I wonder if our culture’s readiness to embrace a future where everything is digitalized and lives in the cloud– including our inner lives, with the ubiquity of facebook– comes in part from the way the consumerism of our culture has rendered physical objects flimsy and disposable? And if so, will the adoption of The Cloud be different in different places, different cultures?
That should teach me to spread opinions around like gospel.
But on my gosh, you guys, identity crisises, and university-age protags, and trains and castles on hillsides and castles in the AIR and awesome robes and a dragon or something and statues and art and food and underwater passages, and secret cross-faculty friendships and romances and abandonment and friendship and this magic system is setting my head on fire.
It’s basically a cross between a Harry Potter fanfic, a Diana Wynne Jones fanfic, a Percy Jackson Fanfic and fanfic of my own nine-year-old self. So I guess the things that never changes are the entire unsell-ability of my ideas, and their UTTER AWESOMENESS.
ETA: Dude, and SPIES, you guys. SPIES.
ETA2: The story just acquired Oxford and a body count among the main characters.
My siblings are visiting me, so I’m showing them all my favourite places around town! The library, the other library, the place where I pick up books, and the store which sells books. (Don’t look now, you guys, but I think I may have a one-track mind.)
At any rate, while cruising the shelves at the library, I noticed something which I found odd. It is really hard to find Science Fiction written for kids. Even the bargain bookstore doesn’t stock it. There are SCADS of fantasy books, and those are vastly outnumbered by the historical fictions. The mystery section is tiny, and even that eclipses the SF books I found.
As soon as I found that I started poking around more, and something else interesting came up. Of the Fantasy books, most of them were very “soft” fantasy, where things are “just magic.” The mystery section– as mentioned– was tiny. What SF there was tended to be YA Dystopian where the world was taken, never explored. In only a small segment of the fiction for kids was there any kind of joy in technical thought, science or in a rigorous attempt to understand how things work. (In most of the YA science fiction and fantasy, while learning was necessary, it was horrible. e.g. you think your life is okay but the truth is that EVERYONE LIES TO YOU and also your dad kills babies. Etc.)
I am very fond of historical fiction, and of soft fantasy. I think these tell awesome and necessary stories. However, I also really enjoy books that have elements that talk about economics, and repercussions, and the interconnectedness of everything, and tactics, and science, and logistics (honestly, I nerd out over F/SF books with logistics in them. It’s kinda embarrassing), and rules of succession, and virology, and all the things which make up “how things work”. I love the struggle to acquire and use knowledge as a story arc. LOVE IT.
I have read a lot of posts about the importance of diversity and inclusivity in terms of gender, class, culture, body type, race and sexuality. And on the whole, I agree with these posts. If you are going to all this trouble to write an awesome story, why would you cheapen it by showing a world less rich than the one we live in?
Indeed. And why would you cheapen your picture of the world by leaving out the absolute awesomeness of the way things work?
If your answer is saying that learning belongs in the classroom, not for fun, or that learning is for non-fiction, not for fiction, I ask you to look at that answer and think about it for a bit. Perhaps modify “learning” so it reads “learning about culture” or “learning about gender” and then think about it a bit more. Why should enjoying learning about how other people live be a worthy goal, and enjoying learning about how to get
I mean, not all stories in life are about learning. There are stories about relationships, and about journeys, and about courage. But I think if when writing fiction we nearly leave out stories about learning– or (also importantly though this post is already too long) if we don’t allow stories to be about BOTH relationships and learning, or BOTH learning and a journey– we impoverish the stock of stories in fiction. We say that you can’t be both interested in the way things work AND interested in the hero’s journey to save her mum.
I’ve been (primarily subconsciously) caught up in thinking to trend, for the last little while. Of the stories I wanted to write, I wanted to focus on the ones that would sell, that people would want to read. I was polishing up my marketable ideas, and trying to fan a fantasy world into flame, and looking for validation that my planned stories would be sell-able. However, according to the libraries around here, there’s a gap between what I love to write and read and what “other people” love to write and read, and I think this gap is a problem.
I have decided to thumb my nose at “other people,” and view this as a niche that needs to be filled.
So in the future I am going to fly in flagrant disregard of trend and what is “sellable,” and do my best to write awesome stories which include the awesomeness of learning how things work. Maybe Science Fiction, maybe Historical Fiction, maybe Fantasy. Maybe I’ll be the next Hunger Games, or (more likely) maybe I’ll never get more than a form rejection. 
But by golly, I’m going to have fun doing it.
My little siblings are staying with me for the weekend. It is both excellent and fun to have them around, and educational to remember exactly what it is like to be younger.
For example, my little brother is five, and he feels the need to climb EVERYTHING. This includes lamp posts, trees and me. And then he jump off. And then he runs ahead to look at more things. He’s just curious about EVERYTHING, and that mixed to gather with glee about what your body can do– jumping! Climbing! Smelling things! Eating! — is a potent mixture.
He also decided that smelling things kept him awake, so he spent the night breathing through his mouth, thereby manufacturing a raspy snore and a cough which he managed to sleep through. In slightly related news, my body isn’t quite as good at doing things as my little brother’s is, today. He is full of boundless energy. I am faking it with the aid of coffee.
In case it wasn’t glaringly obvious from my other posts, I am a baby F/SF writer. And in an effort to make friends and influence people (and buy cupcakes and listen to amazingly clever people talk on panels and make a fool of myself in a public space,) I am going to Chicon this year! It’s in Chicago, and I’m actually staying in the conference hotel (with excellent people) and I am very excited.
As an attending member of the conference, I was eligible to nominate for the Hugo awards, which meant that in January I was carefully making a list of all the novels and short stories I had read in the past year (and for the Campbell, past two years), measuring them against each other, and filling out my ballot.
To be honest, I did fill out the ballot with the kind of giddy excitement you feel when you are finally part of the club and people take your opinions seriously. But I feel like that any time I get to vote. LOOK AT ME I AM AN ACTUAL ADULT FUNNY CAT SHIRTS NOTWITHSTANDING. Oh, okay you need to see my photo id, that’s fair. SEE I AM OF SOUND MIND WHOO. I may have been one of the only people to legitimately try to convince my peers to vote with the argument “but it’s so fun!”
Yesterday the Hugo nominees were announced, so of course my twitter feed went absolutely insane. I am gleefully delighted that two of my Clarion instructors are nominated, John Scalzi for Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue, and Kij Johnson for The Man Who Bridged the Mist. The stories are awesome (though spectacularly different) and I know who I’m cheering for in their categories.
As the excitement continued, however, I noticed that it was only a certain sector of my feed lighting up with congratulations and counter-congradualtions and glee. The sector which writes books for “grown-ups.” None of the YA writers of Science Fiction or Fantasy were involved in this conversation.
I did not expect this.
See, I write YA Fantasy/Science Fiction. So when I go to the book store, I check out the YA section. (It’s usually near the front.) And then I go to the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. (Usually near the back of the store.) I knew that the books I liked were located in two different sections, but I considered that more of a fortunate shelving plus (two sections to browse! awesome!) than a sign that these were extremely different genres. I considered YA F/SF to be F/SF, albeit F/SF that dealt with themes of becoming and coming of age, strongly character-centred, and with maybe a bit more romance. But it’s just a flavour of the grander line of Fantasy/Science Fiction, right?
According to the voters of the Hugo awards, it’s a lesser flavour of the tradition. There is not a single book, novella, novelette, related work, short story, or etc on the ballot that could be termed YA. The only place where there is some cross-over is in the editorial side, where several of the editors have also worked with stories for the teen market. The ballot draws a line between the YA stuff and the Good stuff.
So I thought about that for a bit.
I think I should emphasis again that I am very surprised. I am new to considering the industry, but the people I follow all seemed to be interested in reading in more than one section of the bookstore. I got into Clarion with two stories that were YA, and for goodness sake, the anchor team at Clarion this year is two best-selling YA authors (Cassandra Clare and Holly Black). I had not before noticed the signs that my genre was not considered as “good” as those books in the grown-up section.
If there had only been one YA book on the ballot (or one story from a YA anthology), I think I wouldn’t have surprised at all. I mean, it is quite clear that some compelling story lines when you are 15 fail to be as compelling when you are 35 or 40. Twilight, for example. Very effective when you are not allowed to drive yet. Less wonderful to read when you are a bit older. But to have no YA represented at all? That makes me think that the voters just aren’t reading in the YA section. Even when you look back at other years of hugo nominees, the only ones that made it to the list are books that would be cross-shelved in the adult section, like books by Cory Doctorow.
I mean, last year we had The Freedom Maze come out, a moving and spectacular inditement of racism’s multitude of forms. It happens to be shelved in the YA or MG section. Red Glove, a FREAKING AWESOME book with con men, spectacular magical and political systems, twisty romance and death. Bumped, a scathing and hilarious critique of the reproductive underbelly of modern religion’s focus on purity and secular society’s focus on sexuality. 2011 saw the release of Chime and The Demon’s Lexicon and Goliath and The Girl Of Fire And Thorns and The Boy At The End Of The World. None of them made it to the list. And I think that to have not one of these books even nodded to by the ballot is to have a poorer ballot.
I had heard people say before that the Hugos should include a YA ballot, but I had thought that was rather silly. Wouldn’t they be included in the regular ballot of novels, short stories, novellas and novelettes? Why would they need an extra category?
Because, it seems, nothing found in the kids section is worthy of making it onto a list of best F/SF of the year. It has to be put on a separate list of best TEEN F/SF. I can’t say that I’m delighted to finally figure that out. I liked it better when I thought I was a full member of the club. However, if making a new list, is what it takes to get people to recognize the awesomeness that is going on at the front of the store, I am all for it.
Also, let’s face, it, this way we get twice as many nominees to squee over and fete, and the possibility of more authors and therefore fans coming to the con, and GENERAL AWESOMENESS. What’s not to love?
So I’ve ostensibly been doing a bunch of research for the novel I’m writing in May.
Note the “ostensibly” in that sentence.
I am getting research done! Just not as much as I would like. I distract easily. And I especially distract easily in a town with two new library systems I can hit up. I’ve been doing a lot of reading…
So, it is time to put some brakes on my reading habits. I am going to go back to reviewing books that I read that are not directly related to writing research (because I’m not thinking you’re going to want a review of “In The Hour Of Our Death”), because knowing I need to talk about a book slows down the panicked rate of book-inhalation I’m prone to.
I will still be doing the long-form reviews at Scape, but expect some short-form reviews to pop up here in the future.
P.S. Also, I switched blog services, so if you want to receive blog posts by email, you may need to sign up again. The old list got eaten.
As I was looking for a term to sum up what I’ve been doing with research, I realized the best one I could think of is “fun”. I have been having fun with research. Some of it has been straight up gleeful fun, and some of it has been more challenging fun. For example, in the former case, I realized that a feature of my technology was incorrect and I had to add cranial computers (which are AWESOME), while for the latter I realized that an entire massive section of my plot was based on science I had learned from tv detective dramas. This science was– unsurprisingly– not exactly accurate. (I’m fixing that with my knowledge of pediatric care. LIKE A BOSS.)
Anyhow, fun is being had. I get to look up all kinds crazy factoids and then file random pieces away, and think about future tech and call it work. I think I’m still filled with delight because of the part where I am thinking about space stations and magnetic trains a lot.
Anyhow, in the course of my research I came across some interesting articles about culture. The first was “We’re All The Same Deep Down,” talking about how while that is technically true– all people have hopes and fears and dreams– it’s often used to assume that all peoples and cultures are the same (read: North American). Oh yes, your culture out there is DIFFERENT, but that really just means you use different spices, yes?
No. The differences between cultures go deeper than spices and funny names. North American does not mean default.
And then I came across another post in a similar vein, the “Is Military Science Fiction Nationalistic,” which analyzes how different cultures’ approach to warfare and aggression– what warfare is for– changes the stories they tell.
At this point I was starting to psyche myself out a bit. AUGH WHAT IF I FAIL TO WRITE A COOL STORY WHAT IF I ONLY WRITE A CANADA IN SPACE AUGH I FAIL. And then two things happened. 1.) I decided that Canada in space would be pretty darn awesome. (I do love my country, after all.) And 2.) I found this amazing, delightful, fills-me-with-glee site, “How To Tell If You’re American.” It breaks down facets of american culture which– inside the states– you take for granted as default life. But there are also other “culture tests” (how to tell if you’re Scottish and how to tell if you’re Indian, for example), which show the defaults of other nations, thereby showing how many things are actually different.
I’m a fan of this site.
So yes! I’m having fun, learning new things, and psyching myself out daily. YOU SHOULD JOIN ME IN THIS FUN TIME.
Oh hey, remember how I’m writing reviews now?
I wrote another one.
Click through for the whole review! It's awesome, you'll love me.
I deal pretty well with stress. Of course, I have my tells, as do we all (stomach aches, memory issues and curling into a ball and staring into space, to name a few), but overall I like to think that when faced with stress, I carry on as though nothing bad is happening. I’m a titan of industry!
When that stress finally lets off, I have different tells. Specifically, crushing exhaustion and sinus issues. This usually happens after exam time, or a move.
And RELATEDLY, I just switched jobs. (I promise this is related.) The ones I had before were fine, but probably not ideal for my interests and personality. I’m an introvert, and I was in sales. So I’m in this new job, and it has its share of blinding terrors, but significantly, despite working less hours here, I’m totally exhausted and rocking a head so clogged I feel like I’m going to overbalance. My body is reacting to this full-time job as though it has the same stress level as a vacation.
I’m guessing the job is a good fit for me.
As of this morning, my plan was to write two novels this year. They are both ideas I’ve sat on for years, so I figured it would be hard, but doable. And I’d done a bunch of brain-storming on my world building, I was working on character sketches, i was READY TO WRITE.
And then I read an article about funeral traditions in the Victorian era, and realized no, I was NOT ready to write. I have a lot of research to do. I have so much research to do that I am downgrading my objective from two novels to one.
This is what I am looking into;