Embarrassments of my Youth

There is a popular saying which goes something like this: Once it’s on the internet, it’s on the internet forever. I happen to know this isn’t true; in 2008 my main online journal, Copperbadge on LiveJournal, was hacked and completely erased. Five years of journal entries and their comments were deleted. Using various caching services I managed to reconstruct about 80% of the journal posts, but some were gone forever, and most of the comments were as well.

One of the fortunate things I had done before this took place was to shift all of my fanfic, including fanfic that had been posted on my main journal, to a separate archive on a second LiveJournal account, Sam_Storyteller (this archive is now housed under the same name at Dreamwidth). So all my fanfic was preserved. I say this is fortunate, but in retrospect, I’m not entirely sure it was.

My archive houses work that began in 2003 and runs up to the current day; I just posted a story there last week, and will be posting a few more in the coming weeks. I’ve been adding these stories to my Archive Of Our Own account (I can be found at AO3 under the username Copperbadge), because it offers features like better tagging systems and the ability to download the stories as PDF files.

The problem I’m coming up against, now that I’ve added most of the stuff I’m really proud of, is what to do with the stuff that I’m…less than proud of. There are various reasons for not wanting to add certain stories. Some, by my standards now, are not very well written, though most hold up surprisingly well to the test of time. Some just don’t seem to be that entertaining. Some are so short I don’t feel I ought to bother.

And the question becomes, what do I do with these stories? I’m not especially sentimental about my work in the general sense; I’d be happy to remove them from all archives everywhere. On the other hand, it seems wrong to keep them on one archive and not on another. I know in the past I’ve gone looking for stories I really liked only to find the account deleted or the story locked, and I don’t want to deprive anyone of a story they like, even if I no longer think it’s very good. We all have different tastes, after all.

In a larger sense, there’s a question of completism, and of owning the work I did which was less, for whatever reason, than the work I do now. Is it correct to erase what I’m no longer fond of or proud of?

This is a question professionally published writers face, to be sure. Writers have tried to disown their work, or have publicly said they hated something quite popular with the reading public.  Sometimes a story comes out of a trauma or a situation that the writer would prefer to keep in the past, and the story haunts them with the memory. Sometimes they just don’t think it’s any good. Once in a while it’s a question of shifting ideology; Maurine Watkins, who wrote the play that inspired Chicago, later became a born-again Christian and spent years paying fees to prevent the production of the play because she felt guilty about making money from the stories of real-life murders. Anne Rice has never renounced any of her books, but questions about her views on her past work have arisen in the course of her public struggles with her faith.

My own dilemmas are less dramatic. I’m proud of my original work and I only put my name to work I feel is the best I could possibly do — which happily means that even if I find in later years it’s not very good, I know I was doing my best at the time. With fanfic, it’s different. Some stories I wrote just to entertain friends, or on stupid ideas that in retrospect don’t work as well as I thought they would.

I don’t really have an answer yet. For professionally published writers, the story is out there, and they can’t just pretend it isn’t. For me, I have to work out whether I want to continue to claim this work, or quietly tuck it away, or simply not move it over to the new archive, letting it languish in the convoluted navigational web of the current one.

How do you solve a problem like a Fall Out Boy/Heroes crossover? I’m still working on that one.

Playing A Book

A couple of weeks ago, at the London Book Fair, Faber & Faber announced that it was creating a “fully playable, fully immersive product” when it came to ebooks. It was working with software publishers and a developer, The Story Mechanics, to produce a reprint of John Buchan’s early 20th-century serial novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, which most of us — if we know it at all — know from Hitchcock’s film adaptation.

My knee-jerk response was that any book which has achievements you unlock, items you collect, and music which plays at points during your reading is not a book — that’s a video game. But I reined in my what the hell is wrong with you almost immediately, because whenever I find myself saying “that’s not the thing it says it is, it’s some other thing” I usually end up having to have a long argument with myself (occasionally even other people) about definitions.

Besides, there’s nothing wrong with video games. I know I’m not the only person who does this, but I enjoy video game narratives without needing to play the game. I don’t especially want to play Assassin’s Creed, but I am entranced by the story, so I enjoy watching other people play it. If they made a movie out of the cut scenes, I would probably go to see it. I actually got frustrated that there was no way to pause the cut scenes in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess because when I was playing that game, people would invariably try to talk to me during a really long cut scene. I failed the final level of Braid so hard and so often that it soured the whole game for me and I no longer even care how it ends (apparently it’s incomprehensible anyway) but the only reason I played it as long as I did was the story.

It’s not like a video game has never been based on a book before, either. And there are books you can “play”, like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. But these ebooks, which have a soundtrack and achievements — and maybe levels? Do they have bosses you have to defeat? — blur the line a great deal between what a game is and what a book is.

I keep thinking about Dara O’Briain’s comedy routine about video games: no other medium prevents you from experiencing it based on skill. He points out that music doesn’t make you dance competently before playing the rest of the album; books don’t stop you after chapter three to ask you what the theme of the work is. But we now have a fairly widespread platform for reading where a book could give you a test before allowing you to go any further. Which is a little freaky.

So with the production of books-as-interactive-experiences and video-games-as-narrative-media I suppose there are two questions left to answer: where does the line between story and experience fall? And, if we can cross or blur that line, does the line matter — do we actually need to know?

I am a competitive person and I frustrate easily, so I don’t want to play a book. I just want to read it. I’m also not that keen on paying for a book that has involved a software development team, because I suspect either I’m paying more or the author of the actual story is getting less for features I will not use. But that’s not a good reason to prevent the exploration of a new medium, or a melding of two older mediums, and it’s not a good reason to say that’s not a book — because what does that prove, anyway, and who told me I got to arbitrate what a book is? People have been “playing” murder mysteries for over a century, trying to solve the case before the detective does.

There’s a lot of fear in the publishing industry right now, that ebooks are going to kill paper printing, that authors who grew up in a video-game generation (authors who are — or will be very soon — the children of the MTV generation) don’t have as much invested in the written word. I can’t speak to the former, but I’m pretty sure the latter is bunk — or we wouldn’t get awesome stories in our video games.

So as long as they warn for video games in our awesome stories, I guess I’m good. Trepidatious, but good.

Science Fiction Does Not Require Grace

I made a post on my tumblr the other day reminding people (and informing those who didn’t know) that Ender’s Game is a great book, will likely be a great movie, and you should not pay to see it, because Orson Scott Card is a rabid anti-gay activist.

This isn’t about how Orson Scott Card has threatened to tear down the government over gay marriage. This is about the reactions I got, which were really interesting. The top two were:

1. How does a man who espouses such beliefs in real life write a book about acceptance and understanding like Ender’s Game?

2. How can a science fiction writer be so closed-minded?

I can’t answer #1. Best guess I have is “by accident” or possibly “his better nature had a brief moment of freedom”. The second question, however, I have some thoughts about. I spoke about them a while ago on LJ, but I’d like to see if I can vocalize them a little more clearly a few years on.

To be open-minded, in the way we generally define it, requires three things: imagination, empathy, and the willingness to accept you may be wrong. This is true whether you are being asked to accept two women getting married or whether you’re being asked to consider the idea that a sky-god actually did make the world in six days.

The writing of science fiction — the writing of most fiction — only requires imagination. That’s pretty much it.

Good writing generally employs a high level of empathy, of course. Not only the ability of the writer to put themselves into a situation strange to them, but to put the reader there as well. But it’s a very specific, very localized empathy, and it’s not strictly speaking necessary. If you’re a good storyteller, you can tell a story and even if it’s not true and people know it’s not true, they will still buy into it because you’re telling it in a compelling manner. Sometimes, science fiction is quite clearly a writer telling a story about something they desperately wish would happen to them — which requires very little empathy — and if they’re good at it, they get away with it. I’ve done this; I know there are professionally published writers who have. Talent can take the place of empathy when all you’re doing is sellin’ a story.

And writers of speculative fiction, of fantasy and sci fi, rarely have to entertain the idea that they might be wrong in their writing. Their world isn’t our world. If you set a story in the year 3000, you’ll be dead (presumably) by the time the year 3000 rolls around to prove you wrong. If you tell a story that opens after a massive alien attack has nearly destroyed humanity, you’re probably not going to be around when and if that actually happens. And if you are, people are going to have more pressing issues than whether or not you got the details right.

Science fiction writers don’t have to have the three key components of an open mind in order to tell a story. Some do; some don’t. But it goes beyond “people are different from each other”.

There is an expectation of science fiction writers that because they spend a lot of time thinking about potential futures, they will embrace the real future as it rushes towards us. This seems logical, but it doesn’t take into account the disconnect between what we want and what we get.

Writers like control. Even the ones who espouse chaotic theories like to hold the conversation with themselves. We call it “dialogue” but really it’s a monologue spoken by two different people. I love to write dialogue because I control both sides of the conversation, whereas in real life, about eight times in ten, I get wordless and stammery two or three sentences in. I’m not good at conversation with other people. That’s not the other person’s fault.

Science fiction writers control every aspect of an entire universe. They get to say who survives the apocalypse. They get to say who’s in space and why. They get to say whether the aliens are nice and what technology we’ve held onto. Have you ever noticed that in most scifi television shows, all aliens that come from one planet usually have the same skin colour? They have the same religion, too, and the same social structure. Minbari only have one faith. Klingons only have one social code. This isn’t a hard rule — there are exceptions. They’re just not terribly frequent.

Earth isn’t like that. We have lots of different skin tones and faiths and sexualities and social mores and clothing styles and monetary systems. But a society so vast and complex is difficult to grasp, certainly difficult to encapsulate in fiction. When you do, you end up with the imaginary Princess Bride story where the “good parts” were edited together by the narrator’s father because most of the book is about boring stuff like economics. Economics is necessary but it does not make for compelling fiction.

This is where it gets scary. Because if you control the future in fiction, eventually you forget that you don’t control the future in reality. You want the future to be one way and then it turns out, whoops, cellphones. Whoops, the internet.

Whoops, gay marriage.

Oh snap, yo. Are two dudes kissing in space? I didn’t write that. Who gave the internet permission to happen? These damn cellphones, what the hell is SMS?

You can’t control the future. There are too many variables. And if you can’t control the future, but you desperately want to, the next instinctive, illogical step is to prevent it from happening. Keep things the way they are. Maintain the status quo and you don’t have to worry.

Ray Bradbury likened social justice to censorship, and was violently opposed to his book about censorship being turned into an e-book that literally could not be burned. Orson Scott Card is terrified that legalising gay marriage is going to screw up the social fabric of the entire country, despite the fact that gay people were happily cohabitating with each other long before he was born and will be long after he is dead. Science fiction writers don’t automatically want to see the future. Some want to script it. Some think the only way to do that is to prevent it from happening.

It’s okay to love fictional futures and to write them. It’s okay to be afraid of the real future. It’s also okay to want to guide that future.

But preventing the future? In the books, that’s the province of the villain.

A Fine Tuned Sense Of The Ridiculous

I was on the phone with my mum the other day, discussing the impending upheaval in my life — not only a potential new job but a definite move of house, whether it comes with the new job or not — and I realised that despite the very serious nature of the choices I’m facing this year, we were both laughing an awful lot. It made me think about why I spend so much of my time amused at basically everything that happens to me. One of the things I often hear from people, both in brickspace and online, is that I’m capable of making ordinary things funny. It’s something I prize, because I’m not what you would call a funny person, but I can see things as funny. And I think that’s a huge key to my writing, as well, which I didn’t work out until, well, just now.

I don’t know when my sense of absurdity developed or how, not like I know other things. I know when I found my work ethic (college — late but at least lasting) and I know where my aesthetic sense comes from, because my family gave me that, between my gran the painter and my parents who took me to tons of museums and performances when I was young. I don’t know how I learned to find the ridiculous in the ordinary.

I wasn’t a class clown as a child, and the way in which I express my view of the ridiculous isn’t necessarily spontaneous. It comes through in my writing because I sit and think about how to frame things. Some of it is turns of phrase picked up from here and there, but that’s just dressing to the essential viewpoint I have on the world. I didn’t necessarily believe my high school English teacher who said good writing comes from honestly expressing the way we see the world, but I do now, because I’ve done it.

The next story I’m hoping to work on, called Tunnel, primarily concerns the way in which families interact, and in real terms concerns the structure of Chicago, the way it’s built on Other Parts Of Chicago, and the way we have this massive underground network of passages that nearly nobody knows about. Really, the latter part came first; I wanted to write a story about the underground, and the sibling issues came out of that (and, admittedly, out of my own issues with my brother). But there’s an aspect of the story which keeps trying to take over, and it’s the ridiculous aspect: I call it Bob And The Dragon.

Because see, in this world, there’s a dragon living under Chicago. The dragon is a fun fantasy element; the ridiculous part is that very few people ever encounter the dragon, and the only one who seems to care about him is a guy named Bob. Bob is incredibly ordinary, he’s just a dude in a suit and he doesn’t have much life drama or any ambitious aspirations, but in his spare time he is a dragon tamer. Bob is the one who rescues people from the dragon and buys it expensive sushi and hugs it when it eats people he doesn’t like. Bob is ridiculous. Even the other characters think so.

And I don’t know where that ten-degrees-off-normal viewpoint, which allowed me to produce Bob in the first place, comes from. Possibly from the fact that I wasn’t an especially funny child; I spent some of my childhood and most of my teen years angry, because I was smart and could see that I was surrounded on all sides by bullshit. I can remember my mother telling me it’s not bullshit, it’s just hoops to jump through, and not thinking that was particularly better, but it’s true: much of life, much of the time, is a series of hoops. Some are fun; some are just tedious, and would be unnecessary if more people either saw them at all or called them out when they did. Dress codes, for example, are 1% necessity and 99% ludicrous. I like wearing suits and I still think it’s stupid to make me wear something less comfortable and less efficient to move in for the sake of appearing “more professional”.

When you see how much bullshit you spend your life putting up with, and the rituals you have to undergo — for me, at the moment, all my annoyance at the interview process is coming to the fore — you can either laugh or get angry. I’m too damn lazy to spend my entire life angry, so I suppose, at some point, I chose to laugh. Very likely the novels of Terry Pratchett had a huge influence on this decision as well, since he’s especially good at laughing at bullshit. However it happened, it is the base I stand on to write my stories.

Writers build worlds — it’s a necessary part of what we do. Even if your world is a realistic one, even if it’s nonfiction, you have to re-construct reality within your work. If your world’s not realistic, or if it’s only loosely based in reality, you have to do more. Personal viewpoint influences how that world is built to a massive degree. You don’t have to see a laughable world; you can be angry at what you see and want to change it, or you can see the world in shades of fantasy, or any other viewpoint you happen to have. But having a firm and critically thoughtful view of the world, knowing what you see and what you think of what you see, is absolutely necessary. Until you have that, writing for other people is a struggle that will fight you. Writing, and fiction in particular, demands every part of you, and it’s difficult to give it so much if you don’t know what you’re handing over.

In my case, what I tend to give my writing is laughter; either with the world or at it. Both are effective in their own way.

The Touchiest Of Topics

This post builds a little bit off a previous post about sex in literature, and also a little off my earlier series on how to define a YA Novel. It’s about a hot topic in the literary world right now: YA Lit and Sex.

I think that the topic is hot because YA Lit is increasingly prominent in our culture, and because sex in literature is as well. There’s also been a lot of talk lately about how dark YA Lit is becoming, but even with books like the Hunger Games series, which is held up as the ultimate symbol (if not the only one) of dark writing for kids, sex isn’t often something that comes up. At least, I assume; I figure I’d have heard about it by now if all the starving kids were also having sex. And, in part, publishers are realising that literature aimed at young adults isn’t just being bought by young adults. They’re now working to satisfy the adult desire for something a little steamier. There are a lot of great reasons for adults to read YA; I personally used to pluck random YA novels off the shelf during exam time in college, because they were easy on the brain and could be read quickly.

But, yes. For all of these reasons and others, as well, sex in YA Lit is becoming a forefront discussion.

Sex was an issue I faced when I was writing fanfic, especially Stealing Harry and Laocoon’s Children, two stories that rewrote the Harry Potter novels within an alternate universe. Because I was writing fanfic and not trying to sell anything to children, I had more latitude than a pro-published writer would; I was already including sex scenes between adults even when I was writing about Harry Potter as an eight year old. But as the kids I was writing about got older, I wanted to reflect what everloving horndogs a lot of kids are in their teens. So I was glancing off the idea of teens engaging in romantic and sexual situations; I didn’t want to write kiddie porn but I did want to be honest about how teens behave. I lost my virginity in high school; presumably it wasn’t unlikely that a tightly-knit group of friends would have similar experiences. It’s not that I feel kids ought to, it’s just that I feel like whether or not they ought to, a lot do.

I never got there, because that story fell by the wayside, but it has stayed with me, the idea that people in their teens do have sexual urges and sexual encounters. It’s a tricky place to go, because most writers (quite rightly) don’t want to use underage people as devices for sexual titillation, and more importantly they don’t want to be accused of doing it whether or not that was their intent. And I don’t want to add to the weird societal pressures surrounding sex, the conflicting “Have sex now or you’re abnormal!” and “SEX ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, IT’S A SIN.”

I believe that people shouldn’t be ashamed of having sex, of choosing their partners and the number of their partners, as long as said partners are consenting and capable of consent. I believe people should be told that they’re supposed to enjoy the sex they have, and if they aren’t, they should be encouraged to stop what they’re doing and seek alternatives, be that different partners or different kinds of sex or no sex at all. And one of the things I discovered while exploring the nature of YA Literature is that it is predominantly about adults who have a message they want to convey to young people — like what we think about sex and how we deal with it as adults.

There’s a fantastic quote by a fellow WordPresser, fozmeadows, discussing adolescent sex in YA:

Sex/y scenes in YA matter because YA novels aren’t contraband. It’s not like sneaking a glance at the late night movie, then frantically switching channels when your parents inevitably walk in during the naked bits, or covertly trying to hide a Mills and Boon under your bed, or having to clear your browser history and check that the door’s locked if you want to look at porn or read slashfic on the internet. You can read YA novels openly – on the bus, at school, at home – and never have to worry that someone’s going to find your behaviour suspicious. Sex/y scenes in YA matter because, by the very nature of belonging to a permitted form of media, they help to disassociate sex from surreptitious secrecy: they make it something open rather than furtive, something that rightfully belongs to you, the reader, because the book was meant for you to read and remember.

Fozmeadows is speaking primarily about the way young women are treated both in the world of YA lit and within the books that compose it, which is entirely appropriate given, well, how young women are frequently treated in YA Lit. But it has a broader application as well: the idea that imbuing the concept of sex into a YA book automatically gives the reader just a little more agency and ownership than they had previously.

It doesn’t matter if the scene is detailed or not, if it’s only fiery kisses or much, much more: the point is that you’re allowed to have it, allowed to enjoy it, and that perhaps for the first time in your life, you’re viewing something arousing that doesn’t make you out to be a sex object in heels, but an active, interesting heroine who also happens to have a love life.

It’s true, too — even books that discuss teens committing complicated crimes in an adult world, like the Heist Society series, shy away from teens committing sexual acts. What really hit home for me about that second half of the quote, however, is the concept of not putting an actual sex act into the book: not having to write explicit sex between underage partners — just the legitimate, unflinching potential for sex to occur, or the mention of it happening. Even the desire for it to happen unhampered by the usual “am I ready?” self-flagellating self-examination that media aimed at teens generally includes (almost exclusively with the eventual answer of “No” at the end) would be refreshing. And Fozmeadows is right: it is enough to show readers that they get to control what happens to their bodies and when, without necessarily baring everything.

I think this is important because even authors writing for adult audiences have trouble with sex scenes, as I talked about last week. So understanding that sex in literature is something that people look for and something that can positively influence the way young people see their sexuality (and those of others) is important. But it’s just as important for writers to know that there is space between “never talking about it” and “explicit sexual description” — that wanting sex and experiencing desire can be just as important as the sex that actually happens. It’s not just teenagers who could use a higher comfort level with discussions of sex and sexuality, after all.

Commercially Sexual

The other day, there was an article in the Guardian entitled “Good Sex In Literature: Why Is It So Hard To Find?”

It’s not what the article was actually about. Well, I know leading headlines sometimes help sell papers.

The article was, actually, a sort of mashup of questions without many clear answers. One of the questions was why, in this era, writers feel that their work isn’t commercially as viable if they don’t include sex scenes. The obvious answer is, of course, that sex sells, and now that more open discussion of it is permitted in our culture, authors have the option to include sex scenes without being arrested or having their books banned. It is, actually, a privilege to  be able to write about sex. And even if you are uncomfortable with that privilege or choose not to take advantage of it, the fact that it’s now there means that if you’re not taking advantage of it, you may not be selling as well as someone who is.

It’s not that sex in a novel automatically equals better sales; a well-written book is better than a book full of bad sex anyway, and will probably sell better. Not to mention that books which are formally focused on sexual themes, like erotica, are still struggling to be accepted in the public eye. I’ve written for erotic publishing houses, so I’m aware of the fine line they walk. Books like 50 Shades Of Grey, which are explicitly sexual and heavily focused on sexual themes and yet  become bestsellers, are the exception, not the rule. But clearly there is some cachet to a novel with a steamy subplot.

The most interesting question in the article was, to me, why authors are hesitant to include explicit sexuality in their stories. I’m not sure what the deal is with the guy who wrote the article, who posited that it’s because novels are a more intimate experience or the production of a single individual or imply that the author has participated in the specific sex act being described, but he seems to be overlooking a fairly major, fairly simple explanation.

It is hard to write about sex because then people think you want it. And we might be more open about sex but that doesn’t mean we don’t still think it’s a shameful thing to want, pursue, and enjoy.

I haven’t included sex in many of my published novels; only one of the four has an explicit sex scene, a threesome between a married couple and their close friend. Mainly it’s because sex wasn’t necessary in two of them and would have been creepy in the third. In the novel where I do include explicit sex, the scene is there for a specific reason. But I have written a lot of fanfic, and a lot of it has been explicitly sexual. Sometimes it’s been specifically sexual, written for no other purpose; sometimes sex scenes have been included as part of the plot; sometimes sex scenes have been included because sex is fun and it draws eyeballs, and in fannish culture it’s more permissible than elsewhere. I’ve written from the point of view of different sexual orientations and genders during sex, as well.

Every time, without fail, when writing a sex scene I think to myself, what if people think I want this? This particular kink, this particular position, this particular partner (or set of partners). What if people think I want this, or worse, what if I want this and people figure that out?

And then I think fuck it, so what if they do? I’ve already amply proved that I like sex, and that I want sex, so what do I care if people think I enjoy a specific sexual act? I’m a writer. I’ve written torture scenes and I don’t enjoy torture, I’ve written scenes set in prisons and believe me, those taught me just how much I never want to go to prison. We have a lot of hangups about sex, culturally, but as a writer I’ve found most hangups of any kind can be adjusted by reminding yourself so what? You don’t have to watch anyone read your novel.

A lack of squeamishness about sex and a confidence in my ability to portray sex acts I don’t necessarily personally enjoy was something I learned from fandom. More importantly, the article author’s last enumerated fear — that writers are afraid they might draw attention for writing terrible sex — is also something I don’t have, because I’ve had a lot of practice reading, writing, and talking about sex.

You don’t have to put sex in your stories, particularly if it doesn’t belong in the plot you’re working or if you don’t, you know, like sex. But if you do want to put sex in your story, fandom’s certainly the place to go to learn.

Professionalism and Creativity

Sam’s love of comic books strikes again…

For those of you who don’t read comics or who don’t read comics news, there’s been a lot of fuss lately about working conditions at DC Comics. Rob Liefeld, an artist mainly infamous for being terrible, left in a storm of angry, aggressive, and insulting tweets that in any other field of work would have made him 100% unemployable. Gail Simone, a well-known writer who was working on Batgirl, was fired by email and rehired in the course of about two weeks — she was a lot classier about the whole mess than Liefeld. Rumors abound that scripts are accepted by editorial, only to be returned with complete overhauls necessary when the “editorial brief” changes. The implication seems to be that the direction of the overall story they’re trying to tell keeps shifting.

Which is a shame on a number of levels, including narrative. Because I really want to like DC Comics, and I want to read their comic books, but I can see in every issue I read that the writers are confused by what’s going on and the time they’re given to make their stories work is compressed. It’s difficult to plan long-term because their plans keep getting knocked off-kilter.

Creativity is difficult to regulate. You can’t dole it out from nine to five. Artists have a notorious reputation as flighty flakes (somewhat undeserved, but occasionally true depending on the individual). But here’s the thing: this is professional art and collaborative art. You actually do have to be a professional because other people are depending on you, and most artists — writers included in that term — who work in comic books or television or mainstream film have figured out how to keep their shit together for at least long enough to get the story told.

At first I thought, well, can’t we figure out who is actually fucking all this up and tell them to stop? Because Superman is sucking right now. But in all honesty, this is not just a problem with micromanagerial editors. It seems to be an overall problem with DC, and it has a lot to do with the brand.

A while back I read an article about ways Disney is marketing Marvel correctly, which I wish now I’d kept around but didn’t because at the time it was about ten bullet points to illustrate only two concepts: strong vision and brand coherence. And you can’t really talk about one without the other.

Disney, through Marvel, has developed a very specific vision for its Marvel films, and perhaps less specific but still directed vision for the comics. I don’t know what it’s like to work at Marvel-Disney, but I suspect there is a very strong culture of adherence to the vision. What DC seems to be lacking is either a vision that lasts past the next big storytelling event instead of into it, or the discipline to keep its higher-ups in line with the vision it has. There has to be one page, and everyone has to be on it.

Which sounds a little fascist, I admit. And certainly general consensus seems to be that while Marvel is more coherent, and its books have voices that sound individual, it’s less diverse overall in terms of content. But Marvel is doing well, and telling engaging stories, so…

Well, I don’t mean to criticise DC, that’s not why I’m here. What I mean to do is illustrate that most creatives who want to earn significant money from their creativity have to do the same thing. They have to have a vision of where they’re going and what they want, they have to have a brand that’s going to carry them there, and they have to be consistent in both. It’s no different from developing a prose style, in all honesty. It’s one reason the “copper badge” I’ve had since 2003 is still around, because it’s a major part of my digital brand. That badge is my avatar nearly everywhere, and people know as soon as they see it that they’ve got the right guy. My brand itself has changed dramatically, but there comes a point where at last you want to know where you’re going and have a plan for how to get there.

Working on it.

One More Story I May Never Write

I went down to St. Louis a few weeks ago, and on the train (I love trains!) I caught up on a lot of reading and viewing and learning. One of the shows I watched was a documentary called “Inside America’s Money vault”, which wasn’t so much about a specific vault as it was about the way money is created, regulated, and stored in the United States. They talked a bit about the national mint, and the anti-fraud measures it takes on its bills, and the way bills are treated, possessing an intrinsic value above the material.

Then I flipped over to a TEDtalk by Noah Charney; Charney is an art history expert specializing in art crime who runs a fantastic blog on the topic. Having done a bit of studying in the subject myself — and having read Charney’s writing for some time — I found he wasn’t saying anything I personally didn’t already know, but he was saying it in a different context to what I’d had before.

As Charney says, and as most people who study art crime for any length of time know, most art heists aren’t done by clever gentleman thieves or on commission of secretive billionaire collectors. Most stolen art that isn’t stolen for political reasons eventually — sometimes very quickly — ends up in the hands of organized crime, where it is used as collateral, loan, or payment in various illegal financial dealings.

One thing Charney said struck me in particular: the reasoning that art is used because it leaves no cash trail. And it occurred to me that while paintings are a good way to buy and sell cashlessly, the fact that you truly can’t sell them for their full value on the black market (usual black market price is about 10% of their legitimate worth, I believe) and that they are bulky and require specific care — not that I think crooks often bother — makes them more trouble than they’re worth.

Except in some specific cases (most notably Chinese antiquities, at the moment) illegally obtained works of art are like dollar bills: they do not in themselves have the material worth of the value they represent. They are symbols of value.

So I thought, why not simply mint one’s own currency? Be clever enough about it and nobody would even notice what it was, outside of the circles in which it was used. Why shouldn’t some enterprising crook create the national criminal mint?

In real practice, of course, it’s a ridiculous idea. I know that. There’s no way they could keep it under wraps forever, and anti-fraud measures would be more trouble than handling paintings. Besides, it’s not like some crooks haven’t all but done this anyway; reach a certain level of wealth, and you can open your own bank to launder your money. Apparently this happens in Russia a lot. I’ve done research profiles on Russians who used to be “goods importers” of dubious provenance and now own a bank.

Theoretically, however, it’s a damn fine story. You could even make a short-term profit off minting criminal coin: buy up all the stolen paintings you can find with your minted money, which gives the “crime dollars” value, then ransom them all back to their owners. Insurance pays the ransom (this is apparently a relatively common con), the owners get their paintings, and you get a cut more than you paid for them.

Frankly, I’m also a bit worried for Noah Charney. He’s one of the most vocal agents for art crime education, and he’s very prominently pulling the curtain back from the way art theft and organized crime interact. Narratively, if you had some clever, attentive art history professor who assembled all these re-ransomings into a grand theory of art theft and money minting, who knows what organized crime might risk to keep him or her quiet.

It’s a seductive story. I’m not sure I’m up to writing quite such a Dan Brown-esque thriller, but perhaps one day.

So many stories to write, so little time…

Here’s your problem, here’s your book

Cary Tennis — well, for a start, CARY TENNIS is an awesome name — Cary Tennis is an advice-column writer for Salon.com. I don’t read Salon generally, but a specific letter was linked by Publisher’s Weekly and looked scandalously interesting, so I followed the trail.

The title of the letter to Cary was “I Am Named In A Terrible Book“. It sounds more interesting than it is, to be honest, but if you want to read it for yourself, feel free. I wasn’t even that interested by Cary’s reply, until I skimmed to the end:

As an antidote, I prescribe “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov. This fine tonic will remove the taste of aesthetic badness and also provide a little of the bracing, acerbic hilarity needed to fully recover.

I do love Pale Fire. But what struck me was the idea of an advice columnist that gave you required reading. How great would that job be? You’d have to read a lot of  books, but that’s not exactly a chore. Imagine every week your column runs a (usually banal and easily-solved-by-common-sense) problem, and you provide advice and the name of a book they should read for more context. Ill-mannered family member? The Moonstone. Your child running around with kids you don’t approve of? Well, I suppose it could go either way, like, you could recommend The Outsiders on one end of the spectrum and maybe Harry Potter on the other.

Not sure if you want to get back with your controlling ex? Twilight!

Literary criticism and sound advice all in one place. I’m for it.

Edited on 2/4/2013: Oh snap. VINDICATED.

An Author In Search Of A Novel

I am picking up today where I left off a few days ago, with my examination of YA literature; you can read part one (the problem) here, and part two (the research) here.

After months of trying to finish the essay that those two parts began, I realized that my search for a definition was in fact the wrong search. I should have been searching for a process, because process often defines product. So, thinking as a creator of literature rather than a consumer of it, a few things became clear.

I decided that marketing, definitions applied by others, and even adolescents’ self-definitions don’t matter to the creation of this particular form of novel. In this sense, a YA novel is not a book about something. Except in the rarest of cases, a YA novel is an adult talking to a teenager. Everything else is window dressing.

So I thought about motivation and message and after that came a very simple three question formula (I do love things in threes).

1. Why do I, an adult, want to talk to young people?
2. What do I want to tell them?
3. Why do I want to tell them that?

Mind you, calling them “young people” makes me feel so very old, but I am more than twice the age of the youngest readers on this blog, and I was an adult before some of my presumed target audience was born.

Here’s the kicker about these questions: they are sequential. Each question leads to the next and you can’t get to two without answering one. Question one is vital because I have, in fact, heard writers answer it with “That’s where the money in publishing is”.

That’s a bad answer. Possibly not the only bad answer, I haven’t been through every answer, but certainly a bad one. Even if the statement itself is true — there is a lot of money in YA lit — it’s not the way you ever want to answer a question about your passion.

Anyway, it’s a good question to keep one honest, because it’s the first step in not condescending to your audience. It’s what sticks me down, because initially I thought I don’t want to talk to “young people”. But then I thought, really, it’s more most young people. The Dead Isle came as a surprise YA Fiction to me — I’ve had many parents buy it for their kids, or to read with their kids. It does carry a message that is not exclusively for the young, about compassion and justice and the power of creativity, but that message is conveyed by young characters.

The characters I created for The Dead Isle are the kind of kids I want to talk to. Shy, nerdy, brilliant Jack. Affectionate, cheerful, isolated Clare. Independent, aggressively sensible Purva, who has no patience for the games of others.

But the question isn’t who, the question is why, and I suppose the answer is

1. I want to talk to young people who are who I was: shy, nerdy, smart, independent, relatively happy despite my isolation, old before my peers were, already sick of the bullshit. Because I’ve been there.

I didn’t get very many books about me. Catcher in the Rye was one. Ender’s Game (despite Card’s horrible politics) was another. The Magician’s Nephew, my favourite of all the Narnia books. Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey, which might not be highly acclaimed literature but was valuable to me. These are books of varying quality and era and genre, but they were books about me and they gave me comfort. They taught me about my future.

So assuming those are the kids I want to talk to, the kids like me, what do I want to tell them? I’ve got friends with kids, Olivia and Irene and Harry and Vivi and Little Sam and Noel and Gabriel and a handful of others. I can’t lie to them or be cruel to them. For one, I will get totally busted by their parents.

What do I want to tell them?

2. Well, basically, what I want to tell everyone: that compassion is a high and difficult art, that greed is insidious and cruel, that the world is waiting for people to discover it. I want to explain how the wonder of discovery makes compassion easier and greed more difficult and how the more those two balance out, the closer you come to justice. And sometimes I want to tell stories just plain ’cause I like telling stories.

Three is a little more abstract, because the answers lie in the first two questions. Why do I want to tell kids that?

3. Because people told me about compassion and greed and wonder once, and I believe strongly that what they said was true. If we as a species are going to do more than murder each other and destroy our only home, I think everyone has to understand it. I don’t have all the answers but I have the tools to get us there if kids who are smarter than me take the philosophical hand up that I’m offering them.

So in the end, I don’t know if I want to write a YA novel, or I should say another YA novel. If I did, I doubt it would be one any trad publisher would be interested in. But if I do want to, now I have the knowledge necessary to lay it out.

Really, it’s what I’ve been doing all along.