A Day in the Life of a Poem (and Other Visual Narratives)
In the interest of sharing the absurdity of my life, I present to you the following images for your amusement. First is a page from my notes for my summer seminar, which I subsequently used to draft a poem: Now, I’m no poet. Never been much for reading the stuff, let alone writing it. I have lots of emo poetry lost in a drawer somewhere, which I won’t let out so long as I’m alive, and will likely burn while I’m a ghost. But “The Black City” (which is what I’ve called the monstrosity above) was the result of getting inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I had to write all the fragments you see on the bottom or my head would explode. They’re not in order, and I kind of like it that way. It’s more…fun. The next is a list of texts I’m considering for a course I want to build on postcolonial science fiction. It’s tentative and likely incorrect, but I had fun putting it all together: Tobias S. Buckell and Nalo Hopkinson are obvious choices, but you’ve also got to love the insertion of Lauren Beukes too! Her work is brilliant. And finally, my new backpack! Why? Because the old one was falling apart…literally. So, what have you been doing with your life?
My American Literature Course (Science Fiction = Well-Represented)
In case any of you were curious, the following is the final reading list for the Survey in American Literature course I begin teaching tomorrow. I think the list is fairly diverse and incorporates a great deal of the important figures of American literature while avoiding all the stuff that would bore the hell out of me. Feel free to provide any thoughts you might have in the comments. Books The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974) Writing About Literature: A Portable Guide by Janet Gardner Plays “War Brides” by Marion Craig Wentworth (1915) “Mine Eyes Have Seen” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1918) Short Stories “The Comet” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1920) “The Grave” by Katherine Anne Porter (1944) “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1948) “Lost in the Funhouse” by John Barth (1967) “The Artificial Nigger” by Flannery O’Connor (1955) “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin (1965) “Advancing Luna–and Ida B. Wells” by Alice Walker (1977) “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler (1983) “The Lions Are Asleep This Night” by Howard Waldrop (1986) “Thi Bong Dzu” by Larry Rottmann (1973) “The First Clean Act” by Larry Heinemann (1979) “Faith of Our Fathers” by Philip K. Dick (1967) “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut (1961) Essays “‘The Sun Also Rise’: A Memory of War” by William Adair “’Slaughterhouse-Five’: Time Out of Joint” by Arnold Edelstein “The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy” by H. Bruce Franklin
WISB Podcast: My Grandma Will Be a Frog
One of the amusing things about my family is that it explains why I am so strange. I seem to contain much of my strangeness on this blog, but every once in a while, it gets out… For example, I recently wrote the following to my Grandma in response to a misunderstanding she had about the WISB podcast project (i.e., the donation tier): I’ll write a character *based* on you, which means you’ll likely be a talking frog named Bethel from Ferngarden-upon-Erethen. But that will be up to you. How interested are you in being a giant talking frog? To which she said this: Me a FROG what a novel idea. I know so little about them I know that they are toadly great Are hoppy most of the time Jump willing into new and different situations They love their pad They slurp their food Eat most of the meals on the fly … or is that the fly Go to great lengths …orally … for most of their meals … sometime without moving Can be environmentally friendly ….. they are green for the most part and are a super insect abaters. I will concider being a frog BUT only if I don’t turn into something fluffy and cute if a tall dark and handsome stranger kisses me Can you change the name to Bethellda it sound a little classier and you know me I’m all about couth and culture. Do you see now why I have become a very strange 27-year-old man? (Chapter Thirteen is on its way. My sister is currently staying here as part of her “get to know my brother so I can annoy him better” vacations. But the chapter is coming!)
Writing Young Adult Fantasy: The Challenge of Darkness
How dark is too dark for young adult readers? How dark is too dark for a young adult character? Not long ago, I responded to a Wall Street Journal post by Meghan Cox Gurdon which argued that YA fiction has become exceedingly dark. I didn’t agree with the author’s assessment, largely because it was a “conservative” political manipulation of reality rather than anything approaching legitimate criticism of the genre. In a lot of ways, the thematic shift in the YA literature field to a more active engagement with the things that plague teenagers has been a good thing for me as an author (of YA and other “genres”). When I first began writing The World in the Satin Bag, I intended it to be a quirky fantasy romp a la Leven Thumps, but the deeper I got into the world, the more I found my darker side taking over. WISB is not fluff. In a lot of ways, the novel tricks you into think it is just that. Is there humor? Absolutely. Are there quirky creatures and characters? You bet. But is it a novel that avoids taking its 13-year-old character through the ringer? Nope. WISB is a novel about the limits of young adults. James, my main character, experiences some of the darkest things imaginable for a child, from murder to child kidnapping to the terror of children as soldiers and the horrors of power. And, if you’ve been listening, you’ll know that James has to constantly deal with the fact that his very existence in the world of Traea is the catalyst for near-genocidal behaviors in others. I don’t want to say more than that, because you should listen to the novel (or get the ebook when it comes out). The point is: I might be on Gurdon’s list of depraved authors simply because I’ve written a book which puts a poor 13-year-old character through things that no child should experience, and most children probably won’t. But I hold a very different opinion of young adults than Gurdon. I don’t view them as children in the traditional sense. Young adult is a category which should be taken literally: they are young adults. They may not have the same rights as those of us over the age of 21, and, perhaps, shouldn’t have all those rights for very good reasons (mental growth, etc.), but they are in a long transition phase between childhood and adulthood. As I mentioned in my response to Gurdon, young adults are already dealing with things many adults want to hide them from. They treat young adults like they treat little children, which I find grossly offensive. It’s for that reason that I don’t feel a need to hold back when I punish my main character. The only limits in my story are the limits of James. That doesn’t mean James can’t die (or that he won’t), but it does mean that I know where the line rests and what will happen to my story if I cross it. The challenge of darkness isn’t about public morality or, as Gurdon suggests, avoiding reinforcing bad behaviors. It’s about exploring the limits of the potential of young adults as thinking people. In my mind, it’s also an issue of respect. You drag your characters as far as you can imagine your characters going, and you put a foot over the line to test them. With James, that line is his own cowardice (or, more accurately, his disinterest in things that might get him hurt). But he’s also a character who places extraordinary value on the people who matter to him, and it’s because of this that he has to challenge himself to do something beyond his nature. His strength and resolve will be tested throughout the book, even beyond his initial leap of courage; in fact, James will have to explore the farthest boundaries of his disinterest and experience the very things he has spent his short life avoiding at an exaggerated level. I won’t tell you what happens to him, but it’s not “good,” if you get my meaning. For other authors, those lines are very different. Some authors may want to put a young adult character through the trials of molestation or the scary experience of teen pregnancy. YA fantasy authors might include these themes in their work because they want to show that even characters who use magic and wander around in mystical worlds experience such things too. There’s nothing dark or wrong about exploring these issues; in fact, I would argue that exploring the “dark side” of teenage existence is essential for young adult literature, whether fantastic or otherwise. Perhaps a lot of this discussion comes from the fact that I interact with young adults on a regular basis. As the co-owner (and, more or less, the only “boss”) of Young Writers Online, I talk to a lot of teenagers of all ages. Many of them are people I would consider my friends, even if I am older than them. And through my interactions with these folks, it’s become very clear to me what kind of world they live in. Reading a book like WISB, which does contain a fair deal of blood and violence and, if I’m being honest, downright wicked stuff, won’t destroy their minds. They might find it a good deal of fun, or they might enjoy the underlying “messages” compelling and find themselves thinking about things they might not have thought about before (or might not have expected someone else to write about). And that’s really the point. Darkness or not, YA fantasy (and YA literature in general) is an exploratory process, for authors and for young adult (and even adult) readers.
Why I’m Going Indie: An Anti-Self-Publisher’s Perspective
Longtime readers of this blog will be aware of my harsh opinions about self-publishing. The title of this post is intentionally inflammatory to highlight a point which I hope will be clear by the end of this post. I consider myself exceedingly critical of the concept of self-publishing, not because I think SPing is inherently wrong or improper, but because the field of self-publishing, if one can call it that, is flooded with people who lie or misrepresent traditional- and self-publishing. This is not something you see on the other side of the scale; there are so many writers and authors and editors writing about how hard it is to be traditionally published, and what you have to go through to get there — it’s a gruesome process, after all. I have a tag devoted to these issues. Perhaps this is why some of you may be surprised that I am doing an indie/self-publishing project (namely, podcasting the rewritten version of The World in the Satin Bag and putting together an ebook version to be released later). Why would I put my feet into the self-publishing bucket when I’ve been so critical of it in the past? There are a number of reasons for why I’ve gone indie with WISB. I’ve never been interested in sending it to a traditional publisher, for starters. The book has been sitting on this blog for years, and traditional publishers are generally averse to blog novels, unless it’s extraordinarily popular (some podcasters have had their books picked up, but you already know that). But I also don’t want the novel to sit on this blog and fester, which is what it has been doing for the last four years. In a lot of ways, letting it sit as long as I did was a good thing, because by going back to it now to rewrite it has taught me how far I’ve come as a writer. If you look at the old version, it is absolutely dreadful; the new version, which I’m now podcasting, is a million times better and reflects more of what I think are my strengths as a 27-year-old writer. But now that I can see how far I’ve come, I don’t want WISB to sit; I want it to be more productive for me. But that isn’t a terribly good reason (in my mind) to self-publish. After all, there are plenty of things I’ve written that I’ll never publish in any form, either because they’re terrible or they’re too damned weird or “literary” to have much of a place. Maybe I want those stories to be found in my attic one day…Here’s looking at you, Kafka. The reality is that I’m self-publishing WISB as a podcast and an ebook because the field really is changing. The more I read about all the work the major publishers want me to do on my dime, the more I feel like I should try doing it on my own at least this once. I’ve written about why I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot. The way publishers have been treating ebooks and authors (not exclusively, such as in the case of Angry Robot, who seem to approach ebooks intelligently) is one of the many reasons why so many self-published authors are doing remarkably well without needing major publishers at their back. We’ve heard the names: J. A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and so on. Even Michael R. Hicks, who I have begun talking to on Twitter, is doing astonishingly well as an ebook author, so much so that he is quitting his day job of many years to pursue writing full time (see his sales figures here). I certainly don’t agree with everything Konrath says (he perpetuates falsehoods more than he does truths based on my limited experienced with his writing), but it’s hard to ignore how ebooks have changed what is possible for self-published authors. There are still hurtles (many of them, in fact), and there are still crappy books, bad authors, and shady practices (though I think it’s safe to say that vanity publishers are going to get even more unethical in their business practices in order to hold onto their clients, in part because it’s so damned easy to release ebooks on your own through major ebook retailers). But the field is not the same as it was two years ago. Some of the same problems from the old days still exist, but now the new problems are good problems to have (how to be a better writer, communicating with readers, formatting books, producing quality material and product, etc.). Traditional publishing has changed some, but most of the good changes have been made by the smaller presses, rather than by the big guys. Big publishers are slightly less interested these days in quality material than in the value customers will put on it by spending their money. This is not true of all imprints, as some of the best ones (Tor, etc.) produce some amazing works of fiction, but the more you look at what is on the bestseller list, the more you see books that critics would have used as toilet paper 100 years ago, not because the critics are pretentious assholes, but because a lot of published books are like comparing a McDonald’s cheeseburger to a real cheeseburger. When someone like Sarah Palin can make millions from a book that would give a fact checker ten brain aneurysms in a row, you know the quality of the industry has taken a stab in the heart. That doesn’t mean that I am throwing WISB out there as a podcast and ebook in order to be famous and to make lots of money. The podcast certainly has a financial hope attached to it, but the ebook side of things is really my attempt to test the waters and do something with a project I was otherwise going to let die. I’m still writing short stories and publishing them the traditional
Delurking the Lurkers: Say Hello!
I recently looked at the demographics for this blog and saw that beyond my typical readership from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, there are a great deal of you arriving to this blog from a variety of other countries. Such as: Russia, Romania, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, India, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Spain, and even Saudi Arabia. Some of these places are a bit of a surprise. First: Thanks for visiting/subscribing! It’s awesome to know that people follow my blog all around the world. That makes me feel quite good about myself. Second: Why are you so quiet? Come out and say something! That’s what this post is all about. I want all you lurkers to come out and answer a few questions: Where are you from? What is your native language? What other languages do you speak? What are you currently reading (or writing)? Which book that you read in the last year was your favorite? Why? Let’s talk books, folks! Answer away.