I’ll get to them, I promise.

But, in the spirit of doing at least something I’ve said I’d be better at this year, an update on the List of Stuff I’m Writing:

To write:

Gid— first draft by March 2012 — This actually looks very much on-track. Last few chapters outlined, could even be done (gasp) early. Currently sitting at 25,600ish words.
Gavrick’s Brood — Aiming to start by May. Still a-clamoring. Going to need some worldbuilding, methinks
“The Fire Children” — is hinting it might like to be a longer work when it grows up. I’m stuffing my fingers in my ears. Not that that worked with Gid.

On the horizon/no set dates:
“Wolves”
“The Desert in Fimbulwinter”
“The Reunion Tour of Billy James and the Flamethrowers, or How Billy Got the Band Back Together”

I’ve been carving out more reading time these last few weeks, too, which has been pretty nice. I’d like to get out of my own way and do more reviewing here (which reminds me that one of the not-yet-finished posts is a bit of musing on what a review should do, and how the reviewer/venue affects my thinking on that). The question becomes how far back in my have-read pile to go. I’ve read some pretty excellent stuff.

The caffeine and the day are winding down, and my wit has long fled. In the interest of not adding another unfinished post to the drafts pile, I’ll leave you with a link to Locus’ recommended reading list for 2011. What’s on there that you’ve read? What should I seek out?

But I wasn’t done ruminating, and thus, this post comes not as we stand just over the thresshold of the year, but maybe, I don’t know, a step or two inside, just enough to have tracked a little mud into the hallway. Or for our host to come tearing out of the kitchen shouting “take off your shoes I just mopped!”

I couldn’t remember if I’d done one of these resolution-y posts for 2011, but lo, I did. I actually dreaded searching for that, since, well, what if I hadn’t accomplished anything? The good news is, I seem to have done some stuff:

• Night Owls is done. I could’ve sworn I’d blogged about finishing it, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere. Finished it in June over one feverish leave me the fuck alone, I’m writing weekend. Polished and edited over the next few months. Sent it off to Miriam and she didn’t hate it. Huzzah! Which makes 2012 the year of nail-biting as it goes out to editors.
• Gid is my current project. You might notice it’s gone from “Gid” to Gid. In my head, it made the transition from a short story to not just a novel, but a middle-grade novel. I’d like to be further along on it than I am — 18,000 words in puts me somewhere between a third and halfway in. More outlining should make that end word-count goal a bit clearer. I’d really like to finish it before March.
• “Running” became “Along the Portal Road” and has been sold to an anthology. More on that soon!

In the spirit of (as Logen Ninefingers would say) being realistic about these things, I’m shelving a few projects for the time being:

• The Nin Sequel (with Hill) – sitting at about 57K and likely to stay there for awhile until we hear more about book one.
• “Letters to Janey” — Also temporarily back-burnered until I figure out where it’s going.
• “Kate” — Sadly, I think I’m trunking this one for now. It doesn’t quite fit into any markets I’ve researched, which makes it tough to place. If you hear any calls for bittersweet ghost stories that aren’t actually scary, let me know!

In comparison to other writers, it’s not the most prolific of years. I’m sure if I tallied up all of my writing over the course of 2011, it’d be a nifty-ish number, certainly not a bad one for someone with my schedule. Still, there’s part of me saying, not good enough. Do more. Which leads to the crux of my resolutions for 2012:

This is the year I give myself a break, and the year I demand more from myself.

Contradictory, yet not. Any deadlines I’m on right now are entirely arbitrary. The only person I disappoint by blowing them is me. Which, y’know. A million and ten self-helpy-type people would say I should be at the top of my own Do Not Disappoint These People list.

So, okay, I’m up there.

The plan, then, is to hold myself accountable for writerly goals, but when the inevitable spanner gets thrown into the works, to adjust rather than berate.

We’ll see how that goes.

Looking forward at the mud I plan to track across 2012′s floor:

To write:
Gid — first draft by March 2012
Gavrick’s Brood — name very subject to change. Trying to leave it for after Gid, but damn is it clamoring. Aiming to start it by May.
“The Fire Children”
“Wolves”
“The Desert in Fimbulwinter”
“The Reunion Tour of Billy James and the Flamethrowers, or How Billy Got the Band Back Together”

All of those stories have been started, but have otherwise been put aside. They currently mainly exist in snippets strewn throughout my docs folder, my gmail inbox, and the occasional Evernote file. Ideally, I’d like to finish all of them and get them submitted by the end of the year. I won’t be sticking due dates on them until I have an idea of how Gid is going.

Right, then. I have a clockwork boy who needs to come to a bad realization. Happy New Year, you lot.

I think I’ve got the steps down, though!

Step 1: Decide on inflammatory thesis statement
Step 2: Present opinions as facts
Step 3: Back up the opinion-facts with equally-uninformed-man-on-the-street/concern troll quotes.
Step 4: Under no circumstances speak to anyone who works in the industry on any level unless you can massage their information to agree with yours, or you can take a quote way out of context.
Step 5: Publish!
Step 6: Giggle as the hits pour in.

You get bonus points if you’re a tech or business writer who thinks the book industry is 100% analagous to Apple/the RIAA/Wal-Mart, thus explaining why you don’t have to do any research. (Spoiler: the book industry is different.)

So, of course, yesterday I started seeing this article on Slate linked around, trashing indie bookstores and proposing that Amazon’s better for everyone all around. And here we go again.

Cats ‘n’ kittens, I hadn’t even had my coffee yet. This was not fair. You can’t get a proper frothing going without enough go-juice in the veins.

First off, hie thee over to this excellent response by an independent bookseller. It’s a line-by-line of the Slate article, and it’s spot-on.

I would like to point out, by the way, that the author of the article wrote a book entitled True Enough: Living in a Post-Fact Society. (Link, of course, goes to indiebound because fuck you, buddy.) Part of me is hoping we’re just being trolled, or that he’s trying to pull a Colbert on us. Alas, signs point to him just being a shit-stirrer. Either that or he’s hoping to get some more mileage out of a book that’s three years old.  (Or perhaps his publisher is putting the hardcover out of print and has declined to produce a paperback version, so he’s buddying up to his favorite online superstore in the hopes that he can garner some Kindle sales…)

Anyway, a few points I’d like to make/respond to:

 When you walk into Best Buy and get a salesperson to spend 10 minutes showing you a television, then leave empty-handed so you can buy the TV for less on Amazon, you’ve just turned Best Buy into Jeff Bezos’ chump.

Actually, when you walk into Best Buy — knowing that you’re going to leave and buy the item from Amazon instead — and still spend 10 minutes asking a salesperson about the product you know you are not buying from them, you’re an asshole. Because you’ve just wasted that person’s time. The product specifications are listed on every item on Amazon. If you have questions about it, there’s a little linky that says “Not enough product details to make a purchase? Tell us what you need to know.” You click on that and… oh, wait:

If you can’t see the teeny-tiny print beside the submit button, it reads: “We won’t be able to respond directly to the feedback submitted at this time, but we’ll forward it along to the right people.”

In other words, if you have questions, there’s no one there to help you right this second. Maybe someone will get back to you, at some point, though no promises that the question you’re actually asking is the one that will get answered. Oops!

Mr. Manjoo goes on to discuss Richard Russo’s excellent December 13th op-ed in the New York Times,“Amazon’s Jungle Logic.”  Says Mr. Manjoo:

Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it.

There’s plenty to unpack there. Start with the looking-down-the-nose phrase “his novelist friends.” How quaint! How twee! Novelists. This is the part where I point back to the Slate author’s three-going-on-four year old book, and its lack of transition from hardcover to paperback. Most books, if they’re ever coming out in paper at all, do so within a year. If the hardcover sales tank, quite often the publisher will sell down the hardcover stock and quietly put the book out of print. We’re probably awfully close to the time where that decision will be made. Hmmmm, I say.

Next, suggesting that independent bookstores are cultish and moldering. Does he back those adjectives up with facts? Or expound upon why he feels that way?

/snerk

Of course not.

Mr. Manjoo goes on to claim that “no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books.”

Facts! Show me them!

Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection,

Wait, what? I want to see what this guy’s local bookstores look like, both indies and B&Ns nearby. Because I’ve never seen a bookstore with a paltry selection. Is his local indie a specialty store? Like, is he going into a shop devoted to children’s books looking for computer manuals? In which case, it’s not the bookstore that’s doing it wrong. Pairing up “humongous Barnes & Noble” with “paltry selection” is equally as ridiculous. It’s a big store. That means a lot of books on the shelves. Oh, but wait! He used the qualifier relatively. So, in other words, you might not be able to walk into a B&N that is ten times the square footage of your house (with room leftover for a couple of garages and a park), and find an obscure medical text from 1998. Being surrounded by tens of thousands of other books doesn’t count. Also, god forbid you ask the staff at either the tiny indie or the superhuge B&N to special order the book for you, right?

Honestly, I suspect this guy is counting the book section at his supermarket as his local indie.

no customer reviews,

Funny, because I’ve been to bookstores that DO have shelf-talkers with customer reviews on there. Also, a lot of bookstores have staff picks sections. And store newsletters. And access to the IndieNext list. Plus, Amazon customer reviews can be awfully dubious. They allow one-star reviews that state “I AM ANGRY BECAUSE THERE IS NO EBOOK” or “THIS BOOK HAS A TYPO ON PAGE 34″ to stand beside actual, legitimate reviews. Also? Harriet Klausner loves fucking everything.

no reliable way to find what you’re looking for,

Aside from, y’know, asking the staff, who were hired and trained to know their shit.

Wait.

Oh god, he’s that dude who walks in, gestures around vaguely, and says, “I was in here last month? And there was a book over there? And it was blue? Do you have it?”

and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like.

Seriously, you’ve walked up to the register at the Piggly Wiggly with a bag of oranges and asked the beleaguered clerk to recommend a book to you, haven’t you, Mr. Manjoo? Sure, a local store’s staff picks section will recommend what the booksellers have read and enjoyed. The point of that is to showcase books that people might not have previously considered. They’re not intended to be specific, personally-tailored recommendations, because they’re for everyone to ponder.

Now, if you walk up to a real-live bookseller and say, “I’m looking for a book,” they’re going to ask you what you like to read. They’ll ask what you’ve read recently, who some of your favorite authors are, and base their recommendations around that. Flesh-and-blood booksellers are capable of making these decisions without the support of an algorithm. And if you’re someone who comes in regularly to buy books, they’re going to remember you and your tastes. Y’know, kind of like Amazon does.

Back in my bookstore days, we had a customer who only liked to read medical thrillers. Once a month, she’d come into the store and make a beeline for the register because the staff always knew which new releases would be up her alley. She got to know the names of two of our booksellers: “Are Dave or Mark here? I need a book.”

And you know what? If they weren’t scheduled for that night? They’d probably told the rest of us what she might like. Sometimes they’d even tucked a new copy away behind the register for her.

Dubious recommendation engine. ‘Kay.

It’s not just that bookstores are difficult to use.

SERIOUSLY IS YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE ATOP A MOUNTAIN? IS THE PATH TO IT FRAUGHT WITH DANGER AND ZOMBIE GOATS?

They’re economically inefficient, too. Rent, utilities, and a brigade of book-reading workers aren’t cheap,

Mmmm, concern-trolling.

so the only way for bookstores to stay afloat is to sell items at a huge markup.

Look, Mr. Manjoo, clearly you don’t get it. Selling something at retail price isn’t a markup. It’s the price recommended by the publisher. A markup would be selling a book with $9.99 printed on the cover for $15.99. What you’re complaining about is that the bookseller isn’t marking their stock down to your satisfaction. Clarity in writing is important. Especially for a journalist.

A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent.

This has been pointed out a million-and-ten times on the internet, but let’s say it again: Amazon sells their books at a loss, and they can do that because they make a profit on other, non-book things which booksellers do not sell. Like those TVs that Best Buy carries, and streaming television shows, and I don’t know, monkeys. In fact, two years ago, Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart started a pissing contest to try and see who could sell hardcover bestsellers for the least amount of money possible, all of them setting the books at prices that meant the retail giants would lose money. But booksellers can’t compete with that. If you don’t understand how bookseller discounts work, clicky the link. I went into it. It’s not a big secret. So uh, hooray for capitalism? I guess?

In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.

Bolding mine. Sure you could. You could buy two books for the price of one, or four books for the price of two, or or or…

But will you?

Amazon’s betting you won’t. That instead, you’ll spend that money on something else. Some Pocky to munch on while you read. A new recliner in which to read your loss-leader book and eat said Pocky. Or a monkey to feed you the Pocky while you sit in your new recliner. Better hope that’s chocolate on the Pocky.

I’d love to see numbers on how many people do, in fact, buy more books from Amazon because of their prices. Solid numbers, not just anecdata from a dude writing an editorial for Slate as though it’s a real article. Numbers from Amazon themselves. Except, oh, right. Amazon doesn’t release information with real sales figures. Instead, they speak in relatives — this year we sold more books than last year. Without two concrete numbers to compare, that statement tells us absolutely fuck-all. Of course, with the relatively paltry example above, we can see that Mr. Manjoo is okay with made-up statistics.

There is little that’s “local” about most local bookstores. Unlike a farmers’ market, which connects you with the people who are seasonally and sustainably tending crops within driving distance of your house, an independent bookstore’s shelves don’t have much to do with your community.

Except for the part where book buyers know their customers and order books according to what people in that community read. You’re not likely to find an altar to Rush Limbaugh books in the northeast. Nor will you be likely to find President Obama’s books prominently displayed in more conservative communities. Do you have gamers in your community? The buyers know it. Does the town census skew older or younger? The staff knows what will best sell in that store. Seaside community? Holy excellent selection of beach reads, Batman.

And the beauty is that, if you don’t see what you want on the shelves, not only will your local bookstore order it for you, but in the future they’ll remember your preferences and order accordingly.

Also, and probably the bigger point here:

It’s not just about the books you see on the shelves.

Bookstores support local schools, ordering books on their summer reading lists so the kids can procure them when they rush in the day before Labor Day. They support local book clubs, local anything-clubs, really, if there’s a book relative to the group’s interests. They hold author signings and poetry readings, and are there to partner up with other local businesses to help events succeed.

Which, if Mr. Manjoo had bothered talking to a bookseller, he might have discovered.

With the money you saved by buying books at Amazon, you could have gone to see a few productions at your local theater company, visited your city’s museum, purchased some locally crafted furniture, or spent more money at your farmers’ market. Each of these is a cultural experience that’s created in your community. Buying Steve Jobs at a store down the street isn’t.

There’s the concern-trolling: “I don’t know why you’re supporting X when Y needs your help so much more.” Usually it’s more along the lines of “I don’t know why you feminists are wasting all your energy getting offended at this sexist ad when there are <insert political cause here.> In this case it’s, “You people who spend extra money by paying retail price in your local indie bookstore are hurting your local theatre company.” I would like to know how much of the money Mr. Manjoo saves by shopping at Amazon goes to his local community.

Relatively, even.

Say you just care about books. Well, then it’s easy: The lower the price, the more books people will buy, and the more books people buy, the more they’ll read.

Remember your seventh-grade algebra tests? Please show your work. Or, as they say over at wikipedia, [citation needed].

Amazon has said

I will not Godwin my own post.
I will not Godwin my own post.
I will not Godwin my own post.

that after people buy a Kindle reader, they begin purchasing e-books at twice the rate they’d previously purchased print titles. (And they keep buying print titles.)

Relatively. Again. No concrete numbers, just ratios. Finally we get some links, and it’s to Jeff Bezos’ squirrelly math. Sigh.

Amazon has also been instrumental in helping authors create more books. With the Kindle, it launched a self-publishing system that allows anyone to sell a Kindle book.

Sweet zombie Jesus, this is a whole other post in and of itself. Short version: “more books” doesn’t necessarily translate to “quality books.” Sure, the KDP program made it easier to get your self-pub book out there, but it’s in proprietary Kindle format, so someone like me, who does not shop Amazon, will never read your book. Oops!

There’s also its Kindle Singles program, which transforms stuff that the book industry wouldn’t otherwise be able to sell—shorter-than-book-length magazine articles, essays, and fiction—into material that can be sold for money.

Uh, so acknowledging that this is stuff the book industry doesn’t sell makes it a strike against the book industry? The book industry doesn’t sell TVs, Pocky, or monkeys either. This argument does not support Mr. Manjoo’s case. I mean, I dunno. If the article is still in a magazine, bookstores can still sell the magazine, I guess. But if a customer walked up to me and said, “I’d like to tear out pages six through thirteen and just give you fifty cents for them,” that would be awfully silly.

It’s great that authors can release their shorter fiction as single-hit epubs. I bought Chuck Wendig’s novella Shotgun Gravy in digital format (though I think that likely falls under the regular Kindle publishing format, not the Singles). Pretty keen! I also read short fiction at Ideomancer, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, lest you think I’m a total Luddite. But I’m still unclear on how the Singles program is a strike against booksellers. Apples and oranges, man.

In fact, it’s probably the only thing saving it.

Dear journalistic institutions, both print and intertubes: please stop letting people who know not a goddamned thing about the book industry make statements like this. A little bit of research goes a long goddamned way.

YA isn’t the realm of the devil. Publishers aren’t crashing and burning or quaking in their boots (they’re adapting! Maybe you could do an article on how!)

And above all, bookselling isn’t dead.

]]> http://www.falconesse.com/2011/12/15/oh-internet/feed/ 2 http://www.falconesse.com/2011/11/14/nanowrimo-are-you-playing-to-win-or-playing-to-write/ http://www.falconesse.com/2011/11/14/nanowrimo-are-you-playing-to-win-or-playing-to-write/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:17:42 +0000 falconesse http://www.falconesse.com/?p=557 Continue reading →]]> This morning, on Twitter:

@HillaryMonahan: “Add more dialogue tags to up your NaNo word count!” Me: “NO DON’T DO THAT PLEASE STOP DEAR GOD WHAT IS NANO TEACHING YOU!”

@falconesse: @HillaryMonahan Whoever said that needs a fucking smiting.

@HillaryMonahan: @falconesse Yeah, enter NaNo, the exercise in Dubious Writing Advice From People Who’ll Need An Editor.

@falconesse: @HillaryMonahan Problem is, with that level of superfluous padding an editor’s head will asplode. WON’T ANYONE THINK OF THE EDITORS?

@justanna: @falconesse @HillaryMonahan I think the problem here is that “advice to win NaNo” and “advice to write well” are not the same thing

@Hillary Monahan: @justanna @falconesse We were just talking about that. Unfortunately, a lot of participants don’t seem to SEE the difference.

So, let’s talk about it!

The goal of National Novel Writing Month is to crank out a 50,000-word novel between November 1st and 30th.  One of the “freedoms” participants are supposed to allow themselves during this period is the permission to write without editing.  You sit your butt in your chair, put on your fingerless gloves, hook up the caffeine IV drip, and GOGOGO.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this method so far.  Sure, if you’re used to tinkering with the text as you go, not-editing can feel awfully alien.  It’s like trying to go a week without cracking your knuckles when you do it all the goddamned time — leaving that clunky sentence be just seems so very wrong.  You get used to it after a while, though.  Maybe you start highlighting the text you know you want to go back to in red, or you turn on the track changes feature and insert comments that say FIX THIS.

What gets problematic is the advice doled out on how to hit that sweet, sweet 50K mark.

Some days, writers will run out of steam well-shy of the 1667 words needed to make the daily goal.  Maybe a scene’s not working, or a character’s flat, or they just don’t frickin’ wanna.

Or maybe the looming spectre of Thanksgiving has them wanting to get ahead of schedule, in case a few days’ worth of families and travel and turkey and pie renders word-making unlikely or downright impossible.

This is where padding comes in.

Padding your word count is the NaNo equivalent of stuffing your bra:  come the end of the night (December 1st for NaNoers), that wad of tissues has to go.

And yet, there are forum threads dedicated to adding useless filler.  Typical examples:

• Never use contractions!  Don’t is one word; do not is two!
• Give all of your characters like, four names and always use them!  Joe Bob Smith Jones went to the store.  “Hello, Joe Bob Smith Jones,” said Wanda May “Sunflower” Murphy when Joe Bob Smith Jones entered the bakery department.
• Have your characters read pages out of the dictionary!
• Have your characters make a sandwich and go into excruciating detail about every step!
• RANDOM DREAM SEQUENCE!  RANDOM JOURNAL ENTRY!  GROCERY LISTS!
• Every noun must have at least one adjective!  Every verb at least one adverb!
• Dialogue tags!  Lots of them!

/headdesk /headdesk /headdesk

This is terrible advice.

My question to anyone contemplating these “padding techniques” — and yes, they get scare quotes because I happen to think they’re bullshit — is this:

Do you want to win NaNo, or do you want to write a good book?

The choices certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, but when you start adding in words you know are getting cut come 12/1 just so you can say you won NaNo, then you’ve chosen internet bragging rights over writing.

No, seriously.  The prize for churning out 50,000 words in a month is the ability to say “I wrote 50,000 words in a month and my heart didn’t explode from all the caffeine I ingested to reach that goal.”  You can put a little banner on your website, and come November of 2012 your profile on the NaNo page will say “2011 Winner!”*

But do you have a good book?  Or more realistically, a good, solid first draft?  A first half you’re inclined to finish?  A third?

If a significant chunk of your word count comes from this kind of padding, what use is it to you when the month is over?  At that point, when the frenzy is over and the forumites drift away until sometime next October… what do you have?  Something you need to tear apart?  Something that requires you to go through the draft getting rid of silly character names and adjectives gone wild?  Do you need to spend hours going through 200-ish pages of manuscript making every “is not” into an “isn’t?”  (Global find-and-replace isn’t always your friend here, I promise.)

There will be “winners” who crossed the finish line by inserting their History 101 essay into the pages, or by having a character whose only purpose is to add 300 words to every chapter with a Rickroll.  I have to wonder if the shiny banner for their livejournals is worth it, or if they ever feel a twinge of I didn’t really earn this guilt.

Probably not.

And really, it’s no skin off my teeth either way.  The only ones truly hurt by this false padding are the authors themselves.  The time spent inserting nonsense into their draft (and, if they go back to it after December 1st) the time they spend yanking it back out is time they wasted.  Maybe instead of writing a feverish dream sequence that has no bearing on the plot, they could have spent some time outlining or strengthening some dialogue.  What’s sad is that excessive filler can be hugely overwhelming when you try going back to a story.  It’s extra work.  It’s not fun.  Which might mean they’re more likely to walk away rather than fix it.

—

Does this mean that I think every single word you type should be a keeper?

Hell no.

But if you’re going to add extra words — whether to catch up or get ahead — make them relevant to your project.  Make them words that, even if they don’t make the final cut, you’re proud to have written.  NaNo is about experimenting.  It is about trying different narrative styles.  It is about making mistakes that you’ll fix down the road.

So how about making any padding work for your story?  How about making it really count?  Pretty much every project I start has a “Things the Author Knows” file that goes with it.  That’s where I toss all the little extras that might be important to the world, but have no immediate bearing on the story.  That way, if I need them in the future I can dust ‘em off and work them back in.  Plenty of those snippets are cut right from the drafts, when I reread and see myself veering way off course from the plot to explain something that, well, no one cares about.  At least, they don’t care right then. 

Bored with a scene or don’t know what happens next chronologically?  Skip ahead and write a scene you’ve been looking forward to.

Character’s personality eluding you?  Write a vignette showing an event that shaped who they are today.

Forgive yourself for that infodump, but don’t let it run into a chapters-long digression.

Hone your dialogue:  let two characters banter a bit, as long as that banter advances the plot, reveals backstory, or develops the characters and/or their relationship with one another.

—

Writing ain’t easy.  Writing fifty thousand words in the span of a month is even harder, especially if it’s not a pace you’re used to.  Especially if you have to make room in your day for it and find extra hours that just don’t seem to exist.  Or if you have a job that demands long hours.  Or kids.  Or any number of things that require you to not be in writing-mode.

Point is, if you’re going to change up your routine so you can finally sit down and write that novel that’s been kicking around in your brain since forever, why spend even a second of that precious, possibly-stolen time on words that don’t belong?

Write the best goddamned book you can throughout November.  Even if you only get to ten thousand words.  No one comes to your house on December 1st and takes away your keyboard.  No one points and laughs at you for not winning NaNo, or bars your entry to some swanky NaNo Winners’ Club because you “only” hit 40K.

So make those words count, Wanda May “Sunflower” Murphy!

—

*Yes, I know, there is a page of special offers for winners.  Scrivener, which I love the hell out of, is offering a 50% discount to NaNoers who hit 50K.**  But the prizes that offer you free copies to self-publish your stuff?  Rrrrrrgh.  That’s a whole other post.  Let’s leave it at:  falconesse says that’s probably a bad idea.
**If you hit that 50,000 by padding the shit out of your manuscript and take advantage of Scrivener’s offer, now you’re not just cheating yourself, you’re cheating a small business whose dev team has worked their asses off to bring you a good product.  Just putting that out there.

And like they do every year, the ghosts of old stories stir.  Some of them whisper in their characters’ voices.  Others rattle chains made of plot and setting and mood.  If I close my eyes I can catch flashes of scenes that have been waiting all these years for me to lay down those first few chapters, or a glimpse of a face whose sharp angles I could pick out of a crowd.

Of course, I glance at my sidebar here, and Gid folds his metal arms and tells me he’d like to get back to Aunt Sadie now, please.  A blonde woman looms behind him, the faintest outline of a crown on her forehead, and she is not amused by these upstarts either.  She’s supposed to be next.

Back in September, I told myself that if I could get the first draft of Gid down by the end of October, I could take November and make an attempt at NaNo.  There’s no way I’m cranking out 30,000 words in the next twelve days — that’s an even more intense pace than NaNo — especially not when we have guests coming from out of town this weekend and I’m a-travellin’ for work next week.

So, okay, that should settle it, right?  No NaNo this year, buckle the hell down and finish Gid.

But oh, the temptation.

You see,  this is the first time in nine years that I won’t be spending a significant chunk of November on the road.  That’s where my momentum has always died in the past, and now those thirty days are a gloriously clean slate.  No work travel.  Thanksgiving’s at my house, and I can lose one day of writing to cooking, especially having twenty-four days before it to get a little ahead.

And I think… I think… Why not?

It’s a few things combined, this desire to muck about in things that aren’t on the schedule:

First and foremost, it’s the sense of we’re-all-in-this-together.  I have a lot of friends who write.  Being surrounded by other people who not only get story but share and can commiserate with authorial angst and neuroses is an incredible boon.  When people I know are getting creative, I find my own productivity increases, too.  So imagine that feeling not only concentrated into a span of days where you’re all at work on something, but there are a a couple hundred thousand other people doing the same.

Do I need that for inspiration?  Well, no.  I write the rest of the year, too.  But there’s a sense of camaraderie and excitement around NaNo that’s awfully hard not to get caught up in.

It’s a chance to refocus.  You know how they tell you to check the batteries in your smoke alarms when Daylight Savings time ends?  NaNo is a kind of yearly battery-check for me.  It’s a reminder to take a look at my output, see what I can do better, see what’s worked over the course of the year, what hasn’t.  I can take the month to tweak my schedule and get my butt-in-chair time back on track.  I can look ahead and see where I’d like to be at the same time the next year.  Should I be doing that throughout the year?  Probably.  But I don’t — at least not always — so one big whopping reminder on the calendar works for me.

It’s a chance to catch up.  Yes, the spirit of NaNo is to write a completely new project in thirty days.  But, well, NaNo ain’t the boss of me.  If I want to try finishing Gid and get started on Gavrick’s, that’s okay, too.

It’s a chance to play around.  I am fairly decent at picking one story and sticking with it until it’s done.  Sure, it took me a long damned time to get to that point, but it’s worked.  Still, there are the occasional snippets of things “for when I have time” lurking in my inbox.  They have a way of distracting me from what I should be writing.  NaNo is an opportunity to sharpen a stick and poke at those.  If I like where a story’s going, sweet!  If not, I can decide it doesn’t work, set it aside, and come back to it later on with fresh eyes.

It’s a chance to take chances.  This goes hand-in-hand with the last point.  The introductory how-to-NaNo posts tell you the key to the project:  don’t worry about editing, don’t worry about perfection.  Just write.  This is where I put a little asterisk on my own NaNo philosophy.  I did try the whole “just keep writing, hit your 1667 words a day, and don’t sweat it” thing once.  The story got wildly out of control, and while I got something like 20,000 words in before I gave up, very little of it is salvageable.  It’s on my hard drive, still.  I don’t even like re-opening the file because even thinking about tearing it apart and building it back up makes me cringe.

However.

Want to play with a different voice for a while?  Want to try your hand at science fiction when you primarily write romance?  Why not allow yourself a thousand words, a chapter, three days, to try it out?

Last year I figured, 50,000 words, that’s 10 short stories if you figure the average wordcount is 5K.  One short story every three days, why not?  I wrote down a list of titles — no plot, no character sketches, just aiming to write whatever seemed to fit with the name.  I failed miserably at the experiment, but by the end of the month I had the starts of two stories I intend to go back to.  One needs a huge overhaul, since I changed POV and format halfway through.  The other I think is a solid little thing that just needs more time devoted to it.

—

A lot of writers seem to think hitting the 50,000 mark is the only measure of success.  Either you cross that finish line or you might as well give up.  That’s where I stood the first few times I participated:  if I wasn’t hitting the milestones on time, it wasn’t worth finishing.

Which, whoa.  Hold on juuuust a second there.  Having 40,000… 30,000… 25,000… 10,000 words isn’t good?  It’s not an accomplishment in and of itself?

Hell with that.  I hit a 10K milestone, out comes the dark chocolate.  Shit, sometimes I break it out at 5k.  Or one.

Point is, you’ve written something.  The words don’t magically poof away come December 1st.  The ink doesn’t fade from the page.  Even if you’ve only managed a hundred words a day, at the end of November you’re 3000 words further in than you were at the start.  I’m going to let you in on something.  Come here.  Hunker down.  Ready?

Night Owls, which I finally freakin’ finished this past May, started out as a NaNo project in 2007.  I got 1,845 words in — not even two days’ quota! — before I put it down.  I didn’t pick it up again until last fall sometime.

So, y’know.  It counts.  Whatever you write, how much or how little, it counts.

Who’s in?

I did a wee bit of googling, and it is, indeed, true.  Here’s the reason they’re doing it:

DC Comics had given Amazon an exclusive four-month window during which they can sell 100 previously-unavailable digital editions of DC graphic novels.

Barnes and Noble’s policy is, essentially, that if an eBook edition is available and they’re not allowed to sell it, they won’t carry the print edition, either.  Do I think this is the best policy?

…I’m not sure.

However, I understand the point they’re trying to make.  Many people will walk into a bookstore to browse, then go home and order the books through Amazon because they can get them cheaper.  It’s not too much of a leap to think that people will wander into a B&N, page through a physical copy of a graphic novel to see if they like the art or the story, then surf on over to Amazon to buy it for their Kindle.  Or that Nook owners will, instead of waiting four months for it to be downloadable through B&N, install the Kindle app and download it in November.

As a reader, the deal between DC Comics and Amazon forces me to go to one particular retailer to purchase the electronic edition of their graphic novels if I wish to purchase them on their earliest release date.  In theory, I can simply wait until March to download them from the retailer of my choice.  But why am I being punished for preferring to support my local independent bookstore?  The indies’ loss in sales on that front might not concern DC all that much, but it certainly concerns me.

It’s funny, with all the hats I wear — reader, writer, former indie-bookseller, current sales rep for a publisher — the conflicting views I have on the topic of eBooks in general.

As a reader, I will always prefer the physical editions.  Am I likely to buy Watchmen and Sandman for my iPad?  Nope.  I already own them all in their dead-tree versions.  But boy-howdy am I far behind on, say, Fables, which is on the list.  I own most of the physical issues, but at some point I lost track of where I left off.  Having the e-graphic novels would be a pretty keen way for me to catch up.

As a writer, I want readers to be able to buy books in whichever format makes them happiest.  Sure, I’m biased towards the meatspace editions, but the point is getting the books to the readers, through the vendor of their choice, at the same time as all the other editions.  The frustrating thing here, with B&N pulling the books, is that those are lost sales not just for the bookstore, but for the authors.  Readers can go to another bookstore to buy them, or if they want them delivered directly to their house, B&N will special order the DC titles.  But there won’t be any browsing through the comics section and happening upon a DC title you weren’t planning to pick up that day.  I don’t know how royalties work with comics and graphic novels, but if those were regular old prose novels being removed from shelves, that’s money the author now won’t see, and poor sales can make a publisher turn down the next book.

Both my former-indie-bookseller brain and my current sells-to-indies brain also thinks dead-tree books are the best, but that is largely because for the longest time (in this online world, when months can be like centuries), the playing field was not level.  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders pretty much commanded the market for eBooks, while it was nigh-on impossible for independent booksellers to get a piece of the digital pie.  Now that independent stores can partner with Google eBooks, they have the ability to sell anything the big kids can — provided the publishers make their content available across multiple platforms.

DC’s exclusive deal shuts out readers who would prefer their dollars go to non-Amazon booksellers.

It denies sales to Barnes & Noble and indie stores right around the holidays — not only locking them out of holiday sales (imagine getting a Nook or an iPad pre-loaded with your favorite comics!), but also out of post-holiday sales, as people fill up their shiny new devices with eBooks in early January.

Barnes & Noble’s move is extreme, certainly.  Whether it’s a case of cutting off their nose to spite their face, I don’t know — I have no idea how much of their revenue comes from DC graphic novels.  My guess is that it’s largely a symbolic gesture, and for that, I have to applaud them for taking a stand.

Barnes & Noble made news.  They called attention to the situation.

An indie bookstore doing the same might make the local papers, but certainly won’t get a mention on CNN.  It’s going to take someone bigger than the little guys to say “This is unfair” and be heard.  I know:  right now, the characterization seems to be that B&N is a bunch of crybabies, that they’re taking their ball and going home, but I disagree.  They’re letting people know that this will cost B&N money in lost sales.  DC Comics doesn’t seem ruffled; they’re still planning on giving Amazon the four-month exclusive.  In fact, their spokesperson’s response had the same hollow ring of a weaselly politician to me:

We are disappointed that Barnes & Noble has made the decision to remove these books off their shelves and make them unavailable to their customers.

I don’t know if it reads that way to you, but sweet zombie Jesus, that reeks of spin to me.  Huge turnoff there, DC.

But maybe Barnes & Noble’s decision to pull the dead-tree copies will make other people think.  We just lost Borders.  If publishers keep giving Amazon preferential treatment, how long until it’s the only game in town?

Books get challenged or banned for all sorts of reasons — language, sexual situations, you name it.  Sometimes the reasons for objecting are just plain laughable:  Harry Potter encourages witchcraft!

The problem here is this:  if a parent doesn’t think a book is appropriate for his or her own children, it is that parent’s right to deny his or her children the right to read that book.  When said parent then reaches into the town library, or the school library, and says “And no one else’s kids can read this, either,” that is where censorship comes in.  That parent is now making decisions for other familes and other households, and that is the part that is Not Okay.

This summer saw the rise of #YAsaves on twitter, after a Wall Street Journal article declared young adult literature to be “too dark.”  Toward the end of the article, the writer pitted the book industry against parents and argued in favor of censorship.  (I put up my own response, if you need a refresher.)  If you look at the ALA’s lists, many of the books on there are YA.  I suppose this isn’t that much of a surprise, since many of the challenges come from people trying to keep books out of schools.

The argument that quite often follows goes something like, “if parents want their kids to read Book X, they can just go to the bookstore and buy it for their kids.  It doesn’t have to be in the library.”

Point the first:  public libraries are public for a reason.  My tax dollars pay for the books on those shelves just as much as anyone else’s.  School libraries aren’t open to the public as a whole, but one parent, or one group of parents, ought not have the power to deny other people’s children the right to read the books of their choice.

Point the second:  go read Seanan McGuire’s “Across the Digital Divide.”  She’s talking about access to ebooks vs print books here, but the point also stands for free access to books in libraries.  Some people simply cannot afford to buy books.  So no, “just pop over to the bookstore and drop $10 on your own copy” is not at all as breezy-simple as it sounds for every family.  The nearest bookstore might be miles away.  A trip to it might mean finding a ride, paying for gas the family can’t afford to burn, scraping together not only the price of the book, but also the price of bus fare or other transportation to get there in the first place.

Books are important.  Books save lives.  We should never take away anyone else’s freedom to read.

At the end, before they release you back out into the wild, you sit quietly for a few minutes with your crackers and juice.  I’m not entirely sure what the post-donation crackers and juice do, to be honest — whether they’re immediately replacing lost-fluids and getting your blood sugar back up, or whether it gives you something to do for five minutes so the nurses on duty can make sure you’re not going to faint and that the venipuncture site isn’t going to start bleeding again.

Either way, this morning I was sitting at the front of the bus, people-watching while munching on my peanut butter crackers, and I caught the eye of a passing pedestrian.

And felt immediately ashamed for being a heavy woman eating peanut butter crackers in semi-public at 10:00 on a Wednesday morning.

It’s not that guy’s fault.  He was looking up at the bus, probably curious as to what it was parked there for.  He didn’t make a face, didn’t even really react to my presence.  I’m not sure how much of my reaction was triggered by his own appearance — he was surfer-dude handsome in business casual dress.    Would I have felt the shame if it had been a woman my age?  My weight?

I don’t know.

Thankfully, my brain immediately kicked back in and said, “Hey, dumbass, you just gave blood.  As in, you just helped three people you don’t even know with your donation.  Anyone who has a problem with you eating crackers can fuck right off.”

There’s a lot to unpack here –about my own self-esteem, the way I think others perceive me/my body, how much of that is due to the way the media says I ought to look, and a hojillion other things.  I read a lot of feminist blogs, and blogs about Health at Every Size and Fat Acceptance, so intuitively I know why I felt that way.  Still, it was disconcerting how visceral my reaction was.

I know this is a fairly substance-less post.  I’m mostly leaving this here while I parse it all and will hopefully have something more coherent to say about it in a day or so, but if you’ve had a similar experience, please feel free to hop in with a comment.

Remember the book?  (Ooooh, the book.  Grrrr, the book.)

Two months on and I’m still not finished with it.  I’m closer to the end now, maybe a hundred pages away.  Most of my progress has only happened because I decided it was better if I started skimming.

Two hundred pages of that and I haven’t missed a damned thing, plot-wise.

Because there hasn’t been much plot.

Plenty of character development… for people I suspect are mostly side-characters we’ll never see again once this bit of the arc is over.  Our Hero becomes fascinated with one companion in particular:  a man from another culture whose methods of communication are vastly different.

And here’s where the problems begin.

“Teach me,” says Our Hero.

“‘kay,” says his companion.

Then, for the better part of two hundred pages, we get to sit in on the lessons. It gets tedious very quickly.  Even though the conversations are different, the misunderstandings become repetitive.  We learn — over and over and over — about the nuances in the companion’s communication style.  We get lessons in his culture.  Eventually, after a battle scene that finally inches the plot along, and a 70-page side trip into more worldbuilding (I shit you not), Our Hero follows his companion back to his home country for even more worldbuilding.

And no.  Gorram.  Progression.

Here.  Let me show you how a character can learn another language without it taking up half the goddamned story:

See that?  Three minutes, and Antonio Banderas has solved the problem of “Oh shit, do we have to read subtitles for the next hour and a half, or have everything run through a translator?”

While I will commend the writer of this book (grrrr) on the detailed and intricate world he’s created, and will freely admit that he can string sentences together and create colorful characters, that’s about the best I’ve got.  When it comes to story, we’ve simply been wallowing.

Writers:  know your worlds. It’s essential that you understand the rules governing the places you create.

However.

Your readers don’t need to know every last excruciating detail. Reveal only what is necessary.  Don’t dump it out all at once or spend chapters and chapters teaching the protagonist about the society while nothing else happens plot-wise.

Let’s say your hero spends time with the River People.  Their boats are swift and sturdy, and eventually the hero will escape from the villain in one.  If you’re devoting thousands of words to how the boats are built, or why they’re shaped a certain way, that knowledge had better come into play later on.  A few paragraphs?  Fine.  Sure.  It’s a neat tidbit and a bit of flavor about the world.  But chapter after chapter?  Showing the hero selecting the tree from which to carve the boat?  Showing him carving it out and boiling the pitch to make it water-tight?  If it has no bearing on the plot, ask yourself if you’re not simply wasting the readers’ time.

For a good example of a character learning about a new culture, take a look at Daenerys Targaryen in A Game of Thrones. She’s married off to Khal Drogo and has to pick up the Dothraki language and its culture as she goes along.  We sit in on some of her lessons with Doreah, but they always move the plot along.  Her handmaidens, Irri and Jhiqui, fill in interesting things Dany needs to know while other things are going on.  When Dany learns she has to eat a stallion’s heart in front of the Dothraki, she does — and the action has a noticeable bearing on the story.

Venture with me, if you will, back to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books.  I’ve complained bitterly about the plot stalling for several books, but hark back to the early titles with me, and think about when Rand and the Two Rivers folk spend time with the Aiel.  They tromp all over decorum, embarrass themselves and have misunderstandings that are sometimes comic, sometimes serious.  They spend plenty of time with no bloody idea what the Aiel are on about, or how to interpret their words and actions.  But while all that’s happening, Rand is moving towards becoming the Car’a'carn. Egwene is learning the strength and self-resilience that will not only make the Wise Women accept her enough to teach her how to control her Talent for Dreaming, but the things she learns in the Wastes will eventually help her become the goddamned Amyrlin Seat a few books on.

In this book?  (Oh, this book. Grrr, this book.)  I’m seeing none of that.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe in the next 100 pages or so, I’ll find out why the agonizing details of all the lessons were so damned important.  Maybe because I’ve been skimming, I’ve missed Our Hero’s Huge Epiphany.  (Spoiler: I haven’t.  I was actually watching for one.  It’s not there.)

Eight hundred pages in.  Out of that, I’d guess two hundred pages are actual plot, and that’s if I’m being generous.

I don’t think there’s a golden ratio of worldbuilding to character development to story.  If there is, I certainly don’t think I’m the person to declare what it might be.  Still, devoting less than a quarter of your time to your plot is probably doing it wrong.

Build your world.  Love it.  Know its ins and outs.  But be careful not to overwhelm your readers with it.  Those keen little tidbits can always be published as extras for your fans, whether as neat bonus stuff on your website, or in an eventual compendium if you’ve got an epic on your hands.

Pop into the comments and talk to me!  What stories have you read where the worldbuilding was done well?  Have you read anything where the setting dragged down the plot?

Or even talking to any of the children.

Again.

Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Darkness Too Visible,” with a subtitle that tips us off to her bias right away:

Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?

I dunno, Mrs. Gurdon.  Maybe it’s because contemporary teens’ real lives are already rife with explicit abuse and violence.  Teens are victims of bullying, rape, physical and emotional abuse.  Some of the ones who are lucky enough not to be victims themselves know victims.  They are shoulders to cry on for friends whose parents hit them.  They attend the funerals of friends who’ve committed suicide because the real world was too much. Teens live these experiences every. single. day.

And “depravity?”  Really?  Let me guess:  Thou shalt not talk about sex, or even acknowledge your naughty bits until marriage.

Guess what, Mrs. Gurdon:  teens have sex.  It’s not icky.  It’s not depraved. It’s not always crisp linens and roses and promises of forever, but neither is it dirty, or shameful, or bad.  You can stick your fingers in your ears and shout LALALA all you want, those kids are going to go right on shucking their clothes and making each other feel good.  If their parents are going to pretend it ain’t happening, if grown-ups aren’t going to sit down and have honest, open non-judgmental conversations with their kids about sex, then YA authors are already being more supportive of teens than the “authority figures” in their lives.

They’re probably explaining things a lot better, too.

Mrs. Gurdon starts off with one mother feeling “thwarted and disheartened” at the selection of YA books. She left the store without buying a book for her 13-year-old daughter.  That’s pretty sad.  Did Ms. Freeman ask anyone at the store for help recommending something that met her criteria?  This is what booksellers do day in and day out:  they help readers find something that fits their tastes.  How about Where the Mountain Meets the Moon? Or some Madeleine L’Engle?

Or how about we ask the 13-year-old what she likes to read?

I notice that Mrs. Gurdon leaves out Ms. Freeman’s daughter’s tastes, and have to wonder if she even asked Ms. Freeman what sort of books her daughter enjoys reading.

I understand — and whole-heartedly encourage — parents being aware of the books their children read.  If Ms. Freeman doesn’t want her daughter reading sexy vampire books, that’s between Ms. Freeman and her daughter.  So one woman doesn’t want her kid exposed to certain themes and situations in books.  That’s okay. It would stop being okay if Ms. Freeman told any other parent that their kids couldn’t read those books, either.

Which is what Mrs. Gurdon seems to be suggesting ought to happen.  She laments that the YA on the shelves now is

So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

What a misleading, dismissive way to put it.  You’d think, from Mrs. Gurdon’s suggestion, that the characters in these books give violence a big ol’ yawn.  “Ho hum, Joe’s dad beat him to within an inch of his life last night. Whatevs.”

That’s not how it is.  Not at all.  The characters in these books experience the horrors of violence and are shocked, hurt, devastated by it.  You know what else they do?  They survive it.  They come out the other side. Just like they do outside of those pages, every day.  In real life.

Mrs. Gurdon goes on to say that:

Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail.

You know why they went undescribed in print?  Why they were “sparingly outlined” twenty years ago?

Because those things were considered shameful. The shame wasn’t directed at the person committing the violence.  The victims were the ones tut-tutted.  Because if your dad hit you, it wasn’t supposed to be anyone else’s business.  Hell, forty, fifty years ago, it was his right to do so. If you were raped, you were a slut, not a victim.  You probably asked for it.  You probably deserved it.

Welcome to the 2010s, Mrs. Gurdon, where victims can say that’s bullshit. Where they can say this was wrong. Where they can say no, and stop, and can be told it wasn’t their fault.  They didn’t have it coming.  That no one should do these things to them.

YA writers help readers find their voices.  They show people it can get better.  Their characters are going through the same things these kids are, and if it helps even one reader get out of a bad situation, or it helps even one victim seek help, then they’ve done more for these kids than anyone else has.

Isn’t that a powerful thing?  Isn’t that a good thing?

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is.

Man, I want to live in the world Mrs. Gurdon inhabits.  It seems like it’s all sunshine and fluffy bunnies over there.  In this world — the real, every day world — teens experience violence and brutality every goddamned day.  They don’t just read about it; they live it.  Fun-house mirrors?  There are kids out there whose lives are worse than what’s in the books.  Remember how I said up above that the characters (usually) survive it?  That they come out the other side?

Some kids here in the real world never do.

You tell me who’s guilty of hideous distortion here, Mrs. Gurdon.  Because I’m thinking it might be you.

It has to do with a child’s happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart.

Okay, now I know Mrs. Gurdon’s living in a world filled with fluffy bunnies and rainbows.   Ma’am, bad things happen.  It’s called life. Watch the six o’clock news.  Read a newspaper.  Even better, talk to an actual teenager.  You can hide all the dirty books, but it’s not going to stop reality from rolling right along.

Mrs. Gurdon reminisces about the good old days of S.E. Hinton and Go Ask Alice (except, not really.  She turns her nose up at them, pointing them out as the start of this whole shameful mess.)  Then goes on to discuss two modern-day examples, Andrew Smith’s The Marbury Lens and Jackie Kessler’s Rage. While I’ve not read either of these (yet), I did read Kessler’s Hunger, and found it a raw, wonderful, brilliant book.  You’d think, from Mrs. Gurdon’s account, that Kessler’s glamorizing eating disorders and cutting, but if she’d actually, y’know, read for comprehension rather than digging around for shocking quotes, she’d have realized the care and compassion Ms. Kessler has for her characters.

For the briefest of heartbeats, Mrs. Gurdon seems to twig to what’s going on here:

The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting.

DING DING DING.  GIVE THIS WOMAN A COOKIE.

Oh, wait.  Don’t.  She kept writing:

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue.

Right.  Of course.  We should instead point at the kids who are hurting themselves — because they’re already hurting — and tell them how ashamed they should be.  How their eating disorders make them strange.  How their cutting makes them freaks. As though they’re not already feeling that way.  As though they’re not already feeling alone.  Keep those kids hidden.  Keep them hiding.  They’re only doing it because everyone else is, because all the cool kids are doing it.

Has Mrs. Gurdon ever even met a teenager?  How about one that lives in this reality?

That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

Psst.  Mrs. Gurdon.  Right there?  You’ve just done a whole lot of discounting.  Pro tip:  when you start a sentence with “that is not to discount X,” you’re either winding up to discount X or have just done so.  It’s kind of like when you preface something with “I don’t mean to sound like an asshole but,” you’re about to be an asshole.

She mentions Judy Blume, of course, and how when Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret was published it was “then-daring.”  Yep.  In the 1970s, talking candidly about a girl getting her period was a big deal.  We’re forty-one years past that, Mrs. Gurdon, and you can’t even bring yourself to write the word “period” here, can you?  That’s pretty clear from her condemnation of Lauren Myracle’s writing use of “language that can’t be reprinted in a newspaper.” (She also fails to mention that Ms. Myracle has several books for middle-grade readers that are probably what earned her the Judy Blume comparison more than Shine, which Mrs. Gurdon focused on.  Quality reporting, that.)

It is also extremely telling that, out of the eleven “recommended reading” books on the sidebar (conveniently separated into books for young men and books for young women because you know, sugar and spice vs snails and pails), all but three of them were written or are set before 1975.  The three set post-1960 are all on the young men’s list.  Two of them are set in dystopian futures (the truly excellent Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. (which really can appeal to teens of either gender, thanks) and Fahrenheit 451. About, y’know, burning books.)  I’m not sure why the third, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time can’t be for young women, too.  Is it the male protagonists that put them there?

Mrs. Gurdon then descends into one of my favorite subjects:  book banning.  (And I have to wonder:  has she actually read Fahrenheit 451? Does she know what it’s ultimately about?)

Why, yes, I’m rubbing my hands together.  Why do you ask?

She pits the book industry against parents, because they are one another’s natural enemies.  It’s like Superman vs Lex Luthor, Batman vs the Joker, God vs Satan.

The book industry vs. parents.

But whether it’s language that parents want their children reading is another question. Alas, literary culture is not sympathetic to adults who object either to the words or storylines in young-adult books. In a letter excerpted by the industry magazine, the Horn Book, several years ago, an editor bemoaned the need, in order to get the book into schools, to strip expletives from Chris Lynch’s 2005 novel, “Inexcusable,” which revolves around a thuggish jock and the rape he commits. “I don’t, as a rule, like to do this on young adult books,” the editor grumbled, “I don’t want to compromise on how kids really talk. I don’t want to acknowledge those f—ing gatekeepers.”

By f—ing gatekeepers (the letter-writing editor spelled it out), she meant those who think it’s appropriate to guide what young people read. In the book trade, this is known as “banning.” In the parenting trade, however, we call this “judgment” or “taste.” It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person’s life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks “censorship!”

Dear Mrs. Gurdon,

If a parent doesn’t want their kids to read certain books, it is that parent’s right not to allow their own children to read them.

It is NOT any parent’s right to tell other parents what books the other parents’ children can and cannot read.

That’s not “guiding what young people read.”

That’s book banning.  That’s censorship.  It’s not judgement or taste; it’s sticking your nose into another family’s business and imposing your values on them, whether they want it or not.

I’m not pulling up my petticoats there.  I don’t wear petticoats.  I wear jeans, thank you, because this is 2011 and women haven’t had to wear petticoats for quite some time now.  You seem to have missed that fashion change.  I will, however, put on my stompin’ boots and shout — not shriek, though I see what you did there — I will shout “censorship,” and point at you and shout it some more, because it is censorship.

In seventh grade, my mom worried I’d get in trouble if my teachers saw me reading Stephen King.  My freshman year of high school, she worried I’d get booted out of my Catholic high school for reading Anne Rice.

She worried about those things, but ultimately, my parents let me read those books because they knew I was smart enough and mature enough to handle all the swearing, sex and violence that were contained within those pages.

Mrs. Gurdon quotes a children’s bookseller at Politics & Prose, stating that out of 18 recently visiting high school juniors, only 3 read YA.  I’m not sure that 18 juniors count as a relative scientific sample of all the teens in the US.  Still, 3 out of 18 is 16%.  When you consider the reports from the last couple of years that one in four people don’t read any books at all, I’ll take a handful of kids in Washington DC saying that they do. I’m also not even sure what point Mrs. Gurdon was trying to support with that comment.  That no one’s reading YA because 15 kids in Washington DC didn’t?  Did they ask those kids how many actually read at all?  I think that’s pretty relevant to the overall question.  If out of those 18, only four were regular readers, your whole conversation just changed, now, didn’t it?

The book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn’t be daunted by cries of censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives

Sweet zombie Jesus, talk about pigeonholing and oversimplification.

Yes, the book industry sells books.

This statement is ridiculous.  It’s like saying the auto industry exists to sell cars, or the food industry exists to sell food.

The book industry sells books to readers.  Readers are people who think and feel and experience.  Sometimes those experiences are unpleasant.  Sometimes it’s good to know that there is someone else out there in the universe who is going through what you are.  Teens need to know they’re not alone, even when they feel like they are.  That what they’re going through is normal — and who defines what’s normal, anyway?  You, Mrs. Gurdon?  I certainly hope not.

Mrs. Gurdon, people in the book industry — writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, librarians — are not parents’ enemies. You know who is a parent’s worst enemy?

Closed-minded, head-in-the-sand, I-know-what’s-good-for-you-better-than-you-do people like you.

Because you don’t know what’s good for me, for teens, for readers.  You don’t get to tell people what to read or what not to read.  Pretending that bad things don’t happen doesn’t make them go away. Actually, pretending it doesn’t happen enables the abusers to keep doing what they’re doing.  Shaming the victims makes them remain victims.  It keeps people who need help from seeking it because you’re telling them they’ve done something wrong.

Teens are smart.  They’re capable of making their own decisions.  Suggesting they’re not responsible enough to think about what they’re reading, feeling, experiencing doesn’t give them anywhere near the credit they deserve.  They’re human beings, not fragile dolls in danger of shattering.

And most of them are smarter than you and me.  I’ll trust them to make their own decisions, and have informed conversations with their parents about the choices they make.

How about you try doing the same?