{fiction, instead of lies}

A rare, gorgeously clear day brings us to the treehouse, a bit cold, but optimistic. Saints & Spinners wants to know which A.A. Milne character you are. I’m pretty sure personality-wise most people tend to hang between Eeyore or Owl, but my favorite character is the unsung Roo. However, I think most adults will end up being Kanga, won’t they? I mean, who would admit to being an unstrung manic like Tigger?!

I’m feeling a bit cranky about the L.A. Times article by staff writer Scott Timberg that derides Robert Heinlen as being a has-been and his work as not being anything classic to stand the test of time. “‘When an emerging science-fiction writer’s work earns him comparisons to Robert A. Heinlein,” Dave Itzkoff begins a 2006 New York Times review, “should he take them as a compliment?'” OUCH. I disagree — if I, as a YA writer had a YA science fiction novel compared to Heinlen, I would be beyond pleased. I love his books, and reading about tough, wary, narrow-eyed young people who, with steely determination, go out and take on the perils of the universe. Admittedly, I haven’t read that much of his adult fiction but Have Spacesuit– Will Travel is like the best combination of a frontier space western novel, ever. As a writer, I look at his work and see archetypes and the Hero’s quest written in all kinds of interesting ways. It’s a good exercise to mimic his style, for those who want to write adventures. No matter what anyone says, I can’t imagine that his YA novels, anyway, will ever really be unpopular (as long as no one else makes movies out of them — When I realized Starship Troopers was based on a novel of his? It just proved my point about YA novels and movies. BAD).

Cluck Roosterman is guest blogging at Bottom Shelf Books — promoting Punk Farm’s latest gig, their fundraising raffle. For only five bucks, you can buy in to a raffle to maybe win a painting of your favorite Punk Farm rocker. The money raised is going to the Central Massachusetts Arts Assembly, and to cover a few band expenses (band stuff — you know, instrument tuning, etc.). Check out the portraiture — punk rockers don’t sit still for their portraits, man. They make MUSIC. More awesomeness for a good cause.

Via Bookshelves of Doom, probably the most inappropriate YA book of all time is being celebrated by Jezebel, and with it the bygone YA literary trope of The Parent That Had to Die. (Remember them?) Ah, the 8O’s. One ten year span, one thousand percent awful…

“As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: “Please send us books.” But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

I’m sure that some of them will one day win prizes.

Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”

Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.”

Society has no idea what it means to have a hunger for books. The Literature Nobel Winner is eighty-eight and speaks her mind during her acceptance speech. Read It.

“Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.” If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”

Are you?

SF/F Alert: Tor Books has a great podcast out today, as Jon Scalzi interviews Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier (slaughtering her name genially). It’s an insane conversation, of course — from the zombies to the water to the books. Enjoy.

Further surreality can be found at in perusing the strange case of Topolino, Titty, Paperino, and Paperina, who have been counterfeiting something or other. Or so Minh says.

Via Bookshelves of Doom: the Kansas City Public Library’s new Plaza Branch is PHENOMENAL. The massive bookshelf/parking garage alone gave me chills. And the people have a BULL inside. How cool are they?

Those of us (AHEM!) who have gone away to write our book on a gorgeous island beach are home again. And she took pictures! To make us all jealous!

Not that we are ANYTHING but congratulatory, of course.

The children’s literature ezine we all know and love is up!!

You do NOT want to miss the interview with Kevin Hawkes with Mark of Mark & Andrea’s Just One More Book!, nor A Day in the Life with children’s author Esther Hershenhorn, by Kim of Kat’s Eye Journal nor Little Willow’s awesome feature on Books That Opened Your Eyes.

By the way: BACA’s back. Color me ever-so-pleased.

I always find statistics intriguing, and the new research from Junior Achievement and Deloitte which Anastasia reports on at Ypulse really gave me pause. If you believe the statistics, there are a high number of young people who don’t mind lying and cheating to get ahead, because there is a huge pressure on them to be successful. Those of us on the SF/F Cybils nomination team were talking about some of the books we’re reading, and some of the behavior of the characters. We were discussing them in terms of being realistic (For instance, how much of being a bully is over-the-top? Does anyone’s parents, in this day and age, really allow that?), but Anastasia’s concern was an alleged lack of ethics within an entire generation. It’s an interesting discussion, you’ll want to drop in if you have time.

As part of the Cybils SF/F nominations team, I’m deeply interesting in why many people think science fiction isn’t literature.

Don’t know if you’ve been following the J.K. Rowling v. Publishing Company story, but Camille offers and update. And even though this blog is normally ALL Bear (ahem), GO Stanford!!!! Seriously — I very much respect JKR’s authorial control over her characters and books, etc., but I think she’s going after the wrong people, here.