It’s hard to explain to people with zero interest in fashion why designers like McQueen have such loyal followers. Why his death made me cry. It’s even harder to explain it to people who actively hate fashion. But I want to try.

Clothes like the ones Alexander McQueen made are both something you can wear and what’s more fundamental than clothing? Food, water, shelter, clothing. Those are the basics for keeping us alive. Everyone has some kind of stake in clothing whether they give a damn about their appearance or not. Now, obviously, very few people are buying McQueen just to say warm. His clothes are expensive in the extreme. But the point is that they are wearable. Their performance as clothing is spot on.¹

But McQueen’s clothes are also art.²

This is one of the most beautiful dresses I’ve ever seen.

McQueen’s clothes at their best are jaw droppingly beautiful. I have the same visceral response to them that I do to any other art that moves me: great paintings, sculpture, music, writing. It’s the same feeling that overwhelms me when I see a truly gorgeous sunset or a spectacular view.

The fact that its wearable art just makes it more extraordinary.

I love the sweep of McQueen’s clothes, the use of so many vibrant beautiful colours. I love me a designer unafraid of colour. But as you can see from the first image above and the first one below he could also rock black and white and grey. I love his attention to detail. When you see these clothes up clothes you see the care that’s taken at every level, the buttons, the lining, and the fabric. Like Issey Miyake, McQueen’s fabrics were right at the technological cutting edge. Many of the clothes in McQueen’s final collection are printed with digitised images from European art over several centuries. Scott has a shirt of McQueens’ which is a digitised pattern of a baroque jacket. It’s exquisite. Photos of that shirt do not do it justice. As I’m sure these photos don’t come anywhere close to showing just how beautiful McQueen’s final collection was.

I love that McQueen was greatly influenced by fashion of the twenties, thirties and forties. (My favourite fashion decades of the 20th century.) I love that his influences went broader than that. I love how truly inventive he was.

All my McQueen pieces were bought on sale. If I’d been able to, I’d have bought many many more clothes of his, but most of his clothes are well out of my price range (as they are well out of the reach of the vast majority of the world’s population). One of the major objections to high fashion is that it is obscenely expensive. Who can afford a $10-$1000k (or more) dress? Very few of us. But then who can afford to have an original Modigliani on the wall or have Zaha Hadid design their home?

An artist’s impact is not just in their original art. It is in the light they cast, the inspiration they give, the effect that their work’s existence has on the world. I understand clothing and textiles differently because of Alexander McQueen’s work. More to the point so do other designers and makers of clothes at every level of the fashion industry from Haute Couture through to the High Street.

His influence on my understanding of fashion was strong long before I was lucky enough to buy a few of his pieces. I loved gorgeous fashion long before I could afford to buy any. I adore the work of Vionnet. I own nothing by her. Her clothes, on the rare occasions they’re available, are prohibitevely expensive. They’re often purchased by museums, which I wholeheartedly support. If they’re in private collectors’ hands my and your odds of seeing them drop exponentially. But museums are open to everyone.³

Back to Alexander McQueen. He was a great artist and he will be missed.

I’ll leave you with the last look of his collection. Apparently it made people in the audience cry. I’m with them.

1. Trust me, some designers do not manage that.
2. All the images in this post are from his final collection.
3. With enough money to afford the entrance fee.

Meg Reid is another one of my pen pals.¹ We started corresponding to each other when Meg was sixteen and my father, who is friends with her parents and was staying with them in the US, gave her a copy of Magic or Madness and ordered her to write me about it. Dads! Could they be more embarrassing? On this occasion though he did good and we’ve been writing to each other ever since. Oh, and now Meg’s in graduate school.²

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Megan Reid has blogged for Boston magazine, CosmoGirl, and Ypulse, and really likes writing about her little sister’s clothes. She recently bought her first ball gown. Find her on Twitter here.

Megan says:

Lately, I’ve been a little paranoid about being a bad reader. It’s kind of embarrassing, because it’s something I’ve always thought I was good at—I learned how when I was three, because I told my mom I wanted to, and allegedly I was a very strong willed child.³

Honestly, my main rationale for coming to graduate school in English, rather than Art History or Theatre like I’d spent most of my undergrad career planning to do, was that I realized that I was way better at reading than I was at acting or directing, and I didn’t really want to be a curator. Plus, it was something I liked. “How awesome would it be,” I thought, “to have my whole life for two years be going to school and learning about books, and then coming home and reading books, and then hanging out with clever grad-school people who like to talk about books, TOO?!?” It sounded ideal.⁴

And then I got introduced to theory. And postmodernism. And 500 pages of required reading a night. None of which was bad, exactly, but my dream scenario involved more time for napping and doing my laundry more often.⁵ And romance novels. Definitely more romance novels. I am very good at those.

That isn’t the reason I’m paranoid, though. Imagine my surprise when I found out a couple weeks ago that all this time, I might have been doing it ALL WRONG for eighteen years.

I read like most people do, I think, except for some little quirks, which I will now share publicly, even though they’re kind of embarrassing:

1. When I get really into books I tend to forget to breathe, and then make embarrassing dying goldfish-ish gasping noises every few minutes.
2. In my head, every protagonist has brown or red hair. I don’t know why, but they do. And it’s probably problematic, but that is a story for another post.
3. I don’t read last pages first.

Which is why, after finding out inadvertently halfway through House of Mirth what happened to poor Lily, and poor Selden, and poor Gerty (oh, GOD…), I went home and wept. I literally couldn’t get out of bed for an hour. I had been reading it for class, and the next day, was soundly mocked by my friends. Evidently, they thought I should have gotten over the tragedy a little bit sooner and spent more time researching the distinctions between realism and naturalism. (Fair enough).

Obviously, I’m pretty firm on that last reading quirk. Not to suck up, but I’ll quote Justine to bolster my argument, because she said it very well, and loves House of Mirth, too:

There’s something very vulnerable about reading. When I am immersed in a good book I feel so utterly consumed by it that an unhappy ending, the *****⁶ of a favourite character can totally wreck me. My defenses are down. I cannot cope with the enormity of loss and grief and sorrow.

YES. YES. YES. YES.

The trauma⁷ got me thinking, though—maybe I could have avoided my hour-long crying jag if I’d broken my commitment to reading quirk #3. I’ve never thought there was a right or wrong way to read. Some might be more effective for certain purposes (like skimming that aforementioned 500 pages of reading a night), but are some ways of reading objectively better than others? And if I’m a bad reader, how do I change it?

I know, deep down, that I’m not really a horrible reader, but I’m curious about it now. One of my clever grad-school friends (those, unlike laundry and naps are not myths) attempted to explain literacy studies to me, but even that branch of theory doesn’t quite answer my questions.

I’ve gotten seriously fascinated by how people read. I’ve started asking people questions about their reading quirks.⁸ It’s totally weird, and awesome, and funny. One of my friends reads lying down, so her arms don’t get tired. My mom only reads with socks on. Some people hear characters’ voices in their heads, some have specific narrators (with accents!). A guy I know told me he gets nervous when he doesn’t know how books end beforehand. A girl I studied abroad with sees colors in poetry. One of my neighbors has been known to pair books with wines—Emma goes very well with pinot gris, for example.

Clearly, there’s an upside to having my ending ruined,⁹ and to all this musing about right and wrong reading paranoia. And, since Justine was lovely enough to ask me to blog, I get to extend my new favorite question to all of you (since it’s finals week, I‘ll pretend it’s Very Serious Research): what are your reading quirks?

1. Pen pal, still making me giggle.
2. Is a postgraduate.
3. Seriously. I found a book on “How to Raise the Strong-Willed Child” on my parent’s bookshelves when we moved a couple years ago. I had NO IDEA what it was doing there.
4. As you might be able to tell, I didn’t really take English classes in undergrad.
5. I won’t say how often I do it now, because my mom will probably read this, and I don’t want to shock her.
6. I don’t want to wreck the ending for anyone else. Seriously. Read it.
7. Exaggerating, obviously. Since I have now been exposed to the field of trauma studies and am fully aware this does not apply . . .
8. Maybe if I creatively edit them, a la Eve Ensler, I can turn them in instead of a final next quarter?
9. But only just barely.

Kristin Cashore is one of the bright new stars of YA fantasy. I met her at a Books of Wonder event last year and we had a lovely time gossiping talking of serious matters and have been pen pals¹ ever since.

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Kristin Cashore is the author of the fantasy novels Graceling and Fire and is working on her third book, Bitterblue. She’s lived in an awful lot of places but has recently moved back to Massachusetts, where she writes in a green armchair with an enormous cup of tea at her elbow.
Kristin says:

(A friendly warning to any readers who are afraid of heights: this post and its pictures might be uncomfortable!)

A few trapeze lessons ago, I was up on the platform, getting ready to swing. Now, for a beginning flyer like me, what this means is that I was leaning perilously over the edge of the platform, reaching for the trapeze bar, while an instructor behind me held onto my belt to keep me from falling down into the net. The instructor, Kaz, was giving me my instructions — stomach out, shoulders back, lean forward — and I wanted to do what he said — I even thought I was doing what he said — but actually I wasn’t, not really, not entirely, because, well, as it happens, on occasion, my body has an adverse reaction to the concept of leaning out over a void.

Then Kaz, holding my belt, said a single word: “Trust.” Words are powerful, aren’t they? That word made me understand everything all at once: what I was doing, what I wasn’t doing, what I was afraid of. I understood that Kaz wasn’t going to let go of my belt and drop me; that Steve, holding my lines on the floor below, wasn’t going to drop me either; and that Jon, swinging in the catch trap on the other side of the void, was going to do everything in his power to catch me when the time came. I trusted these guys. So I leaned myself out the way I was supposed to, and when I heard my call . . . I jumped, swung, and FLEW.

I’ve been thinking a lot about trust. Nothing in the world works without it, but even when it’s working, it doesn’t always make sense, does it? Trust is one of those words that means what it means, but also means the opposite of what it means, if you get what I mean. In other words, trust is about choosing to believe in something, even while knowing it might not exist. It’s about throwing yourself into something wholeheartedly, deciding to be certain about something, despite your uncertainty. Have you heard the saying, “Leap, and the net will appear?”

(They really shouldn’t let writers on the flying trapeze. There are too many impossible-to-resist metaphors.)

In my current work in progress, my protagonist, Bitterblue, a very young queen, doesn’t know whom to trust. She’s so turned around that she doesn’t even trust her own instincts about trust. Trust is stupid, she thinks at one point. What’s the true reason I’ve decided to trust [this person]? Certainly his work recommends him, his choice of friends; but isn’t it just as much his voice? I like to hear him say words. I trust the deep way he says, “Yes, Lady Queen.”

Why do I trust the instructors at my trapeze school? There’s something about their focus, their no-nonsense instructions, their calm demeanors, and the way they are completely accepting of people who are frightened or people who struggle. I keep expecting the instructors at trapeze school to tell me I don’t belong there. To make fun of me when I wipe out. To tell me I’m not learning fast enough. Instead, they explain that it doesn’t matter how slowly I learn. They tell me that my lessons will always be tailored to me, to my own personal abilities and limits. They are all superior athletes; they could flip circles around me on the trapeze. I have never considered myself an athlete, not once in my entire life, and I have a lot of strength and flexibility work to do if I truly want to advance on the trapeze. But they’re okay with that. They get that I, and most of my classmates, are baby trapezers. They treat us with respect despite how little we can do. And lo and behold, I reciprocate — by trusting them, quite literally, with my life.

Why do you trust the people you trust?

Writing is also about trust, of course. For example, I trust my early readers with my manuscripts; I choose them as early readers because I trust them to be honest, but respectful. I trust my editor because we’ve been through enough rounds of manuscripts and editorial letters and revisions and re-revisions for me to understand that she trusts me. And I also trust her because I trust myself; I trust myself to figure out when I agree with her and when I disagree, and I trust myself not to cave under pressure if I feel strongly about something. And I trust her opinions, even when I disagree, to be well-worth pondering and playing around with. I trust her to have good reasons for her criticisms.

Are you a writer? Do you feel discouraged sometimes, and wonder if you have any right to be writing? Are you depressed by the pile of crap you wrote yesterday? Well, for the record, I’m depressed by the pile of crap I wrote yesterday, too , and just so you know, I get it. I know just how hard it is to keep faith in yourself when you’re writing. Will you trust me when I tell you that I believe in you? That the pile of crap is fixable, and writing is learnable, and being the creator of something is a risk — a leap — worth taking?

I don’t have anything profound to say about trust here… just that I think about it a lot, in my own life, in my characters’ lives, in my writing, in my relationships, in the car when I’m surrounded by crazy drivers — and on the trapeze. And I’m curious to hear any thoughts y’all have about it!

I’ll close with an illustration of the trapeze triangle of trust.

As you gaze upon the picture above, no doubt you’re admiring my socks and the chalk all over my ass, but what I’d really like you to notice is the disembodied arm in the right background. That arm belongs to the instructor on the platform, who, during this particular swing, was Jon. Jon helped me during my takeoff, reminding me of my form, giving me tips for the trick I was about to do, and holding my belt, pre-takeoff, so I didn’t fall off.

Perhaps, like me, you’re impressed with the photographer who took the photo above. Notice my hands? Somehow, the photographer managed to capture the exact moment in this trick where I let go of the trapeze in preparation for straightening myself out to be caught by the catcher. However, what I really want you notice is the carabiner attached to the belt around my waist. That carabiner, and another on the other side hidden behind my whooshing pony-tail, is connected to my rope lines, which pass through loops in the ceiling and back down to the floor, straight into the strong and capable hands of the instructor standing there, who happened to be Theresa when this picture was taken. If I miss my catch, or do anything wrong at any moment, Theresa will pull on the lines to break my fall into the net so that I land safely.

Finally, while you are no doubt fascinated by the view up my nose in the photo above, what I’d really like you to focus on are the hands reaching from the left, snatching me out of thin air. Those hands belong to Mike, who is swinging back and forth from his knees, upside down, in the catch trapeze. If I hadn’t trusted Mike to be there? I wouldn’t have flung myself off the trapeze with enough aggression. But I did trust him, and there he was.

BTW, I know these tricks can be pretty hard to parse from still photographs. If you care to see what this trick, called the “set straddle whip,” looks like in action, go to this page, scroll down, and watch the short video. That’s not me, and that’s not my trapeze school, but it’s pretty much what I was doing.

One last BTW — For anyone interested in flying, there are schools all over the world — you might be surprised to find one near you! I can vouch that TSNY has schools in New York, Boston, Washington DC, and Los Angeles.

1. I love the phrase “pen pal.” It’s so corny. Espcially as I have not used a pen to write a letter since I was a kid. “Pal” also has a deliciously archaic sound to me. Seriously who calls their friends their “pals”?

I first came across Courtney Milan when she very intelligently defended my honour on her blog. Turned out everything on her blog is witty and/or smart. Then Sarah Rees Brennan, my guide to romance, started raving about her writing. I commend both to you.¹ You can also follow her on twitter.

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Courtney Milan writes historical romances for adults. She has been lucky enough to hold two jobs she did not need to tell lies to get, and one job that she lied to get and then loved. Her website is at courtneymilan.com.

In Defense of Lying

The heroine of my debut novel, Proof by Seduction, is a liar. Not a compulsive liar like Justine’s Micah. No; Jenny Keeble (that’s her real name, although she never admits it) is a liar who pretends that she can tell the future, so that people will give her filthy lucre. And while this may seem a little dishonest, believe it or not, we all do it.

I happen to be thinking about lying because a friend of mine has an important job interview next week, and today I was helping her practice. Here’s the problem: She wants to get the job. She wants to get the job very badly, because as you may have noticed, the economy sucks, and at six months of unemployment, one starts to become antsy about things such as paychecks and the like. She does not, however, feel very excited about the prospect of actually doing the job. You understand how these things go. And so she has two options. She can go to the interview and tell the truth—and inevitably not get the job. Or she can lie.

This is actually a really common problem, whether the economy is good or bad. At some point in any job interview, someone will ask you this question: “Why do you want to work for us?” It doesn’t matter whether the job is flipping hamburgers at McDonalds or if you’re auditioning to be the next CEO of Proctor and Gamble. They’re going to ask the question. And they never want to hear the truth. The truth is something closer to this: “Because Burger King isn’t hiring, and my parents told me I had to get a job.” Or, the high-end version: “Your parachute is so golden that when you fire me in thirteen months, I won’t have to work for another two years.” No; nobody ever wants to hear the truth.

But, fickle and undependable as people are, they also don’t want to hear obvious lies. And so what you have to do, as an interviewee, is learn how to lie effectively. Why do you want to work for McDonalds? They don’t really want to know why you want to work for them, because the truth is too crass. The question they are really asking is this: “Why am I great? Please pay me several compliments, because I am feeling surprisingly needy and insecure.” So you think of all the reasons why McDonalds will think they are a good employer. And you then lie. “My friend Jill works for you, and I’ve heard you’re a really fair manager in dividing up shifts.” There you are. True. Believable. And also, a complete fabrication.

Good liars recognize that most people will only ask you three or four real questions. One of them, I’ve already told you—”please pay me several compliments.” But there are also questions that are like this: “I don’t have anything to say, and I’m afraid if I sit here in silence you will think I am an idiot, so can you please fill the time?” And: “Hey, does this question make me look smart?” And finally: “Do you think everything’s going to be okay?”

Good liars ignore the question that people actually ask, and answer the deep down question instead. “Hey, you’re pretty cool. No, you’re not an idiot. Dang, that question makes you look pretty smart.” And the best liars . . . they figure out how to answer that deep-down question, while still telling the truth. And that makes them very, very scary people.

1. Courtney’s writing and her blog, I mean. Not SRB. Not that I’m not commending SRB to you—she is wonderful—just on this occasion I am saving my commendations for Courtney Milan.

Then I read this very sensible piece by Jay Lake, which solidified for me something I’ve been trying to say for awhile now, which basically goes like this: before you take someone’s advice pay careful attention to where that person is coming from. Are they qualified to be giving this particular advice?

Now, it’s pretty obvious that if you wish to be published taking advice from some who has never been published is usually not wise. But Jay’s bigger advice is that often taking the advice of someone with a thriving career is also not wise because too many times what they can tell you is how they broke into the field. Problem is that happened ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty years ago and the field has changed since then.

So that when an established writer tells you that you don’t need an agent to get published they’re not lying. Back in the day when they were first published you didn’t. They’re also not lying when they say they continue to be published without an agent. But they’re neglecting to mention that that’s because they are known by those publishers. Someone looking to sell their first novel is not and given that so many of the big publishing houses are closed to submissions an agent is usually a first-time author’s best bet for getting published at a big house.

Any advice I give about getting published has to be taken with a large grain of salt by anyone who isn’t trying to break in to YA in the US. I have no idea how to get published in Australia—even though I’m Australian. I wasn’t published there until after I sold in the US. I still know far more about publishing in the US than I do about my own country. Nor do I know much about any market in the world except YA in the USA. If you’re trying to break into Romance or Crime or Literachure I’m useless to you.

That said, I’m probably not the most useful person to you for breaking into YA in the US either. I know about half a dozen agents well. There are way more reputable ones than that. I follow all the publishing news, far more than most YA writers, but I still don’t know that much about what goes on in those publishing houses and what all the editors are looking for. I know many editors, but I’ve only worked with a handful. You only really know an editor well when you’ve worked with them.

I know I said above that you shouldn’t be taking an unpublished person’s advice, but there are some great blogs by such writers detailing the process of trying to get published, which have very sensible things to say about query letters and the nuts and bolts of submitting to various different publishers when you don’t have an agent. All stuff that I know very little about. I have not written a query letter in a decade. Someone who’s actively trying to get published right now knows way more about query letters than I do.

I can talk about what it’s llike being a journeyman YA author. I can give you an author’s view on how you get published in more than one country and a variety of other topics that have to do with being a YA author with five novels under her belt. But take what I say about breaking into this field with a grain of salt. For that you’ll get better advice from agents and editors and brand new YA authors and from those on the verge of being published.

1. Before you yell at me for this statement you should know that I spent twenty years trying to break into mainstream publishing. I know how it feels. Also very few of those unpublished writers are bitter about it and decide that the big publishers are evil. Most suck it up and keep trying.
2. No, the way to break into YA is not to publish short stories first. That may apply to science fiction (though not nearly as much as it used to) but there is no YA short story market except for anthologies that you don’t get invited to submit to you unless you’re already published. I got my first anthology invitation after having three novels published.

When I’m at my computer for my scant four hours my top priority is my novel. After that I deal with the most important email (from agent, publishers etc) after that I tackle this blog. So far that’s pretty much all I get to. Which means I am not reading anything on Twitter and I have not read any blogs in a donkey’s age.

Thus I do not know what you’ve been saying about me. I’m not ignoring you, honest. I just haven’t read it. I do not know the latest kidlit gossip (unless Scott remembers to tell me). I have not answered your lovely email to me. But I have read it and been thrilled by it. Thank you.

To summarise: if you wish me to know something email me. But know that it will take me a long time to answer. My apologies in advance.

Which leads me to answering the questions I’ve been emailed lately:

Q: How is your injury going?

A: I’m doing much better. Thank you.

Q: Does that mean you’ll be online more?

A: For the time being no. Until I’m completely healed I’m going to continue the current no-more-than-four-hours daily-on-computer-five-days-a-week regime. Aside from anything else I’m getting a lot more writing done this way.

And when I’m not at the computer I’m getting a tonne of reading done. Most of it is research for my novel but I also recently read and loved Melina Marchetta’s Piper’s Son and Jaclyn Moriarty’s Dreaming of Amelia. I have also read two awesomely great novels by Sarah Cross. (Neither published yet. Sorry. But, trust me, you’re gunna love them.) I’ve been reading the serialised version of the third book in Sarah Rees Brennan’s Demon’s Lexicon trilogy, which I am also adoring. (Though I am very impatient for the next installment. Aren’t I lucky to know so many great writers who let me read their books early?) I’m also buried deep in Pluto by Naoki Urasawa. (I also love his Monster and am about to get started on 20th Century Boys.)

Q: What is this novel that’s eating all your computer time?

A: It is the 1930s novel that I have been mentioning for some time. That’s right I finally settled down and picked just one novel to work on. It’s big and sprawling and set in NYC in the early 1930s and is written in a mixture of omniscient point of view and letters.¹ I haven’t had this much fun writing in ages.

Q: When will your new book be published?

A: I have no idea. I am writing the 1930s book without a contract. I’ll sell it—or, rather, my agent Jill Grinberg will—when I’ve finished the book. So your guess is as good as mine as to when that will be.

Well, okay, my guess is a lot better than yours. The book just passed the 40k mark and I haven’t even gotten up to the events in the proposal (which I wrote when we were going to sell it before I finished it). I think I’ve written about a quarter or less of the novel. I also think it may be more than one novel. But I have decided to write the entire story in one go no matter how long it is. Then and only then will it be sold. The soonest I can imagine this book being finished would be the end of this year. But that’s probably way too optimistic. Then Jill would have to sell it, then the publisher would have to find a place for it in their publishing schedule, which would be 2012 at the earliest. Again that’s a very optimistic guestimate. In short: do not hold your breath for my next novel to appear in bookshops any time soon.

Q: How has Liar been selling?

A: My Australian and USian publishers tell me Liar is selling better than any of my other books. But that’s all I know. (It hasn’t been published anywhere but Australia/NZ and USA/Canada yet. Though it has sold in a number of other countries.)

Q: How is your garden coming along?

A: Wonderfully well. Thank you for asking. All the plants are in! We’ve even used some of them in cooking. (Mint, bay leaves, dill, chillis.) Being surrounded by gorgeous plants has made us both happier and we spend much time doting on them (and then eating some of them). Here is a photo for your delectation:

This is what it used to look like (Well, actually, this is what it looked like after we got the deck sanded prior to garden going in. Click here for the pre-sanded version.):

Thanks again for the lovely letters. The ones in praise of Liar are becoming more and more frequent and never fail to make my day. I’m so pleased that book has meant so much to so many readers.

1. That’s right, Justine goes for the most commercial angles yet again.

Alaya Dawn Johnson is a wonderful writer, whose short story in Zombies v Unicorns, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is jaw-droppingly good. Her next novel, Moonshine, out in May is my fave New York City vampire novel. I love it so much that it’s been killing me waiting for it to come out because I’ve been dying to rave about Moonshine to youse lot. Trust me, you want this book.

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Alaya Dawn Johnson dated a zombie once in high school, but it didn’t stick. Her first novel was Racing the Dark, the first in a trilogy she decided to call The Spirit Binders once her publisher told her trilogies needed names. The second book, The Burning City, is due out in June. She is also looking forward to the May 11 publication of Moonshine, her 1920s vampire novel set in the Lower East Side of New York City.

Alaya says:

What My Dad Said

When I first showed my dad the new paperback cover of Racing the Dark, I was pretty proud of it. I thought that it evoked the book and was fairly striking. I won’t lie, I pretty much expected him to pat me on the head and say, “Looks great, honey.”

Instead, he picked it up and turned it over a few times. His face took on that serious, thinking expression I recognized meant he was considering how to phrase something important.

“Alaya,” he said, “the art is lovely. The image and everything is great. But are you sure you want to limit yourself like that with this cover?”

“Limit myself?” I asked.

“White people are going to be way less likely to pick up a book with a cover featuring a brown person. That’s just the way the world works.”

I told my dad (with some annoyance) that I didn’t think that was true, and anyway, my book is about a brown person, so these hypothetical white people would just have to suck it up.

Cut to this past Christmas, when my Dad, my sister, my brother and I were all last-minute shopping at the local mall. Like we do every Christmas, we all tromped through the local Borders, looking for presents. This time I was especially excited, because the store claimed to have a copy of my book.

My dad and I searched all through the fantasy section, just so I could experience hasn’t-gotten-old-yet zing of seeing my own work in a bookstore. But Racing the Dark wasn’t there. Finally, we went back to the computers to look for it again.

And we saw what we had missed the first time: though Racing the Dark is clearly labeled “fantasy” on its spine, the powers that be at Borders, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to shelve me in the “African American” section.

At least I was in good company. On the shelves surrounding my book were works by Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. I’ve looked through this peculiar hybrid section before, and I’ve always been bewildered by the mish-mash of genres and writers all sandwiched together on two narrow shelves. Would someone like to tell me what on earth Zane and Toni Morrison have to do with each other?

Dad and I stared at the book in dismay. “I can’t believe they did this,” I said.

“Honey, I told you,” he said. “You should have had a more generic cover.”

I couldn’t really disagree with him, at that point.

So Dad picked up the book and we physically marched it over to the Fantasy section, where we left it, cover side out.

“Alaya,” my Dad said, later that day, over dinner, “you have to understand that you live in the world. You can’t mess around with the way you wish things would be. You have to deal with the way that they are. A black woman writing a book with a cover like that is going to get shoved in a category you might not want to be in.”

Considering that we had just seen the physical evidence of my being shoved into that category, I just nodded and went back to my food.

It stuck with me, though. And I realized that my dad’s point of view hasn’t really been in much of the ongoing discussion about cover art and whitewashing.

In a lot of discussions about race, my Dad and I suffer from a pretty profound generational gap. My dad is of the Old School, which we could call “determined pragmatism.” As far as my dad is concerned, he grew up in a world where he couldn’t sit down at half the lunch counters in Richmond, where he had to sit in the balcony of the theater, drink from labeled water fountains and sit on the black side of the court house.

Now, in his sixties, my dad owns a business that actually works with the same governments that supported Jim Crow laws. He’s moved into that small percentage of the black upper-middle class, and as far as he’s concerned, race is something you deal with and move on. If you have to change something because white people don’t like overt blackness, then you do that. It’s not that my dad doesn’t understand my points about how frustrating and degrading it can be to always have non-whiteness relegated to this unwanted subcategory (or, even worse, an exoticized one). He does. He just feels that if the world works this way and if I’m just a writer struggling to make a living, then I ought to find a way to help myself within that existing power structure.

Now, I still don’t think he’s right. I still like my cover and I’m still very happy that it very clearly features my non-white main character.

But I will say that it felt like a gut punch to see Racing the Dark shelved—with such a contemptuous lack of care for its content or its audience—in the African American section of Borders.

Melina Marchetta is probably Australia’s most popular YA writer and with good reason her books are deeply awesome. I just finished her latest, The Piper’s Son and I think it’s her best book to date. I was up reading it till 3AM and then I couldn’t sleep for another hour because I was weeping too hard. LOVED IT.

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Melina Marchetta is a Sydney writer. She has just released her fifth novel, The Piper’s Son, a sequel to her 2003 novel Saving Francesca which will be published in the US next March. Her website is www.melinamarchetta.com.au.

Melina says:

Please note that this is not a piece about books I don’t like, but about personal taste and what we look for in the novels we choose to read.

When you don’t like a book that everyone is raving about, you feel guilty. You don’t want to be that person who lets hype affect their reading because I hate that person. I want to say to that person, ‘Grow up. You can still be individual and love the same book or film as everyone else.’

I’m only admitting this publicly because he’s dead and I won’t be offending him, but I’m in the minority and didn’t care for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Despite being told that I wasn’t going to be able to put down Dragon Tattoo after page 200, I spent the next 356 pages dying to do just that. But I’d like to think that deep down, me not liking it had nothing to do with the hype or with Stieg Larsson’s writing and had everything to do with personal taste.

It wasn’t until I recently read another crime fiction novel, Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore, that it became clear to me that when it comes to that particular genre, I need a tortured hero, lack of exposition and killer dialogue. As booklovers we choose novels because they have the secret ingredient we need to nourish our personal reading appetite. We reject others because they have the ‘turn off’ ingredient that is made up mostly by our personal idiosyncrasies or context.

Someone close to me is turned off by YA literature, for example. I forgive them because they have pretty good reasoning. Being a teenager was bad enough when they were young and they can’t bear the idea of re-living it again through angst-ridden characters like most of mine.

But the problem with me and those who have rules about what they do and don’t include in their reading material is that we miss out on some great stories and genres. I love it when someone stumbles on my work by pure accident. I love it when I stumble into a genre that I’ve kept away from. Science Fiction is a classic example. I always felt it was a bit over my head and then I read Cordelia’s Honour by Lois McMaster Bujold. I picked it up because I thought it was a romance. I ended up having a mini obsession for every Miles Vorkosigan novel. It was a good introduction to the genre.

But despite that, I still have my list below of what turns me away from reading a novel. Any suggestions to change my mind will be appreciated.

• Love triangles. I haven’t been in one since fourth grade so it’s probably love-triangle envy that I’m feeling.
  Novels where middle aged men end up with much younger women.
• Novels where there are no women or vague references to them. I forgive Melville and Conrad for Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness because one has a killer opening line and the other nourishes my obsession with rivers, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
• Poor female representation. This can be anything from insipid female characters to one dimensional kick-arse heroines. Of course there are some fantastic kick-arse heroines out there, but the ones I don’t care for are those who display a plethora of male traits and nothing else and are considered the new feminists.
• Novels where the character describes themselves as feisty, witty and quirky on the first page. These are characteristics that can’t be self-diagnosed and have to been shown not told.
• Novels where the hero/heroine die at the end. I’m that person standing beside you in the bookstore reading the last page first. If there’s death on the last page the book goes back on the shelf. I know I’m missing out on some really fantastic novels by this exclusion. Before I die, for example, will be the first novel I read if I let go of my not-reading-novels-where-the-heroine-dies-in-the-end rule because I hear it’s absolutely fantastic and I’m going to go with the hype. If you’ve read any of my novels, all the deaths happen early on, usually on the first page and a couple of hundred in between, but rarely at the end. The idea of mortality keeps me awake at night so having to agonise over my death as well as another character’s is trauma I try to avoid.

  Note: The no-death rule also applies to films. I refuse to watch any more productions of Romeo and Juliet or anything to do with the life of Jesus Christ because we all know what happens at the end. They die.

Does anyone else have any turn-off ingredient? (please don’t mention book titles unless the author is dead).

Claire Light is many things including a writer, a blogger extraordinaire, and a teacher. She provides this blog with its first guest post on how to write, which is odd. I was kind of expecting that there’d have been more than one by now. See what happens when you give people a free reign? But it’s worth the wait because this is a most excellent post on structure. Something I find it very hard to articulate my thoughts on. Thank you, Claire!

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Claire Light is a writer and freelance nonprofit hack living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a cat who’s allergic to people (although he really likes them) and she sometimes teaches creative writing to unwary victims. Her first collection of short stories, Slightly Behind and to the Left, was just released by Aqueduct Press in December.

Claire says:

Hi everyone! I’m thrilled to be posting on Justine’s blog, which I read religiously. Justine was one of the folks who got me reading YA again, after a long hiatus of absurd adulthood, and I find her blog just as entertaining and interesting and fun as her books.

I thought I’d bust out something today from my writing classes (for you budding writers out there.) That’s right, I’m teaching (FREE!) writing classes in Oakland, California through the Oakland Word program. This program is a (FREE!) gift of the Oakland Library (and the California State Library) because they are awesome. Libraries are truly Our Friends, people. So if any of you are in Oakland or the East Bay and want to take a class, you can sign up for our second session here for FREE! (but you do have to sign up. By the way, we have classes for adults and teens.)

I’m teaching a fiction class and a memoir (or “life stories”) class, but what I’m REALLY teaching in both cases is how to put together a story. Because whether you’re writing about “true” things that happened to you, or whether you’re making sh%t up, your readers sorta kinda expect you to write the story in a recognizable story shape. Stories are shapes that information (about what we think life is) comes in that make the information easy for us to take in, pick apart, and digest. We learn the story shape in school, and by reading lots of books. So your readers are primed and ready to receive stories, and your readers know when a story is shaped right and when it’s not (and will throw fits when it’s not.) Sometimes writers deliberately distort story shapes (the way Justine did with Liar) just to make things interesting.

But to mess with things in that way, you have to know what the “proper” story structure is, at least, what it is in our storytelling tradition. Now, when I say “our tradition,” let’s be clear, I’m talking about a western, primarily European tradition of storytelling that goes back over 2000 years to Aristotle (or back even farther than that, but Aristotle wrote the first creative writing manual about it.) We’ve altered, added to, and refined this tradition along the way, certainly. But the way James Cameron shaped Avatar is still pretty frakkin close to how Homer (if he existed) shaped The Iliad. (footnote: This western tradition persists in the US and other former European colonies, despite their increasing multiculturalism. And this tradition is making inroads into nonwestern storytelling traditions through the movies (and TV and books) that are exported all over the world. Folks from other cultures often add aspects of their own storytelling traditions to the western tradition. But what rules on English-language bookshelves is largely western storytelling.)

At the heart of both of these stories, and of most of the stories you read in our tradition, is conflict. Conflict, simply put, is where someone wants something and can’t get it, at least not immediately. Now maybe they can’t get it because someone else wants it and is fighting them for it (Avatar, The Iliad .) Or maybe they can’t get it because it’s hiding far away somewhere and they have to Have Adventures before they can get it Lord of the Rings, Holy Grail romances.) Or maybe they can’t get it because they’re crazy neurotics who love to make things difficult for themselves (any Woody Allen movie, the story of my life.) But you can reduce almost any story down to a formula: desire + obstacle = conflict. Keep in mind, of course, that the best stories are complex and will have more than one conflict, or will have conflicts going in all directions among many different characters, or will have the same set of conflicts repeat again and again in different ways.

Take the movie The Matrix for example. (If you haven’t seen it, go see it immediately! Whether you like it or not, it was a game-changer in filmic storytelling.) The core desire is Neo’s desire to understand reality. The core obstacle to his understanding is the Matrix and the beings who created it. So the core conflict is Neo’s quest to understand reality in the face of the massive illusion that is the Matrix and the resistance of the creepy Agents. The story starts out with Neo’s feeling that something is wrong with the world, and his search (mostly on the internet) for clues as to what that is. Once Neo meets up with Morpheus and Trinity and the rebels and learns about the Matrix, his quest then becomes to understand reality by learning to control the Matrix.

The desire + the obstacle necessitates action. The protagonist must take some action to overcome the obstacle, and achieve the desire. Neo must take action to overcome his initial obstacle, which is his inability to find out what the Matrix is. He overcomes this obstacle by spending waaaay too much time on the internet and not sleeping. As each obstacle to achieving his desire is overcome, another obstacle arises, and he must take new action to overcome that obstacle. So once he goes to a nightclub and meets the rebels, he has to decide whether to take the blue pill or the red pill. Once he exits the Matrix, he must download kung fu (whoa.) Once he learns how to manipulate the Matrix, he must go back in and fight the Agents. Because the film was set up for a sequel, Neo’s main desire is never quite achieved in the first movie. But he does reach a good resting place, where a large part of his desire to understand reality (mastery of the Matrix) is achieved.

Because The Matrix is a competently written movie, there is more than one conflict in the story. Many characters want many different things: Morpheus wants to find The One, Trinity wants to find her true love, Cypher wants to get back into the Matrix and eat steak, Agent Smith wants to control the human virus and destroy the rebels. Because this story is a very traditional hero story, the desires of the good guys align with the protagonist’s desire, and the desires of the bad guys run directly counter to the protagonist’s desire. But the difference between the good guys and the protagonist is that, while the good guys have desires and obstacles and do stuff to overcome their obstacles, it’s the protagonist’s desire that moves the main action of the story.

So how do you use this in your own writing? Well, pretty much every story writer everywhere has had this experience: you get a great idea, you come up with some great characters and a great setting, you start writing with great enthusiasm, and then at some point … well, you kind of stop. What happens next? You don’t know. You’re stuck. You’re out of ideas. (footnote: Don’t worry. This happens to the best of ‘em. Look carefully in published novels and you’ll often find a point somewhere around the halfway mark where the author suddenly gets very philosophical about what is happening in the story. Yeah, it’s because the author ran out of ideas for a while and is stalling.) This is usually because you haven’t entirely understood your conflict yet, so you don’t know what your protagonist needs to do to resolve it. The question isn’t “what happens next?” the question is rather “what does my character make happen?” And to answer that, you have to understand what your character wants, and what is keeping your character from achieving it.

So here’s what I ask my students to do. Think about where your protagonist comes from, in terms of culture, in terms of family and upbringing. What are her expectations of life? What are all the things she wants in life — not just the big things but the small things too. Does she want to be famous? Does she want to fall in love? Does she want for everything to stay the same always (a common conflict, in which the protagonist has to overcome the desire instead of its obstacle, which is the fact that everything changes.) Does she want to acquire a complicated skill set? (Swordsmanship, for example, or mechanics.) Does she want a particular dress? (Paul Gallico created a wonderful fairy tale of class conflict around a cleaning lady’s desire for a couture dress in Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris.)

Now think about your protagonist’s strengths and weaknesses, her fears large and small. Think about the world she lives in and the people around her. What do they want? Think about all the ways she can be stopped from getting what she wants: the desires of other people, her own fears or inabilities, the distance or the difficulty of achieving the desire. Try taking notes about all of these as you think about them. And when you have understood the situation all around think about this: what would your protagonist do first to achieve her desire and what do you think would come of it? Write that. When you’re done writing that, think about it again, and take the next step. I guarantee that your dry spell will end quickly and soon your brain will fill back up with ideas.

Good luck with the storytelling, and feel free to share your writing problems and solutions in the comments!

I just want to make it clear that I’m only letting Diana be a guest here because she has threatened me with a fate worse than death. Mind you, she’s already mentioned uni**rns like ten times. Surely that’s a fate worse than death? My blog has been violated! She and Sarah Cross need to go form a band together. I should also mention that Diana’s books are excellent. Especially—believe it or not—the killer uni***n ones. Also I agree with this post a hundred per cent. Except for what she says about uni***ns.

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Diana Peterfreund loves unicorns. Despite this, Justine is letting her guest blog. Her fifth book, Rampant, and her sixth, Ascendant (out this fall) are all about killer unicorns, specifically. So is the story she has coming out in Holly & Justine’s Zombies vs. Unicorns anthology. She’s pretty much the captain of Team Unicorn. (And she’d like to point out that the stuff about Tonks is a dirty rumor of John Green’s. Tonks was killed by a werewolf.) Diana lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and the most beautiful puppy in the world. She loves the outdoors, television shows about awesome women like Veronica Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Avatar: The Last Airbender . . . and all animals, not just unicorns. Also, Justine? Unicorns, unicorns, unicorns. Check out Diana’s website or Twitter feed.

TRASK. RADIO. TRASK. RADIO.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the complexity of inspiration. One of the most common questions writers get is “where do you get your ideas?” It’s one that makes a lot of writers want to run screaming for the hillside. We don’t all have cute, soundbite-worthy answers. Lucky the author who can cite a dream about a sparkly dude in a meadow and call it a day. Luckier still, those authors who can actually point to blog evidence of their inspiration in action.

Sans a convenient dream or public debate to spark the imagination, many authors, when faced with this ubiquitous question, just manufacture a Eureka moment to please their audience. I’ve actually gotten emails from enthusiastic fans who want to know why I say in one interview that Rampant was inspired by a dream of being chased by a unicorn and in another that I got the idea after mistakenly hearing the words “unicorn hunter” on a local television program.

The truth is, inspiration is not so simple. Rarely is there one bolt from the blue that turns into a 400 page novel. Rampant was also inspired by a desire to write about women warriors, by my long love of classic mythology, and by a passing interest of several years to talk about the topic of virginity in one of my books. Each of these motes float around in the brain, sometimes glancing off one another and moving on, sometimes colliding and accreting and eventually turning into something resembling what John Scalzi would call “a big idea.”1 Sometimes, the process takes years. And it’s not always interesting or linear or even something we can explain – or would want to in a public forum.

So why is this question so persistently popular? Is it the equivalent of talking about the weather? Less-than-imaginative interviewers who can’t think of anything more interesting to ask? My friends will tell you that I’m a lover of fictional concepts. I love hearing about people’s ideas, talking about the nature of ideas, the classification of ideas, how people sell ideas, why ideas fit into this trend or that trend (or not). I read Scalzi’s Big Idea posts religiously. And yet, how the person “came up with” the idea is never as interesting to me as how this idea was so powerful it moved them to create a fictional world through which to explore it.

But maybe I’m biased, because I’m a writer and I know the process of story creation is rarely romantic. So I tried to think if I’m fascinated by other kinds of inspiration—scientific discoveries or culinary coups. Do I want to know about apples falling on people’s heads, or an engineer taking a close look at the burrs stuck to a dog’s fur after a hike? (The inspiration for Velcro.) I know many of these stories off the top of my head. I know that Post-Its were a lucky lab accident, like Silly Putty, and of course, penicillin.

Though maybe I only know these because they are so famous for being accidents. Indeed, there are several other scientific inventions that are often called accidents, because that’s a far sexier story than, “This scientist named Goodyear was working for years on making vulcanized rubber, and he had all the ingredients right but for one and then one day, after many, many, many attempts, he finally got the formula exactly perfect.”

I liked learning that ice cream cones were a last-minute substitution after vendors ran out of dishes, that potato chips were invented to piss off a customer complaining about soggy French fries, and that Coke started out life as a headache remedy (possibly when it still contained actual coca leaves) and only then became a food. So maybe I have the same issue in fields other than my own, where the romantic aspects of those careers still hold sway.

Perhaps we’re hardwired to gravitate toward stories of “how’d they do that.” Maybe it’s similar to the urge folks have to know how a couple met? (Woe to the couple with no “cute meet” when asked this question. I feel their pain.)

Savvy readers will note that the title of this post refers to a line from the film WORKING GIRL. In the climax of the movie, the heroine, Tess, must defend her ownership of a business deal her unscrupulous boss Katherine is trying to steal credit for. The test—for both these women—is based on inspiration. Tess has a torn sheet of newsprint connecting the idea of Trask Industries and the idea of radio, and Katherine claims she can’t quite remember her initial “spark.” Though I love this movie, that particular scene always sits wrong with me.

I know Katherine is an evil thief and we’re all supposed to be on Tess’s side anyway, but I hate the fact that we’re supposed to condemn Katherine merely for not having a published record of her inspirational path. Moreover, on top of a torn sheet of newsprint, Tess has been working her butt off on the deal for the entire film. She’s put everything together – and Harrison Ford’s Jack was there to witness her doing so. Isn’t all that work far more important (and indicative of her true ownership of the deal) than some crumpled scrap of tabloid? Isn’t the work far more vital to the product than the spark?

Thomas Edison once said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And that may be true, but that doesn’t mean it’s interesting to the audience. After all, here’s another truth: “Never let them see you sweat.”

Some days though I find bad reviews of my own work a bit hard to take. When that happens I turn to the one-star reviews of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice which are the best therapy in the universe and never fail to cheer me up.

Here are a few faves:

Like others, I really did want to like this book. I tried and tried to read it, but it was all nonsensical jibber-jabber. I may try again, but doubt it. It’s torture!”

“Nonsensical jibber-jabber” is now my favourite phrase of all time.

Me no could read that book good. It too slow. Me like better book. Me like Tales from the Crypt. I no think any one should read. I would not read again. If you like torture read book. If you smart spend money on beacon soda.

I’m pretty sure this one is on-purpose funny. I salute it! I too enjoy Tales from the Crypt.

It appears that the odds are against me since most people love this…I don’t even know what to call it. And that is perfectly fine we are not all a like and have a right to our own views and opinions. Nevertheless, I must speak out and let my opinon be heard even though most of you who can’t say enough about this book wouldn’t want to hear.

I am forced to read this book for my lit class and I find this book repulsive. I have never read such a novel that is completly incompetant, complete nonsence, the smallest talks of all the small talks in the world, it is about nothingness, and how several nothings trying and wanting to get married to other nothings for all the wrong reasons in the world. It is about people pretending to be inteligent and pretending to be civilized. It is a book where they compliment women as being handsome and men as being well…also handsome. It is quite contageous I might add because I find myself helplessly imatitating the language that it was written in. I am offended by every paragraph that I read. I have never felt such contemt for any work that I read. I pasionately despise this novel and I could write an entire paper on why. The 17th century English aristocracy and the way the people cary and behave themselves and think so highly of themselves and so low of anybody who is different, is offensive and without merit. You may think “that I simply don’t understand this work” well I don’t and I am not going pretend that I understand this “classic” Perhaps I am incapable of comprehending this novel. I do know however that there are a lot finer book writen in the 17th centuries and earlier and after, which are better, more meaningful then this book and are also classic but some of them are notoverated enough as much as this book is.

Tee. I can’t fault them for getting their centuries wrong. I myself am quite inumerate and am constantly reversing numbers. 17th century, 19th century. What’s the diff? Also I am a pretty poor speller myself. It would be hypocrisy of the first order were I to mock the spelling. And yet . . .

I tried to read it, but I couldn’t. I put it down at about page 100. From a fan of IMMANUEL KANT, this was too boring. Honestly, after I put it down, I had to study the Diamond Sutra and the Book of Job to get the vapid feeling out of my head. Someone on here wrote something to the effect of “as Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, so did Austen see the world in a drawing room”. To this, I’d say that there is a vast difference in seeing the world in a drawing room, and thinking that the world IS a drawing room.

*cough* I will say nothing . . .

I HATED THIS BOOK. I READ IT IN HIGH SCHOOL, ABOUT 9 YEARS AGO AND I STILL REMEMBER HOW MUCH I HATE THE PUFFY PATHETIC NARRATIVE OF WHINY WOMEN IN WANT OF HUSBANDS. It is with deep anguish that I note that there are books on how to teach this book in classes, thereby continuing the legacy of pain to innocent students of this day and age.

I FEEL YOUR PAIN. THEY MADE ME READ THE GREAT GATSBY IN HIGH SCHOOL. I STILL REMEMBER HOW MUCH I HATED THE PUFFY PATHETIC NARRATIVE ABOUT A BUNCH OF WHINY MEN IN WANT OF MONEY.¹

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, is a book about the life of a girl, Elizabeth Bennet. She has five sisters and lives with her mother and father in 18th century England. The story tells of her sisters’ loves and marriages. Elizabeth’s youngest sister gets married to a man of questionable character, who happens to be the friend of the man that Elizabeth herself loves, Mr. Darcy. Of course Elizabeth’s love isn’t that simple, since she first has to hate Mr. Darcy and then blames him for everything that her sister is going through. Jane, Elizabeth’s oldest sister, falls in love with another of Darcy’s friends. All the trouble that any of Elizabeth’s not-quite-normal family has is blamed on Mr. Darcy.

Basically, the whole book is about an 18th century girl whining about her upper middle class life. Of course, at the end, she gets exactly what she wants and everyone lives happily ever after. There is credit to be given to Jane Austen, since she wrote the book in an American household in the early 1800s, with no support from any of her family. She had to hide her writing under knitting or sewing whenever someone approached. She then had a friend publish the books she wrote, without telling her husband. Considering all that, the story really isn’t that bad, but in general, if you were looking for a book by Jane Austen, Emma would be a better read. If you want a predictable love story, “Pride and Prejudice” is a good book for you.”

Bless! How foolish we all were thinking that Jane Austen was English and unmarried and her books were set and published in the 19th century.² Amazon reviews are educational. Yes, that last review does have a most amusing comment correction thread in response.

The point being that there is no book or author that is universally loved. We all of us have our foibles and preferences, blind spots and, well, prejudices and it is through them that we perceive the world and the books in it.³

All of which makes the world a rich and interesting place. There’s room for Jane Austen haters and lovers. There’s even room for the Jane Austen indifferents.

1. Actually, I quite like The Great Gatsby and am a bit of an F. Scott Fitzgerald fan, but it’s fun to see John Green and English teachers freak out when I say I hate it.
2. I know! I know! Those pesky numbers.
3. Except for me, of couse, my hatred of Moby Dick and the writings of Henry Miller, Patrick White and Norman Mailer is completely rational and anyone who likes them is just flat out wrong.

So, last night I checked out Justine Larbalestier’s Liar out of the library. I curled up on the couch and happily got to page 34, only to discover that someone ripped out pages 35-36. Upon closer examination, I discovered someone did the same for pages 82-83 and 137-138.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a US edition of Liar here in Sydney and I confess I’m dying of curiosity to know what’s on those specific pages. Could one of you help me out? If you could give me the first sentence on page 35 & the last on page 36 and the same with pages 82-83 and 137-138 that would be deeply awesome. I can then look them up in the Oz edition I have here.

Thank you!

Update: Thank you so much for your incredibly fast response. Bless!

Update the second: I’ve gone through the pages and I can detect no pattern. I think whoever it was had very idiosyncratic reasons for vandalising the book. Maybe they just desperately needed paper? Odd.

My heart fills with joy:

ALL MINE.

Er, um, Scott can have one. If he’s good.

Must go. Have a whole bowl of mangosteens to gobble.

Then I realised I couldn’t think of any other songs about women who have priorities in life other than getting married.¹ Other than the “I never will marry” song:

I never will marry
I’ll be no man’s bride
I expect to stay single
For the rest of my life²

But that’s usually sung as a heartbroken miserable song of despair, which is not what I’m talking about.

Can anyone think of cheerful songs of women who are happy to be single, who are not desperate to be married, of women who may want to marry some day but not right now? Please to share in comments if so.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against marriage. I am married myself. Happily even. Nor do I have anything against women wanting to be married. It’s just that they already have a tonne of songs. I want representation for all the girls who don’t dream of a big wedding and marriage when they grow up.

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Thanks to everyone for all the lovely get well wishes. I is touched. Truly I am on the mend and is not that bad an injury. Trust me, I’ve had worse. But, yes, I will continue to not be online much for the forseeable and, yes, there will be more guest bloggers. Thank you, wonderful guests, and thanks again, faithful readers, for bearing with me.

Have a good weekend everyone!

1. This probably reflects more on my dreadful memory than anything else.
2. Lyrics from memory thus could be wrong—too many keystrokes to google.

David Levithan’s a writer, an editor, and class president of the NYC YA scene. He got the YA drinks night going and the NYC YA Lit Festival. He does not sleep and must be at least part cyborg. (Or there’s more than one of him, which his interview of himself below strongly implies.) This post came at just the right time for me because it’s all about loving writing. I confess that right now I am head over heels in love with writing so his interview with himself made me smile and go “awww” and nod in recognition (and be really glad that I was enjoying summer in Sydney, not enduring smelly winter in NYC).¹

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David Levithan writes books by himself, writes books with other people, and edits books written by other people. His latest book is Will Grayson, Will Grayson, written with John Green, which will be out in April in the US and in May in Australia and New Zealand. You might be able to find him on facebook.

The two Davids say:

Q: Why do you write?

A: I write because I am in love with life. Or I write because I want to be in love with life. I think it’s always one of the two.

Q: What do you mean?

A: It’s nearing the end of a long winter. I don’t mind snow, but I’m tired of boots. I don’t mind cold, but I’m tired of the way we can’t talk about anything else. I feel the desire to retreat becoming more pronounced. But at the same time, I recognize that when I do retreat, when I do hole up in my home, I do so because I want to reconnect with the most elemental parts of my life. Writing is like that, too. You escape life to discover life again. And I can’t help but love that. Or be in love with that.

Q: You often write love stories. Conventional love stories. Two people falling in love. Why?

A: I think I write about that – a lot – because loving another person is a manifestation of loving life, or being in love with life.

Q: You keep talking about being in love with life . . .

A: It’s like synesthesia, without the wires crossed. Instead of seeing red when you hear a note of music, when you see red you really see the red, and when you hear a note of music, you really hear the note of music. I guess I truly believe the world is made of marvels. Horrible things, too. Awful things. But mostly marvels. And I rely on writing to help me capture them in some way. For myself and for others. Other people find their marvels in science, or math, or other arts. I understand that. But for me, the words get me closest to the true experience of life.

Q: You sound too happy.

A: I used to worry that you had to be in pain to be a great writer. I’ve gotten over that.

Q: But doesn’t a writer need to have an edge of despair?

A: That’s the popular conception. I’m getting over that too. It can certainly be there. But I don’t think it’s required.

Q: Why do you write?

A: I enjoy these words. I enjoy the sensation of sitting at this laptop and seeing which words float to the top from the depth where all possible words are kept. I think it’s strange that we rarely talk about this enjoyment, perhaps because we’re in awe of it, or perhaps because we feel to be a good warrior, you need to go through the wars and have the scars to prove it.

Q: You never write out of anger? Hate? Fury?

A: Of course I do. But it’s only because I believe in the right things that I can write about the wrong.

Q: Do you worry that words are losing their meaning?

A: In what way?

Q: Does technology devalue words, detach them from the marvels?

A: No. Well crafted phrases still show a love for life.

Q: For example?

A: I had cereal for dinner. It’s hard to imagine a more banal sentence. But if you can attach the sentence to its sensations, it will make you more in love with life. Tonight, I had cereal for dinner. It made me feel like an adult, but on childish terms. I walked around my apartment with the bowl in my hand, felt the cereal crunch in my teeth, drank the leftover milk when the cereal was gone. As I did, a trickle ran down my chin. I felt I was seven years old and thirty-seven years old at the same time. All of which is contained in the sentence, I had cereal for dinner.

Q: Why do you write?

A: Because I love that life is a puzzle and we only have a small chance to figure it out. Because it’s memory. Because I can make things exist that don’t exist, and I can also choose to show things as they exist.

Q: What do you want people to know?

A: That it’s okay to openly love writing, even when it’s hard. That it’s okay to be in love with life, even when it’s hard. That there is no reason to anything, and thus you find your own reasons. I never get a chance to talk about how much I love what I do. I really love what I do.

1. What? I get to gloat!

Ron Bradfield Jnr blogs as Belongum. I discovered his wonderful blog via Cellobella, another fabulous WA blogger, who I met at the Perth Writers Festival last year. See sometimes you can discover fabulous blogs via real life. Amazing, innit?

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Ron Bradfield Jnr is a contemporary Bardi man because he has to be. His mob come for the tip of Cape Leveque, north of Broome, Western Australia. He was born and brought up, away from his Country and worked extensively through remote and rural communities all up and down WA. He works with visual artists (via Artsource) and it’s been said many times before in his presence, that herding cats would be a darn sight simpler! In his spare time, he writes. Mostly that consists of blogging, although he is also guilty of publishing in various related work-related magazines as well. It all depends on the two little people in his house and their fantastic mother. Family always gets squashed in there somewhere. All in all, Ron loves what a good yarn can do. Sharing our respective cultures in respectful and healthy ways is the key. Poking people in the eye with it—just makes for a bad experiences all-round and has us remembering them for all the wrong reasons. Our respective cultures make us the richest species on the planet—yet we don’t celebrate this in any way that helps us connect well to each other. Ron’s crossing his fingers in the vain hope that it’s all not too late and that we continue to share. You can find out more about the world he lives in on his blog.

It’s All English to Me

You’ve undoubtedly heard . . .

. . . the phrase ‘lost in translation’. It’s a phrase I see confirmed on many levels here in Australia. All irony aside, most Australians born and living in our English speaking country, probably don’t realise the trap that our familiarity with the English language brings: it leads us to assume certain things, based upon particular meanings. It fails to acknowledge other associated depths to a word—spoken or written—especially those relevant to other cultures. Most particularly—mine!

I am of two worlds. I have a foot in two culture camps here in Oz: that of the Aboriginal peoples (Bardi Mob in particular) of this country and that of the Irish who were brought, or settled here. I have lived a pretty varied life so far; it has seen me fail my early ‘schooling’; learn and work in my trade; sport two military uniforms for this country; work extensively with isolated and damaged young people; assist Aboriginal communities and now—I get to yarn with some of Western Australia’s most amazing visual artists.

My journey into the arts has allowed a fantasy of mine to come true: it’s given me a perfect excuse to write. I’ve always wanted to—I was just never allowed to explore this kind of opportunity as a kid. In general, our education system didn’t invest much in Aboriginal kids when I was young. It was just the way it was here in
Australia in the early 80’s. Thankfully though; at an early age, I discovered books.

They took me places my education couldn’t and allowed me sneak-peaks at worlds I didn’t believe existed. They showed me very early in life that words had an amazing power and they raised questions in me—I was reading of other people’s experiences—but none of them were mine.

Let me correct that some; none of them, were of my Mob. Not too many of these wonderful books brought me the Aboriginal meanings I had come to associate with certain English words. I recognized similar notions in other cultures that weren’t English based and only because the depth associated with the word was often accompanied by descriptions that took my mind along other paths to build the picture I needed. Rather than tell me a concept, my favourite writers showed me. In doing so, I was allowed the room to let MY cultural notion of the words exist without constraint. My understandings of these words were included and—as most people of another Culture in this country already knew—this was a rare experience indeed.

A simple example? Well, in my Mob (and for that of most Australian Aboriginal and Islander peoples) we call all our birth mother’s sisters, ‘Mum’. This is the translation in English of course, although each of the differing nations or language groups have their own term for this, but essentially—the notion of the word ‘Mum’ or ‘Mother’ in English—tends to fit. It’s not as limited in its use within our communities though. We don’t have only ONE Mum—we have many. Yep, I know, we’re just greedy that way.

The English word ‘Aunty’ just doesn’t fit here either and, should it be used (as it often is in other Aboriginal and Islander communities more impacted upon by our backward past policies of taking our children away), it’s used as the word’s actual meaning defines it—but the underlying cultural context—tells you a completely different thing entirely. Past government policies have managed to break our families apart, exterminate so many of our languages and cultures and almost rendered us lost to today’s Australian society—but it has NEVER squashed our own sense, of ourselves.

I know this to be true, simply because when I use the words Culture and Country—they take on a completely different meaning for us, than it does for the vast majority of those who live here. Please understand that I don’t say this to NOT include you dear readers; just to highlight a point. If anything I believe that if you call this Country your home – than you should understand these concepts as part of your own Australian heritage (despite what some people will tell you—you’re actually welcome to do so) and culture. Country is where I come from, what I’m
connected to and it defines who I am (to others). Culture is what connects me there; it feeds my centre and keeps me whole. I can’t explain it any simpler than that. It’s something I’d need to show you—as it can’t be captured completely in English.

English Dictionaries will tell you a completely different thing and that is an absolute shame. The English language is a tool. It shouldn’t govern the meaning you place upon your written words to the N’th degree—not like that. You—or should I say WE—as writers have a huge responsibility placed upon our shoulders. We have to convey actual meaning (real living and breathing meaning) to our readers and we have such a limited language with which to do it.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Ask those who have already contributed here their thoughts on how the English language constrains the notion of other people’s Culture. It’s a mark of their skill (and yours) as writers that they can bring their world into this one—the one you’re reading right now—the world of English.

My hat’s off to you all and I mean that sincerely, because achieving that, is no mean feat!

Coda: A Few Words on the Word ‘Mob’

Mob. There has been a tendency to use the word Tribe when describing each of the different language groups that exist in Aboriginal and Islander peoples cultures across Australia. This is actually incorrect. If anything we more closely represent family Clans (not all that different to Celtic and Gaelic ones). Language groups in distinct areas—broken further down to smaller family clans—better able to survive across harsh country—coming together at set times in the year—to trade goods and marry. Or at least this was the case a long time ago—when it was
necessary.

Instead of the word Clan, we tend to use the word Mob. Aboriginal and Islander people will say “Which Mob?” or “Who your Mob?” when trying to narrow down who you belong too. It’s an important question—it tells another Aboriginal or Islander person where you come from and who you’re likely to be related too. This determines how you should be addressed and who might be responsible for you—laying down the groundwork for a complex protocol system that nearly all Aboriginal and Islander children know backwards by the time they are 5 years old.

There are over a hundred language groups still surviving in our country. All of us have different cultural bases—yet all of us are similar in particular ways. This website doesn’t do a bad business of explaining this further—as my explanations are very simple.

And here is a map of how Aboriginal and Islander Language groups or nations looked (and to a degree still do) in it’s simplest form. Lastly some government statistics.

END of Message

(Sorry Military past intrudes haha—old habits!)

Today’s guest, Carol Cooper, is one of an increasingly rare breed, a working journalist. I have known her for many, many years now. I suspect since my first visit to NYC back in 1993.¹ She’s a wonderful writer and friend and knows what she’s talking about on many, many, many topics, but most especially journalism. All heed what she has to say.

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Carol Cooper is a NY born and based cultural critic, who also enjoys an active online presence at www.rocksbackpages.com and www.carolcooper.org.

Carol says:

So many possible topics, so little time!

As soon as our ever gracious host Justine offered me this guest spot, I started agonizing over how best to use it. I’m sure my concern is an occupational hazard, since the job of a freelance journalist is to pitch her editors the most compelling story of the moment . . . ideally before any other journalist has already written about it.

But . . . as you may have heard . . . rules and opportunities in the news game have, well, changed. Not long ago one of the papers I still sometimes work for ran a cover story they chose to illustrate with a little zombie paperboy dressed in Depression-era drag under the headline: “Print is Undead.” In a similar mood of gallows humor, the same publication also ran an education story which paraphrased the musical question: “I just graduated from J-school . . . what WAS I thinking?”

In the past few years the precipitous decline in print media advertising and circulation has forced even the most famous newspapers and magazines—like the New York Times and the Kirkus book review organ—to the brink of economic extinction. Established daily newspapers in big cities like Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco have already bitten the dust, and even online-only news and lifestyle publications continue to shrink and die due to staff cuts on a daily basis.

Now I don’t cover the war/politics/police-blotter/hard copy beats that normally put the “news” in newspapers . . . I’m a pop-culture reporter. And I’ve discovered it’s not really pop-culture reporting that suffers when printed publications vanish. What suffers—especially when online versions of respected newspapers fail to make any money by offering reportorial content on a daily basis, is a factual, archivable and informed analysis of economic and political events in real life as it happens.

Web-based information sources get plenty of traffic to sources of gossip, entertainment and opinion. But far fewer readers flock to .gov sites to read a thousand pages of a health care reform bill for pleasure. Even the less intimidating summary of such important information is harder to find and consume than the average Twitter feed or celebrity blog. The web makes it too easy to narrow our focus to only those subjects you already like or know about. And the web is a much greater time-gobbler than any print publication. What a good newspaper or magazine using a large diverse staff of writers is supposed to do is design a seductive, well-researched, and easily portable package of information providing insightful glimpses into every possible area of human interest.

The music, book, film, and nightlife reporting I like to do needs to be part of that larger package to have the kind of impact I want my work to have. Art, philosophy, and culture (to me) are innately political, and must be understood within the context of every other societal factor to be fully appreciated. When it comes to topical brain food, an all-candy diet is no better than an all-tuna or all-spinach diet if you want to live a long, healthy life.

So . . . while I continue to labor in an industry that appears to be burning down around me, I cling with giddy optimism to the fact that television didn’t kill radio; that YouTube hasn’t killed commercial TV; that video games have yet to replace the movies; and that old, seemingly obsolete media like vinyl singles and albums, remain collectible and are even being re-manufactured now as prestige items on the international scene. So—am I a paper chauvinist? I’d have to say ‘yes’ . . . even with one foot firmly planted on the other side of the digital divide!

I’ve been recruited to write for online sites since the early 1990s, and I still gotta say . . . paper is way better. Ever since some duplicitous staffer at the now defunct SonicNet e-zine put her own name on a great feature-review I wrote for them about Tupac Shakur, I don’t trust the online world to respect the integrity of my byline the same way “hard copy” does. Ah yes, the sweet sanctity of the byline. Honey, I’d go back to writing in cuniform on clay tablets if it would protect my byline!!!

Meanwhile, my being tempted to migrate into book-length fiction or historical biography in a world where the predictive quality of Orson Scott Card’s Ender series and the inspirational quality of Carolyn Burke’s bio of surrealist muse and photographer Lee Miller rival anything investigative journalism can do, is a strong possibility. If I resist the golden allure of series television,² I might eventually abandon periodical literature to write those kinds of printed matter. But we’re still talking PRINTED matter here. And between recycled newsprint and paper made out of all kinds of sustainable non-arboreal sources (not to mention the sustainable soft-pine grown abundantly on my grandfather’s land in Texas) this NYC-based freelancer will defend the survival of print media until you pry her back-issues of The New Musical Express, The Negro Digest, and Locus from her cold, dead hands.

1. Momentary pause while Justine contemplates the weirdness and fastness of time. It is, indeed, a peculiar item.
2. Bring back Gilmore Girls!!

Like almost every writer I know, I have a number of chronic—though not particularly bad¹—injuries, that were caused by (or flare up when) I spend a lot of time at my computer. Sitting at a computer for long hours is not good for your body. Which is why so many writers, receptionists, data processors, computer programmers etc etc² have repetitive strain injuries, headaches, chronic back and neck problems, shooting pains in the arms and hands and so on and so forth.³

Like many of you, I frequently spend more than fourteen hours a day at my computer.⁴ A recent injury (not sitting-at-computer related) has made that impossible. In order for my injury to heal I have had to drastically reduce my time at the computer, which forced me to prioritise what I do there:

1. Write novel.
2. Answer urgent business related email.
3. Blog.
4. Answer other emails.
5. IM with friends.
6. Read blogs, twitter etc.

Here’s what most days since the injury have looked like:

1. Write novel.

I no longer spend more than four hours on the computer. If the pain flares before four hours I stop. Four hours is not long so my novel gets my top priority. Many days writing my novel is the only thing I do at the computer. Ironically, I’ve written more in the last month than in the previous six. The book’s going well and I’m loving it. Bless, this injury!⁵ I have not once gotten past no. 4 on my list. So that is why you have not heard from me.

The acute injury is improving, slowly but surely.⁶ However, I have decided to stick to the current regime at least until the injury is completely healed and maybe longer because I have experienced less pain with my other chronic injuries as well.

In fact, February has seen me increase the amount of walking I do every day, I’ve taken up Pilates⁷, and I’ve upped the amount of time I spend at the gym.⁸ Injury aside, I feel better than I have in a long, long time. I’ve been reading way more books and manga as well.⁹

Because of this injury I’m fitter than I was, more flexible and, best of all, getting more writing and reading done. All good, right?

Not exactly. The reduced computer time has meant that I have not been communicating regularly with many of my close friends. I’m massively behind on email. I no longer IM.¹⁰ I feel like I’m losing touch with my online communities, which may sound trivial, but as Varian pointed out last week that sense of community is very important. It’s a large part of why I blog in the first place. Not blogging and responding to your comments has been difficult.

In fact, that is why this post. I don’t much like whingeing about my health here.¹¹ Boring! But I couldn’t really think of any other way to let people know that even when I’m not responding I’m thinking about them. I feel especially bad about all the lovely fan mail I’m not answering.¹² Several of the letters people have written me about Liar and have reduced me to tears.¹³ Thank you.

Thank you also to all my guest bloggers. You’ve kept this blog alive with entertaining, moving, informative, funny, wonderful posts. Bless you all. And thank you readers for supporting the blog in my absence. I’ve been so delighted to see the continued volume of traffic and comments. Yay!

One last thing: I know a fair number of you are in your teens and twenties and spending a vast amount of time at computers.¹⁴ If you’re not already taking care of your body now’s the time to get into good habits. Take frequent breaks, have an ergonomic set up,¹⁵ mouse with both hands¹⁶, take up yoga/pilates/tai chi/some kind of something that’s all about putting you in touch with the muscles in your body,¹⁷ drink gallons of water,¹⁸ stay as fit as you can, go outdoors etc etc.

You only get one body. Trust me, it will turn on you if you don’t treat it right.¹⁹

Update: You all need to read this beautiful, moving post by Tessa Kum about her struggles with RSI.

1. I know people who have been crippled by RSIs and now can only write with voice recognition software.
2. There are bazillions of jobs that involve long hours sitting in front of a computer.
3. Any kind of repetitive movement done day after day can lead to injuries. I know a house painter with carpal tunnel. In fact, almost every profession has occupational hazards. I wish that careers days at school would include a list of the health risks & how to avoid getting them alongside all the other information they give about jobs.
4. I have, on occasion, spent fourteen hours straight just IMing. Yeah, I know.
5. No, not really.
6. To repeat, it’s not a drastic injury.
7. On doctor’s rec. I was dubious, but it’s been great.
8. While injured I can’t do upper body strength stuff but I can do lots of cardio.
9. Pluto is awesome!
10. Which I miss so much. It’s such a great way to stay in touch and shoot the fat. It’s also a great way to stay online for hours and hours and destroy all that great rehab work.
11. Especially as I know many people who are dealing with much, much worse than I am.
12. Once I’m properly healed I’ll be devoting time to answering it.
13. In a good way. I am a big sook but that doesn’t mean the letters aren’t beautiful and moving.
14. I know several people in their twenties who are already dealing with RSIs.
15. Yes, writing hunched over your laptop on a couch is really bad for you.
16. I have two mouses attached to my keyboard and alternate between them when I work
17. Just to state the obvious: different things work for different people.
18. Drink much water = pee much. Which means getting up a lot. Which is a very good thing.
19. Not that you aren’t your body. Mind/body split, you are imaginary!

Malinda Lo debuted in 2009 with Ash, which has made an enormous splash, getting shorlisted for gazillions of prizes and being loved by readers all over. I have heard wonderful things about it.¹ I invited Malinda to be a guest blogger because I have become a big fan of her blog and I’d like to encourage more of you to read it. *hint* *hint* Also Aussie & Kiwi readers take note: Ash will be published here next week!

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Malinda Lo is the author of Ash, a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian twist. Published last fall in the U.S. and Canada, Ash comes out in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand on 4 March. Ash was a finalist for the ALA’s 2010 William C. Morris Award and a Kirkus Best YA Book of 2009. Her next novel, Huntress, a companion to Ash, will be published in spring 2011. She lives in Northern California with her partner and their dog. Her website is www.malindalo.com.

Malinda says:

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about race and representation in young adult books. Justine’s blog has become one of the centers for that discussion, and because of that, when she asked me to guest blog I jumped at the chance to share one of my experiences of encountering race in the pages of a book.

Many of the posts about this subject have focused on the importance of publishing books about people of color so that people of color can see themselves represented in print. Reading these posts made me remember my junior year in high school, when my favorite English teacher gave me a book to read because she thought I might identify with it. I am Chinese American; the book was The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, an autobiography subtitled “Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts.”

She meant well, but the book made me feel like a total foreigner. I hated it.

It made me wonder: Was this the way white Americans saw my family? Did they really think that I came from a family that believed in ghosts and treated their daughters like property?

I remember being distinctly disturbed by the book, and when I decided to write this post, I went back and re-read the first chapter. In retrospect, I’m stunned that my teacher gave it to me, because that chapter alone includes sex, rape, misogyny, and suicide.

I was probably 16 years old when I read it, and while I’d like to think that my teacher thought I might be mature enough to handle the content, I wonder if it was simply the only book she knew of that involved a female Chinese American main character. I have to give her points for attempting to find me a book that mirrored my life, but the fact is, The Woman Warrior made me cringe.

It’s not that the book is poorly written. Reading through it again, I find much to enjoy in Kingston’s prose. It’s that the book seemed to have nothing to do with me or my background, and the idea that my teacher thought it did shocked me. I thought: Was this what being Chinese American was supposed to be like?

(Notably, the book has been criticized as much as it has been praised, with some Asian American writers arguing that Kingston uses Orientalist stereotypes to present an exoticized vision of Chinese America for white readers. Kingston herself has asked why she should be required to represent anyone but herself.)

I was born in China, but I moved to the U.S. with my family in 1978 when I was 3 years old. I come from a long line of intellectuals, and some of my family were persecuted for their political backgrounds by the Communist Party. In addition, my paternal grandmother was white. She was one of the few Westerners to actually live in China during the Cultural Revolution, and when she returned to the U.S., she wrote a memoir about it (In the Eye of the Typhoon by Ruth Earnshaw Lo).

Because of all this, I grew up thinking my family was special. I’m pretty sure it made me (as a teen) a bit self-important and defensive about all things related to China.

On the other hand, I also grew up as one of only four Asian American kids in my high school class. The four of us knew each other and we had overlapping friends, but we did not group together out of any shared “Asian American” identity. There were too few of us. Instead, I think we all tried to blend in as much as possible. We didn’t advertise our different cultural traditions; we didn’t speak foreign languages at school even if we did at home; we did our best to be normal—to be white.

But Woman Warrior—and the fact that my teacher gave it to me specifically—forced me to acknowledge that I was not like everyone else, and it was an awful feeling.

In high school, we have a lot of chains on our feet. The way you dress; the street you live on; the group you belong to. I didn’t want another one. I was happier ignoring the fact that other people perceived me as different.

It took many years for me to accept that other people will see me through their own preconceptions, regardless of my wishes.

I joined (and left) Asian American student groups at college. I majored in Chinese Studies, then got a master’s in East Asian Studies. I went back to China. I dated Asian Americans. I attempted to become part of the Asian American community. But I never felt like I really fit in. The ghost of Woman Warrior, I admit, has been difficult to dodge.

And then there’s the fact that I’m a lesbian. Being queer and Asian can be problematic, because many Asian American families are quite homophobic. There wasn’t much room for queerness in the Asian American community when I was coming out, and I felt as though I had to choose between identities.

Sometimes, it’s still a struggle, especially when meeting new people who only know what they see on my face. They see Asianness, but they don’t see my white ancestors. They see a feminine woman; they don’t understand how I could be gay. As recently as last fall, I’ve gotten the comment, “You speak English so well.”

For those of us who occupy the spaces between identities—because of our personalities or because we have a foot in more than one subgroup—finding representation anywhere, in any form of media, can be extremely rare. It can be tempting to hand a person a book and say, “This is where you fit in,” but in many, many cases, that won’t be true. It may end up alienating the person more than making them feel welcome.

I want to make sure to state that I wholeheartedly believe that it’s important to publish books that incorporate diverse characters and stories. In my experience, every book, TV show or film that includes difference makes a difference—even if I personally disliked it. Woman Warrior did not mirror my life, but it gave me something to reject, and that played a valuable role in the continuing evolution of my own identity.

I have always identified much more with Jo March or Anne Shirley than any of the people in Woman Warrior. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t appreciate — eventually — my teacher’s suggestion that I read the book.

After all, twenty years later, I’m still thinking about it.

1. Yup, Ash is on my to be read list. My reading for my 1930s book means it’s taking me a long time to get to more recent books.

Today’s guest blogger is Baby Power Dyke whose blog I discovered last year and instantly fell in love with. She’s rude, smart and funny. We have shared crushes on Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Lacewell. So, clearly, she has excellent tase. She is my kind of a gal.

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Baby Power Dyke is a smartass. She’s an actor in New York City who is terrible about auditions. She lives in Brooklyn with the love of her life, who is also an actor and is muchMUCH better about auditions. Nonprofitting supports her blogging and acting habits. She loves cheese. She was born on April Fool’s Day and thinks that because of that, she receives the best birthday presents ever. She’s terrible about mail. Her personal theme songs are “Voodoo Child” by Jimi Hendrix and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” by Barbra Streisand.

BPD says:

It is Black History Month and boy am I feeling the love.

Just yesterday Rush Limbaugh (or as I like to think of him, the Phantom Menace) derisively referred to the health care reform bill which is swimming its way upstream through Congress as a “civil rights bill” and “reparations.” To be clear, what he means by using “civil rights bill” and “reparations” as a pejorative is “this health care bill is another attempt by the lowly, lazy, complaining Black folk to take bread from the mouths of hard-working honest White Americans. First they took February, what’s next? March?.”

Last week the fine gentlemen of Pi Kappa Alpha decided to throw a party to “honor” Black History Month which included a very helpful how-to for the ladies so that they might properly comport themselves as “Ghetto chicks.”

Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes—they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red. They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises,grunts, and faces.

But it was John Mayer (singer, songwriter, Poor Man’s Stevie Ray Vaughn) that got the month started off right with an interview that he did for Playboy where he proved that he doesn’t have the good sense (or graces) that God gave Kanye West.

MAYER: Star magazine at one point said I was writing a tell-all book for $10 million. On Star’s cover it said what a rat! My entire life I’ve tried to be a nice guy.

PLAYBOY: Do black women throw themselves at you?

MAYER: I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.

PLAYBOY: Let’s put some names out there. Let’s get specific.

MAYER: I always thought Holly Robinson Peete was gorgeous. Every white dude loved Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Kerry Washington. She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.”

That’s an official Nice Guy FAIL.

These harbingers of Black History Month can get a girl a little down.

But not me. I am thankful that I have a partner who loves and cherishes me for the supreme delight that I am.

I am also thankful for the amazing strong black women (SBW) that I have in my life as role-models.
 Without my mother, Oprah Winfrey and Barbra Streisand, my confidence in my smokingness (both intellectual and physical) might have been dimmed by that young-man whose mother must be really ashamed of him right now and who is actually making me sympathize with that Jennifer Aniston person.

But lately I realize that I’ve been leaving out one deserving woman in my SBW list of might: RuPaul.

Nownownow, I know what you’re saying, “But BPD, RuPaul’s been around since forever how come it’s taken you so long?” Really, I have no excuse.

From the revelatory, Super Model, with its clarion cry that got me through many a grueling show choir rehearsal (damn you mirrored gym) to the present RuPaul’s Drag Race—which is not about cars¹ —RuPaul has given me the balls to get through the tough times. RuPaul has made me the man I am today. And by man, I mean small black lesbian gay-dandy.²

When I’m about to do something that seems super important, I think, “You better work, bitch!”
 I chant, “It’s time to lip-synch for your life!” when it’s time for me to move mountains.

Click here for vid.
. . . Minute 37 is where the real magic happens.

RuPaul is about knowing who you are and owning your fabulousness. RuPaul is about ripping people’s faces off with your fierceness and leaping in your stilettos over the shit. Most importantly RuPaul is not about some trifling mess of a boy that even Ghandi would slap.

With Ru and the other SBW in my life, I know my worth. I’m not even going to sweat it. Because I know, that despite how hurtful and how hateful what John Mayer said was, it’s not about me. It’s not about any other woman of color (or woman, frankly) in the world. It’s about him and the dick-shrivel that he is. I’m not waiting for the world to change. I am the change that I seek in the world. I am the light that I want to see. I am fabulous. I am fierce. I am magnificent.

Come for me, bitches.

1. But just . . . can we all agree that if RuPaul hosted a muscle car show with, say, Joan Rivers or Tina Turner—that pair would be a mother-fucking wig-off—that show would be ridiculously awesome.
2. 2010 is the year of the bow-tie. Look out people!

Today’s blogger, Lauren McLaughlin, is a crazy talented YA writer, who has one of the more unusual backgrounds of all the YA novelists I know. She used to be a Hollywood producer. This means that she has more confidence than anyone else I know and is extraordinarily good at saying “no” and meaning it. She is also one of the most focussed and driven people I’ve known. I am all admiration and awe.

- – -

Lauren McLaughlin is the author of Cycler and (Re)Cycler, both YA novels about a teenage girl who turns into a boy for four days each month. She can be found all over the internet, but tends to materialize most frequently at her blog and
on Twitter. She strongly encourages people to read things for free whenever possible and has thusly provided the first three chapters of Cycler as a free download here.

Lauren says:

Greetings Larbalestians!

The wise and wonderful Justine herself has invited me to occupy some air time on her blog, which I am only too thrilled to do, being a friend, as well as a fan.

I’m still fairly new to the world of publishing, having only published my second novel, (Re)Cycler, in the fall of 2009. But I’m even newer at being a mother, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on what it’s like to be a rookie at these two endeavours.

Novels and babies can both be challenging, but if I had to crown one the Supreme High-Maintenance Pain In The Butt, I’d have to go with the novel. Babies spend the first three months in a semi-vegetative state and have no problem whatsoever about informing you, quite loudly, when they’re in need of something. Novels, on the other hand, never inform you of anything, but rather sit there dumbly while you work your tail off. And only after you’ve invested a week/month/year/lifetime in their progress do they casually scream that you’ve COMPLETELY FAILED AND HAVE TO START OVER!

You can’t start over with babies. They have to adjust.

Also, novels never look up at you in blind dumbstruck love then grab a fistful of your hair and suck it while nuzzling into your shoulder. (I know, it sounds gross. Trust me, it’s transporting.)

Because of deadline pressure, I had to work through the first four months of my daughter’s life. It was difficult at times, squeezing in writing sessions between the frequent feedings and changings, but luckily my husband was around to pick up the slack. And when I turned in that final draft, I took two whole months off, something I’d never done before. In fact, I’d never had more than two weeks in a row off in my life.

It was strange indeed to face each day without a gaping blank page staring back at me. The only thing staring back now was my daughter. And without the pressing need to squeeze four hours of writing into each day, life seemed to open up for us. I could truly focus on her and enjoy our time together without ever feeling crunched.

Alas, after two blissful months of full-time motherhood, my editor delivered her rewrite notes and it was time to be a writer again. But something had changed. My novel was a futuristic story about teenagers and surveillance, and all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t just writing about the future. I was writing about my daughter’s future. My editor, brutal genius that she is, had already done a bang up job of pointing out all the little ways I had failed. And now, I found myself adding to the list. The novel lacked seriousness. It lacked a clean persuasive connection to the current state of affairs. And worst of all, it lacked color. Everyone in it was white.

But my daughter is not. My daughter is mixed race. What kind of a literary heritage was I creating for her if I kept situating my novels in the thinly fictionalized version of the all-white New England suburb where I grew up? The world had changed. Even that suburb had changed. When I was there, it was all Stacy’s, Kristin’s, Jonathan’s, and Patrick’s. But now it was sprinkled with Rojit’s, Jayla’s, Shinya’s and Yuri’s. I had to stop being so lazy. I had to open my eyes. I had to learn how to write my daughter into my fiction.

I had tried this in the past. Tried and failed, unfortunately. In an early draft of (Re)Cycler, one of the main characters spent four months as a thirty-five year-old African American woman before I realized that, although she was a fantastic character, she was in the wrong novel. I give myself no extra credit for the try, incidentally. Both Cycler and (Re)Cycler are overwhelmingly white.

But my next novel will not be. The main character is mixed race. And I have a feeling my days of setting novels in the white-washed suburb of my past are over. Of course, I’m only at the beginning of this journey and I expect plenty of bumps along the way, but I’m committed to it nevertheless. I could have made this commitment at any time, of course. Perhaps I needed the confidence of completing two novels within my teenage comfort zone first. Perhaps, I needed to read other writers’ attempts at writing outside their race. Or maybe all it took was for my daughter to look up at me, a chunk of my hair in her tiny fist, then smile at me with that blind dumbstruck love.

Varian Johnson is not only a wonderful writer—you must read My Life as a Rhombus—he’s also an engineer who builds bridges. Real ones that you can walk or drive on. Why, yes, I am very impressed. Varian’s yet another writer who has a job in a completely unrelated field and still finds time to write novels. I begin to suspect that the one can be very inspiring for the other.¹ Though writing at 5AM? Eeek.

- – -

Varian Johnson is the author of My Life as a Rhombus and the forthcoming Saving Maddie. He’s a fairly lazy blogger, though you can find him on Twitter quite a bit. He is also active with The Brown Bookshelf, which he strongly suggests you check out as soon as you finish reading this post.

Varian says:

When Justine asked me to write something for her blog, I immediately said, “Yes.”

Then I said, “What the hell am I thinking? I don’t have time to write a post.”

After spending an hour or so thinking about how I didn’t have time to write a post, I decided to write about exactly that. Making time out of no time. Time management.

Because, Lord knows I’ve dealt with my share of time management issues. For all practical purposes, I have three “jobs”, all of which I’m juggling with varying degrees of success. Among other things:

1. I’m trying to write a new novel (due to my editor in seven months, which may seem like a long time, but as this is the first uncompleted novel I’ve sold, I’ve found myself spending quite a bit of time completely freaking out).

2. I’m teaching a course on Children’s Literature at a small liberal arts university. (Love the students, love the teaching, but the grading . . . grrr. I’d rather eat Lucky Charms.)

Lucky Charms

3. And I happen to also design bridges. (And “bridges” isn’t a metaphor—I mean honest to goodness, concrete and steel structures, like this.)

Of course, I haven’t listed all the other writing-related things I do—promotion for the new book (which hits stores in March—eek!!!), author events, tax stuff, etc. And I have a lovely, beautiful wife that I actually like to see every now and then, and a lawn to maintain, and—well, you get the picture. I have a lot going on.

So, clearly, I should know a few things about time management. Except I don’t. I mean, I have a few tricks that work from time to time, but in general, I often fiddle with my schedule, trying to tweak it just enough so I can make it through the next book without a nervous breakdown / heart attack / dismemberment by axe-wielding wife.

For what it’s worth, this is what I try to do:

SET UP OFFICE HOURS: I write—or at least attempt to write—every morning, at the ungodly hour of 5:00, when I’m the freshest. I type away a bit on my manuscript, answer a few emails, send a few twitter messages, and down a gallon or so of coffee. From 8:00 to 10:00 that night, I wash, rinse, repeat. Ditto for Saturday and Sunday mornings. It’s a bit painful, but it works. And slowly but surely, I chop away at my novel.

Of course, there are times when I have to miss office hours, but I really try to plan this in advance, so I can still get my core hours in. So, if Mrs. V wants me to spend ALL DAY SATURDAY looking for the perfect shade of (overpriced) granite for our kitchen, I’ll do this, as long as I get those hours back on Sunday.

And here’s the other thing with office hours—you have to be heartless when it comes to distractions. If the phone rings, don’t answer it. If the spouse knocks on the door, promising chocolate and ice cream, don’t open it. If you hear little Johnny attacking little Kevin with a baseball ball, well, let them go at it, and consider it a life lesson (and really, little Kevin will be just fine with one kidney).

When it comes to protecting your writing time, you have to be cold. Heartless. Merciless. Ruthless. Remember, you’re not Fredo Corleone. You’re Michael. 


SET UP REALISTIC GOALS: I used to think I was the type of author that could crank out 20,000 words a month. Ha! If I get 30 decent pages written, I’m usually ahead of the game.

TURN OFF THE INTERNET: I find Twitter, Facebook, and blogging an important part of being a published author. But when I find myself spending more time on Wikipedia than on my manuscript, I turn off the Wi-Fi on my laptop. And when that doesn’t work, I unplug the router.

DON’T GET JEALOUS OF OTHER AUTHORS: Everyone’s situation is different. Some authors make enough money from their books or have a home situation which enables them to write full-time. Some don’t. That’s just the way it is. There’s no point in pouting about it, because I’ve tried that, and believe me, that crap doesn’t fly with Mrs. V. All you can do is figure out what works for you, and do it.

FIND A WRITING COMMUNITY: You can’t stay holed up in your writing cave forever. You eventually have to come out, bath, and interact with the real world. When you do, it’s helpful to hang with other people that feel your pain. I consider my critique group meetings like a form of group therapy, where we spend the first hour or so either celebrating successes or talking about how screwed up this industry is. Plus we drink a lot of wine and eat chocolate.

MAKE TIME HOWEVER YOU CAN: In order to stick around in this business, you have to really want to do it. You have to want to write more than you want to play Wii Sports, more than you want to sleep, more than you want to hang out with your friends as you watch Matthew McConaughey movies.

It’s lonely. And a lot of times it sucks. But sometimes . . . it doesn’t suck. And sometimes it’s even fun. And if you work hard enough, and maybe with a bit of luck, you’ll finish a manuscript or two or three.

Again, this is what works for me. I’d love to hear if anyone else has any ideas.

1. At some point in the future I will write a whole post about it.

Today’s guest bloggers are two Allen & Unwin editors. Allen & Unwin publish me in my home country¹ and I think they are absolutely wonderful. One of the two editors might even be my editor there. They are based in Melbourne² and have generously said that they’re happy to take questions. You could ask them what a design brief is for instance. For contrast I recommend you also read USian editor, Alvina Ling’s post and the comments, to get a sense of the different approaches to editing childrens & YA books in the two countries. Keep in mind that Alvina works for a very big US publisher, Little, Brown. Allen & Unwin is a much smaller operation.³

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The Alien Onions say:

Every day is different at the House of Onion. Different, yet the same. Every day is all about the business of editing, publishing and championing fabulous books for children and teenagers. Books we are very proud to publish. Including the extremely funny How to Ditch Your Fairy and the incredibly brilliant Liar.
 
The process of taking a book from manuscript to wonderful shiny new book on the shelf has many stages. In order to demystify this process somewhat, we have been posting an occasional series on our blog Alien Onion entitled What do Editors Do All Day. We have tried to accommodate those who thrive on visual learning as well as those who have a preference for text-based information acquisition.

So far our series has covered copy-editing and structural editing. Stay tuned for future entries on design briefing, blurb writing, correction checking and cake eating.
 
Today for our guest post on Justine’s blog we are providing a different kind of insight into life at the House of Onion. A sneak peek into the days of two of the Alien Onions whose roles in the House are different, yet the same.
 
ANY GIVEN FRIDAY at the HOUSE OF ONION
  
Susannah
 
7.45: Leave house, walk to tramstop reading excellent MS⁴ on iPhone.
7.47: Narrowly avoid lamppost.
7.50-8.00: Wait for tram. Spy on reading material of stylish lady waiting nearby. Spy on shoes of stylish lady waiting nearby.
8.01: Hop on tram, find seat (miracle!), continue reading MS.
8.20: Arrive at work. Discover work keys not in bag. Chastise self.
8.21-8.55: Sit on front step and read excellent MS on iPhone until colleague arrives with keys. Praise iPhone and colleague. Praise MS to colleague.
8.56-9.09: Read excellent MS on iPhone while waiting for computer to boot up.
9.10:  Receive coffee delivery from tall designer. Praise tall designer.
9.11-11.00: Copyedit, Copyedit, copyedit.⁵
11.03: Congratulate self on being excellent and efficient copyeditor.
11.05: Ask for opinion from colleagues on recalcitrant sentence.
11.10: Copyedit.⁶
11.15: Scramble to find the per-unit cost of a recently reprinted book so the Rights Department know if they can make a special overseas sale.
11.20: Copyedit.
11.25: Give opinion (solicited) to colleagues about matt lamination versus gloss and how it will effect the colour of already dark artwork.
11.35: Copyedit.
11.37: Give opinion (unsolicited) to colleague on e-book revolution. Ask opinion from colleague on same.
11.40: Copyedit.
11.45: Stare out window. (Where I can just catch a glimpse of the light towers of the MCG. That’s the Melbourne Cricket Ground for you USians. Where they play the cricket, you understand.) Chastise self.
11.47-12.30: Copyedit, copyedit, copyedit.
12.31-12.50: Eat lunch. Noodle around on favourite kid lit blogs (also Cakewrecks). Formulate an idea for Alien Onion post.
12.56: Advances of picture book arrive in reception. Squeal. Gallop downstairs.
12.57-1.20: Rip through 17 layers of packaging to reveal advances. Squeal. Admire. Congratulate self. Gallop upstairs to show publisher. Squeal, admire, congratulate selves. Ring author. Squeal down phone. Congratulate author.
1.21: Return to desk. Too het up for copyediting.
1.22-2.00: Write design brief for YA cover.
2.05: CAKE CAKE CAKE!
2.20-4.00: Update publicity/advertising/marketing copy for three books.
4.01: Wonder if it’s wine-time yet.
4.02: Sigh with relief that no books have to be sent to the printer today.
4.03: Panic that three books have to be sent to the printer next Friday.
4.04: Keep panicking.
4.05: Argue with tall designer over the relative merits of hyphenating a word at the end of a line of text and thus making it difficult to read, versus keeping word whole and having too much white space in the line.
4.10: Reach compromise with tall designer.
4.11: Read email reminding everyone that 4.15 on Friday afternoon is a good time to archive some of that paperwork from now-published books.
4.12: Look at towering piles of paperwork.
4.13: Place head on desk.
4.15-5.10: Resign self to Fridayafternoonitis and resume reading excellent manuscript. Do internal happy dance.
5.11: Confer with colleagues about readiness to downtools and have a small glass of wine.
5.11 & 30 seconds: Retrieve wine and glasses while colleague emails office.
5.15-? : Drink delicious cold wine, talk delicious shop, trade delicious gossip, moan about less-than-delicious printing error, enthuse about delicious authors, smell delicious vanilla beans that colleague has ordered on the internet which have been delivered vacuum-packed.
Eventually head to tram stop, hop on tram and read excellent MS all the way home.

 
 
 
Jodie
 
7.45: Look up from laptop rested on knees to discover it is well-past time to stop checking emails and GET OUT OF BED. Chastise self. Continue with email management.
8.01: Narrowly avoid tripping over pile of unread ms beside bed.
8.41: Arrive at station. Discover train not due for ten minutes. Procure caffeination from conveniently located coffee emporium.
8.52: Lean against train doors, juggling coffee and e-book reading device (which is MUCH easier to juggle than coffee and unwieldy ms—praise Mothership for facilitating test-drive of e-book reading device).
9.12: Walk through Fitzroy Gardens enjoying lovely morning while making mental to-do list.
9.22: Arrive at office. Transcribe list of to-do items into notebook while computer boots up.
9.27: Consider list. Hyperventilate. Highlight in orange items that truly need to be completed today. Hyperventilate.
9.30: Refine blurb for graphic novel design brief. Compose email to designer explaining both design brief and why so many elements of design brief are still to-be-confirmed.
9.45: Save design brief email as draft in hope that to-be-confirmed items are confirmed by afternoon.
9.46: Consider next item on list. Hyperventilate. Compose replies to backlog of emailed author enquiries instead. Save replies as drafts to allow thinking time.
11.20: Respond to Rights colleague about request from Korean magazine for editorial article to accompany Korean publication of book.
11.25: Solicit opinions about the matt lamination. Ruminate on responses.
11.30: Check over contract to ensure all details of accepted offer are correct before sending to agent.
11.37: Engage with colleague, who has taken up residence in comfortable chair in office, about imminent e-book revolution.
11.40: Return to contract checking.
11.46: Catch sight of to-be-read ms pile. Try to keep guilt at bay.
11.47: Consider second coffee. Will tall designer to have second-coffee craving too.
11.49: Send draft-agreement email to agent.
11.50-12.48: Open New Book Notes template to complete so assistant can enter details of three new books into production database. Become distracted by recollection of MS number one. Email author to gush about brilliant, heart-wrenching ms. Save New Book Notes as draft.
12.49: Email colleague to say she is genius and should upload clever, funny Alien Onion post immediately.
12.50-12.55: Check next item on list. Hyperventilate. Open Publishing Proposal template and compose pitch for fabulous picture book ms to be presented to publishing acquisitions team. Save as draft.
12.56 : Hear squeal from colleague’s office. See colleague gallop downstairs. Hope colleague doesn’t trip.
12.57: Catch sight of ms to-be-rejected pile. Fail to keep guilt at bay.
12.59-1.03: Admire colleague’s GORGEOUS brand new advance copy of picture book. Squeal over endpapers.
1.03-2.00: Return to desk. Consider pros and cons of publishing fabulous picture book proposal while eating lunch. Do costing for fabulous new picture book proposal. Hyperventilate. Open PDF to reacquaint self with fabulousness of picture book proposal. Do happy dance. Complete Publishing Proposal and send to publisher colleague for comment before distribution to wider team.
2.05: CAKE CAKE CAKE!
2.20-4.00: Check over long-lead information for October 2010 books. Meet with editor to hand over ms for February 2011. Relay editorial discussion with author so far, enthuse about vision for book, confirm specifications and suggest cover ideas. Confer with colleague about titles to be pitched at Bologna Book Fair.
4.01: Wonder if it’s wine-time yet.
4.02: Check in with editor about progress of three books scheduled to go to the printer next Friday.
4.03: Confirm specifications for exciting new box set project.
4.05: Send replies to authors after adding ideas that have percolated over day.
4.15: Ignore email reminder about archiving.
4.15-5.10: Open New Book Notes template with aim of completing notes for second and third new book projects before overwhelming Fridayafternoonitis sets in. While writing pitch for new teen fiction, get distracted by recollection of how good ms is. Do happy dance. Save New Book Notes as draft. Congratulate tall designer on short-listings in Book Design Awards (Link is pdf).
5.11: Confer with colleague about readiness to downtools and have small glass of wine.
5.11: Email office to inform all that it’s time to celebrate successes (or drown sorrows) by gathering in reception with conveniently chilled wine.
5.15-6.30: Drink delicious cold wine, talk delicious shop, trade delicious gossip, moan about less-than-delicious printing error, enthuse about delicious authors, smell delicious vanilla beans that colleague has ordered on the internet which have been delivered vacuum-packed.
6.30: What happens after 6.30 on a Friday stays after 6.30 on a Friday . . .

1. Which is why they say lovely things about my books.
2. You can tell from the frequent mention of trams. Sydney is tram-less alas. Also the mention of the MCG. Here in Sydney we have the SCG. Both are most excellently wonderful places. If I had a view of the SCG from my office I would get no work done. I have a view of the lights of the SCG from our deck and that’s bad enough.
3. Just reading the two posts you’ll notice terminology differences such as in Australia a “blurb” is what they call “cover copy” in the US. In the US a “blurb” is a quote recommending the book from a reviewer or author that appears on the book jacket.
4. Manuscript.
5. *GASP* ON SCREEN? Yes on screen. Always on screen. On screen is my friend. *Drowns out cries of, ‘The horror the horror’ with the efficient clacking of the keyboard.*
6. Clearly, this is a copyediting day. Anytime the word ‘copyedit’ appears in this timetable, it could be replaced on any given day by: structural edit, structural edit, structural edit, or check corrections, check corrections, check corrections, or meetings, meetings, meetings, or photo research, or blurb writing, or permissions chasing, or proof checking, or manuscript reading, or author/illustrator phoning/emailing. You get the idea.

I have known Lili Wilkinson for many years now. She’s one of the most talented, driven, organised people I have ever met. I am in awe of her. (Yes, even when I’m asleep.) She has had many wonderful books published in Australia as well as the UK and Germany. Her first novel to be published in the US is Pink which is one of her very best. It will be out in Fall of this year from Harper Collins. Trust me, USians, you want this book. Her post today is a wonderful follow up to Sarah Rees Brennan’s post on double standards in Hollywood.

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Lili Wilkinson is the author of five books, including Scatterheart and Pink. She tends to write nerdy chick-lit for teens. She’s currently enjoying Battlestar Galactica and likes making monsters out of wool. You can find her at www.liliwilkinson.com, her blog, and on twitter.

Lili says:

SEX.

There, I said it. Lots of other people have been saying it lately as well, particularly in Australia. Because a couple of weeks ago the leader of our Opposition party, Tony Abbott, told the Women’s Weekly> that he hoped his daughters¹ would wait until they were married until they had sex, and that a woman’s virginity is “the greatest gift you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving.”

That was the beginning. Then 17 year old YA author Alexandra Adornetto weighed in in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper. She said some reasonably sensible things about self-value and the desire to have meaningful experiences. Then she said that “virginity is not highly valued among teenage boys” and that girls had to protect their reputations, which I kind of thought was a bit sexist and disrespectful to all the boys out there who are also looking for meaningful experiences.

Then 16 year old author Steph Bowe wrote a response on her (awesome) blog. I must restrain from quoting the whole thing here, but Steph’s basic opinion is, “if sex is legal, consensual, and there’s mutual respect, I really don’t see the issue.” I highly recommend her piece.

Reading the comments on these two articles are almost as enlightening as the pieces themselves. They cover both sides of the argument, and frankly both sides are offensively judgemental.

Anyway, I’ve got some opinions of my own on the matter, so I thought I’d take this particular forum to share them. So without further ado, here are the six things I’ve learned about sex.

We have to respect other people’s choices. If someone chooses to wait until they’re married, then good for them. If they don’t, please don’t inform them they’re going to burn in the fires of Hades.

There’s a lot of talk about people wanting their first time to be special and amazing and perfect. I totally respect that, but let me tell you from experience – there’s a strong chance it won’t be. You know how the first couple of pancakes are always a bit weird, until you get the consistency and heat just right? Well it’s a bit like that.

Virginity is not a gift. Losing your virginity is an important experience, but it doesn’t define you as a person. It’s like losing your baby teeth. Does anyone ever say “I want the first time I lose a tooth to be really special”?²

Sex is a gift. I don’t want to sound like someone’s slightly batty aunty here, but sex is something important that you should share with someone who you trust. It should be fun. It isn’t something that a girl sacrifices for a boy, never to have it back. It is, in fact, the gift that keeps on giving.³

People make mistakes. Some of them involve sex. I think if we didn’t place quite so much mystery and awe around the whole thing, this might not happen so much.

You are totally allowed to disagree with my opinions and my choices, just as much as I’m allowed to have them in the first place.

As a writer I’ve never included an actual sex scene in a book, because they’re REALLY hard to write. But there’s some implied sex. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. Some of it will be regretted. Some of it won’t. Because I think that reflects the reality of sex. There can’t be any blanket rules of you have to be THIS old or THIS mature. It just doesn’t work that way.

Anyway, for further reading I recommend you check out the comments on this matter on Insideadog, and Gayle Foreman’s excellent post on sex in YA books.

1. One of these daughters referred to her dad last year as “a lame, gay, churchy loser”. I’m just saying.
2. This has led me to some peculiar thoughts about the Tooth Fairy and whether there is Another Kind of Fairy… actually, never mind. Bad thoughts.
3. I really just said that, didn’t I? Sigh.

Zetta Elliott’s A Wish After Midnight was one of my favourite YA novels of 2009. I still can’t believe no mainstream publisher picked it up and I am hoping the book’s re-realease by Amazon will get this wonderful book into many more hands. Zetta’s blog is also a must read. (And not just because it’s named for the great Octavia Butler’s last published novel.)

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Zetta Elliott is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator. She is the author of the award-winning picture book, Bird (Lee & Low); her self-published young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, was re-released by AmazonEncore in February 2010.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Race and Reviews

I had insomnia last night and so for hours I lay awake wondering if I should stop writing reviews for my blog. I am an author, so I’m under no real obligation to review other people’s work. Generally I only write about books that I love, and have thus far refused occasional requests from authors who hope I’ll feature them on my blog. Trouble is, even though I was trained to “lead with what I like,” I do often mention the limitations I found in a book. And apparently, for some, this breaks an unspoken rule in the kidlit blogging community: never critique another author’s book. I have some friends who won’t write a review at all unless they can honestly admit they loved the book. Others insist that books by fellow authors must be praised (whether they deserve it or not) in order to preserve professional solidarity (and sales). And then, of course, there is the expectation that when the time comes, your book will be reviewed with equal enthusiasm, so “do unto others”—or else!

I’m new to this particular community and I only follow about a dozen blogs, so maybe I’ve got this wrong. But when I look at some reviews in the kidlit blogosphere I sometimes find a curious lack of rigor. To critique a book doesn’t mean you rip it to shreds. You start with its strengths and then move on to its flaws or areas that could use improvement. And, of course, as a reviewer you are only giving your opinion. So why not be honest about how you feel? Well, because there is a serious power imbalance in the children’s publishing industry, and publicly pointing out weaknesses in a book is, for some of us, like openly criticizing the President.

Right now I’m reading The Breakthrough by Gwen Ifill, and I’m struck by the similarities between the arena of politics and the arena of publishing. Both have unspoken codes of conduct, and there can be serious consequences when you go against the grain or dare to suggest a new paradigm. Both arenas also require people of color to navigate a sea of shifting alliances. Now, I am in no way comparing myself to President Obama (and he’s not the only black politician featured in Ifill’s book), but I think it’s interesting to consider the strengths and limitations of “groupthink” in the 21st century. Do black people owe this particular president their unconditional devotion? Do critiques of the President’s policies strengthen his administration, or bolster the opposition (which has done nothing to distance itself from far-right racists)? Ifill points out that candidate Obama walked a fine line when it came to the issue of race; he couldn’t win the confidence of white voters (and the election itself) by presenting himself as a black man—instead he needed to be viewed as a man who happened to be black. Candidate Obama had to assure white voters that he was neither angry nor bitter about the nation’s history of racial oppression, and no mention was ever made of the unearned advantages that come with being white. Fortunately, I’m not running for political office. And I assure you that at times I am angry and bitter, and I must insist that we talk about white privilege.

The practice of never criticizing another author’s book has particular ramifications for people of color. Since we are already marginalized as authors and seriously underrepresented on editorial boards, a negative review can be devastating—especially if that review comes from another person of color. This is due, in part, to complicated notions of authenticity. Many people (of all races) believe that being black automatically makes you an expert on all things relating to black history, culture, politics, etc. When a black author writes a book that features black characters, there is often an assumption that the story is “authentic” due to the author’s inherent, intuitive understanding of her subject. The same is not true when a white author chooses to write about people of color. Then the assumption is that the author completed exhaustive research in order to “capture the essence” of her black characters. There is one such book out right now that has been getting rave reviews from white bloggers, yet two of my black blogger friends think it’s one of the worst books they’ve ever read. A third black blogger quite enjoyed it. So who’s right? Or, more importantly, whose opinion carries the most weight?

I must confess that lately, the only white-authored books I read are those about people of color. I sometimes feel obligated to read these books in order to ascertain whether or not black people are being misrepresented by white authors who mean well, but don’t really have a clue. I generally expect white authors to get it wrong, but sometimes they do surprise me (Liar would be one example; Octavian Nothing Vol. 1 is another) so it’s important to keep an open mind. Mostly I just wish white authors would leave people of color alone. I appreciate their desire to be inclusive, but statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center show that there are more books about African Americans than by African Americans. This brings to mind a documentary I saw on PBS not too long ago about the white anthropologist Melville Herskovits. His contribution to the understanding of black culture and identity formation was significant and lasting, but this white Jewish man became “the” expert on black people at the expense of qualified black scholars who lacked the same privilege and access to resources. That said, I can imagine how desolate my childhood might have been without the picture books of Ezra Jack Keats. Yet it’s hard to fully appreciate the efforts of well-intending white authors when I know that authors from my own community are being shut out of the industry altogether. And, ultimately, being able to write about anyone from anywhere is a privilege reserved primarily for whites.

So what’s a black author to do? After a decade of rejection, I chose to self-publish some of my books. My young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, is being re-released this month by AmazonEncore. As an immigrant and a mixed-race woman, I often confront challenges to my own authenticity. How could I possibly know what it’s like to be a dark-skinned teenage girl growing up in a low-income area of Brooklyn? When I was pitching my novel to editors and agents, I stressed my years of experience teaching black children throughout NYC; I mentioned that I had a PhD in American Studies and that my research was on representations of racial violence in African American literature. Does that make me an expert on all things black? No. Does it bother me that editors who are outside my community and ignorant of my cultural history get the final say on whether or not my work deserves to be published and/or reviewed? YES. Developing competence in a culture not your own takes time, patience, and humility. I suspect that most white editors have little to no training in Asian, Native American, Latino, or African American literature. They are unlikely, therefore, to situate a manuscript within those particular storytelling traditions. And without a sense of various cultural standards, they wrongly assume their particular standard for what constitutes a good story is “universal.” The same might be said of some professional reviewers and award committee members—a point made brilliantly by Percival Everett in his satirical novel, Erasure.

Of course, you don’t need a PhD to review a book on your blog. And I certainly don’t want to vindicate those timid bloggers who only review white-authored books because they feel they’re not “qualified” to review books by people of color. It’s ok to step outside your comfort zone, and there are lots of great bloggers who can show you how it’s done—Jill over at Rhapsody in Books regularly provides historical and political context for the books she reviews. You can also check in with bloggers of color to see how their reception of a book might differ from yours. That doesn’t mean you can’t trust your own opinion—it means you can strengthen your own position by recognizing and engaging with other points of view.

I’m sorry to say I don’t really have a conclusion for this post. I want to be able to write openly and honestly about the books that I read, though this may not be advisable. I certainly don’t mean to sabotage other authors, and books I found to be flawed have gone on to win major awards so it’s not like my single opinion counts for much. I like to think I can accept fair critiques of my own work, and I feel that thoughtful, constructive critiques can enhance our ability to read, write, and review books. What I want most is excellence and equity in children’s literature, but I feel the current system and codes of conduct aren’t leading us in that direction. And I don’t believe that not talking about the problem will lead to a breakthrough . . .