Category Archives: State of the World

One Cherie Priest Forgot

In a bizarre oversight Cherie forgot to mention this golden rule of publishing—Never publish a novel which is a thinly disguised account of a murder you committed. It might help the cops bust you:

In his debut 2003 novel Amok, Polish author Krystian Bala describes the torture and murder of a young woman whose hands are bound behind her back with a cord that is then looped to form a noose around her neck. According to a judge’s ruling this week in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, Bala was drawing not on his imagination for that scene, but on his own experience.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I thought we authors were smarter than that?

Plus: killing people is wrong.

On the other hand, his book was a bestseller . . .

Say no to SFWA

Here’s why I will never join SFWA:

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to fraudulently remove numerous non-infringing works from Scribd, a site that allows the general public to share text files with one another in much the same way that Flickr allows its users to share pictures.

Included in the takedown were: a junior high teacher’s bibliography of works that will excite children about reading sf, the back-catalog of a magazine called Ray Gun Revival, books by other authors who have never authorized SFWA to act on their behalf, such as Bruce Sterling, and my own [Cory Doctorow’s] Creative Commons-licensed novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

SFWA’s attitude to copyright has stepped over the line from luddite into barking mad. As a writer I love my fans. Adore them! I wish I had way more of them. Why on Earth would I join an organisation that is hellbent on prosecuting them? I completely agree with Cory Doctorow.

Does she have to be black?

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I’d been criticised for making the main character in the Magic or Madness trilogy black when the story isn’t about her being black. I said I’d write more about it and then didn’t. Mostly because there are so many disturbing assumptions in that criticism that it makes my head explode. And also because I was secretly hoping someone else would post about it.

Well, yay! Tempest did:

Why, they ask, does the character have to be non-white if the story isn’t about being non-white? Because, I say, every story of my life isn’t about my non-whiteness. Sometimes it’s about my ability to let go of a crush, or figure out what raptor birds are doing on my fire escape at night, or what I plan to do with my life after college, or why I love the view from on top of a mountain yet fear the way up. If that’s true for me, it’s true of other non-whites, too.

And, you know, there are lots of non-white people in this world. It’s all right to have a few stories where they just exist, okay?

Specifying race helps to fill a character in, but doesn’t necessarily mean that the filler is standard and clichéd. When the reader first reads that Brenna is of a specific ancestry rather than a general, unspecified one, it makes her more real. Same with Reason. That’s what it adds to the story.

Many white writers are nervous about writing characters who aren’t white and seem to think that if they do so there must be a reason for it. They fear being criticised for writing people who have a different skin colour to them, they fear getting it wrong. On the other hand they worry about being criticised for having no non-white characters. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

To which I say, well, der. Of course, you’re going to be criticised. If you write and people read the words you have written some of them will not like those words. Doesn’t matter if you’re posting on your blog, writing an email, or publishing a novel.

My trilogy has been criticised for being too Australian and for being not Australian enough, for getting the American characters completely wrong, for getting Sydney and New York City wrong, and for many other things. That’s what happens when stuff you write is out there where people who don’t know or care about you can read it.

If you’re not going to write something because you’re afraid of criticism why bother writing at all?

As for why Reason has to be black: It’s because she is black, okay?

Also, Tempest, you have raptor birds on your fire escape at night? Really? That is so cool.

Elvis Presley was not a racist

I’ve been an Elvis fan since I was a small child. I can recognise pretty much any Elvis recording within half a bar. I have loved his music longer than I’ve loved anyone else’s. When I’m down the only remedy is “Viva Las Vegas” (or any number of his gazillion other recordings). Today is the thirtieth anniversary of his death. I cried then even though I was only little and I’m a little weepy about it today.

I am not one of those fans who has any illusions about the man. Yes, when he died he was a grotesquely overweight junkie. Yes, there are many other performers who were more talented and innovative than he. Yes, Big Mama Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” is WAY better than Elvis’s. Yes, he’s example no. 1 of how corrupting fame is. But I do think he was more interesting and complicated than he is popularly portrayed. And I love his voice. I hear it and I melt. If he’d been born into an affluent family he would’ve wound up a famous tenor.

In the New York Times this week Peter Guralnick argues that Elvis Presley was not a racist:

Just how committed [Elvis] was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue—and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic—in an interview for the black weekly Jet.

After citing lots of evidence of Elvis’ not being the racist redneck he’s often portrayed as Guralnick moves on to talk about why Presley is often seen that way:

As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context [of social inequalty], for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?

Elvis would have been the first to agree. When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ‘n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.”

But Guralnick doesn’t talk about other reasons Elvis is seen this way. Like the oodles and oodles of paraphernalia that associates Elvis with the confederate flag. And also because, rightly or wrongly, white southerners are frequently viewed by the rest of the US as racists. Elvis was a white southerner therefore . . . Elvis appropriated black music therefore . . .

I have friends who hate Elvis because he was loved by the good ole boy racist sexist dropkicks they went to school with in the South. Elvis is forever tainted by that good ole boy worship.

Everything I’ve read about Elvis convinces me that for his time and place he was less racist than many of his peers. He understood the origins of the music he played which is more than I can say for many white boy rock ‘n’ rollers over the years. Does that mean he wasn’t racist at all? Unlikely given the systemic racial inequality that prevails in this and every other country and infects all our brains. Does it mean he was a nice guy? Who knows? He certainly wasn’t in his later drug-addicted days. Junkies are hard work. And rich junkies who are worshipped by millions of people world wide? Ugh.

I think it matters whether or not he was overtly racist. People who hold him up as a symbol of the white South and a believer in white supremacy should know he wasn’t a white supremacist.

It’s very hard to separate the symbol from the person. Especially when the person was as big a mess as Elvis was.

Excuse me, I’m going to go have a little cry and play “Long Black Limousine” now.

International Blog Against Racism Week

International Blog Against Racism Week is on again. Yay! If you’re confused about racism and race you can ask the awesome Angry Black Woman questions. She’s smart and funny and will treat you with the respect that you will, naturally, accord her. It is a brave and time consuming thing she has agreed to do.

You can find lots of links and posts here.

I was thinking of responding to Scalzi’s post about how he deals with race in his books, but Kameron Hurly has eloquently said what I was gunna say.

I’ve also decided against writing about the miscegenation bruhaha over on lj because so many smart people have covered it.

And I’m definitely not going to write about my nervousness in discussing race and racism. I see no way of doing it that doesn’t go down the white liberal guilt road, which is, frankly, deadly dull.

I would, however, like to post about my theories as to why I get asked about the race of the protagonist of the Magic or Madness trilogy (Reason Cansino) who isn’t white, but I never get asked about the race of the white characters (like Tom Yarbro). I’ve also had people complain that Reason being of Aboriginal ancestry doesn’t “add” anything to the story. As if the story should somehow be “about” her race. (Though it might not happen on account of the whole busy-ness thing—also I’m not sure I’ve sorted my thoughts out yet.)

Then there’s Tobias Buckell’s post on being (not visibly1) mixed race and how it freaks many white people. The assumption that (visibly) white people have two white parents, and that (visibly) black people have two black parents, or that a light-skinned black person has to have a white parent speaks to misapprehensions about how genes are passed on. Not to mention the cultural specificity of race. Black and white are not tidy terms, they leak.

In Australia a black person is, by and large, an indigenous person. In the US of A it usually means someone of African ancestry. In the UK I have heard people of Indian ancestry described as “black” and also as “asian”. In Australia only people from China, Japan, and Southeast Asia are called “asian”. And so it goes.

In Toure‘s review of CHARGING THE NET: A History of Blacks in Tennis From Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters by Cecil Harris and Larryette Kyle-DeBoseof he questioned some of the inclusions and exclusions:

There are some strange choices—they barely mention two Africans now on the tour, Hicham Arazi and Younes el-Aynaoui, both from Morocco, but give several pages to the Wimbledon winner Evonne Goolagong, an Australian aborigine. Aborigines may be oppressed and darker-skinned, but does that make them black? The original Australians are no blacker than, say, Vijay Amritraj of India, who played in the ’70s and ’80s and acted opposite Roger Moore in “Octopussy.” Alas, he’s not in the book.

Today in a review of a new reality TV show set in an affluent black suburb of Los Angeles the term “white” is jokingly used to described a group of affluent black teenagers:

This leaves “Baldwin Hills” in constant danger of turning into “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” albeit with better jokes. The show avoids that fate by focusing much of its attention on the hugely charismatic Staci, the only cast member to live in the low-lying, less wealthy district known as the J’s (for “the jungle”), and her constant nemesis, Garnette, the self-possessed queen bee of the girls up the hill.

In one of the show’s main plot lines so far, Garnette, against her better judgment, invites Staci—whose sense of humor makes her popular—to a party and then watches in horror as Staci, the “party starter,” takes center stage and shows everyone how to dance. Back in the J’s with her friends, Staci is asked where she’s been and sums up the whole situation in six words: “Hanging out with the white chicks.”

Black people are often accused of being culturally “white”. Do white people ever get accused of being culturally “black”? And if so how different are the effects of those accusations? Working class whites aspiring to upper class tastes and culture are pursuing the great [insert country here] dream or at worst getting above themselves; black people are trying to be “white”.

Then there’s the Brazilians who are white in Brazil, but black and/or hispanic (even though they speak Portugese) in the US of A (sorry can’t find the link to the fabby article about this—will keep searching).

It would be comforting to think that this was all a matter of linguistics, but way too often it’s a matter of life, death, and freedom.

  1. Whatever “visibly white” means. One person’s white person is another person’s Jennifer Beals. [↩]

Tell it like it is (updated)

From this sensible article on cheating in sports by JERÉ LONGMAN for the New York Times:

Fausto Coppi of Italy, who won the Tour de France in 1949 and 1952, was once asked if he ever fueled himself with amphetamines.

“Only when necessary,” he said.

How often was that?

“Most of the time,” Coppi replied.

The Tour de France ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 kilometres long (1,800 to 2,500 miles) which must be covered really fast in three weeks over hill and dale with just two rest days. Evidence is pretty strong that chemical assistance has been used since the tour began.

Longman points out that the two sports that have had the most drug scandals are the ones that have pursued the issue most vigorously: cycling and track & field. The end result: people think those are the sports that are jam packed with drug cheats. Yet it’s very likely that there’s not a pro sport in the world that doesn’t have athletes who use performance enhancing drugs.

My biggest concern is that athletes are taking drugs that can cause them long term damage (even death) because the hypocrisy around the issue means that drug use is unregulated. And some of the drugs being taken have never been properly tested. That’s scary.

In an ideal world there would be drug-free athletes. What we have now is a world in which not everyone using is getting caught, those who stay clean are at a disadvantage, and there’s doubt and suspicion of everyone. I’m not sure it’s tenable. But I’m not sure what is.

Which is to say I’m bummed I didn’t get to follow the Tour this year. I’m thrilled at how well Cadel Evans did. And I’ll be making sure I get to follow it next year. And hoping that something really radical and smart happens across all sports to regulate drug use in a way that make for more transparency and way less potential harm to athletes. And while they’re at it, if they could end all match fixing, that’d be grouse.

Update: Jenny Davidson has pointed to this fascinating article by Stuart Stevens on performance-enhancing drugs. Stevens tries a whole bunch of them, notes the results, and comes down firmly against them. Well, against almost all of them.

Sibling differences

In the New York Times sisters (and friends of mine) Catherine Gilbert Murdock and Elizabeth Gilbert discuss recent findings that older siblings have higher IQs than younger ones. They are wry and amusing. Especially if like me you have one sister. (Not telling whether I’m older or younger.) Go read! (If you don’t have a login bugmenot is your friend.)

Catherine & Liz are both fabulous writers. Liz’s latest Eat, Pray, Love has been no. 1 on the New York Times bestseller non-fic paperback list for weeks and weeks and weeks. Seriously, everyone I’ve ever met has read and loved her book. I keep getting emails from people asking why Scott and me are mentioned (amongst many others) in the acknowledgments. The subtext being, “I can’t believe you know an actual famous person!” Well, yes, we do. Plus we were once on the same street as Bill Clinton. We could see his head just peeping out over those of his bodyguards. Us and famous people—we’re like this. I’m just saying . . .

And Catherine’s Dairy Queen has been praised over hill and dale. I loved it, but I loved the sequel Off Season even more. It’s my favourite sequel I’ve read in ages for many, many, many reasons but mostly because of what she does with the romance plot. Brilliant, moving and so very true. Go read! I’m really hoping there’ll be a third book. Catherine?

Friday the 13th

I am not a superstitious person and thus far every Friday the 13th has passed by without incident for me or anyone I know. Still as a writer the idea of a day of bad luck appeals to me.

Have any of you been aversely affected by it? Any stories to tell? Do you have any other days you think are unlucky? I had one friend who would not go outside on his birthday because he was convinced it was cursed.

Here’s hoping today passes without untoward incident for anyone!

Sex

Certain folks are uncomfortable with books aimed at teenagers depicting them thinking about or, even worse, having sex.

Problem is many many teenagers think about sex. Quite a lot of the time. And way more of them have sex than most people are comfortable with. In the US of A a rather large percentage of teenage girls wind up pregnant. Last time I looked it was a bigger percentage than any other first world country.

Yet the US of A is the first world country most concerned about books that address these issues. More books are banned here than anywhere else in the western world. And a fair few of them are banned for “inappropriate content” which often enough boils down to sex.

This is the great dilemma of writing for teenagers: the tension between writing to reflect teenage experience or writing to be instructive and good for teenagers. I think teen books that don’t touch on sex in some way are fundamentally dishonest to the experience of being a teenager.

Afterall, even those teens who have no interest in sex are wondering why they’re not like everybody else. They’re getting hassled by their peers for not dating. Sometimes their parents are worried about them too.

Sex is inescapable. And restricting a teenager’s reading to Anne of Green Gables (which, by the way, is kind of a sexy book) and their viewing to the Disney channel is not going to stop them from thinking about it and wondering about it, but it may well keep them from useful information that could help them. And from finding books that reflect who they are.

Cause that’s one of the many fabulous things books do: reflect who we are back at us. Let us know that we’re not alone, we’re not a weirdo (or, at least, not that weird), that there are other people who look like us, think like us, and who are freaked out by the stuff that freaks us out.

The idea of sex is scary and weird and compelling and dangerous and funny—so’s the idea of becoming a grown up. There are teen books that cover almost every possible permutation of that strangeness. That is a good thing.

It seems to me that the tension I mentioned above—between writing to reflect teenage experience or writing to be instructive and good for teenagers—isn’t really a tension. Because if you write well, if you manage to reflect some teen experience and tell a compelling story—story’s key!—then odds are that the book is “good” for them and for any adult who reads it. But not good in a castor oil way. Not good in a what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-grow kind of way.

Meg Cabot’s All American Girl: Ready or Not tackles the whole when-to-have-sex thing. It’s light and funny and I raced through it. Sarah Zarr’s Story of A Girl deals with early sex (the girl is thirteen) with a manipulative older boy (seventeen) and the consequences (she’s branded a slut by her father and everyone at school; the boy goes about his life with no ill effects). In their own way both books are powerful and moving—Cabot’s made me laugh; Zarr’s made me cry—and I wish they’d been around for me to read as a teenager.

I do believe that writers for teenagers have a special duty of care, but then I believe that for all writers: we should strive to get it right, to be honest to the emotions and experiences we’re writing about. We don’t all of us manage it all of the time, but we bloody well try.

The writer’s life: 1930 compared to 2007

Somerset Maugham meditating upon the writer’s life:

It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with good will to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

—Cakes and Ale (1930)

Leaving aside that Maugham is under the delusion that everyone is male except wives and those in need of marital advice, how does all of that apply to us pro writers now? Or, rather, to this pro writer in particular.

Tribulation? Check.
Fickle public? Check. Why can’t all of them love all of us all the time? Or even know who we are!
Mercy of journalists who want interviews? Of bloggers yes. Of journalists not so much. But frankly I kind of like it that way.
Of photographers who want to take the writer’s picture? Hah! If only Maugham had lived to the current day when almost everyone in the first world has a bloody camera and feels compelled to plague everyone else with it and will not accept the idea that some people do not want their photo taken. Is there anyone left who’s never been photographed? Are there any souls left unstolen?
Editors who harry the writer for copy? Oh, yes. Just the same! Bastard editors!
Tax gatherers who harry a writer for income tax? How odd. I didn’t realise that in 1930 only writers had to pay tax.
Persons of quality who ask the writer to lunch? Are my editors and agents “people of quality”? Are librarians? I’m gunna say yes.
Secretaries of institutes who ask the writer to lecture? I imagine that still applies. Not to me though. No secretary of any institute has ever asked me to lecture. Rotters!
Women who want to marry the writer? Now, I’m bummed. No woman or man has ever asked me to marry ’em just cause I’m a writer.
Women who want to divorce the writer? But, here’s the upside: no one’s ever asked me for a divorce on account of I write words that turn into books on shelves. Poor Mr Maugham!
Of youths who want the writer’s autograph? This has happened occasionally. And, oh, how I loves it! More, please!
Actors who want parts? Parts of what? Most definitely does not apply.
Strangers who want a loan? Do letters from Nigeria count?
Of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs? Actually, because I wrote this piece I have had a handful of people asking for advice on their love life. None of them gushed though and they were boys as well as girls.
Earnest young men who want advice on their compositions? Check. Though not all earnest, not all young and not all men.
At the mercy of agents? Check. I guess. But my agents, Jill Grinberg and Whitney Lee, are so lovely and so very good at what they do it’s hard to think of it that way.
Of publishers? Check.
Of managers? Writers had managers back in 1930? I didn’t even think they had them now. How strange.
Of bores? Check. But just a tiny percentage of the number I had to deal with when I was an academic.
Of admirers? Check. There’s one or two. Bless their every breath.
Of critics? Check. One or two of them and all.
Of their own conscience? Huh? What is this “conscience” Maugham speaks of? And why would I be at it’s mercy? I am confused!

As for Maugham’s one compensation:

Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

Maybe I’m more neurotic than Maugham—figures, it’s more than seventy years later, neuroticness has definitely grown—but just writing about a trauma or experience does not expunge it for me. Or maybe that’s just because I haven’t really done it. I haven’t written about the people I love who have died. I haven’t typed for hours to make it go away. I am not free.

Though I’ll wager that my writer’s life is heaps happier than Maugham’s!

I do agree with him, though, that the writing part is by far the most wonderful thing about being a writer.

That, and the champagne.

Oz GLBT YA books (updated)

David Levithan’s speech at Reading Matters inspired me to put together a list of Australian gay and lesbian young adult books.

I could not do this on my own. Thank you Lynndy Bennett, Kate Constable, Susannah Chambers, Pamela Freeman, Simmone Howell, Judith Ridge, Penni Russon and Ron Serdiuk for all your help and suggestions.

This list is definitely not complete and is not annotated. It’s just a start. If you can think of any more titles, please let me know! And if you’ve read any of the books on the list and can say a bit more about them that’d be great too.

Lili Wilkinson has said that the Centre for Youth Literature will give the list a permanent home.

So here it is:

    Novels

    Will by Maria Boyd 2006
    Settling Storms by Charlotte Calder 2000
    The Rage of Sheep by Michelle Cooper 2007 (It will be released in August—so soon that I figured no need to stick it in the forthcoming list.)
    The Tiger Project by Susanna van Essen 2003
    A Trick of the Light by Susanna van Essen 2004 (Lili Wilkinson says “two dads”.)
    The Other Madonna by Scot Gardner 2003
    White Ute Dreaming by Scot Gardner 2002
    Square Pegs by Nette Hilton 1991
    Out of the Shadows by Sue Hines 1998 (Lynndy Bennett says, “From memory—it’s years since I read this—it is not the teenage characters but some of the parents who are gay or lesbian.” Update: I’ve now heard from a few people that there are gay teenagers as well.)
    A Charm of Powerful Trouble by Joanne Horniman 2002
    Obsession by Julia Lawrinson 2001
    Suburban Freak Show by Julia Lawrinson 2006
    Tumble Turn by Doug Macleod 2003 (Lynndy says “there is the assumption the protagonist is gay”.)
    Hot Hits: The Remix by Bernie Monagle 2003
    Thriller and Me by Merrilee Moss 1994 (Lynndy says, “From memory—it’s years since I read the book–it is not the teenage characters but some of the parents who are gay or lesbian.)
    Mr Enigmatic by Jenny Pausacker 1995
    What are ya? by Jenny Pausacker 1987
    Sky Legs by Irini Savvides 2003
    A Candle for St Antony by Eleanor Spence 1977 (Penni Russon says “a friend said it was a memorable book about an intimate relationship between two boys, though I think the homosexuality is very understated. It’s more about love than sex, I think the boys actually tell each other that they love each other and then kind of have to deal with the intensity of their emotions in the face of their peer groups.”)
    Peter by Kate Walker 1991
    Camphor Laurel by Sarah Walker 1999
    The Year of Freaking Out 1997 by Sarah Walker
    Loose Lips by Chris Wheat 1998

    Forthcoming novels
    Truly Mackenzie by Kate Constable 2008

    Collections
    Clouded Edges by Nette Hilton 1997

    Anthologies

    Ready or Not: Stories of YA Sexuality edited by Mark MacLeod 1996
    Hide and Seek edited by Jenny Pausacker 1996

    Memoir

    Holding the Man by Tim Conigrave 1995 (Penni Russon says “it wasn’t published as YA, it’s also not strictly fiction I think. But it is about two young men (a lot of it is about the relationship they have at school) and it’s such a beautiful beautiful weepy wonderful book.”)

    Inside Out: Australian Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered People Write About Their Lives edited by Erin Shale 1999

Top 10 Reasons Banning Books is a Bad Idea

10. It upsets the writers what wrote the books.

9. It upsets the readers what want to read the books.

8. It makes the books cry and books are very sensitive.

7. If you really want people not to read a book, banning it will have the opposite effect.

6. If the content of a book offends you there are more effective ways to deal with your offendedness. Like, you know, engaging with it. Maureen Dowd’s columns frequently drive me spare, but I don’t try to get them banned, I argue against them.

5. Besides banning books does not make them go away. Just ask Chris Crutcher.

4. Banning books might make you feel like you’re in control, but it actually screams of lack of control. You think you can control input but you can’t. Banned books have a way of being passed around mightily and promoted during banned book week and gaining a whole other life they might not otherwise have had.

3. Banning books, you know, it kind of doesn’t encourage literacy. Last time I looked literacy was a good thing that goes hand in hand with increased life expectancy, education, living standards. Little stuff like that.

2. It’s a short step from banning books to wanting to burn ’em. People who burn books, well that is not company you want to keep.

1. Book banning clashes with everything in your wardrobe. Every. Single. Thing.

Yes, we are in Paris

But I want to update you on the Bermudez Triangle liberation efforts. As I mentioned it was banned. Maureen Johnson, its wonderful author, has just posted about the campaign to get it put back on the library shelves with some truly excellent suggestions of what we can do to help.

And John Green has posted his letter protesting the banning. If you felt like doing the same thing, the email addresses are over here.

One of the librarians from Bartlesville’s public library, Beth Degeer, has also written a wonderful letter to the local newspaper.

I must dash—I’m about to have lunch with Scott and one of our wonderful French publishers.

My quick verdict on Paris thus far: Gorgeous! Yummy! Mmmmmm!

Paris, noon, 2 May 2007

Another book banned (updated)

Maureen Johnson‘s excellent and extremely clean (no sex or violence) book, The Bermudez Triangle has just been banned in a school in Bartlesville, Oklahoma because it is about (among many other things) two girls who fall in love.

A parent read it, hated it and complained, demanding it be removed from the shelves and suggested the bible as a replacement. I’m very fond of the bible myself, but it has way more sex and violence than Maureen’s book. There’s incest in the bible, people!

There’s also excellent bits like this:

“There is no longer male nor female, bond nor free, Jew nor Gentile, for we are all equal in Jesus Christ.”

—Galatians 3:28

I believe that includes homosexuals as well as heterosexuals.

If anyone who reads this is from Bartlesville, Oklahoma and cares about first amendment rights, you are in a position to be able to complain to the school and to the local newspapers. I really hope you will. Bermudez Triangle is a lovely warm book about the importance of friendship.

For the rest of us, I think now would be a really good time to invest in a copy of Maureen’s book. She’s a wonderful writer and it’s a wonderful book.

Update: Maryrose Wood eloquently explains what the first amendment means when a book is banned in the US of A.

National character

Shashi Tharoor has written a wry op ed piece for the New York Times on the World Cup and how Americans are oblivious to what is preoccupying a billion plus folks at the moment. It ends thus:

In any event, nothing about cricket seems suited to the American national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities that could occur with each delivery of the ball, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all patterned for a society of endless forms and varieties, not of a homogenized McWorld. They are rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score.

Cricket is better suited to a country like India, where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets — so they can well appreciate a sport in which, even more than in baseball, an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly prepared pitch, a lost toss of the coin at the start of a match or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, hotly contested, occasionally meandering days of cricketing could still end in a draw seems derived from ancient Indian philosophy, which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination. Not exactly the American Dream.

Ha ha! That makes me giggle. Though to be honest I’m not convinced. Cricket’s popularity in India and elsewhere is an historical accident. If in the early days of cricket in America they’d had some home-grown cricketing heroes demolishing visiting English players and some ambitious entrepreneurs touring the game around the country and bringing in the dosh I reckon things woulda turned out differently.

Cricket’s also bloody popular back home. I’m pretty sure the majority of Australians don’t consult astrologers or believe in the capricious influence of planets (of pollies? yes, but planets? not so much). Or certainly we don’t do it any more than Americans do.

I’m always suspicious of sketches of “national character”. I’m not saying there aren’t difference between nations. I’m often amazed by the extraordinary confidence of the middle and upper classes in the US, especially the white folk. So many of them seem to have this sense of the inevitability of their own success (whether it’s happened yet or not). I’ve never met so many people who are just waiting for their first million, their first broadway show, big movie role, bestselling novel. No question in their mind that it will happen. Even if they’ve never acted or ever written anything longer than a limerick.

But I’ve also met enough Americans who are not like that, and Australians who are, to be wary of typing a whole people. People are complicated and large groups of them even more so and you can never discount regional and class and racial and gender differences.

I also wonder how much of that disturbing confidence is real and how much of it is people saying what they think they’re supposed to be saying.

Back home you’re emphatically not supposed to say stuff like that. If you do you’re a wanker who writes tickets on yourself. Being up yourself is one of the worst things anyone can say about you.

Here that attitude doesn’t seem nearly so wide spread. For instance American English has no home-grown synonyms (that I’ve heard) for “writing tickets” “being stuck up”, “getting above yourself”, “being up yourself”, or “being a wanker”. Mostly because they almost never accuse anyone of that kind of behaviour. Nor do they have the terms “tall poppies” or “cultural cringe”.

So while it might be true that on the whole Americans=confident and Australians=not confident. It could also be that we just know what we are and aren’t allowed to say out loud. If an Aussie says “I’m a genius!” odds are they’re being sarcastic. If a Usian says it not so much. But does the Aussie secretly think they are a genius while the Usian secretly fears they are not?

There are, of course, lots of exceptions to all of this. And things are changing in both countries. I even know Americans who adore cricket.

And, um, did I mention that I have a new book out, Magic’s Child? And, er, it’s not too foul. Really. Well, um, other people think it’s okay. Sorry. Don’t mind me. I’ll get out of your way now . . .

Accents

Enough of you have been asking me what accents I think are sexy that I figured I’d best respond. My answer:

None.

There is no accent in the world that’s intrinsically sexy.

When I was little I thought Southern USian accents were sexy. Then I met more people from down there, travelled to Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Louisiana and heard many decidely unsexy voiced Southerners. Turned out I just thought Elvis’ voice is sexy. Which it is. But his accent is neither here nor there. He’d’ve had a sexy voice no matter where he lived.

Same for Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, Charlotte Rampling, John Clarke,1 Lauren Bacall and Grace Jones. It ain’t their accents—it’s their voices.

Being into accents is being into the other, having a yen for someone cause they’re not from round here. Nobody ever told me I had a sexy accent until I was many thousands of ks from home.

To sum up: voices sexy not accents.

And, um, Magic’s Child pubs on Friday.

  1. And a few more because I love Messers Clarke & Dawe so much. [↩]

I have a theory

Every single USian woman I have ever known finds English accents unbelievably sexy. No matter that there are gazillions of different English accents, they think they’re all sexy: Yorkshire, Chav, Geordie, Sloane Ranger, cockney—they don’t care. If an English person speaks they are ipso facto sexy. There is not a USian woman on the planet who does not hold this view.

As an Australian it is difficult for me to express my extreme horror so I will not bother. My true compatriots understand. Enough said.

But how is it possible for every woman of one nation to hold such an insane belief?

I have a theory.

The British tourist authorities have been secretly brainwashing USian women. And I suspect they’ve done it by implanting a tiny chip that emits brainwashing English-accents-are-sexy rays in every copy of Pride and Prejudice and every Hugh Grant movie.

I believe the folks responsible for attempting to convince the rest of the world of the existence of “Cool Britannia” (as if!) are capable of anything.1

So USian women quit reading, watching or thinking about Pride and Prejudice and Hugh Grant. Let your ears hear unhindered. The way Tony Blair talks? Not sexy. David Beckham? Not even close. The Prince of Wales? Aarrghh!!!

In the meantime we unbrainwashed folk have to learn compassion for those so afflicted. Especially for those whose brain damage has led them into unfortunate relationships. They know not what they do.

  1. Or it could be bunnies. You know, cause they’re not cute like everybody supposes. [↩]

Slaughter of the Minnow-cents + Sachin

Every world cup it seems there’s a debate about whether allowing in the so-called minnows of the game is a good idea or not. Because every world cup there are 200-plus run victories as Bermuda or Scotland or whoever are bowled out for less than a hundred by Australia or India or whoever.

It’s happened again this year. Herschelle Gibbs even smashed a world record 36 off an over against the Netherlands. For those whose maths is as poor as mine that’s a six off every single ball. No one had ever it done it internationally before, not in ODIs and not in test cricket.

The argument against the inclusion of minnows is that they help create crazy world records like that cause they’re just not up to snuff. “What’s the point of such an uneven competition?” they ask. And blah blah blah.

To which my response is, “Please!” One of the best ways to improve at anything is to learn from people who are better and more experienced than you are. Letting the minnows play with the top cricketing nations means that they will get oodles of practice against the best players in the world. As they improve they’ll create more interest in cricket back home and more potential cricket players and thus the game will grow and prosper throughout the world.

And they do get better.

As evidence I present Exhibits A & B: Bangladesh and Ireland.

The minnows sometimes upset the giants. Bangladesh just beat India in the first round. In the past few years they’ve racked up victories against a number of top teams including Australia. They are no longer as minnowy as they once were. I don’t think they’re a shot at the world cup (though how cool would that be?) but they’re certainly going to give a number of teams a testing time. Yay, Bangladesh!

First Ireland tied with Zimbabwe in their opening match and then in their second they beat Pakistan! Bowling them out for a pathetic 132 in the 45th over and following that up with a gritty batting display against some awesome bowling (and even better appealing—give Mr Sami an Oscar! He’s up there with Our Shane). And I’m so relieved the bad light and rain did not reduce things to a Duckworth-Lewis decision. Bravo to Ireland. They have several players I reckon England1 would love to have on their side.

Back in the olden days Sri Lanka and New Zealand were minnows; now they are not. They got that way by being included in world-class competition. I really don’t understand how anyone could argue against minnow inclusion. Me, I’m hoping a US of A team will qualify for the next world cup.

And via Christopher Rowe some other cricketing news: Sachin Tendulkar is going to have his own comic book:

The superhero character will be known as “Sachin The Master Blaster” for comic books, animation and games.

Excuse me? Sachin is one of the finest, but there is only one Master Blaster and his name is Viv Richards.

The article also claims that Sachin is the second greatest batsman of all time. Nuh uh. Not on his own he isn’t. I don’t care what Wisden says. There are a lot of other very fine batsmen in the running for that spot. Other than Sir Viv, there’s Brian Lara, Garfield Sobers, Sunil Gavaskar, and Ricky Ponting. But don’t ask me to pick a best out of that lot. I can’t. They’re all amazing. And besides comparisons are odious.

  1. Bummer about that loss to New Zealand, eh? [↩]

A real life Reason Cansino

Reason Cansino, the protag of my Magic or Madness trilogy, is somewhat of a mathematical prodigy, but she pales in comparison to Terence Tao:

By age two, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his Ph.D.

Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world’s top mathematicians.

. . .

“I always liked numbers,” he said.

A 2-year-old Terry Tao used toy blocks to show older children how to count. He was aquick with language and used the blocks to spell words like “dog” and “cat.”

. . .

At age 5, he was enrolled in a public school, and his parents, adminstrators and teachers set up an individualized program for him. He proceeded through each subject at his own pace, quickly accelerating through several grades in maths and science while remaining closer to his age group in other subjects. In English classes, for instance, he became flustered when he had to write essays.

“I never really got the hang of that,” he said. “These very vague, undefined questions. i always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.”

Assigned to write a story about what was going on at home, Terry went from room to room and made detailed lists of the contents.

I love that last image of the boy writing lists, rather than a story. Though, of course, depending on how he ordered them, they could well wind up being one. Harper’s Index is jampacked with stories. Many of them deeply disturbing.

I can’t imagine Reason making lists in quite that way (though in the early chapters of Magic or Madness she is pretty methodical as she notes the contents of the rooms of her grandmother’s house) but I can totally see her using blocks to teach other kids to count. And if she were to survive the last book of the trilogy1 I see her going on to be a mathematician. Maybe she’d be working on primes just like Mr Tao. They do sing to her.

The Times article on Tao is a lovely portrait of someone who hasn’t been wrecked by being a prodigy. Nice to have a counter to all those stories of prodigies who crash and burn.

  1. Do not ask for I will not tell you. [↩]

Amazon meanness (updated)

Further to Maureen’s wittiness on the topic, I thought I’d add some (sadly) serious thoughts.

First, I’ve heard from pretty much everyone that reviews by punters on Amazon have zero effect on book sales. Let me repeat that for the amazon-review obsessed writers: Amazon reviews have zero effect on book sales. We writers are tieing ourselves in knots over nothing. Do not worry your pretty little head about your amazon reviews—it will not hurt your sales or your career—just your feelings.1

Update: I was referring to nasty Amazon reviews having no effect. Should have made that clearer. Also I have since heard from folks who have worked at or with Amazon that Amazon’s own research shows that punters’ reviews on Amazon has no stastistically significant impact on sales. They may sway you, but that puts you in the minority (according to that research). The vast majority of people going to buy books on Amazon already know what they want. They do not browse. (On the other hand punters’ reviews seem to have an impact on the sale of appliances etc.)

It’s also important for writers to remember that book sales on Amazon are not a very signifcant chunk of the overall book market. I’ve heard estimates that range from 3% to 7% as to what that share is. You can sell badly on Amazon and still be selling very nicely indeed elsewhere. /end update

The reviews on Amazon that make me crankiest are the toxic attacks on writers which almost always say little about the book they’re purportedly reviewing:

I went to tihs riter’s websight and they are bigheads and narcarsitac adn this book sux and they smell bad and there girlfrend is a ho.2

I have taken to pressing the “report this” button cause “reviews” like that really are inappropriate. Review the book, not the person. We all know some writers are jerks, but that’s got nothing to do with the books they write. Some of my favourite books were written by people I’d rather not ever have a beer with. Or, you know, be on the same continent as. Doesn’t stop them being fabulous writers.

What is it with Amazon reviews that brings this viciousness out in certain people? Would they say stuff like that to the writer’s face? What is it about the internet that makes some people feel free to be mean in a way they never would if the person were standing in front of them?

As it happens this syndrome has a name: “online disinhibition effect” and a bunch of research is being done on it.

So next time you’re starting to add something cranky to a comment thread or on amazon or wherever perhaps you should ask yourself if you would say what you’re about to share with the greater online universe to the person’s face. If you wouldn’t then don’t post it.

I wish someone had given me that advice a long time ago. Sadly I’ve been online since 1993 and, um, I have sent many an email and comment that I really really wish I hadn’t. The worse thing, of course, is that stuff will come back to haunt you. I guess that’s why so much online viciousness is posted anonymously. Wish I’d thought of that!

So, anyone want to share (anonymously if you prefer) some of your online misdemeanours? Anything you regret? Am I the only one who’s succumbed to “online disinhibition effect”?

  1. No laughing matter, of course. I believe I’ve mentioned the horrible condition that most writers suffer from: thin-skinitis. [↩]
  2. In case you were wondering: No, I’ve had no such nasty reviews written about me. I mean I’ve had reviews from folks who didn’t like my books but no attacks on me personally. [↩]

Getting paid, or, don’t quit your day job

I promised some friends that I wouldn’t blog about the business of writing for a while and I haven’t in ages so, um, you two? Avert your eyes.

Recently some dear friends of mine sold books for the very first time. A small round of applause for their hard work and good fortune! Yay, them!

And as you do (and as I did) they’ve started planning how to spend their advance money (such that it is). They were suffering from the missaprehension that they would be seeing the money sometime soon. I disabused them.

Now I would like to disabuse you.

Before I begin two things:

    1. I’m only talking about publishing payment practices in the US of A and I’m only talking about mine and my friends’ experiences of them. I have never worked in publishing. I’d be grateful and interested to hear about varying experiences both here and in the rest of the world. And I’d love to hear from those who pay as well as those who receive.

    2. I suspect some of you are hazy on what exactly an advance is. (I was.) An advance is a sum of money that is paid (or advanced) to a writer by a publisher against the future earnings of a book. So when a writer is made an offer of money for their book that offer is an advance.

    I sold my first book (not a novel) to Wesleyan University Press for US$1,000. I got to keep that money no matter what happened, but I didn’t get any more dosh from Wesleyan until the royalties (a percentage of each book sold, can vary from 5% to 12% depending on format) on the book exceeded the $1,000 needed to pay Wesleyan back.

Here’s what happens when you sell a book:

A choir of angels sing and fairy dust descends from the air

Once you have accepted an offer on your book the nitty gritty of the contract must be negotiated. This is tricky to do and involves things like “escalation clauses” and “sub-rights” and is why it’s a stupendously excellent idea to have an agent do it for you. Believe me they earn their 15%.

How long that process takes depends on whether your agent already has a specific pre-negotiated contract with the publishing house or not. When I negotiated my contract with Penguin USA for the Magic or Madness books it didn’t take very long because I had no idea what I was doing and said yes to pretty much everything. Ah, the perils of negotiating a contract agent-less.

Once that’s done the contract has to be drawn up. How long that takes depends on the publishing house. Once it’s done your agent checks it. Believe it or not, sometimes there are things in the contract that shouldn’t be there, items that have specifically been negotiated out. This is another reason it’s such a great idea to have an agent.

One of the items specified in the contract is not just how much you will be paid, but how you will be paid. Typically (but definitely not always) your advance is split into thirds. The first third you get upon signing the contract, the second upon delivery and acceptance of your manuscript, and the third upon publication.

If you have a three-book deal of say $15,000 a book1 your total advance is $45,000. Thus you get $15,000 up front as the third on signing because you are signing for all three books. Then you get another $5,000 when the first book is delivered and accepted because that is a third of the $15,000 advance for that book. Then another $5,000 on the publication of the first book. And so on for the second and third book. Your $45,000 winds up being spread over at least three years, but sometimes more than four or five. This depends on how long before your first book is published.

Back to the contract:

Once your agent approves it, you sign it, and the contract is returned to the publishing house where the department that handles payments issues a cheque. I have seen the gap between signing the contract and receiving the cheque be anywhere between two weeks and a year. Any of you had a quicker turnaround? Slower?

The gap between accepting the offer and the contract being offered can also be many weeks. So it’s not only possible but usual for it to take at least six weeks between the intial offer and your cheque showing up. And, frankly, six weeks is fast.

And remember that’s just the first third. The other two thirds will come to you in third of a third parcels over the next few years. It means that your writing earnings could well look like this (minus your agent’s 15% which I haven’t taken out on account of my mathematical ability is not up to it):

2007: $20,000 (payment on signing, delivery & acceptance of 1st book)
2008: $10,000 (publication of 1st, delivery & acceptance of 2nd)
2009: $10,000 (publication of 2nd, delivery & acceptance of 3rd)
2010: $5,000 (publication of 3nd)

It will especially look like this if, like me, you didn’t know enough to make sure that your three-book deal wasn’t joint accounted. I sold my trilogy in 2003 and although the first two books have already earned out their advances I have not seen any royalties. Nor will I until the third book earns out as well. That’s what joint accounted means: The accounting for all three books is tied together.

It’s also increasingly unusual for a book to come out that quickly. I have several friends who sold books last year that aren’t scheduled for publication until 2009 (or in one case 2010). In which case their spread could look like this:

2006: $20,000 (payment on signing, delivery & acceptance of 1st book)
2007: $5,000 (delivery & acceptance of 2nd)
2008: $5,000 (delivery & acceptance of 3rd)
2009: $5,000 (publication of 1st)
2010: $5,000 (publication of 2nd)
2011: $5,000 (publication of 3rd)

Obviously living on $5,000 a year is tricky. Most full-time writers I know are getting bigger advances than that, or writing more than one book a year, or doing other kinds of writing, or all of the above. Scalzi did a recent breakdown of his fiction writing earnings over the past few years.

The more salient point: Most writers I know have a day job.

Each one of those payments comes less quickly than you think it will. I naively thought that my payment on delivery & acceptance of my first book would come automatically as soon as my editor had accepted the manuscript. It did not come until I asked for it. Or rather several weeks after asking.

This is not unique to publishing. It is, in fact, the lot of the freelancer: No matter who you work for, no matter what the industry, the gap between doing the work and getting paid is a LOT longer than we freelancers would like.

Hope this has been helpful.

Do please fill the comments thread with criticisms, questions and accounts of how it works in other places. I’m all ears. (Or, you know, eyes. Whatever!)

  1. That’s an above average advance for most genres I know about. I chose it because it’s easier to do the maths with an advance of $15,000. [↩]

Zombies, unicorns, scrotum (updated)

What have I started? Arguments about the relative merits of zombies and unicorns rage across the intramanets. And on each thread someone suggests the zombie-unicorn hybrid. Great minds think alike? Or fools seldom differ?

I was greatly distressed that lovely friends of mine like Holly Black, Cecil Castellucci, Meg McCarron and Literaticat have fallen pray to the false glittery charms of unicorns despite the fact that being virgin fascists unicorns would have nothing to do with them. I guess it falls into the whole desiring-what-you-can’t-have camp. Perhaps to resolve our issues Holly and I should collaborate on a Zombies vesus Unicorns novel? I will write the zombies and she can have the unicorns. Though I’m not sure how well that will work given that she won’t read about zombies and I won’t read about unicorns.

Some school librarians are saying that they won’t have Susan Patron’s Newbery Award-winning novel, THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY, in their library because it contains the word “scrotum” (in reference to a dog). Apparently “scrotum” is an offensive word. I had no idea. I thought it was an anatomical term for a part of the male body. I’ve never heard anyone use it as a swear word and I come from a swearing people.

The New York Times also covers the story but seems to think that authors sneak words like “scrotum” into their novels solely to offend.1 Um, what now? Rosemary Graham responds eloquently to the extremely unbalanced Times coverage. The best reporting on the whole story can be found at Publishers Weekly which points out the role Jordan Sonnenblick and Asif! had in drawing attention to it.

I write novels to tell the best stories I can for teenagers. I try very hard to write characters who are believeable and I choose the language they use accordingly. I do not set out to offend anyone. I’m sorry when that happens, but I’m not going to write less believable stories in order not to offend people. That leads to the worst possible kind of censorship: When you start second-guessing yourself. Can I use the word “pom”? No, that will offend English people. Can I use the word “pink”? No, that will offend pink-haters (and possibly also pink-lovers). How about “jasmine”? No, Margo Lanagan will come gunning for me. When does it end?

Librarians and school librarians in particular have an incredibly hard job. I admire them tremendously. I just wish we were living in a world where people’s response to being offended was to talk about why, to explain the history and context of the word, and how that has made it offensive to them, rather than trying to wipe the books that contain the word off the face of the earth. I mean I am not advocating banning books about unicorns. I just won’t blurb them.

As soon as it is warm enough to go outside I’m off to buy a copy of The Higher Power of Lucky from my local children’s bookshop.

Update: Scott adds his two cents’ worth.

  1. For the record, if concerned adults can find the naughty words we wicked authors sneak into our books then we clearly haven’t been sneaky enough. [↩]

That word does not mean what you think it means

This one breaks my brain.

From the Sydney Morning Herald the Australian cricket team responds to accusations of being arrogant, rude, sledging bastards:

“The way I look at cricket, you do everything possible to win. Some people like the verbal side of the game, some don’t, but you just get one with what your job. I take what Vincent is saying as a backhanded compliment.”

Hayden, Clark’s Australian teammate, was equally indignant.

“If he considers that to be the case, I’m not unhappy about it, to be honest,” Hayden said. “It’s a great clash between New Zealand and Australia and long may it continue. It doesn’t matter what sport—we could be playing kick a cockroach from here to the wall and we’d want to be competitive.”

You know last time I looked “indignant” meant “cranky”, “pissed off”, “ropeable”. It did not mean “bemused”.

Talk about sloppy journalism of the let’s-try-to-manufacture-controversy-even-if-the-quotes-don’t-fit variety. That or the journo truly doesn’t know what “indignant” means. Well, whoever wrote that, I am indignant at your use of the word indignant.

Though maybe they were just being a smartarse? Cause Hayden is just as indignant as Clarke, i.e. not at all.

Drought

Most of Australia is in drought right now. Has been for years. Some say this is a thousand-year drought that Australia may never come out of. That this continent will get hotter and drier until agriculture becomes impossible. Until recently a visitor to Sydney would never have never known it.

But that’s changing. Since we go back here in December, I’ve noticed how much more seriously everyone in Sydney is taking it. The conversation often turns to the level of water in the dams that supply Sydney (at the moment they’re at about 35%—not good), when the water restrictions are going to be raised to level 4, and what we can do to be gooder than we are about saving water.

The last has led to all sorts of potlatching conversations. One of us will boast of having reduced shower time to less than two minutes by only having the water on for the intial wetting and then for rinsing. Someone else will top that by having a bucket in the shower to collect grey water for the garden.

I worry about this last one. I am a clumsy person and I suspect me and the bucket would come a cropper. Astonishingly, my proposal that we all shower just once a week was not met with enthusiasm. Where is everyone’s backbone? Do they not want our country to survive the drought?

Scott’s father grew up on a farm in Texas. He starts to get twitchy when it hasn’t rained for a couple of days. Nothing makes him happier than the sound of rain. This despite not having worked on a farm for half a century.

The longer the drought goes on the more city people like myself feel the same way. When it doesn’t rain for weeks and weeks and weeks on end, it becomes more and more unnerving. In some parts of the country there are small kids who have never seen rain. Can you imagine that?

I have not heard a single person whinge about the water restrictions. The most common response is to wonder why they weren’t brought in sooner and why they aren’t stricter. People want to do their bit. Like during World War 2 when people (for the most part) cheerfully made all sorts of personal sacrifices—wedding dresses given away to be made into parachutes. If there’s something—anything—we can do to make sure this country, this world, has a future then we’ll do it.

Last Day of 2006

It’s been another good year for me professionally and I will now skite about it: My second and third books, Magic Lessons and Daughters of Earth, were both published to some very nice reviews and reader responses. The whole Magic or Madness trilogy sold to Editora Record in Brazil, Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons sold to Mondadori in Italy, while Magic Lessons and Magic’s Chld sold to Amarin in Thailand. And then there was the recent sale of the trilogy to the Science Fiction Book Club for a 3-in-1. Not to mention Magic Lessons being on the shortlist for the Aurealis.

It was a great year for Scott who hit the New York Times bestseller list not once, not twice, but three times! Woo hoo! Twice for Specials and once for Pretties. Also my friends Yvette Christianse’s (Unconfessed), Kate Crawford (Adult Themes), Ellen Kushner (Privilege of the Sword), Julie Phillips (James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon) and Delia Sherman (Changeling) all published wonderful books that were well-received. If you haven’t already read them—do so immediately!

Other dear friends also published fabby books, but these are the ones that I saw through gestation. In the same way I’m very excited to see how Holly Black’s Ironside and Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones fare next year. Do yourself a favour and get hold of copies as soon as you can!

Next year I have three English-language publications on the horizon:

  • Magic Lessons will appear in paperback in February.
  • The final book of the trilogy, Magic’s Child, will be out in hardcover in March.
  • Also in March—the SFBC’s 3-in-1 edition of the trilogy.

As you can imagine I’m dead excited to find out what my readers think of the complete trilogy. Do not hold back! (Unless what you have to say might harm a writer’s delicate sensibilities. Always remember: praise is good!)

This year has also been a great one for me blog. Readers way more than doubled this year, which is just lovely. I’m particularly excited to have picked up so many more readers here in Australia. Especially the ones I don’t know and am not related to. (Not that there’s anything wrong with my friends and relatives, mind. Well, not that much wrong.) Thank you so much everyone for hanging out and commenting. Your comments are more than half the fun. Without you there wouldn’t be much point. Much appreciated.

Last year on this day I set out my goals for 2006:

I’m aiming to write two books (both of which I’ve already started) in 2006 and sell one (two would be nice, but I don’t want to jinx myself). I also plan to spend the majority of the year in Sydney, cause now that I’m home I just want to stay. And I really, really, really want to get tickets for the Sydney Ashes test. Ideally for every day of play.

How did that work out?

I finished one book: Magic’s Child, but it wasn’t one of the books I was talking about above. So I didn’t finish either of the books I aimed to. Though I got awfully close to finishing the first draft of the great Australian feminist monkey knife-fighting mangosteen cricket fairy young adult novel. (So close I can smell it! Oh the frustration!)

This year I have the same goal: to finish two novels. My odds are much better given that I’m mere days away from finishing the fairy book . . . And I’ve made good starts on six other novels. Dunno which one I’ll write next. What fun not to know!

I didn’t sell any books on account of not finishing any to give to my agent for said selling. I won’t be declaring my intent on sales again because it’s pointless. I have some control over how many books I write; but none over how many I sell.

The big change this year was my decision not to sell any books until I’ve finished them. (Another explanations for no sales this year.) It’s also why I’m finishing this year without any dread deadlines over me. Much less stressful!

I spent only five months in Sydney and even though that’s more time than I spent anywhere else I still did not see nearly as much of my family and friends here as I’d like. Sigh.

There was way too much travelling this year. And while I loved all the places I visited—Bologna and Kyoto especially—I haven’t stayed anywhere for more than three months since 2003. I’m sick of it. I’d love to travel less, but already 07 is shaping up to be very travelly. Come June though and I believe we’ll be applying the breaks. Aside from it being exhausting and conducive to the contracting of viruses, travelling that much in aeroplanes and staying in hotels is terrible for the environment and no amount of offsets makes up for that.

I did get tickets to the Sydney test. Fourth day. Can’t wait. And we Aussies reclaimed the ashes what should always be ours. Bliss. Now I have to figure out how to get coverage of the world cup while we’re in the US of A. We may even cough up for satellite coverage. Would be fabulous to get over to the West Indies, but see above on wanting to travel less.

To sum up: Life is good. I hope yours is too.

I have a very good feeling about 2007, not just for me, but for the wider world.

Happy new year!

Don’t

Somewhere out in the dangerous land of the intramawebby, an author is being bent out of shape by a less-than-positive review they have accidentally stumbled across using the magic of “google”, or “blogpulse”, or “icerocket”, or some such fell black witchcraft. That author is prolly contemplating their witty riposte, or deciding what to call the vengeful sock puppet they will loose upon the malign and malodorous writer of the less-than-positive review.

Don’t.

Truly. Just let it go. If you publish stuff you have to learn to do the duck’s back thing. Folks are going to read your stuff and hate it. You cannot stop them. And if you try you will only look really really really pathetic and tarnish your reputation amongst readers who really care about what they read. Like I said before your book no belonga you.

And those reviews? Bad or good: they’re not about you or for you. Believe it or not, most are written without giving the real, living, easily wounded author of the book a second thought. A wise friend of mine points out that they are written for readers. Just as most literary prizes are about canon formation, about pointing librarians and booksellers to the books they should be making available, and scholars to the books they should be writing about. Rewarding the author is a mere side effect.

Or to put it more simply: you are not your books. You just writes them.

Summer in Australia

I just came across a lovely piece by Mark Lawrence about the outsiderness of living through Australian summers while knowing very little about cricket:

What [being a migrant] means is that I have very little understanding of the finer points of cricket, and don’t play it at all well. I can’t tell the difference between ‘long leg’ and ‘short leg’, and I have absolutely no idea where ‘mid-on’ is. After over a decade living in Australia, I do have an idea of how the game is played, but only a middling understanding of how it is scored or how a test proceeds. Strategy? Not a scratch. So much so that during the recent Ashes test in Adelaide, I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, while my colleagues could assess exactly how the day’s play had progressed and what the scores meant in an instant. I was left going, ‘What happened? What happened?’.

Of course, as he points out, there are lots of Australians who don’t give a damn about cricket, actively hate it even. Sadly many of them are friends of mine. At dinner last night as I was trying to talk with another cricket-loving friend about Shane Warne’s retirement, the rest of the table stuck their fingers in their ears and starting humming. It is to sigh.

But, yes, during an Australian summer cricket is everywhere. It’s the main headline on the sports page and quite often the front page too. You see it played on television (free-to-air and cable), on the various cricket grounds around the country, in parks, on beaches and in backyards. It’s played at all levels: from muck around family games where the stumps are an esky, through school competitions, grade and state levels, all the way up to international test series.

For me, even more than cicadas, the voices of Alan McGilvray, James Maxwell, Geoff Lawson and the rest of the ABC’s radio commentary team past and present has long been the sound of summer. Cricket discussions with my family, my (non-insane) friends, cab drivers, wait staff, people in queues for the bus are as much a part of summer as mangoes and passionfruit.

What will our side be without Shane Warne? Is Langer going to retire too? What about Hayden and Gilchrist? Is this the end of Australian cricket supremacy? How long before Murali takes Warne’s world record?

Lawrence worries that his cricket ignorance will affect his son’s progress in the game:

To an extent, my concern is whether my son will lack the necessary cricket skills, as I don’t want him to miss out on learning the game and being included in the matches that will invariably spring up at school, or at the beach or park with friends and family as the summer progresses.

But I recognise there is more to it: some of these concerns stem from my anxieties about what it means to be a migrant in Australia and, by extension, being an outsider. It is also an anxiety about whether I can truly prepare my son to be at home in Australian culture – to not be an outsider through no choice or fault of his own.

My father is the son of migrants from a non-cricket playing country (Poland/Ukraine) who knew nothing about the game and cared less. But he grew up loving and playing cricket and passed that love onto me and my sister. (As did my fourth or fifth generation Australian mother.) I grew up listening to, watching, talking about and (very) occasionally playing cricket in the backyard.

In my teens, inspired by the Bodyline mini-series, I started to read about the history of cricket. The first book I read was a very poorly written biography of Donald Bradman. The first book I enjoyed was Sid Barnes’ autobiography, which confirmed my admiration of Bradman the batsman and dislike for Bradman the man. I also discovered Keith Miller and fell in love.

The history of cricket is the history of English colonialism; they brought cricket with them wherever they went. In some place it died out: For my birthday this year Scott bought me two gorgeous American prints from the 1870s. One of them shows international cricket being played in New England. The other shows a game of baseball looking remarkably like a game of cricket.

In some places it did not: A quarter of the world’s population lives in cricket-playing nations. Just read C. L. R. James’ Beyond a Boundary on cricket in the West Indies and Ramachandra Guha’s Corner of a Foreign Field on cricket in India and Pakistan. They are not only extraordinary books on cricket, they are amongst the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, bringing the complexity of the game and its history alive. They are about race, class, caste, gender, nationhood, politics and colonialism, because it’s impossible to write a good book about cricket without touching on those issues.

The books of Gideon Haigh are also remarkable and have taught me a great deal about the history of cricket in my own country. And thus a great deal about Australia. You don’t have to like, or give a rat’s arse about cricket to be Australian. But knowing a little of the game’s history teaches you a little more about Australia’s. For example, our first team to tour England was Aboriginal, and yet the official Australian team has had almost no representatives of Aboriginal ancestory.

I didn’t start loving cricket because of its happy history of illuminating colonial relationships, but reading its history has made an already rich and complicated sport irresistably fascinating to me. There are few sports with as long and rich a history. And I can’t help but want to share that fascination with other people, Australian or not.

I hope that Mark Lawrence is curious enough to read some of those books. It is truly not necessary to know the difference between “long leg” and “short leg” to enjoy them (or cricket for that matter). Though if he does want to know there’s a rather helpful *cough* *cough* guide right here.

For your edermahcayshun

An excellent piece from Daily Kos on the influence foreignors have always had on American politics. To which I can only say, “Well, der, people.” Show me one country in the world that isn’t influenced by other countries. For that matter show me one person who isn’t influenced by other people. Even hermits are influenced by others.

This is my favourite review of Scott‘s latest book, The Last Days. I think she misses Cal. What do you reckon? I gotta confess I prefer Last Days to Peeps, but I hear her pain. For the record, we wanted the book to be subtitled “Companion to Peeps” but we was overruled.

Simonne Howell, author of the fabulous Notes from the Teenage Underground (which Scott just finished and thoroughly enjoyed), is collecting haikus on her myspace account. I contributed a cricket one. Surely she needs more than just one cricket haiku . . .

I learned today that Harry Potter is hugely hugely hugely popular here in Thailand, which made me wonder: is there’s any country in the world where Harry Potter isn’t popular? While in England I learned that quite a few books and writers that are enormously popular in the US of A can barely sell more than a dozen copies in the UK. (No, I will not name them. On account of their lack of success reflects rather poorly on the United Kingdom.)

What exciting things have you lot learned today?

Adulthood (Updated)

What is an adult?

I mean I’m way over 13 or 18 or 21 or any of the other arbitrary points at which you magically become one. But I know that by certain standards I’m not an adult.

I have no children. I don’t own a house or a flat or any other kind of property. Nor do I own a car. And I’ve never been through any initiation-to-adulthood ceremonies. Or killed any enemies of my tribe.

I have had sex and been drunk though. I’m married. I also have a job. Or at least am self-employed. So I’ve got some claims to adulthood other than my chronological age. But for some that’s not enough.

Those people for whom you have to leap a bunch of arbitrary hurdles in order to be a “real” adult have been around since the very dawn of time.1 They reckon the childless, property-less youngies are layabouts what don’t hold up the previous generation’s standards and know bugger all about responsibility and blah blah blah.

Generations have been bagging the generation that came after them since forever. There’s a famous quote from Thucydides or Herodutus or someone bagging the young uns, but I’m not in the mood to go hunt it down. It sounds exactly like Bill O’Reilly insisting that America is about to be destroyed because of all those young uns and their devil video games.

Utter, uttter, utter rubbish. Chariot racing didn’t destroy the fabric of society and neither has the charleston, television, or the humble ipod.

My dear friend, the multi-talented Kate Crawford, has recently published a book on this very topic. Adult Themes in which she examines how this debate evolved and how very stupid it is. Why aren’t the folks under forty getting married, having babies and buying houses as quickly and as often as their parents did? Because houses are way more expensive, as is raising a kid. Der.

Adult Themes is awesome. Funny, smart and wicked to the point. You should all read it.

Update: and if you wish to buy it go here. As far as I know the book has only been published in Australia so far.

In the meantime. Those of you who are adults—do you feel like one? What is it that makes you feel like a grown up? Or do you feel like an imposter?

And for those you aren’t adults yet—whatcha reckon you’ll need to do to become one?

Update: Sherwood Smith has now written very eloquently and movingly on this subject.

  1. Or, you know, that time when humans were evolved enough to start bitching at one another. [↩]

Interior Decorating

I’ve had a bunch of people ask me recently why I don’t blog about politics, given that I have strong opinions on the subject. (Like there’s anything I don’t have strong opinions on. Why is no one wondering why I don’t blog about interior decorating? For the record: wall-to-wall carpet is an abomination.)

There are lots of reasons I don’t rant politics here, but the main one is I hate flamewars. Don’t get me wrong I quite enjoy following them on other people’s blogs. But I have no interest in having them here. The minute you start talking about current politics, people will come and people will yell. And then I’ll have to waste my time deleting everyone. That’s right the blog overlord will censor discourse on this blog.

I really enjoy the comments here. I’ve been blogging for more than a year and the vast majority of the conversations have been civil and fun. I want things to stay that way. Thus I won’t be blogging about party political stuff.

But feel free to share all your interior decorating hates. Is there anything worse than carpet on the walls? Actually, I think I just hate carpet . . .

Everything dates (updated)

Quite a few writers of books for teens are deathly afraid of producing works that seem old-fashioned and dated within minutes of publication. To avert this dread fate they aim for timelessness and classicness by avoiding slang and brand names and pop culture references. I have good news and bad news for them.

  • The good news is that there are books with dated slang and brand names what remain in print decades after their first printing.
  • The bad news is that all books become dated.

It’s pretty much impossible to write a book without using the language of your time and place. Lots of phrases and words that don’t seem like they could ever date, do. Take “gay”, for example. It used to mean happy and carefree. Remember Cary Grant dancing around Katherine Hepburn’s family house in 1938’s Bringing up Baby, wearing a frilly nightgown and screaming, “Because I just went gay, all of a sudden!” He didn’t mean what you think he means. But who cares? The new meaning of “gay” makes it even funnier. (Update: Walter Jon Williams sets me straight—so to speak.)

Every single one of the movies I love so much from the 1930s and 40s are dated. And yet they’re still widely available and consumed and loved and written and talked about.

Same for the books. Dawn Powell, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are all dated. Very. People don’t talk like that now (if they ever did). The world isn’t the same. Those versions of New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles are long gone. But you know what? The best of their books are still fabulously readable despite their weird forms of address (“doll”?) and the strange way the characters dress (hats at all times for everyone; suits and ties always for the men; gloves for women).

So should you pay attention to advice that says at all costs avoid contemporary slang, avoid referring to things by brand name, and avoid pop culture references?

Yeah, you prolly should, at least, most of the time.

Here’s why. The time when datedness is the biggest issue is in the early days of your book’s lifespan. You have to remember that there’s usually (at least) a year’s gap between a book being finished and a book coming out. A lot can happen in a year. Words that are hip and happening now can be torpid and dated then.

If your characters are obsessed with the hit TV show Dale Susskind’s Food Frolics, but before your pub date the show is cancelled because of the financial and sexual scandal that enveloped Susskind, and “Let’s frolic!” the hip catch-phrase that your characters say a lot has become a reference to a sad and incarcerated man. Reviewers are likely to make note of it and mock you more than somewhat. You better pray your book is good enough for it not to matter.

But in twenty, forty, sixty, two hundred years time most people won’t have heard of Dale Sussskind’s Food Frolics. Your book will no longer create cognitive dissonance for your readers.

Think of it as like fish. There’s the fresh, good-to-eat period shortly after being caught, then there’s the hideous rotting stage, but then—glory of glories—there’s the fossilization phase where the stink’s gone forever. And if your fish was lucky enough to be smoked it stays edible and tasty even longer.

Of course, the bad news is that most books go out of print within six months no matter how fresh they were on publication. But then not many fish make it to the fossilization stage either.

Chocolate proms

Maureen Johnson is being funny again—this time about her prom.

I did not have a prom. In Sydney1 they’re called school dances (or at least they were in my day) and they are nothing like the big deal they seem to be here in the US of A. And, no, I didn’t have a school dance either on account of going to a tiny hippy school with only about two hundred students. (We didn’t “date” either. Not in the American sense of the word. I don’t think I’ve ever gone on a bona fide “date”.)

Anyways my knowledge of proms is gleaned from Hollywood movies, YA novels, and my American friends. I find prom (and “date”) stories deeply fascinating in an anthropological way. And Maureen’s is a beaut. If you’ve got any fun stories of your own—spit ’em out! Bonus points if you can explain the whole cottilion/debutante ball thing.

In other news it turns out that chocolate is evil. Thus I’m a very very good person because I don’t like it. Don’t believe me? Then read this. Via Elizabeth Bear.

  1. I can’t speak for the whole of Australia—for all I know there may be some small town somewhere that does have proms. Or where school dances are a huge deal. I’ve already discovered that not everyone says “grouse”. Poor blighters. [↩]

More on banned books week

Us Asif! authors have been chatting more than a little about the whole books-being-banned situation and we don’t always agree. Some of us do think there are books that are inappropriate for kids. For instance, I would not be totally wild about a ten-year-old reading the Marquis de Sade.

On the other hand, when I was ten I picked up Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (I blame my parents!) and promptly put it back down ’cause it was not only gross, it was really really really boring. I read it again in my late teens and had the exact same response. I imagine the ten-year-old me would have had the same response to the Marquis. As a kid, much like the kid in The Princess Bride, I skipped all the kissing bits. Boooring!

nullMost of us Asifers agree that there are books that kids shouldn’t be reading, but none of us can agree on what those books are or what the magic age of being able to read “adult” stuff is. I read and loved Alexander Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet at an early age, along with a slew of other “inappropriate” books. I think it had no ill effects on me (others may disagree).

The problem with the banning of books in the US of A is that there are different rules in every state. Hell, there are different rules in every school. In a lot of cases individual principals (head masters) and school librarians are removing books from shelves, or not ordering them in the first place.

Now, obviously school librarians need a certain amount of discretion. They have budgets. They can’t buy every book and it’s their job to buy books that are appropriate for their students. You can’t do that without making judgements.

The school librarians and principals are the ones on the frontline. They’re the ones dealing with parental complaints. They’re the ones looking at catalogues and deciding what to order. If their school is in a particularly conservative area they might see a book titled Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs fall in love listed as a middle grade book and decide that ordering it just isn’t worth the grief, no matter how tame the content.

As it happens that’s exactly what’s happened to Maryrose Wood’s book despite it being as pure as the driven snow and its title being the raunchiest thing about it. And yet the title fits the book to a tee. Should her publishers have called it something else? Should people read books before they rush to ban ’em?

Is banning books ever a good idea? How about just limiting access? There are some kids who are horribly freaked out by books. I babysat for this one little boy and if I read him stories that were even a teeny tiny bit scary he would not be able to sleep for a few nights. When he was a little older and reading on his own, Grimm’s fairy tales deprived him of sleep for weeks. He wasn’t ready for it and was a much happier and saner kid when he stuck to sport and pony books.

But there are young kids who adore the scary stuff. Why should they be deprived of their reading pleasure cause some other kid is scared by the same books? Kids mature at different rates. One size really does not fit all. And besides, that kid I babysat for—he self-regulated. He stopped reading the fairy tales after the first two. Every time he decided a book was scary he stopped reading. I suspect a lot of kids do the same thing.

So usually it’s not a question about what a kid does or doesn’t want to read; it’s about what their parents do or don’t want them to read. And, yes, parents have every right to do that. But they do not have every right to regulate what all the kids at their child’s school can read.

And, frankly, I worry about parents who are that controlling. When I was in primary school one of my friends was not allowed to read any books her olds deemed sexist or racist. So she read those forbidden books (mostly by Enid Blyton) over at my place and we’d pretend to be members of the Famous Five (with huge fights over who got to be George) or pretend we were in boarding school at Mallory Towers and have midnight feasts (though sadly we never managed to stay up till midnight for them).

Forbidding her those books and not allowing her to watch television did not protect her from racism or sexism. It just made the forbidden items more desirable. It’s incredibly hard to control the cultural artefacts your child comes into contact with and even harder to control what they make of them.

I understand the impulse, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. (I also understand why authors feel compelled to respond to bad reviews.) I also wonder what exactly is the harm that parents think their child will contract from reading books they deem “inappropriate”. Is it a bid to put off having awkward conversations? To protect the child from how foul the world is? Is it an attempt to mould your children in your own image? (Good luck with that, by the way.)

What do you lot reckon?

Write me this book!

My intensive google research has revealed that there is no biography of Fredi Washington. I demand that one of you get off your arse and write one immediately! (Or use your better research skills to find me one.)

Who is Fredi Washington, you ask? Why, let me tell you:

Fredi Washington as Peola in Imitation of LifeFredi Washington was a light-skinned black actor and dancer. She largely starred in movies for the Jim Crow circuit and often with her skin darkened. She was such a compelling screen presence that the Hollywood bigwigs in the thirties offered to make her a big star if she’d pass as white. She told ’em all where to go. Yay, Fredi! (I also want to know if that’s actually true.)

Ironically, her one big role in white movies was playing the “tragic mulatto”, Peola, in the original Imitation of Life.1 She steals the movie. Everytime she’s on screen she’s where you’re looking.

I want to know more about her. I demand to know more about her! I want a big fat bio on the scale of the Tiptree one. I want it to be as thoroughly researched and as beautifully written and I want it right this minute.

On your bikes, people!

  1. I totally recommend watching the two Imitations of Life back to back. The 1934 one followed by the 1959 Juanita Moore one. Fascinating to see the shifts in representations of race relations. Though in both, Peola/Sara Jane’s decision to pass as white seems inexplicable.

    If you were an alien watching the movies you’d be scratching your head trying to figure out what was so very terrible about being a black person. Other than the only other black people being servants, but there are so few of them you’d think maybe they’re off enjoying cool jobs elsewhere. In neither film are there any cafes with signs saying “Whites Only”. The black characters never have to sit at the back of the bus.

    There is one horrible scene of racism in the 1959 version, but it plays out like racism is just that particular person’s problem, not anything systemic. The most you get in the 1935 version are the kids at school looking shocked when they discover that Peola is passing. Their reaction shot lasts less than five seconds. [↩]

Banned books week

It’s banned books week, people. Check out the following links and then go out and adopt a banned book. Bring it home, love it, read it, blog about it. Encourage others to love the many banned books.

Here are banned books links courtesy of the lovely E. Lockhart:

Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century (2000-2005)

The fabulous asif site. I’m a proud member of Asif!

Badges (buttons) and other images you can use.

The Freedom to Read foundation.

THE BOOKSENSE TOP TEN BANNED BOOKS

1. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, by Harper Lee
2. GEOGRAPHY CLUB, by Brent Hartinger
3. THE GIVER, by Lois Lowry
4. THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, by Helen Bannerman, Christopher H. Bing (Illus.)
5. THE BLUEST EYE, by Toni Morrison
6. BRAVE NEW WORLD, by Aldous Huxley
7. FOREVER, by Judy Blume
8. HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSPHER’S STONE, by J.K. Rowling
9. WE, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
10. WHALE TALK, by Chris Crutcher

My favourite banned book at this exact moment in time is To Kill A Mockingbird if only to make Truman Capote turn in his grave.

What’s your favourite banned book? Don’t forget you can find longer lists here.

John Green and The Art of Lying

“And now that she was doing something difficult
and familiar and never quite predictable,
namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again,
the same sense of complexity and control
that the alethiometer gave her.”
—Phillip Pullman The Golden Compass

John Green, whose latest book, An Abundance of Katherines, is out this week is stopping by my blog today to be interrogated interviewed by me about lying, on account of how he is somewhat partial to spouting the tall ones.

John’s partialness is by no means unique amongst writers. (Truman Capote, anyone?) In the interview we ponder the connection between the telling of lies and the writing of stories. Do you have to be a good liar to be a good storyteller?

Justine: So, John, were you always a liar?

John: Presumably there was a time before I could talk when I was honest, but I’ve been a liar since at least the age of four, when I convinced my preschool teacher my home had been burglarized, and that the burglars had stolen our television. How about you?

Justine: My memories are hazy, but I do remember trying to convince my younger sister that she was adopted, but even though she was very little at the time she wasn’t buying it—we look a lot like each other.

Do you think that lying and being a writer go together?

John: One time I was on a panel with Markus Zusak, and I made some joke about how when I was a kid I figured that the only things I was good at were sitting and telling lies, so I decided to become a writer. And then someone was blogging about this event later and said something like, “Shame on John Green for claiming that fiction writing is lying.” Shame on me? Am I wrong? Is it NOT lying?

Justine: I think so. The kind of creativity you need to get away with an elaborate lie is very close to what you need for writing fiction. But at the same time if a book’s labelled as being fiction then it’s not actually lying. I can see the point, just not why people get so upset about it.

Why do you think people get hot under the collar about calling fiction writing lying?

John: I have no idea. People can be very persnickety about what writing is, and how to do it, and what writing ought to do.

I will acknowledge that the mere ability to lie well is not the same thing as being able to write good fiction, but they are surely related talents.

Justine: Indeed. I’ve heard people from certain religious backgrounds say they weren’t allowed to read novels on the grounds that they are nothing but a pack of lies. Jane Austen makes reference to the supposed moral laxity of novels in her books. Maybe people are still angry that used to happen?

Or perhaps it’s because some people agree that lying is a terrible sin and believe that liars can’t be trusted. If you lie, they believe, you’ll also cheat and steal and murder.

But I think there’s a big difference between kinds of lies. Lying for gain or to cheat are bad, bad, bad things. But lots of lies are completely necessary and good. If people are coming to kill your family and friends and you know where they are hidden, saying you don’t know is the only honourable, good thing you can do. Telling the truth in that situation would be reprehensible.

Also sometimes telling someone the truth can really, really hurt them. I once told a friend that her boyfriend was cheating on her. She hated me for it and we’re still not friends. I have never done that again. There are some things people don’t need to know or need to find out for themselves.

Is there anyone you would never lie to?

John: The true answer is no, although I’d like to say yes. I very rarely lie to my wife, and never about issues of substance. But I’m with you on the nobility of some lies. I am WILLING to lie to anyone, if the situation arises. I’ve always felt that lying can be perfectly noble: Say, for instance, that Sarah (my wife) got into a duel, and her opponent cut off her nose (as happened to the astronomer Tycho Brahe). Okay, so if a half-conscious and noseless Sarah said to me, “Am I losing a lot of blood?” And I would say, “No,” because I’d want her to stay calm and wait for help to arrive. That’s an ethical lie, I think.

Justine: I’m adding that to my list of folks it’s okay to lie to: semi-conscious, noseless people. I don’t lie to Scott or my parents or sister. Well, not unless I confess instantly in a ha-ha tricked-you way.

Is there anything you would never lie about?

John: Oddly, I don’t think I would ever lie about my lying. Does that make sense? Like, I am perfectly happy to answer these questions honestly. I don’t think we, as liars, should be ashamed. There are shameful lies, certainly, but I don’t think the enterprise is in and of itself bad. Lying is like the Force: It can be used for good or evil.

Justine: Absolutely! I don’t lie for gain. I could never be a confidence trickster because I find parting fools from their money deeply wrong. We’re all of us foolish about something, so we can all be tricked. The conman believes that they’re better than everyone else. They’re grifters; we exist only to be their marks. That’s psycho thinking.

Did you make a distinction between the different kinds of lies you tell? (I have many categories for different kinds of lies.)

John: Oh, yeah. What are your categories?

Justine: Reinventing-Yourself lies, Making-a-Better-Story lies, White lies, Getting-Out-of-Trouble lies, Exaggeration.

When I was young Reinventing-Myself lies were my favourites. I moved around a lot as a kid, so every time I was the new kid in school I had a new opportunity to reinvent myself and my family. A lot of the lies were wish-fulfillment lies. I would say that I was on the verge of selling a novel, that I’d been asked to become a model/actor/singer/trapeze artist/DJ but turned them down because it seemed like too much work. Stuff like that. My parents weren’t too worried about it cause the lies were mostly so outrageous no one believed them for long. (They were a bit miffed though when I said they’d met fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War on account of they’re not nearly old enough to have done it. Not really born enough, either.)

John: Reinventing-Myself lies were also very popular with me, and I still occasionally find myself telling a Reinventing-Myself lie when I feel nervous or uncomfortable. A few years ago, for instance, I was having dinner with a woman I’d just started dating, and before I could even stop myself, I started talking about the two weeks I’d spent in Uzbekistan just after graduating from college. In fact, I’ve never even been to England, let alone Uzbekistan. To me, the Reinventing Myself lie is the surest sign of adolescence and/or immaturity.

Justine: Also of boredom. Me and my sister being on the run from an evil cult of nuns who killed our family and ate our family cat and now being in witness protection with our fake parents was way more exciting than my actual life. But now I think my actual life does not need to be improved by adding evil nun cults.

I also used to tell a lot of Making-a-Better-Story lies. When retelling a story I smooth things, leave the boring bits out, add more interesting bits in order to make the story more story-like. Real life is irritatingly messy and usually does not translate well into a story unless you bend things.

John: I am also quite fond of the Making-Better-Story lie. I’m sure that all of my stories contain them, although I’ve been telling some of those stories so long I don’t even know what’s false memory and what isn’t. The narrator of The Great Gatsby notwithstanding, very honest people rarely tell good stories, in my experience.

Justine: My next category is White lies. Even though I don’t lie nearly as much now as I did as a kid, I still sometimes tell social lies to people I don’t know that well. “Your dress is beautiful.” “I loved your book.” “Sorry we couldn’t make it to your party—we were both a bit under the weather.” Etc. etc.

John: Yeah. With my closest friends, the white lie is unnecessary, because I can just say something like, “I want to go home now,” and that’s fine. But with acquaintances, the white lie is a great blessing.

Justine: Getting-Out-of-Trouble lies are the kind I always felt the guiltiest about. I usually wound up confessing to my misdeeds later.

John: I rarely tell these anymore, because I’ve become such a boring homebody that on those rare occasions when I get myself into trouble, I sort of enjoy it.

Justine: Me neither. When I was a kid, getting in trouble was the worst thing in the world. I’m completely inured to it now and will own my bad deeds. Mostly because I try hard not to commit any.

Exaggeration’s the last kind of lie on my list. Most of my lies are of the poetic kind, embellishing stuff to make it cooler variety. The ceilings were twenty metres high! The walls painted such an intense gold your eyes watered just looking at it! Though it prolly belongs in the Making-Better-Story category.

John: Yes, I’m also given over to these.

Justine: Do you have any categories of your own?

John: Well, I would add the Compassionate Lie (outlined above, in the example where Sarah gets her nose cut off during a duel). I’m a big fan of the Compassionate Lie, although it can be a bit of a slippery slope. It’s easy to convince yourself you’re telling a Compassionate Lie when you’re really just telling a regular old self-interested lie. Here’s an example: Say I killed your pet llama by accident. Now, I can tell you that your pet llama ran away, or that it went to go live on a farm. And that’s kind of a compassionate lie. But mostly, I just don’t want you to be mad at me about killing your llama.

Justine: Oh, yes. I used to tell people what I thought they wanted to hear when they asked me if they looked okay. But now if there’s something correctably wrong I will tell them: “Your tag’s sticking up.” ‘There’s schmutz on your face.” “Your pimple is glowing red.”

John: I’d also say that for me, Telling-Better-Stories lies and Reinventing-Myself lies are subcategories of Trying-to-Make-People-Like-Me lies. Basically, all of my lies were Trying-to-Make-People-Like-Me lies.

Justine: Once again we are in complete agreement.

Do you lie as much now as when you were kid?

John: Oh God, no. It would be impossible to lie as much now as when I was a kid. When I was younger, I was able to devote all of my resources to lying. Entire days could be spent on the construction and telling of lies. Now I have to, like, do the dishes and go to the grocery store. But also, as I get older, I feel less compelled to lie. Partly, this is because I’m happier. I have friends now who like me, which is most of what I wanted to get out of lying. The Trying-to-Make-People-Like-Me lie just doesn’t appeal to me like it used to. I’ve discovered, belatedly, that pretending to have spent two weeks in Uzbekistan does not actually make people like you.

Justine: Me neither. For much the same reasons. In fact I don’t tell anything other than white lies and exaggerations these days. Of course I’m stuck with the legacy of my lying past. No one in my family believes a word I say. I am the family’s unreliable witness and even though I’m almost entirely lie-free and have been for years—they will always doubt me. That’s my warning to the kids who read this: The tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf is absolutely true.

Do you have that reputation within your family?

John: To an extent. None of my complaints are ever taken seriously, because they’re counted upon to be exaggerations. But they’ve learned to trust my stories. Or at least they pretend they do.

Justine: Do you think part of why you lie less now is because the lying part of you gets enough exercise from writing novels?

John: That’s a good observation, and I think writing has lessened my desire to lie. I can now get immersed in a fictional world without having to deceive my friends, and you never have to feel guilty about making things up in a novel. When I’m working on a book, during those periods where I’m just working day and night, I get to spin whatever lies I want about those characters. Reinventing-Yourself lies and Exaggerations and Making-a-Better-Story lies and lies that help me get the characters out of trouble. Not all the lies go into the book, of course, but it’s fun regardless.

Justine: Yup. I got a huge kick out of some of the more elaborate stories I used to tell, the friends I invented and their stories. I get to use all those skills when I write novels but this way I don’t get in trouble for it, I don’t lose friends, and I get paid!

What’s the worst trouble you’ve ever gotten into for lying?

John: Well, my fourth grade girlfriend Julie Baskin broke up with me because of my lying, which sucked. But I think the worst consequences for lying are emotional: If you tell the wrong kind of lies, it prevents intimacy; it makes it impossible for you to be a whole person in communion with others; it poisons your relationships. That hasn’t been an issue for me in adulthood, thank God, but it’s something I think liars must always stay mindful of.

Justine: Yes, indeed, the erosion of trust is a biggie. It’s why I don’t lie to the people I care about. Or not about anything important.

Who is your favourite fictional liar? Mine’s Lyra Silvertongue from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. She is brave and courageous and true and totally understands the difference between good and bad lies. I adore her.

John: I can see the case for Lyra Silvertongue, but of course I can’t pick her because fantasy isn’t really literature. Oh, God! I’m kidding! Stop hitting me! I have to go with Huck Finn. And then maybe Jay Gatsby, but Huck Finn stands out to me as the best liar, real or fake, in all of history.

Justine: Who is your favourite real person liar?

John: Well, I’m quite fond of you. And Sarah knows how to tell a tale, certainly. Sometimes, I’ll see a flicker in her eyes when one of her stories takes a turn, and I’ll know, but even when you know, it is a sweet pleasure to watch a master work.

Justine: Yes, indeed! Watching Scott telling stories is prolly one of my favourite things in the universe. Even though I’ve heard all his stories a gazillion times he changes them depending on who he’s telling them to and what the context is. I loves it. (And, natch, I too am fond of you.)

Disclaimer: This entire conversation is, itself, a pack of lies.

To belong or not to belong

I’m a big believer in community. I’m convinced that it’s very very very difficult to produce good art without some kind of a community behind you. I can date the turnaround in my own writing to my first showing it to other writers. Their critiques hurt like hell, but my writing got better in ways it never would have otherwise.

The communities of writers and other publishing folks I’m involved with share a wealth of information with each other. We tell each other about which editors we enjoy working with and why, which houses have the best publicity/sales/marketing departments. Who got paid what by which house. When third person is a better fit than first. What the differences are between writing middle grade and young adult books. What Amazon numbers mean (bugger all). How to survive writing the third book in a trilogy and so on and so forth.

I honestly don’t know how I’d cope in this industry if I didn’t have all my publishing friends to turn to. I’ve also been enjoying passing on what I’ve learned to others via my musings, this blog, at various appearances, and by other means, most enjoyably in person over a yummy meal. Helping other folks is even better than being helped. Who knew?

And yet I’m also extremely reluctant to join organisations.

I’m currently a member of SCBWI because I taught at one of the SCBWI workshops and was comped a year’s membership. I doubt I would have joined otherwise. I’m also a member of ASIF! because censorship makes my blood boil and also it’s not a formal organisation in the way that SCBWI is—it’s more of an activist mailing list based around one particular issue. Mailing lists I can do. I’m also not a member of SFWA which is the premier organisation of science fiction and fantasy professionals.

That’s weird because although I made my fiction debut as a young adult writer, I’ve been a part of the sf and fantasy community for more than fifteen years now, dating back to when I was researching my PhD (which became The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction).

I think it might be because I know too much about SFWA. As part of my doctoral and post-doctoral research I read a vast deal of correspondence about SFWA and a great many back issues of their SFWA Forum. The result is that I feel completely burned out by the organisation without ever having been part of it.

This is not to say that SFWA is any more dysfunctional than any other organisation. Show me an organisation whose members are all a hundred per cent gruntled and I’d want to know what drugs they’re on.

Professional organisations have a great deal going for them. The best of them provide vital services to their members like advocacy when professional disasters occur, cheap lawyers, cheap health insurance, and so forth. They’re also a good way to meet your peers, which (see above) is invaluable.

However, you can be part of a community but not of any its professional bodies. There are some who’d say you’re not being a good citizen in doing so, but, well, I seem to disagree. Thing is I’m not entirely sure why.

It may be a touch of the Groucho Marxes (“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”), or it could be that I worry about being associated with an organisation that is on the record as supporting causes I don’t support. Or not on the record for supporting causes I do. I guess I would much rather keep my solo voice as part of broader and more disparate communities.

Or maybe it’s because I didn’t enjoy playground politics in high school. Nor did I enjoy the university version—either as a student or as a staff member. It could be that I’m just not comfortable with the politics of any formal organisations. I guess there’s a reason that the happiest I’ve ever been is as a work-at-home freelancer.

Could also be that I’m just lazy.

Or something. Those of you who are members of these kind of organisations—what do you get out of it? How do you cope with the politics?

Answers

While I’ve been buried in my book and/or in Kyoto (will tell all about it when my sister sends me photos) you lot asked a bunch of interesting quessies. Here are my answers:

    Quessies from Ken Kugler: I was wondering if the deadline given to you pushes you to complete a book before you are really ready to give it to the editor? It seems that if that is the case, writing the book first and being satisfied with the final results before handing it in would be the way to go if you can hold out for money. Also there is the question of payment. Are there financial incentives to consider such as preselling a series at a lower price?
    A: Sure, that definitely happens. So far it hasn’t happened to me. I’m blessed with editors who won’t publish anything from me unless they’re sure it’s the best I can do. I’m running late on the current book and rather than publish prematurely we’ve chosen to skip doing arcs (advance readers’ copies). If this were a standalone book or the first in a series that would be a disaster. Fortunately it’s the third book in a trilogy so it should be okay. I’d much rather be late and unreviewed than publish a sub-par book.
    Typically a starting writer will get more money for a finished book than for a partial (usually a first-time writer can’t sell from a partial at all). There are exceptions obviously. As you get more established and particularly if you become a New York Times bestselling author like Libba Bray or my old man or other exalted folk you can prolly sell a rough idea scribbled down on a napkin for scads of dosh. In my case I imagine I’ll get more money for a finished book (depends on the book, natch). If an agent or editor wants to step in and answer this one I’d love to hear it.
    Now a bunch from Amanda Coppedge to help flesh out my wikipedia entry:What is your favourite book? Er, um. So hard! It used to be The Master and Margarita. Some days it still is.

    Food: mangosteens.

    Colour: Um again. I am tempted to say puce. Easier to tell you what colour I don’t like: yellow. But that’s only cause I look crap in it.

    Animal: my husband.

    Toothpaste: people have a favourite toothpaste?

    Did you always want to be a writer, or did you have other career aspirations as a youngster? I never wanted to be anything else, but I did work on having a main job so that I could support myself. For the longest time that job was being an academic.

    Any awards, degrees, etc. that should really be up there? Not that I can think of. I am award-less. Though I do have a Ph.D so you must all bow down and call me Dr Justine.

    Anything else that just screams “essential Justine bio factoid”? That my religion is the noble sport of cricket.

    Quessie from Marrije: I wonder what stories the taxi drivers in New York tell themselves and each other about black people.

    A: Here are some theories I’ve heard: Cab drivers don’t stop for black men because they think they are more likely to be robbed and/or assaulted by black men then by anyone else. And they don’t stop for black women because they think they are accompanied by hidden black men who are just waiting for the cab to stop so that they can jump out and assault and/or rob them. And even if there is no assault the black passenger will make the cab driver go to an “unsafe” neighbourhood where they will be assaulted and/or robbed.

    Q from Kristine Smith: Have you run this [the idea of writing a book on spec] past your agent?

    A: Yup. She thought it was an excellent idea.

    In response to those (few) folks wanting to read the Cambodian novel: I may well make it available online some day, but only when all possibilities of traditional publication are totally exhausted.

If anyone else has any further theories, answers or questions fire away.

And thanks again for all the fab comments on the writing on spec post. I feel very encouraged by your responses. My loins are now girded. I shall do this thing!

IBARW: Moment of Clarity (updated)

A contribution to International Blog Against Racism Week:

One time white me was out on the town with a black friend. We were wearing our very bestest clothes and looking very fine indeed. Especially my friend who is gorgeous no matter what she wears.

We needed a cab. She, being the seasoned New Yorker, stepped out onto the street with her arm out while I futzed about with my bag. Several cabs with their lights on zoomed by.

I looked up wondering why there were so many off-duty cabs at a non-off-duty time of night. More empty cabs went by. Not one had off-duty lights on. What the hell? I thought.

“Okay,” my friend said. “You try.”

We switched places. Seconds later. I kid you not—seconds—a cab stopped.

“Noooo!” I said.

“Yes,” my friend replied.

“Is it always like this?”

“Not always, but often enough.”

Update: Lili has a wonderful story in the comments.

International Blog Against Racism Week

I’ve swiped the following announcement from Oyceter, coffeeandink and Rachelmaninja over in livejournal land. If you want to take part here’s what to do:

  1. Announce the week in your blog.
  2. If you have an livejournal account you can switch your default icon to either an official IBAS icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBAS icon, you can make up of your own or ask [info]oyceter to do so as she has agreed to be the Official Iconmaker of the Revolution, or hop over to her LJ and pick up one of the general-use ones she’s put up.
  3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn’t yours, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc.

Inaugural posts are here, here, and here. And they are all mighty fine.
I’m going to do my damnedest to do no. 3 some time this week–deadline allowing. In the meantime here’s hoping you lot take part as well.

Now, back down the coal mine goes me.

Slave economies

In New Orleans I saw men in orange jumpsuits being watched over as they worked by a man wearing a blue coat with the word Sheriff on the back.

Today’s New York Times explains what I saw. Turns out that Louisiana is the one state in the United States that allows private citizens to use prison labour:

    At barbecues, ballgames and funerals, cotton gins, service stations, the First Baptist Church, the pepper-sauce factory and the local private school—the men in orange are everywhere.Many people here in East Carroll Parish . . . say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable.
    . . .
    The churches, too, are grateful beneficiaries. “They sent me prisoners for a month” for menial chores at the First Baptist Church, said Reynold Minsky, also chairman of the local levee board. “All completely free,” Mr. Minsky added. “It’s a real good deal. Everybody is tickled.”

They’re also used at a local private school where the school’s principal, Morris Richardson, said, “We try to provide their lunch for them.” Makes you wonder what the prisoners are eating at their other jobs.

How is this economy sustainable? The unskilled work is being done by prisoners for free. The poor people who aren’t in gaol can’t find any work. How are they able to support themselves and their families?

Some would have to steal to survive, and then if they’re busted, they’re sent to gaol to join the ever-expanding pool of free and/or dirt cheap labour that so tickles Reynold Minsky. And repeat.

Them that’s got shall have . . .

If you don’t have a login for the Times go to bugmenot.com and get one.

Noooooooo!!!!! (updated)

Okay, I got nothing against France. They publish my books after all, and it’s where some of my ancestors are from, but I love the Brazilian football team, have done for ages, and I really, really, really wanted to see them in the final.

I’m bummed.

Yeah, yeah, France played better. Yeah, yeah, I have the consolation of England being knocked out. But it’s depressing knowing it’s going to be an all-European final with not one team from the rest of the world.

Poo!

Oh, well, maybe we’ll be able to take the Tour de France. Are there any Brazilians in the Tour? Ghanaians? Japanese? With all those drug expulsions surely my Aussie boys Cadel Evans and Michael Rogers are a shot?

Right then, that’s out of my system, back to Magic’s Child . . .

Update: Here’s a haiku I swiped from Scott’s blog:

yes, brazil lost it
yellow shirts not so sunny
rain falls on the field

—orangedragonfly

New Orleans (updated)

The American Library Association Conference was the first to be held in New Orleans since Katrina. Everywhere we went people thanked us for being there, for spending our money at their hotels, restaurants, bars, cafes and shops, for riding in their cabs and dancing in their clubs. For the first few days that was the most frequent sign of what Katrina had wrought: intense gratitude that 18 thousand librarians (and hangers on such as, you know, writers and other publishing types) were in town.

The French quarter is on higher ground and largely looks like nothing happened. Gorgeous wrought iron lace work terraces (looking not unlike Sydney ones) line the narrow streets, and the restaurants and cafes and bars all seem to be open even if they are festooned with Help Wanted signs. It was easy to stroll around in the delicious heat and imagine taking a writing holiday there, spending four or six weeks writing every day in one of those gorgeous terraces, going out every night to gorge on the fabulous creole cooking, and get to know the place the place better; it was hard to keep in mind that this was the city that had been completely devastated last year.

I didn’t recognise the first sign of devestation I’d seen: when we flew in we were treated to a lovely view of the city, dotted with lots of bright blue, which I later learned was FEMA-supplied canvas.

The driver who picked us up and took us to our hotel was living in a FEMA trailer parked in front of his slowly being rebuilt house. The driver who picked us up on our way back home took us on an impromptu tour of a tiny part of the devestated parts of town. He told us 80% of the city is still waiting to be repaired (over the five days I heard estimates running from 60% to 85%). All the houses had clearly visible high water marks almost three metres above the ground and on each house someone had leaned out from a boat to make an X and mark how many dead people and animals were found inside. There were no cars parked outside, no people walking along the foot paths. It was a ghost town.

The same driver told us that the official death toll for the Convention Centre was 1. He had a firemen friend who’d seen a room inside the Centre piled high with what he reckoned was at least 150 bodies.

After 9/11 the newspapers round the world (or at least in Australia and the US of A) carried the death toll in their pages which was updated every day for weeks and weeks after the attack. I saw no equivalent after Katrina.

Why is there so little coverage of the fact that around 1,000 people are still unaccounted for? Or of the long, slow recovery? The local New Orleans paper, The Times Picayune, has stories every single day. The New York Times has had one in the last month or so. It was about the huge increase in the suicide rate in New Orleans. [Update: this is not true the Times has run lots of articles.]

Reading about New Orleans from New York City I honestly though I’d be visiting a city well on its way to recovery. A city being rebuilt. That’s not what I found there. [Update: this just shows that I’m a careless reader of the Times.]

If you can visit, do. If you can’t how about donating a book here which will help some of the devestated libraries in the area.

P.S. Yes, Cecil, I will be posting an account of the actual conference, too. Short version: twas a blast and Margo Lanagan is awesome beyond words.

Update: Monica Edinger points out in the comments that a simple search of the New York Times archive would’ve shown me that I was being not only unfair to the Times but completely wrong. That’s what I get for writing what felt true without checking. Always check your facts, folks!

Names & titles

Over at Miss Snark’s some folks get all snooty when agents address them by first name. I find their crankiness weird and am wondering if it’s a generational thing or because (as another commenter says) I’m Australian and we’re less uptight more relaxed than USians.

Personally, I’m more squicked when people insist on using a title with my name. My name is Justine Larbalestier, it’s not Ms Justine Larbalestier, certainly not Miss or Mrs Justine Larbalestier and you’re risking life and limb if you ever use Mrs Scott Westerfeld, though FYI Scott adores being called Mr Justine Larbalestier.

If you must use a title the correct one’s actually Dr, which I’m not wild about either, but at least I earned that one after almost four years of blood, sweat and tears (oh, yes, tears, lots and lots and lots of tears).

But how to negotiate this web of correct name/title useage? Even though I think it’s fusty and weird to want to be addressed by a title I also don’t want to offend anyone (not unintentionally anyways). So what are you supposed to do when some folks will spit the dummy if you don’t use a title, and others if you do?!

Here’s my cunning solution: echo how they sign off. If they sign off Dr Massively Stuckup, then you respond thus:

    Dear Dr Massively Stuckup

And sign off how you would prefer to be addressed:

    Cheers,

    Notuptightatall

Simple, eh?

But what to do if you’re the one writing the first letter? If you have a mutual acquaintance ask them. Otherwise play it safe. In the US of A I would use title plus full name (unless I can’t figure out whether they’re a sheila or a bloke or whether they have a phd or not in which case I’d use full name). In Australia I use full name sans title. Then I wait for the reply and adjust my salutation accordingly.

Aren’t you lucky to have me here to solve all etiquette problems?

Con artists

You know how in Hollywood movies con artists are usually sexy, or interesting, or secretly kind of good guys, or all of those things (think The Grifters, Paper Moon, The Sting etc. etc.) and most of the people they scam are greedy bad people anyways, so it doesn’t really matter? When I watch those movies I’m completely sucked in, and on their side, and want them to win.

In real life, not so much. Cause, you see, scam agents and publishers are also con artists. They prey on people who are ignorant of the publishing industry and desperately want to have their work published and read. I was once ignorant of publishing and desperate to become a real author with a real published book. If I’d come across one of these scams back then I bet I would’ve fallen for it. Many otherwise smart people have.

Falling for a con isn’t about how smart you are. It’s about how much you know. It’s many years now since I’ve known enough about publishing to be immune to the kinds of scams that are regularly exposed by Writers Beware and Predators & Editors.

But on many things I’m easy to fool. If someone tells me something my instinct (like most people’s) is to believe it. I’m endlessly tricked by my friends and relatives—curse them. And April’s Fool’s Day? Gah. For starters, I’m a freelancer, so I never notice what day it is, besides most April Fool’s day gags consist of telling people something that could be plausible. What’s so dumb in believing them? There’s so many implausible things in the world that are true. You know, like Tom Cruise being a sex symbol, and people actually believing that American Beauty and The English Patient are good movies, and that Bring It On and Resident Evil 2 are bad. Excuse me?

I’ve almost been conned in NYC, but fortunately I was with a more knowledgeable person who recognised a scam (whatever it was—I still don’t know) coming.

I even understand the impulse to trick people—there’s an element of the trickster in every fiction writer. I’m just saying it ain’t that hard, nor if you’re doing it to trick money out of folks is it glamorous, noble, sexy or any of the other things that Hollywood likes to make it seem. You don’t even have to be especially smart to do it. That particular scam consists of the scammer advertising for unpublished writers and then when they send their writing the scammer says it’s fabulous and for a fee will represent the writer. Easy. All the scammer needs is for the unpub’d writer to be ignorant of the fact that good agents don’t charge fees and especially not in the multiples of a thousand.

Of course, it’s not just Hollywood that glamorises scammers. There are lots of really excellent crime books out there from the point of view of grifters. I just read Lawrence Block’s The Girl With the Long Green Heart (thanks, Naomi) and I really enjoyed it. But something happened as I read it, I started thinking about things from the griftee’s point of view. Even though—as is usual with these stories—he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work because he was greedy and thought he was gaming those who were gaming him. At which point it’s hard to see which way’s up ethically speaking. Who’re worse the people who make a living gaming people illigetimately? Or real estate speculators etc who game people legally? The grifters point at the griftees and say it wouldn’t happen to them if they weren’t so greedy. But isn’t greed for money one of the key motiviating factors of the grifter?

My head hurts.

There are lots of movies and books I enjoy whose ethics are beyond questionable. Gross Point Blank anyone? In which the hero is a guilt-free paid killer. And yet the audience is expected to be barracking for him to wind up with the girl. Which I always do even though I’m sure that were it real life and not a perverse fairy tale the first time his girl annoys him he’d off her without thinking twice.

And my point would be?

Dunno. Oh, hang on, yes I do. My point is that fiction ain’t life and that Writer’s Beware and Predator’s & Editors are doing stellar work and I salute them.

Ideas, like butterflies, are free

I was out doing errands t’other day (including a visit to the Tax Office to get my German contracts stamped—thank you, Niki). At one of my stops the fact of my being a writer came up and the bloke behind the counter said, “Really? You know, I have this great idea. If I give it to you, and you write the book, you can keep half the profits.”

My mouth opened. My mouth closed. See, I’ve heard other writers talk about non-writers making that offer, but I’ve never actually had it made to me so I didn’t have an answered prepared. I stammered something about being grateful for the offer, but that I have a tonne of ideas of my own, thanks all the same.

Ideas are no big deal. I have a gazillion ideas every day. Oodles of the little buggers. But without labour an idea is nothing. Unless I sit down and type for several months and turn a bunch of ideas into a book, those ideas are worthless. Their only value is in what’s done with them. Lots of people have ideas for books; not that many write them.

Scott and me were talking about the inflated value many people give ideas. And Scott wondered if that was partly behind the ever-growing insane obsession with copyright (like the Canadian Red Cross trying to copyright the Red Cross symbol). And the notion so many people have that ideas can be stolen. That rewriting an earlier story is somehow plagiarism (that’s right, Shakespeare was a plaigarist, and James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and just about any other writer you care to name).

Some are unable to make a distinction between riffing on something and stealing. If someone were to write a book about a girl who a finds a door that leads from Sydney and New York City and has adventures. I would not be bothered. Not unless the characters bore an uncanny resemblance to Magic or Madness and large chunks of the book were word-for-word the same as mine. Plagiarising means to take some one else’s work and pass it off as your own. Taking credit for someone else’s labour is wrong; riffing on someone else’s ideas is what writers/comedians/artists/musicians etc. etc. do. That’s their job.

Which leads me to Cory Doctorow’s fabulous post on BoingBoing about the publishing industries ludicrous efforts to stop Google’s fabulous Book Search which would make said riffing so much easier. What he said.

I am easily amused (Updated)

Top ten searches that led to my site over the last 24 hours:

Is there no topic on which I’m not an authority? Nope, not one.

Update: Just so as you know, I cheated and left out all the obvious searches like my name, books I’ve written, Elvis and mangosteens.

Hating Cities

I will never understand all the Melbournites who despise Sydney, some of them folks who’ve never even been here. Seriously, I’ve met Melbournites who sneer with disdain at the mere thought of stepping foot in Sydney. The horror they say!

Me, I’m from Sydney. I love it, but I also have a whole lot of time for Melbourne. Melbourne has better licensing laws and thus better bars than Sydney, a better art and live music scene, and (mostly) better clothes shopping. Melbourne has trams. And what is not to love about trams? But Melbourne has little of Sydney’s breath-taking physical beauty, doesn’t have her beaches, or national parks, or fairies, er, I mean ferries, actually I mean both. It doesn’t have the wonderful bike path all the way from Newtown to the beach. Melbourne is, well, kind of dreary looking and its winter is unendurable. Nor does it have many of my favourite restaurants in the world the way Sydney does but, hey, the food is plenty fine in Melbourne too. And, please, do not give me the sacred MCG thing. There’s only one truly beautiful test-hosting cricket oval in Australia and it’s in Adelaide. And anyways my heart belongs to the SCG.

But who am I kidding? I was born here. I’ve spent the majority of my life here. I am completely biased about Sydney.

I’m not asking Melbournites to start loving Sydney. I’m just asking them to be a little reasonable about their over-the-top hatred. There are other cities out there that are actually worth hating (like, you know, um, another Oz city that I will not name because I have friends who live there what will be offended). Sydney ain’t one of them. And while I’m at it, Adelaiders, quit hating Melbourne, okay? You’re just being silly and why hate them when their MCG is ugly and your Adelaide Oval beautimous? You should pity them.

For me to work up a real forth of city hating, it has to be either a) a city I spent a miserable few years of my childhood in, or b) a city where you can’t get around if you don’t drive. Where the public transport and pedestrian access sucks. For this reason I perfectly understand why so many folks in the US of A loathe Los Angeles. Without a car in L.A. you are totally buggered. You have to beg rides from all your friends and are reduced to the status of a helpless child. But you know what? That’s true of almost every city in the USA, which is one of the reason I love NYC and San Francisco so much, they’re perfectly navigable by public transport and in Manhattan you can go wherever you want by shank’s pony. Plus, you know, there are so many places in both cities you’d want to go.

I used to hate London, because every time I’d visited the food was vile and expensive, it was gray, cold and raining (even in “summer”), and the people were obnoxious and rude. On my most recent trip the food was still expensive but it was excellent, the weather was endurable, and I only had one rude encounter, so now London’s in my good books. It certainly passes with flying colours the good public transport and pedestrian getaroundability rule. (Thanks to Niki, Lauren and Andrew for showing me the non-sucky London.)

Cities are who you know. The people who take you in and show you their town. I’ve had wonderful times in Dallas and Austin, Texas neither of them pedestrian friendly. I adore Toronto and it sure ain’t pretty. I’ve enjoyed Brisbane, Rome, Madrid, Bangkok, Jakarta, Dunedin, San Miguel de Allende, Davis and Lisbon—all of them because the people there were amazing and went out of their way to show their town to me. I imagine that even L.A. with the right people in the right light could be kind of okay. And now that my sister‘s moved there I guess I’m going to find out.

Or maybe not. There’s still that bloody car thing.