I'm working on it

Catheryne M. Valente wrote an excellent blog post about why authors need publishers. My favorite quote:


You can read the whole, delicious rant here.

 

I will be there, and presenting a workshop. More information to follow.

I write children’s books. On my end it means I write novels for an audience that consists primarily of children.

That’s not enough, I am told. Your books have to teach. Since the audience consists of malleable minds, there has to be some sort of message, uplifting messages being best.

Enter didacticism.

Okay, comes the response, you don’t need to be didactic, but there should be some underlying theme, something the kid takes away. Why? Because the audience consists of malleable minds, there has to be some sort of message, uplifting messages being best.

What if I just want to entertain?

Of course you can entertain. But these are kids. And they have malleable minds. . .

You get the drift. I call this the Books Are To Teach camp. Children’s books belong in the same category as self-help books, except with attractive pictures and a simpler vocabulary. Somehow, unlike a movie, if you hand kids a book, they have to learn something. They can’t just enjoy the story. No, there has to be a Message, like a portable schoolroom.

Tell me. Does any other fiction genre carry this burden?

Oh, I hear the response: “Adult fiction also has themes.” Yeah, I say, but first they are stories populated by interesting characters who do interesting things and make interesting choices. The best stories talk about being human, which raises themes, I suppose, but it's a good story first. And you know what? That’s what good children’s books do as well. Tell good stories.

And shouldn’t we use good stories to teach? I’m asked.

Sigh. Yes. But that’s a parent’s or teacher’s job. Always has been. You take something human and teach what makes it human, giving value to it. But that’s not the writer’s job. The writer’s job is to create a tale that talks about being human in an entertaining way. If you find something teach in it, terrific. It means I've described a human story in a meaty way. I'm honored. But it's not my job. I'm here to entertain.*



* I write for a general market. Before I'm told that the educational market requires more, please note that the educational market's audience isn't children but their teachers.

Remember back in early January, I related an incident where I couldn't get a water company representative to listen to me because of my gender? Finally, thanks to Justine Larbalestier, I have a word for it:  mansplaining.

Thank you Justine!

Let’s start with the series title. Definitely a turn off for me. Not “Maggie Quinn.” Not the “vs. Evil” part either. But “Girl?” She’s a young woman!

Grump. Grump. Grump.

Other than that, I really love Rosemary Clement-Moore’s Maggie Quinn series.



I read Prom Dates from Hell when it first came out in 2007. I was going through a very difficult period, commuting back and forth between three states visiting sick and dying family. To say that it was no fun is an understatement. I needed something light and distracting. Clement-Moore was a member of the Class of 2k7 (which I belonged to as well), and I thought, why not? This looked just my speed.

I laughed through the book. It was the absolute best medicine. How can you not like a journalist/detective/demon slayer with quick wit who has to combat spawns of darkness in a too tight prom dress and high heeled shoes (that she’s none too pleased about)? The romance was nice and not too overwhelming. And it hit all those Buffy bells.

I put the book down and thought, “I needed that.”



So when Hell Week showed up at our library, I picked it up, too. I was not in that really bad place I had been a year or so before, but I remembered the pleasure I had gotten out of the first book and thought, why not?

The cover didn’t wow me, but I quickly realized that this wasn’t going to be a paean to sororities. It was fun. I laughed some more. And I still enjoyed Maggie Quinn’s world.



Enough so that when I realized that there was a third installment to the series, Highway to Hell, I asked my library to hold it for me. I am really glad I did.

This has been my favorite book of the three (and not only ‘cause I like the cover). The writing is perhaps the strongest so far—it brought in flavors of South Texas; Maggie had become more and more of a real person; the plot is wonderfully complex and satisfying; and we never lose the humor that made me enjoy the books in the first place.

Thank you Rosemary Clement-Moore for this entertaining journalist/detective/demon slayer (whether or not you call her a girl or young woman).

What you’re seeing is two continent-sized storms on Jupiter. Here’s an infrared version which highlights them.




And once again, credit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. (Click on images for more details.)

If you look very carefully, you can see a tiny dot on the left, under the rings. That’s Mimas, one of Saturn’s 62 moons.

Credit: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. (Click on image for more details.)

That’s our sun. I hope you’re having a good Monday.

Credit: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. (Click on image for more details.)   

This is what it looks like when stars begin to form. And to think, every atom of each us started off in something like that.

Credit: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. (Click on image for more details.)   

It’s gotten so that I no longer want to listen to the radio, or read the paper, and you can forget about the TV. News has just been horrible. Tens of thousands of people killed, more hurt, and even more homeless in Haiti. The GOP condemning 40 million Americans to a life without health care. The Supreme Court handing the U.S. electoral process to corporations. And some racist idiot  bigoted entrepreneur  royal jackass guy planning to start a whites only basketball league, to approval by other [fill in the blank] people.

So I’m taking a breather. Maybe with a little distance, the world won’t seem so totally messed up.



Images are from the Photojournal created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Click on the photos to learn more about them.

Check out these beautiful images from Mars. (Click on the photos for more information.)

This is from inside an impact crater:



Here’s a potential landing site for future missions:



Here’s an image from an old volcano:



And now, some frost covered dunes:



You can see many more gorgeous images from Mars at HIRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment from the Department of Planetary Sciences, Lunar and Planetary Observatory at the University of Arizona. (Here’s the link to their catalog of photos. )

I am white. My family comes in different hues. When I purchase books (and I purchase a whole lot of books) for my nieces and nephews I find it disheartening that so few of the characters look like my family's kids.

But the stories are good, aren't they? you ask. Yeah. But what's on the cover and the pictures inside the book, matter to a kid. Read  this by Ari at Reading In Color and tell me you aren't just a little shaken by the fact that her sister believes that white kids are prettier and more interesting than kids of color, because they're featured in all the books she reads; or by the fact that her brother reads less and less because he isn't finding any books about kids like him.

How characters are represented matters, in all media. Really. Leaving people of color out from picture books, on novel covers, in comic books is hurtful. It means that they're unimportant. They're invisible. And kids get that message, loud and clear.



Thank you Justine Larbalestier for the link and for speaking so eloquently about the subject.

Sometimes it takes me awhile to catch up, but I've just gotten hooked onto The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, published by DC Comics' Vertigo line.

Meet Tom Taylor. His father wrote the most popular series of books in the world, similar to Harry Potter, but its popularity outstrips Rowling’s opus. The main character, Tommy Taylor, is supposedly based upon Tom.

Tom is an adult now. His father disappeared when he was still a kid, and all Tom has from him is the "literary geography" that was drilled into him—the ability to pinpoint places with literary events. (We are told, for example, that Pianosa off the Tuscan coast is the setting for Catch 22.) But the world still clamors for more Tommy Taylor stories and has latched onto Tom as the embodiment of their favorite hero. Then mysterious people start going after him. And we discover that literature somehow has something to do with the present.



I've reached issue 9 (that's the cover art, above) and there's still a lot of mystery. I’m enjoying the literary elements, the bizarreness, and the surprises—the writing is good. This isn’t a story where magic comes in and saves the day. Innocents do die. And like many comics, there are a fair number of casualties—readers are warned that the content is “suggested for mature readers.”

There are things that bother me about the series. I find the Harry Potter parallels annoying, but since they are incidental to the main plot (at least for the moment), I’m willing to forgive them. More annoying is that, except for one page, all the characters are white. Note to the creators: Europe has as many hues as the U.S. And when you set a portion of your story in India, it’s a cheap trick to use sepia tones to color everyone the same, even in a clever bit of literary historical fantasy.

But yeah. I’ll be picking up issue #10. I really am curious about which piece of literary geography we’ll be visiting next. And do I want to know what will happen to Tom. That's what being hooked is all about.

Heard on National Public Radio:

"Brought to you by Mars. We've always made our chocolate with 100% pure cocoa butter. Visit us at Mars Healthy Living dot com."

You can't make this stuff up.

What do you know? There may be some life to Kirkus yet. They're asking for galleys from publishers and restarting publication, stating that there's a potential buyer in sight.

There's hope.


Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for the link.

I vividly remember taking Physics in high school and discussing fluids. We were shown a diagram of a pipe filled with little dots with arrows all pointing in the same direction representing moving water molecules.

"Now," asked the professor, "what happens when the tube becomes narrower?"

Every weekend of my life, I had driven from Montreal to the Laurentians. I knew exactly what happened when a heavily traveled road narrowed -- a traffic jam ensued.

My hand shot up. So did others'. The prof picked someone near me.

"The fluid speeds up," she said.

"Correct!"

What? I thought. And as our prof explained the forces and motion, it made perfect sense. Squeeze a hose and the water spray speeds up. Of course!*

Lessons learned: What I thought I knew was the exact opposite of what happened. Pay attention, I thought, things don't necessarily work the way you think they do. Oh. And shut up from time to time. You may learn something.

Then I read this today. I became so angry I could spit. Three American evangelical Christians went to Uganda to preach the dangers of homosexuality at a conference, fired up the participants, and now a law is winding its way through the Ugandan parliament proposing death sentences for homosexuals.**

What these so-called men of God failed to consider was that they were adding gasoline to a fire and squeezing the blasted hose! Societal homophobia is virulent in Uganda. It doesn't need the out-of-reality rhetoric from the U.S. culture wars to fan it along. Over the course of three days they told leaders that their kids were at risk, their families would be destroyed, that they were at war -- in a country that knows the atrocities of war only too well. What the heck did they think would happen?

They are apologetic, these men. "I didn't know. . ." "I didn't mean. . ." And the absolute worst, "Some of the nicest people I know are gay. . ." Then why on earth were they there to start with, talking trash about gays?

And beyond the ugly hate speech they glibly preached, why did they preach to folks without understanding to whom they were preaching?

Okay. This is a friendly crowd, guys. Did you spend even a microsecond thinking about Ugandan culture? I'm talking about your friends. The gay-bashers. The folks you like. Did you have so much as an inkling of how your incendiary slanders sounded to them? Did you consider that they might not have been weaned on U.S. televangelists and might have a different take on your rhetoric?

"I didn't know. . ." "I didn't mean. . ."

You squeezed the hose. You fanned the fire in an explosive way. The real world doesn't run the way you see it in your heads. Go out and take a look at it. Really take a look at it.

Oh, and shut the @#$% up, while you're at it.



* Why not cars? Because they're not a fluid. When they bump into each other, an accident occurs bringing everything to a standstill.

** Although after the international outcry and the possible risk to multiple millions of dollars in aid, there's a proposed amendment to change the sentence to life imprisonment.

Several years ago, to complete a series of plumbing repairs, we had to shut off the water to our house from the water main. I contacted the water company and a worker was dispatched.

Now the water line to my house had been lain about 50 years earlier and left undisturbed all that time. The shut-off valve was buried under our lawn, and I had no idea where it was. Fortunately, the water company gave the worker a map of our property, drawn when the lines were first laid, plus a metal detector. The valve, according to the map, was 20 feet from the southwest corner of the house.

The worker measured it out and turned on the metal detector. No luck.

He searched fruitlessly for a couple of minutes when a thought struck me. Sometime after the house was built, rooms had been added to the southwest side along with a covered porch in front. The footprint of the house had changed from the footprint the water company had on file. I could easily point out where the original southwest corner lay, so I approached the worker to tell him.

He was having none of it. He consulted with his driver, with the plumber (whom I had hired for the plumbing repairs), the plumber's assistant, but steadfastly ignored every attempt I made to talk to him. He scratched his head, insisted it was hopeless, there was no way to find the shut-off valve, and was about to leave.

It finally dawned on me. Of the five people trying to locate the valve, I was the only woman.

So I approached my plumber. "Listen. The footprint of the house has changed from the map he's using. He needs to measure from that corner there, not the one he started with."

The plumber immediately understood. He repeated what I had said almost word-for-word, and within thirty seconds, they located the shut-off valve. The worker never once acknowledged me. He spoke only to the plumber.

The plumber's assistant shook his head, giving me an apologetic look.

The plumber, on the other hand, seemed pleased. Now he might simply have been pleased with the ultimate outcome -- he could finally finish his job. But I couldn't tell. They weren't talking to me.

The finished plumbing work was competent. Better than competent, even. But I hired someone else for my next plumbing job. And after the assistant opened his own business, I've hired him. Each time.

I think that covers it.

I like science fiction. But lately, I’ve read a whole bunch of SF that feels, well, dated.

The books were older, granted, but each author was highly regarded so I looked forward to engaging reads. And in the opening few pages, I was engaged (these were good writers, you understand). But then, as I read about the colonization of Mars in the second half of the 21st century, I was told that white Americans and Russians had done all the space exploration to date. In another story, a female leader of the 22nd century asked her male companion whether “women drivers” made him nervous. And in a third volume, worse still, the author described a late 22nd century English bureaucracy run by Chinese immigrants because, you know, they’re so canny. (I am not making this up—I couldn’t finish the book.)

This was the future I was reading about. And in each case, wham, the author dragged me back to the past—and not a nice one, either. I did try to reimmerse myself, but once my ears had been attuned, every new anachronism pulled me further away from the story. By the time I finished the book, I was thinking, meh, this is supposed to be good?

Which made me wonder: does science fiction age faster than other kind of fiction?

The present is changing fast. The future is changing faster. The far future envisioned by a present-day author will be overtaken (at least in part) by new technology within the next ten years. But that kind of dating doesn’t usually bother me. As long as the book is well written, I’m willing to suspend disbelief and place the story in an alternate future where, say, hand held communicators are still brand new one hundred years from now. What bothers me is an envisioned future where social mores are stuck at the date of publication.

What makes science fiction fascinating to me—what makes all fiction fascinating to me—is the author’s view of human nature. These are stories about people, even when the people are in the form of alien beings with eight limbs. You plop someone down in 18th century Scotland, or in early 1900s Lahore, India, or on a ship traveling for years between planets, and what I’m interested in is how these humans (in whatever form they’re given) react to their circumstances. The danger in science fiction is to confuse current social mores with human nature.

That’s where other fiction has it easier—you don’t usually have to make such a fine point between what is fundamental to humans and what society imposes because the story takes place at a specific point of time, either in the past or the present. The social mores are given (or researched). Science fiction has the added task of creating plausible social mores. And because our social mores are associated with values (“It’s polite to shake hands in the U.S.” “Picking your nose in public is gross.”), and they change over time (in the 1950s, it was considered polite for women to wear gloves and a hat when in public), to have a story set in a time ahead of me with values that are already dated, jars. Add to that technological anachronisms, and the story starts feeling its age, very, very quickly.

This is not to say that other fiction doesn’t get dated, too. Of course it does. But it’s easier to forgive outdated mores if they are true to their era than if they occur in the future. A story where it’s considered shocking for an American woman to drive a car might be okay if placed in the early 20th century, but it’d be absurd set in the late 21st.

Maybe this is why other kinds of fantastical fiction dates more slowly. I can deal with outdated mores in a world that is not meant to have come from mine. The future is trickier. Which is another reason why I like good science fiction—it takes a really good writer to do it well.

What do The Tree of the Dancing Goats, The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, and Once Upon a Time in the North all have in common? They are on a reading list of great read-alouds that fit this winter season. I blog about it on Write Up Our Alley. Go check it out!