{fiction, instead of lies}

In Praise of Book Reviews: Reviewing for the 48 Hour Book Contest (for which I read a whopping 2,004 pages, so I don’t feel quite so bad anymore that it was only 7 books) made me uncomfortably aware of the hyperbole of critique. I always feel just a bit leery when I read jacket blurbs that say that something is “laugh out loud hilarious,” “edgy,” (I am actually to the point of getting a rash when I read the ‘e-word,’) or “brilliant,” or “luminous.” I almost never feel the same way, and it makes me feel like a right idiot to be the one person on Planet Earth who just thinks a novel is simply ‘pretty funny’ or ‘cute’ or “has quirky, lovable characters.” Especially when I read The Book Thief, I realized that all the adjectives in praise of the novel had been taken by writers before me (except for the word ‘humbling,’ which is what I felt about the whole huge scope of the novel and my talent next to the talent of Mr. Zusak). It makes me wonder what blurb writers do when they really don’t like what they’ve been asked to read and review. Are all the adjectives an elaborate cover-up for what they really mean? I smile whenever I read blurbs put out by friends of authors, and I solemnly promise not to make ANY of you write ANYTHING like that on books of mine, when I am rich and famou$, and I’ll do the same for you. If I like it, I’ll say so. If not… well, then look out for adjective overload and clouds of purple prose!

Dickens,The Movie: Last week (years late) I “discovered” graphic novels. Okay, I’d read some before, but they were comic books – which are old school, right? So, now that I’m hip with the new name, I’m keeping an eye out for more graphic literature that appeals to my reluctant reader little brother and sister but doesn’t insult them (like the horrible comic of the New Testament that someone gave me as a child. Pah!). I discovered a BBC site on Victorianism and Dickens. They’ve animated Bleak House, of all things, and it’s worth a quick visit.

The Light Fantastic: I read with interest last Sunday’s Washington Post interview with Shannon Hale, author of The Goose Girl and other novels. The nicest thing her readers have told her, Hale says, is that they didn’t realize they were reading fantasy when they started reading Goose Girl, which is actually a retelling of one of Grimm’s famous tales. They just opened up the book, and fell headlong into a good story. What a nice thought.

I remember hearing Bruce Coville speak at a Conference once on what he calls the “cool things per page” ratio in fantasy novels. The Goose Girl is full of things that aren’t part of the ‘now’ world, so the reader is drawn in quickly and propelled along, and then – hey! Magic! It’s always really neat to see the stuff we writers know about in theory work so well. I look forward to getting back into the mythical worlds and peopling them with such memorable characters that the fantasy element is the last thing on a reader’s mind… At least that’s the plan! (And I was really pleased to see an editor interview at Cynsations of Mirrorstone Books, a new imprint at Wizards of the Coast, which still is interested in unagented stuff from new writers, so there’s still hope for people who’ve never published in the genre before!)
Ah well, back to work.

I recently read another YA novel aimed at girls, and there was the usual roll call of products in it that I’ve counted before – brands of lipstick, jeans, shoes, lingerie, shirts, cars, etc. It wasn’t too invasive, it wasn’t overboard, but I noticed it because it really has become something that was once a buzz and now has grown to a roar. And I looked back at my two novels in progress and realized, to my chagrin, that I actually talk about certain TV shows and cooking professionals in those books. Am I guilty of trying to turn my readers into FoodTV afficianados? I hope not!

I agree with the point of view raised at Cynsations, that we perhaps label types of people with our choices of brands and labels. There is a lot that can be inferred from the way our characters shop, the places they go, the food they eat. And for a novelist, mostly this kind of thing is deliberate. But I do wonder, for those who are inserting brand names every other sentence …I wonder if they aren’t perhaps narrowing their audience. For instance, I know when I read a novel where the characters wear Juicy Couture hoodies, I know it’s not meant for me. It’s meant for girls with money to burn and small figures. My agent mentioned that this is also why many American novels cannot “cross the pond” and do well in the UK and Australia — because one of the things that doesn’t translate well the world around is hyper-affluence in young adults! It’s an uniquely American value, the importance of things… labels… brand names.

When I knew I wanted to write YA novels, I knew I wanted to write them to show the commonalities of the human experience, of the experience of growing up. I wanted every YA to have access to that little moment that feels like “Hey! That happened to me too!” so that they would know that they weren’t alone in feeling the way they did about a particular topic. As others have said, maybe it’s not for us to judge those who do put labels and brand names in their work, but I know that I’m going to be very sparing about it. The things that we have in common in this world are more important to me than the things which divide us – So if my character never drives off in a Lexus, drinking a Snapple and talking on her T-Mobile… well, I’ll guess she’ll still be okay…

The contest is over, and I only managed a lousy seven books! You can check them out on our review site, but I’m a bit disappointed I got nowhere near my goal of at least twelve. Sigh! Next time I’ll hole up somewhere in the woods where no one can find me! I hear we’re doing this again next year, so I’m already making plans.

Meanwhile, I just came back from the library. As a gift to myself in Editing Hell… I’m going to go and read another book.

There is nothing as cool as a trip to the library, unless it’s a trip to the bookstore with lots of money. These things should inspire me to get a real job, but alas… What I am inspired to do, though, is read the Cool Girl novels this weekend that I haven’t yet read. I may not get them all written up in time to qualify for the 48 Hour Book Challenge, but I’m already making lists and gloating because Liesel, main character in Markus Zusak’s latest novel counts as a cool girl, and that one’s already next to my bed. The most fun thing about this challenge is that I have an actual excuse to read all weekend. It’s awful that it’s Father’s Day and I have a birthday party to attend this weekend, this is going to severely cut into my reading time. Fortunately I’m going to see my father at my brother-in-law’s party; I can fling two gifts at them and leave, thereby cementing my reputation as an antisocial boor, and picking up where I left off on my last chapter…!

A.Fortis is always finding really cool graphic novels to share. I know nothing from that genre, so was pleased to read that Hyperion is publishing Abadazan, an intriguing graphic novel book-within-a-book kind of thing. It’s partly the journal of a girl named Kate, interspersed with pages from a novel of this fantasy realm, Abadazan, and includes a graphic novel section as well. It sounds really interesting.

Something else graphic I want to check out is a surprise find from Mo Willems. The cartoonist of Pigeon and Codename: Kids Next Door fame has written an older picturebook – kind of adult, really – called You Can Never Find A Rickshaw When It Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon A Day. It’s a collection of travel cartoons Willems did less when he embarked on a trip around the world less than a week after he graduated from college. What a cool idea, to wander the world sketching it as you go. Reviews says Willems captures world cultures ‘drolly,’ which has got to be the only way to capture them. I’ve heard the book might make a great gift, so possibly I’ll fling it at someone this weekend.

Sigh. The recent Kids and Family Reading Report states that only 29% of kids ages 9-11 years old are high frequency readers and that the percentage of kids who read for fun (which is the definition of ‘high frequency reader’) continues to drop off through age 17. There’s more detail, of course, talking about boys vs. girls, and telling us yet again that reading for boys drops off sharply after a certain age, etc., etc., ad infinitum, blah blah. The results of the study aren’t really new. Perhaps a more beneficial conversation would be a plan to do something about it involving parents, teachers, schools and communities. Then there could be a study published about how well it worked, and what else we could do to fine tune it. Imagine all the new information then! The more readers, the more thinkers; the more thinkers, the more informed and involved citizens in our world, and God knows we need people who are paying attention!

Oh, man, is it ONLY Tuesday!? I need a vacation already. Actually, I’ve just read that the U. of Hawai’i at Manoa is having their Thirteenth Biennial Conference on Literature: Imagining Other Lives, Other Times, Other Places, and I’m wishing I was going. Put on by Children’s Literature Hawai’i, the conference features one of my favorite middle grade writers, Karen Hesse, and I just realized that if the PhD plans I had only a few years ago had panned out, I’d already be there. Sigh.

(Actually, I’m not sure what the sigh was for… I have enough to do this week without homework!)

Well, I feel slightly vindicated for my little grip last week on how so much of YA fiction is turning into a long commercial to a particular brand of something or other, since Monday’s New York Times carried a piece on the same thing. Though there is still no money changing hands (and that’s really intriguing to me – would you, as a writer, do free advertising?) CoverGirl cosmetics is well mentioned in Cathy’s Book, and the company is launching a website in August to help tie the two.

Despite the buzz, this pat-my-back, I’ll-pat-yours routine isn’t anything new, really. I guess it’s simply the first time there’s been a formalized arrangement of you change that eyeliner to a color we make, we list your novel on our website, but there are some issues that bear deeper thought. How long is your publisher going to be your publisher if they’re taking funds from someone else to create your book? How long until that touches you as the writer?, On one hand, it’s a nifty idea to have websites and addresses where readers can get more information on the book, and from what I hear of the novel, it’s kind of an updated, choose-your-own-adventure which uses technology to go even further with the storyline. That’s excellent! On the other hand… further ad space for makeup products? Even a tiny bit of marketing to teen readers seems in bad taste. Mmm, gonna have to think about that one…

The Chron did a great piece this morning on Frank Portman and his new novel that’s already generated so much excitement (in its FIFTH printing after only two months on the shelves – wow!) King Dork. I had to laugh at Portman’s assumption that someday he’d be a literati, smoking a pipe and teaching school somewhere like Maine. Yeah, that’s how all humanities majors start out, isn’t it? And then you interact with both academia and reality for a bit, and realize you might need to think again. This novel wasn’t necessarily on top of my must-read list (okay, I admit it – I’ve grown out of my punk band phase), but the enthused folks at ‘not your mother’s bookclub’ have talked it up so much that it’s rapidly moving to the top of my pile.

Happy Writing…!

I’ve been whinging about the dearth of multicultural children’s lit. Aside from Mitali Perkins, whom we’ve gushed about before on this site, I am cheered to find a South Asian children’s site that is an annotated bibliography that keeps track of what’s new, what’s out there, etc., for the young reader. Yay!

You know I have gnashed and wept and griped before about the lack of centrally featured strong and impervious girls in literature… (I mean, it’s a bit of a shame that the Potter epics aren’t called Hermione and the Sorcerers Sword, isn’t it? Okay, okay, I know that may be pushing it, but…) I was pleased to find that East Bay maven Jen Robinson has started an official Cool Girls List, and at one point, it was going to be highlighting the top twenty coolest girls in literature. Hah! It’s much longer than that now, and I can think of many more!

Awhile ago, Texas illustrator Don Tate blogged about the lack of stories of black males who just … do stuff, like normal people. I let that thought percolate around in my head in view of the conversations I’ve had with The Agent, and remembering a very nice rejection I received which said that they appreciated that my character’s race wasn’t a subject of angst for her, that it was a “refreshing change.” I am encouraged by his comments and the number of people who have linked to the post, discussed it, etc., and I know I have my work cut out for me… maybe we all do.

Every once in awhile I find new bloggers on my favorite topic, YA and Children’s Books, and I get a warm fuzzy. I’ve got more than a warm fuzzy now, I’ve got The Mother of All Challenges for a book reading/reviewing extravaganza. (Yes, I, too, am prone to hyperbole. I even like spelling the word. Wheee!) How many books can you read and review in 48 hours?! Game to find out? Some of the participants are professional reviewers, ALA types, junior librarians, etc., and your honor as a complete weekend slacker and constant-reader-of-YA-novels-while-eating-in-bed is at stake. The person who started this thinks she can read/review, count ’em, 40. Four-Oh. Are you in?

Final rules and information will be available on Thursday, June 15th, and then it’s on. And here’s a review of the rules so far:

The weekend is June 16–18th, 2006. Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. Start no sooner than 7:00 a.m. on Friday the 15th and end no later than 7:00 a.m. Monday. So, go from 7:00 p.m. Friday to 7:00 p.m. on Sunday… or maybe 7:00 a.m. Saturday to 7:00 a.m. Monday works better for you. But the 48 hours do need to be in a row.

The books should be about fourth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine, especially if any adult book bloggers want to play.

It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. If you want to skip sleep and showers to do this, go for it (but don’t stand next to me). If you want to be a bit more laid back, fine. But you have to put something into it or it’s not a challenge.

The length of the reviews are not an issue. You can write a sentence, paragraph, or a full-length review.

For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. When you write your final summary on Monday, let that be the last thing you write that day, so for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak.

Your final summary should be posted online after 8:00 on Monday morning, even if you finished your 48 hours on Sunday. Include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading, and any other comments you want to make on the experience.

Hit the link here to sign up, and start stockpiling food in your bedroom. Good luck!

Every once in awhile I find new bloggers on my favorite topic, YA and Children’s Books, and I get a warm fuzzy. I’ve got more than a warm fuzzy now, I’ve got The Mother of All Challenges for a book reading/reviewing extravaganza. (Yes, I, too, am prone to hyperbole. I even like spelling the word. Wheee!) How many books can you read and review in 48 hours?! Game to find out? Some of the participants are professional reviewers, ALA types, junior librarians, etc., and your honor as a complete weekend slacker and constant-reader-of-YA-novels-while-eating-in-bed is at stake. The person who started this thinks she can read/review, count ’em, 40. Four-Oh. Are you in?

Final rules and information will be available on Thursday, June 15th, and then it’s on. And here’s a review of the rules so far:

The weekend is June 16–18th, 2006. Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. Start no sooner than 7:00 a.m. on Friday the 15th and end no later than 7:00 a.m. Monday. So, go from 7:00 p.m. Friday to 7:00 p.m. on Sunday… or maybe 7:00 a.m. Saturday to 7:00 a.m. Monday works better for you. But the 48 hours do need to be in a row.

The books should be about fourth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine, especially if any adult book bloggers want to play.

It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. If you want to skip sleep and showers to do this, go for it (but don’t stand next to me). If you want to be a bit more laid back, fine. But you have to put something into it or it’s not a challenge.

The length of the reviews are not an issue. You can write a sentence, paragraph, or a full-length review.

For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. When you write your final summary on Monday, let that be the last thing you write that day, so for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak.

Your final summary should be posted online after 8:00 on Monday morning, even if you finished your 48 hours on Sunday. Include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading, and any other comments you want to make on the experience.

Hit the link here to sign up, and start stockpiling food in your bedroom. Good luck!

(I should warn you that this is the Web equivalent of drunk-dialing: blogging about writing while in depressing Edit Hell. I apologize in advance for the negative tone.)
I have been thinking I should get a real job.
There’s got to be millions to be made in marketing, but I’ve never been interested in creating consumerism and pandering to corporations. I want to be a writer, and do boring things like connect with people and help YA readers and middle grade kids know that, whatever their home life or school situation is, they’re not alone.
How silly of me.

Today I read Kate Brian’s Lucky T and realize that a ‘real’ job is just inches away. I can now engage in my chosen profession AND siphon some of the cash to be had in marketing jobs. Product placement is the key! Kate Brian is living the dream: she’s a marketing guru disguised as a YA writer.

I knew it by the time I got to the third chapter of her novel. I stopped, picked up pen and paper, and went back to the beginning of her novel, so I could take notes on her awesome huckster technique. This is what I found:

In the first chapter of her novel, Brian mentioned:
Victoria’s Secret, Miss Sixty low-riders, Red Bull, Diet Coke, (Anne of Green Gables, Tolkien, Beauty & the Beast) Hubba Bubba, Hello Kitty & “Micky-D’s.” Chapter 2 listed the Escape Hybrid, Pizza Hut Express, and McDonalds. Chapter 3: American Eagle, FCUK, BBQ Lays, Proactiv, The Matrix, NBA Blazers, (Pier 39 – a place, so that’s iffy) Advil, Cosmo Magazine. Chapter 4 gave me Fudge-Covered Oreos, Snapple, Febreze, Travel Network, DKNY Jeans, Hilton, Discman; Ch. 5 inserted Avon’s Skin-So-Soft, Mack trucks, Kill Bill, and Wes Craven, the movie-maker, and led to Chapter 6 with Oral B Brush-ups, J-Crew, Collin Farrell, NCAA College Basketball 2K3 on Xbox and SportCenter. It goes on. By Chapter 9, I had to get another pad of paper. It included: 49ers, BCBG, Abercrombie, (Captain Underpants) Shape Magazine, Power Rangers, Maxim Magazine, Lindsay Lohan, iPod, WNBA, Tom Hanks,( the movie, Castaway) Ch. 12: Kodak, FedEx, Barbie, Pacific Sunwear, Hollister Co., Haagen-Dazs, The Gap, Yoo-Hoo, Birkenstocks, InStyle Magazine, BlackBerry, Starbucks, Polo Sport Cologne.

It’s so simple it’s blinding. Character-driven fiction isn’t what 13-18’s want to read, anyway. They simply want to be told what to wear and where to get it. And then they can get on with the rest of their fairytales lives and live happily ever after.
Right?
Okay. I know that publishers these days publish some novels to be commercials, books not destined for bookshelves longer than a season, thus okay to be filled with soon-to-be-dated pop culture references and this week’s fashion trends. I realize that in many ways publishing is no longer about the book, or, heck, the reader and it’s all about the money and how best to make it fastest. That’s part of being in a capitalistic culture. And I want to state that I don’t think that eliminating all brand names and popular culture references from a novel is necessary. I know that there are some things that are sort of American icons like Disneyland or well-known landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the names of movies and actors, bands and singers, etc., that can bring a little anchoring to your story, and I’m CERTAINLY all for mentioning the titles of books that the characters are reading or have read. But enough is enough. Am I hoping to sell Proactiv to my acne-scarred reader? Maybe entice them to whine for more allowance to try the newest Starbucks drink or scarf down the flavor of the month at Haagen-Dazs or the newest double cheese burger at Burger King and pack on a few more pounds? If I am… why?

I think my mother kind of created a monster when she used to rip the brand tags off my (secondhand, name brand) jeans and tell me that Mr. Levi-Strauss didn’t pay rent to be advertised on my body. (Too bad I didn’t appreciate this point of view at the time.) I can’t do this pop culture thing. I’m too disbelieving and too cynical and frankly, too slow to keep up with the mercurial ebbs and flows of what’s hot and what’s not. Trying makes me feel like a junior high geek (that ill-concealed persona which lurks beneath my urbane adult self) and also seems to make me Least Likely To Succeed as a writer. And, finally, it makes me feel dishonest to think of putting so many products in a story, as if I’ve cheapened the act of creation it is to write a story. I’d feel like a total sell-out. What does Abercrombie & Fitch or Bayer or Tide or Jenny Craig or NyQuil or NoDoze or any other pharmaceutical, cleaning product, food brand or clothing line have to do with telling a good story? And it always begs the question, to me: what’s the benefit for the writer? Are these people paying her somehow?

Every teen I know is already so self-conscious that what they have isn’t the best thing, the right thing, the things that the leaders of the pack have had for weeks and are about to throw away for the next big thing that they’re halfway insane. If you’re writing for kids because you love that age group, why would you help make them crazier by writing them ad copy in lieu of a story that can take them out of the noise in their heads, for just a blessed minute?

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. — W. Somerset Maugham

I don’t know what they are, either. After another round of edits (and a truly horrendous conversation with *S.A.M., resulting in him actually feeling the need to explain emigrate vs. immigrate, and saying the words “show, don’t tell” — the horror!!) I now officially feel that I know nothing about novels, nothing about writing, nothing about my characters, and all too much about the nature of certain people on the East Coast. That’s okay – I know someone else on that side of the world, and she remarked once that she was glad to be back East where she can be rude. This North Bay girl might need to take some lessons from a Jersey Girl and be a little rude…

The Detroit Free Press is following one of their writers through the process of writing and selling a book. Her first installment is a funny piece on readers and writers and that frightening statistic of 80% of Americans who believe they have a book within them (That number comes from Brian Hill and Dee Power, the authors of “The Making of a Bestseller: Success Stories from Authors and the Editors, Agents and Booksellers Behind Them” (Kaplan, $19.95).). Well, we have that in common, I suppose, but it’ll be interesting to see if the author perseveres to get it written and actually sold. Anyway, statistics (those lying, twisted things) are always being collected to reveal that there are far more novelists than readers, and writers often have to take a deep breath before committing themselves to the act of creation that is writing. But once you’re in for the lunacy of writing, why stop there? Why not believe that you can win tickets to the Dublin Writing Festival, too? It’s just one more impossible thing to believe before breakfast.

A really annoying trip to the bookstore with the Littles (younger sibs) proved to me something I’d long suspected: that there really are very few good chapter books for the transitional group from early readers to longer fiction. There aren’t as many multicultural books as there should be. There aren’t as many great books for middle grade readers as they should be, and there really aren’t as many books for reluctant readers as there could be. This is NOT to say that there aren’t some marvelous books out, but in the huge chain bookstore where I was (yuck, and I usually patronize independents, but I wasn’t near one), I saw huge, thick books that beckoned middle grade readers who were already competent, not interesting books for struggling kids. I saw a lot I didn’t like, and it made me want to go home. Funnily enough, an article I ran across in the School Library Journal website came to the same conclusions! I feel vindicated… but now I’m worried, too. What are we writers going to do about this? I hope publishers are listening, too…
*secret agent man, in case you’d forgotten.