Collection

Danger, Will Robinson! Plot bunnies ahead! But wow is this a GREAT mind-blower for Friday the 13th. The Atlantic on the possibility of truly ANCIENT civilization (... ?). Man, oh man, the fiction you could write riffing on this idea! OSUM. This appeals to me immensely, with my increasing thing about systems and scale ...

If you can fix this truth in your minds, namely, that the true use of books is to make you wiser and better, you will have both profit and pleasure form what you read.
--Sarah Fielding

Oh my gosh, what a splendid piece of YA literary history. Also, I love a teacher names Mrs. Teachum. I just like the word teachum, like hokum, absurdum, or bunkum but so much more appealing. Go make with the click.

And a little more from Smithsonian Magazine - e-cigs are using the same advertising gambits decades and even generations-since prohibited for combustible cigarettes. PLUS a back-to-school special ad, which I don't think the old school ever even tried. Stay classy, vape-producers!

Collection

At NPR online, Margaret Atwood discusses the next big form. I know from the moment the election was decided, MANY writers were vocal online and everywhere else about how they were already inspired to new dystopian work. To look at the form those works may take is a great exercise; and I think she may be right. The pace of traditional fiction cannot do justice to the creative juices flowing right now.

The evidence from Pech IV and Roc de Marsal clearly shows that the Neanderthals at these sites lived without fire not only for long periods but also during the coldest periods.

The Atlantic has a cool look at fire (hah). I've always been fascinated by the concept of the human hearth; hearth rights, the earliest human domesticity, the social contracts born of our control of and sharing of flame for warmth, protection, and cooking.

When a question is asked perfectly, it doesn’t need a tidy answer.

TA also has a wonderful link for writers (and readers!), just with its opener (well, or Faulkner's) on this article about asking the right questions. I have talked about the problems I have with creating tension on the page; as a writer of historicals set in known events and amongst characters who actually lived, it's too easy for me to think the (hi)story itself is enough. But it's necessary to know both WHY anyone else would find that enough, and to entice them to want to know. What gifts do we as authors bring to our characters ... ?

Which gets me thinking about my WIP's first line ...

The heat had begun to feed upon the red tile roofs of Ravenna, as if with a hostile will, when Amalasuntha was born more than eight days late.

Now, the CLOSING sentence (currently) is a literary in-joke. I love it, though it may not survive. It's worth reading the whole to get to it. Let's hope I'm getting the hang of this tension thing ...

(Confidential to my nerd readers: anyone else watch Caprica?)

Yeah, and it's a lot from The Atlantic today, but bear with me; they have some excellent writing!

Who else recalls Mike Mulligan and The Little House? Staples of my own childhood, I was thinking of the beautiful art for The Little House just a couple of days ago; the way it depicted time, especially; the way the house had a face, filled with emotion. This essay picks up those memories, and finds the relevance right now, with a powerful punch at the whole idea that innovation was invented recently. Y'all know how I love a good recency illusion and a The Dirty, Stupid Past refutation! (Want to get away from The Atlantic? Worth a click is the New Yorker story about Virginia Lee Burton.)

(S)uccessful in eliminating hair, and also in causing muscular atrophy, blindness, limb damage, and death.
Hoo baby!

Okay, back to The Atlantic, for another of my obsessions, hygeine! On the industry, social and cultural implications, and pain of feminine hair removal. Evolutionary racism, and Darwin's culpability. Ow.

This Never Happens to Me ... Genre Question!

Being an author of historical fiction, I often breathe a sigh of relief when other authors must decide on the genre of a given piece.

For my non(professional)-writer readers, you would be absolutely astounded at how difficult this can be. For one, category and genre are often confused - "YA" (young adult) is not a genre, but it often manages to pass for one, right or not. For two, where does one draw the line between historical and time travel, when sci-fi is not the point nor even much featured in a story? Or between dystopian and science fiction? Literary and coming-of-age, women's fiction or commercial ... the difficulties are confounding, and I am frequently relieved my own work sits pretty clearly in its place.

Today, though ... I have issues! But it's kind of fun.

In contemplating submitting a first page for my upcoming conference, I'm looking pretty hard at a certain ghost story I've been toying with for a couple of years almost.

Is "ghost story" an acceptable genre choice? Should it be sci-fi (though there is no science whatever, only fiction)? It has a sensual strain running through it, but it is NOT erotica by a long shot. There is romantic tension, but no way is this thing a romance - to me, it actually is, but in marketing terms, what I've written would not be understandably shelved with what publishing calls "romance".

I'm looking at one of my Reider pals in particular and a certain deliciously intemperate friend of mine, who have read the thing themselves, but would love feedback from anyone.

Where should I "shelve" an eerie and slow-building ghost story in the vein of Chinese fox legends?

What genre would you suggest?

Go-Nowhere Stories

I'm a well established darling-killer ...

Kipling had his Just-So stories, I have my go-nowheres.  Every now and then I get an idea and start writing something, but there is no ending, and I never even have any intention of finishing.  Short stories tend to crop up in my brain, I write for a a short while – long enough to feel limbered up – and am satisfied, with no conclusion.

I have, over time, shared two of these with my writing group looking for some way to wind up, and found nothing – and have tried to donate the ideas, actually.  They like the beginnings, and want to see endings, and at *least* one of my group’s members, I think would be really well suited to do these errant plot bunnies justice in a way I clearly don’t care enough to do.  Of course, it’s like shoes – once someone else has walked in them, it’s either kinda-gross or just uncomfortable to take them for a walk secondhand.  So these stories die on the vine, and I don’t particularly care.

It’s good writing, I’ll say that.  One in particular has some description in it – short passages, but highly effective ones – I have that consistent experience with, when it comes to my own writing; that I don’t feel ownership over the words, that I know “I did that” but I don’t feel possesive nor even proud, so much as pleased in much the same way I am pleased by ANYBODY’s good writing.  Reading good words is enjoyable, and credit for them is beside the point.  I don’t own whatever talent I have – it is simply the result of experience, of education, of my unique sensibility.  So I feel free to like it, and that’s fun.

Oddly, most of this stillbirth writing is sci-fi of one type or another, fairly “hard” (not fantasy, just extrapolations from possible science and so on).  The oldest one came many iterations of real technology ago, involving a magical cassette tape which could counteract sound waves in real time, in any given space, from the loudest to the most infinitessimally slight, and create for a listener the sensation of *absolute* silence.  If I ever even wrote any part of this (I’m sure I did), it was twenty years ago, and the remnants are lost.  Still, the idea remains – indeed, it is perhaps more viable than ever, with advances in digital sound – and that is all it does.  The idea was going to be that actual, perfect silence would in fact drive someone insane, or kill them, or something dire of that sort.  Silence doesn’t really exist – even in a quiet room, we can hear our blood in our ears, we can hear our own breath.  There is always some vibration in the world, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Anyway, freshman-philosopher 101 stuff, but it *could* be done well by the right hand.  Probably has.  Maybe fifty times.  Clearly, I don’t read enough to know.

Several years ago, I started a police procedural, set in the near future, in which breath-contact could be measured.  If, as Sherlock Holmes gave us to expect, ANY contact produces some manner of transfer – fingerprints onto a surface, fibers onto a person or vehicle – what if the DNA or some such signature could be measured from the humidity of our breath?  What if we could measure how long a person had been in an apartment – and where – by their breath-contact?  What if this could be simulated by “bagging” – by secretly stealing the breath-contact signature of a person from space they routinely occupied, or by stealing it surreptitiously in their presence, and planting that in a space they never had been, or by increasing their signature in a space they had been to, but only seldom?

This is the one that my writing pals have asked me most enthusiastically to do something with, but … “that’s all I got,” as the man says.  That’s all there is.  A police detective named Raheema following up on a fishy chick with a shaved head, a delicate portable scaffolding for a crime scene which keeps anyone from so much as treading on the floor, some forensic techs measuring signature from the walls and surfaces in a flop apartment, and “bagging” breath signature.  That’s it.

Without a verb (or even two), the thing’s dead in the water, and I won’t force it and I don’t care enough to save My Darling from oblivion.  I write enough I expect *will* get seen; for me, go-nowheres are little more than intriguing exercises.  Which is frankly bizarre, as I seem to suffer from a completist neurosis in every other way in my life, especially reading.  It is all but impossible for me to not-finish even cruddy writing, no matter its venue, if I start.  I’ve gotten easier going about that with age, but it remains a “thing” in my brain, that an article, a story, a poem, a book, must be finished, if started.

Not with writing.

The final piece I actually might like the most, might most care about someday completing – and, oddly enough, it was born of an assignment The Sarcastic Broads gave ourselves, and never saw through.  (Yes, it is true – writers occasionally set goals we don’t bother to meet.  Shocking.)  I don’t know how we started, but we decided that each of us was going to write a ghost story, and we’d relaunch the SBC blog with new material.  New blood, even, perhaps – given our chosen topic.  Heh.

This story, for me, is actually more personal than infantile philosophizing or prospecting for The Future, it’s all meaningful and junk, and I think it would be good to look back at the piece while I’m querying again.  To work on the novel in progress is probably more than my brain can take while dealing with the shilling process, and it might be interesting to see if I can get the thing to tick.

Slacker

I have long hated Pandora Radio because it will not allow listeners to shut off its “you might also like” algorithms, which for me are (as with all such suggestion-generating applications) a terrible failure.  I’m a contrarian by nature, and so have a ready supply of impatience for missteps in these intrusive little marketing devices, as well as a hearty disdain when a suggestion goes really wrong – so Pandora is just not the option for me, never has been.  Slacker Radio’s “suggestiveness” can be pretty tightly minimized (and, for a fee, turned entirely off), and even when it’s on, it doesn’t seem to be quite so bewilderingly miscalculated as, say, Blockbuster or Pandora or my grocery store’s coupon-generating printers are.

Let it be said that, in addition to the contrarianness, I am old enough and private enough that these things continue to wig me out even something like eighteen years or so since their advent in earlier, rather less insinuatingly personal and scary forms.  The fact is, I’ve ALWAYS found this type of marketing frightening, and always will.  It icks me out, sets my teeth against certain brands, standards, and manifestations – and keeps my jaw on the ground, that so many people don’t seem to mind this insidious searching of their personal preferences.

All of which is beside the point.

The point is that, today at work, Slacker was still showing its autonomy at me, and it worked out.  I’ve only crafted one station for myself, and it contains all my moods, from Apoptygma Berzerk to Priest to Adele and the Beatles and Type O Negative.  Most days, in the office, Slacker stays in a somewhat electro/industrial vein, with some pop and what we once amusingly called “Alternative” thrown in.  There are days, though, when I start off with Judas Priest’s “Alone” and then follows up with Metallica, and I stop and go “hm” for a moment, and decide – yes, that’s just about right, thank you, Slacker.  Today, obviously, was one of those days, and it reminded me how much I like metal, enjoy Zeppelin, and old school hard rock.  As much momentum as dance tunes can give to a day, there’s no arguing that Iron Maiden particularly slows me down.  And then, because it’s sort of a funny diet I’ve fed the little beast, it’ll drop Duran Duran’s “The Chauffer” down in the middle of these things, and my odd little brain thinks, “that goes together better than you’d think” and then go on to whatever I’ve got to finish on the desk.

I once bought a Priest CD, along with a Leonard Cohen and a Billie Holiday.  The clerk at the store (I was in California) gave me the smiling eyebrow and said, “Shopping for gifts?”  I was a tad confused and said no, it was driving music (I was in California driving between SF and LA, and my rental had a CD in dash; at the time, this was pretty state of the art), all for me.  It was clear I’d made something of a conquest just by failing to fit in a musical box, and I got to muse a bit about what it must be like, the parade of individual tastes one must serve selling music all day every day.  Obviously, given that that was something like 15 years ago, I was pretty pleased with myself for my little toppling of expectations – and, equally obviously, I still revel, as I always have, in gravitating to what genuinely appeals to me, rather than to what is served to me (lord, just trying to imagine what my life would be like populated only with that music made for women such as myself is stifling).  Just think what an eyebrow I might have gotten if I’d had Ice T in that little stack of CDs.

To our culture and society, there are aspects of my nonconformity which speak to an inherent immaturity:  I refused to cut my hair when it became age-appropriate by those standards I consider to be utterly superfluous.  I never stopped going out dancing – and I am forty-five.  Being unmarried and not a parent, I have held on to habits generally reserved for “the young” (if not to say ‘those who are fifty pounds slimmer and fifty miles more currently fashionable’ than I am).  Being a relic of the 80s and 90s, I still admit to listening to Judas Priest and yet also pretend to be conversant in Deadmaus and even FGFC820, which should be so far outside the frame of reference of a person such as myself as to be almost anger-inducingly alien to me.

To be sure, I sneer like the old broad I earned every second of being, at the names of twentysomething celebs and performers I’ve never heard of.  It gives a special pleasure to indulge in this privilege of age, this frank indulgence of chrono-bigotry, even as I know precisely how irrelevant and, indeed, stupid it is.  But it is as much a joy to ignore expectations as it is to play into and play with them ... and I get to listen to good music, at that.

YA Reading ... and Reading ... and Reading

Sixteen years ago next week, apparently, was the debut of the first book in the Harry Potter series.  I remember the first time I heard of it, from a friend of mine with an advanced degree and a penchant for guilty pleasures in the Melrose Place, Buffy, and - obviously - Potter vein.  I remember, too, hearing Diane Sawyer tell the world that reading was in again thanks to the boy wizard.  The book was a phenomenon many of its target audience may not now remember, nor have comprehended at the time.

I remember, more than anything else, being a bit bewildered as to why what I categorized in my mind as a "children's book" (the label YA was not yet the hot trend it's been ever since; many of us were barely aware that such a genre/category as "young adult" lit existed) was such a sensation.  Having had it recommended to me was a little bemusing as well; there's really nothing in my character that points to much interest in preteen boys' adventures in magic-land.  I wasn't offended, merely perplexed at the idea.

It's not something one discusses these days, YA having become the market maker that it is ... but I've never "gotten" why it has come to dominate the market as it now does.  Intellectually, sure, I can easily see that YA is easy reading, and the genre is well suited to the trends of urban fantasy and the genres selling the most right now.  Its accessibility is key, and I've also been told by more than one person that it's nice to get a break from sex in books.

This last bit perplexes me, too, admittedly.

After the death of Parke Godwin this week, I spent a little while after work today perusing his works at Amazon (it's an easy tool, even if Amazon is a terrifying market behemoth) and then took a look at Donald Harington as well.  What struck me was that, in Harington's reviews in particular, the negatives had a very strong tendency to judge his books badly because of the sex.

Harington takes hillbilly stereotypes and turns them into storytelling and characters.  So one finds an awful lot of incest - consensual and non - a good deal of very youthful canoodling, and not an incidental amount of rape.  Of course (and there's a whole screed in this problem, but I will leave it unsaid for now) rape scenes are called "sex" scenes by reviewers nursed on our seriously deranged culture.

But what interested me is how viscerally people were responding to the sex.

When Fifty Shades is the other bestseller of the moment (and is written, as far as I can tell, with a good deal *less* sophistication than the YA series leading the rest of the market these days).

We have ... an interesting interplay, in the US market anyway, right now where Terrifying yet Titillating sex is concerned.  People seem to hate it, react against it powerfully, find an entire book ruined by it - when it's rarely the whole point.  And then books whose whole points *are* the sex scenes (again, I've never heard anyone accusing the Fifties of being good literature) sell like steaming hotcakes all over the place.


***


NPR, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

The upshot of all this is that even the adult novels selling right now seem to have become less sophisticated.

Which actually brings me (you thought this was post enough? I'm just getting started) to the thesis of this post, which is that readership nationally has devolved.  In schools, "the classics" (again, deconstructing this is another post, but don't take it as read I think this generic label is necessarily a be-all) have steadily given ground for about 25 years to more accessible, and less complex, reading.

As with everything else we do these days, Americans don't go in much for balance in the written word.  There is a quote in the NPR story linked here:  "Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.'"

Now, most of us know that all of the latter genres mentioned as likable are represented in some of the most sophisticated echelons of our literary heritage.  But the current market has a tendency to gravitate to these genres in YA, and the market has for all of the sixteen years since Potter been stalking YA properties for the Next Big Potter (or Twilight, or Hunger Games, and so on).

In a sense ... the bestseller lists are not much about readers and books, but about product and profit.  We all know this, too, but we don't think a lot about its ramifications.  And the YA-ification of our reading habits is beginning to tell on us, apparently.

I may not be able to lead a literature symposium, but I can at least, thanks to the education I was fortunate to partake of, competently participate in a discussion of Hemingway, Shakespeare, the greater themes and plots through the history of literature, and even manage to avoid appearing an utter dunderhead when it comes to literature beyond (gasp) those Great Classics of Western lit.  I have a little exposure to ancient storytelling beyond my heritage, I have enormous respect for Asian storytelling I adore but would be terrified to try to actually take on.  I can function intellectually precisely because, while we did get to read "accessible" literature when I was young (which I think is an extremely good thing) it was often in the form of a kind of dessert, toward the end of a term or a school year, when we'd been working pretty hard on the sorts of reading which presents greater challenges.

Reading is entertainment, but its value as a literal exercise, a mental challenge, seems to have gone out of vogue.

Again, I have been biting my lip for the past decade and a half - and particularly since trying to make an "author platform" out of this blog - about what I must admit to be a contrarianism about YA.  It isn't politic, if one wants to be a published author (even if not in the Hot Genre du jour) to go around dissing what *is* hot.  It isn't clever to sneer at what's popular, nor at particular authors/works, either.  And it isn't smart to go to a cocktail party and give everybody the finger.  What if I queried an agent who loves YA but also does happen to do straight historical fiction?

It also just isn't nice to be nasty about something just because you don't get it, and don't want to.  Okay, I can't find any part of myself that can understand the fascination for a kid in a magic school.  (Yes, I know that is incredibly reductive - our first impulses on buying/reading anything tend to be so.)  I also don't begrudge my PhD pal for loving the kid, nor anyone else out of the millions of readers.  Reading is entertainment.

I just wonder whether this sixteen year trend will ever turn again.  I'm old enough to be skeptical any market maker is forever.

Whatever the trends - and I don't think I ever will write to them - books like The Ax and the Vase still have a place.  They have, as long as literature and publishing have been in anything like the forms we recognize today, since Walter Scott's romantic adventures in historical fiction, and there are plentiful authors keeping histfic not merely alive, but fascinating.  To intellectually mature readers of whatever age.

The fantasy I have about Ax's "place" in this world remains the same.  It is:  on that shelf at some old relative's house, where a kid, thirty years from now, is going to find it and pull it down, some boring summer day.  And they will love it for the rest of their life.


I've been that kid.  I know that kid's still alive.  I know that kid doesn't need to be talked down to, that the story of Clovis will be enough.

I can't wait for that kid to stumble across him, and dog-ear him to death, till something is on fire inside.

Genres I Don't Want to Know About

Researching agents just now, ran across one (who still doesn't even accept electronic queries - good lord, people) who is especially drawn to "chick lit, lady lit, lad lit" ...

This is a woman I clearly do not wish to work with.

As offensive as the idea of chick-lit is (because, like razors and other perfectly ordinary products, it is necessary to color things pink and/or outright label them For The Ladies so we'll know we're allowed to consume ... and avoid anything else our dainty tiny little brains might not be able to cope with), "lady lit" frankly terrifies me and "lad lit" - given what I know about lad culture - scares the pickles out of my not at all pink little brain.

Holy crud.

Quote, Interrupted

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard

This quote cropped up in my random reading this evening, and it struck me negatively for some reason.  I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but quickly realized that, beyond simply reducing an entire universe of communication to a selfish world of useless indulgence, it's fundamentally in error.

Writing is almost never formed in a single, glutting, go.  It is by nature almost nothing BUT interruption.  Few authors, scriptwriters, essayists, working in ficiton or non, in short form, long form, poetry, or even graphic work - nor any other writer - creates an entire piece in one sitting, without revision.  Ever.  For the sake of the reader, writing almost *must* be interrupted, and for the sake of the author's message, story, issue, interest - likewise.  For clarity - interruption.  For entertainment - interruption (who can build tension, perfectly, with nary an edit?).  For every possible purpose - staying on point, getting the story told well, evoking a setting (fiction or non, we're always *somewhere* when we read) - interruption.

Writing is the art of perfecting your OWN interruptions.  Of learning to use them - the down times between having the actual moment to write.  Of winnowing inspiration by the process of editing - learning how to use the interruptions in time, the interruption of revision, the interruption of feedback, refining, polishing.  Writing is the *cultivation* of interruption, in order to write well, to engage.

Talking without being interrupted is just self indulgence.  It isn't writing.  Not good writing.

Good to See

Cornwell hits another good list this year.  And my work is supposed to be outta style ...  Keep showin' 'em, Bernard.

Con Time

My Conference is in a week, and last night came the news that the editor I had a meeting with has had to cancel her participation. It's a bit of a blow, though I know that must sound pretty overdramatic.

Registration time this year came right in my period of unemployment. I had finished the novel, was (much more actively) querying, and was excited for this event, my annual fire-starter, fun time, and opportunity. Last year, I got a request for a partial out of my agent meeting, and this year an agent from the agency which handles Sharon Kay Penman was on the list.

I queried this particular woman, with mention of SKP and another histfic writer on their roster, and noted the upcoming Conference, where I'd like to meet her. She couldn't have been nicer when she told me SKP was in fact one of the owner's first clients ever, and the other one had been her ASSISTANT for eight years - and that, actually, other than those two, they really don't do histfic. But please say hi at the Conference.

Will do.



Agh, but - *sigh*



I hike up my boots and look at the Conference list, and find that the EDITOR appearing as well lists historical fiction first in her area of expertise, go "WHEEEEEE" and sign up for her. You know, really, I said to myself, this is better than an agent - because with an agent, the conversation is black or white (give me a partial, or flat rejection), whereas maybe an editor will say, "Okay have you queried X, Y, or Z yet?" or "you know, for your kind of non-romance historical writing, being a woman, I know an agent who could sell you just right."

I mean, sure, that's the realm of fantasy in some ways. But my writing is good, my story has such a hook, and frankly I am, as a property myself, not without some interesting aspects. And, again, an editor might have a wider scope to offer, if she were interested enough to do so. An agent - even if interested, the only option at a Con is "maybe".

Maybe was wildly exciting last year. But I think it is off the table now. As is anything else.


***


So when the editor canceled, I have to say, I was thinking, "well of course." So now I have a Conference to go to with nobody who handles my genre. In some ways, this is freeing. But it's a little disappointing.

The agent I have chosen to meet with now, I would say almost certainly has no interest in histfic. Her house is the only one of those entities appearing which even MENTIONS histfic at all - so the outside chance here is that someone else at that venue might be a referral. I can't say my hopes are high for this, but it is still another pitch opportunity, and I prefer that to the querying process. Living eyes - even if they are not really looking to see what I'm showing - is STILL more fulfilling than blindly wondering, "Do I look like a complete moron here?"



I am bummed out.

But I'm also still excited.

And not because, accidentally, it turns out next weekend will be a four-day-er. (Hey, thanks, Columbus!)