control people, really. It’s nasty – subtle and kind of crazy-making, really, because it’s hard to prove.

Undue influence is not as obvious as being forced to sign a contract at gunpoint — or under duress. Undue influence is more insidious, and subtle. It’s like being invited to your boss’s church, or having a college professor ask you on a date. It’s like your priest assuming you’ll vote a particular way because the parish would benefit from a certain person being in office. It’s taking a personal thing and making it someone else’s business, and it’s causing someone to do something they maybe wouldn’t have chosen to do on their own.

I know that this site intends to provide a place for people who aren’t yet voting age to enter into the democratic process, and use their creativity to help Mr. Obama get elected, and a venue like that is certainly a good thing. The content of the site isn’t what I wonder about. I do wonder whether we’re using our position as storytellers inappropriately. I wonder if we’re overstepping our role, and using that privilege as a platform from which to push political views.

In the early American days of big slogans and Manifest Destiny, there was a popular phrase: “…the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” I prefer not to think of YA’ers as a faceless, nameless force that is ripe for manipulation and direction, even in the kindliest meant ways. When I write for young adults, I write to remind them that adolescence doesn’t last forever, and that they’re not alone in being basically ignored, condescended to, or disenfranchised. It might seem like a social networking site aimed at including YA’ers in the voting process is a positive and inclusive step, but are we including young adults in a conversation that they want to have? Or is this another way of playing politics and using technology to reach kids “where they live”? Somehow, writers inviting young adults to join them as they stump for a political candidate just doesn’t seem entirely …kosher.

The other day, Liz posted that she votes for herself in terms of sanity, and keeping her blog politics free. I think I vote for me, too, and for keeping secret ballots secret, differentiating between what is politically or morally right and staying the heck out of trying to mix my readers with my politics.

Just thinkin’ some thoughts this fine sunny Monday morning.

Once again, the blogosphere has provided a sort of writer’s echo chamber ~ a place to throw out ideas and have them reverberate back changed and clarified and strengthened.

Viewing the serious state of things in the world can often cause artists to question their purpose and their place in the state of things, and it seems that more than just a few of us are wondering how to keep going. Via Writing & Ruminating, a really excellent piece by Jennifer Lynn Barnes on how to recapture the joy of writing.

“Now, however, I’ve discovered many other terrifying possibilities that writers have to make their peace with, too. Like what if you write a book and you sell it and then the chain stores don’t pick it up and readers can’t find it and the sales are disappointing and every time you try to sell another book, editors pull up those numbers and it’s a giant brand on your forehead, and you end up being worse-off than you would be if you’d never published a book at all? Or what if the book does really well, but all of the people who liked your previous books absolutely HATE this one and feel personally let down by you and it ruins your previous books for them because they just hate this one that much? What if (and this is, I swear, something every single published writer I know has thought at one point or another) the books you’ve done so far are just a fluke and you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security in thinking that maybe you don’t suck, but you really do, and soon you will be revealed as an impostor, full of suckiness?

Jennifer Barnes follows these ponderings on suckiness with fourteen concrete ways to keep your head, and keep your love of writing alive. Though she writes from the point of view of someone who has achieved mucho success with Golden and her Squad novels (and you may want to haul off and belt her with a fish you think she’s bemoaning her success — she’s not, so hold off on the piscatorial punishments), there’s plenty here for the unpublished writer as well. More encouraging suggestions follow in the comments.

This is a fabulous piece to read and reread and then push off into a strong sprint into your writing week.

Cheers, and thanks, Kelly and Jennifer.