Diane Duane on Darkness in Teen Literature

From the sounds of it, this whole Wall Street Journal 'teen literature is too dark' thing is really getting talked about, at least in some circles. To the point where people are getting sick of it!

Anyway, Diane Duane (a YA author) has this to say on the subject:

What I found while doing one-to-one therapy with adolescent patients is that to successfully start working through their problems, what they initially needed more than anything else was confirmation and acknowledgement from those around them that the problems existed in the first place – that they weren’t unique or alone in their situation, that other people knew about it and that it was real. Books dealing with the problem in question were and are often a useful tool to help that acknowledgement get started, and even (in some cases) in getting a patient past their own denial that they had any such difficulty at all.

When I was practicing, such books were often painfully dry and didactic, and I wish there’d been more young adult fiction available on such subjects… for fiction (especially when done well) tends to lecture less than nonfiction and is more likely to be successfully internalized because you’re hearing, not a dry recitation of fact, but someone’s voice. Young adult novels that deal honestly with such issues unquestionably have value for teens groping their way toward understanding of how to tackle their problems. They invite them into the dialogue: they make the troubled teen part of the solution. And at the very least, they let their readers know that they’re not alone. There are times when that knowledge is enough to mean the difference between life and death. Here, without any doubt whatever, YA really does save.

What a gigantic quote. She has a lot more to say, too, if you care to follow the link. Again (I feel like I say this every time the subject comes up), the sense of feeling alone is a big problem for kids, or even for grown-ups, and having a book that makes someone feel less alone is often helpful.

Page 99 Test

Via The High Definite, the Page 99 Test. Based on the Ford Madox Ford quote, "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you," this website provides the 99th pages of various published and unpublished authors.

Until today I had never heard of neither the 99th page rule nor Ford Madox Ford, who has an awesome name.

The Hobbit vs. Where the Wild Things Are

Once upon a time, back when the 30th anniversary edition of The Hobbit was planned, Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are fame was asked to illustrate Tolkien's work. It did not work out due to a couple of bits of bad luck.

I wish it had happened; the illustration shown in the article looks wonderful.

More on Amanda Hocking

More news concerning Amanda Hocking, discussed in the blog post Ebook Millionaire: she has signed with St. Martin's Press.

“I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Ms. Hocking said in an interview on Thursday. “People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.”

Are Book Genres Being Replaced by Tags?

From io9: Are book genres being replaced by tags? Eric Rosenfield debates whether or not standard genres like 'fantasy' and 'sci fi' (and, one assumes, 'romance') can still be used to classify books when books have been splintered into tiny little niches that potentially cross over into multiple designations. Have an excerpt:

The thing is though, the handful of categories that fiction is still sold under-as classified on Barnes and Noble.com, "Fiction & Literature", "Mystery & Crime", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Teens", "Romance", "Horror", "Thrillers", "Westerns" (and lumped in is Poetry which is not fiction, and Graphic Novels which are another medium altogether)-are accidents of history and technology, and even these clear demarkations are of recent vintage; bookstores did not even have separate science fiction, mystery or romance sections until the 1980s or so, and books specifically marketed to niche groups were relegated primarily to book clubs, mail order, specialty stores, and if one was lucky, newsstands, all except the latter being where the modern genre categories really emerged after the implosion of the pulp magazine markets in the 1940s and of the bulk of the science fiction magazines in the 50s. And yet we now take these categories for granted and talk about "transcending" them as if they had such impenetrable physical form that they can only be passed over metaphysically.

The world that gave rise to these categories is fading rapidly into nonexistence. The new bookstores are not circumscribed by retail space, they're the limitless possibilities of a search box. We live in a world in which most any book you can think of can be downloaded to your home, and where anyone with an Internet connection can fill a blog with reviews, interviews, news items, and free-form ramblings about whatever she thinks is important. That is a paradigm shift on a level we don't fully understand yet.

I no longer believe we should stop using terms like science fiction and fantasy and so on; those terms can be useful in describing certain things, certain ways of reading. But their status as hard-and-fast slots into which we plug in all of our books is already starting to fade, as the once nebulous megacategory of science fiction and fantasy splinters into steampunk, urban fantasy, paranormal romance and so on, subcategories that once upon a time might have been merely commented on but which because of the 'Net have blossomed into subcultures all their own, distinct and often non-communicating with the groups reading the space opera or sword and sorcery that since Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings have dominated science fiction and fantasy respectively.

It is a big excerpt.

Twitter Lands New Author a Book Deal

More odd publishing news: Adam Christopher was discovered by publisher Angry Robot Books via Twitter. While perhaps not the most established publisher, Angry Robot Books does seem to publish books I would be interested in reading based on premises alone.

Ebook Millionaire

Amanda Hocking, 26, is making millions from publishing ebooks through the Kindle store.

Hocking, a self-proclaimed unicorn enthusiast and Muppet activist, writes about vampires, zombies, and yes, romance. According to reports, just one year ago, the Minnesota-based writer was "impoverished," "living paycheck to paycheck," and the manuscripts she sent out were rejected by publishers all over New York. Like many authors, Hocking turned to self-publishing, creating a store on Amazon. She set the prices of her work relatively low — 99¢ to $2.99 — and for every $2.99 book she sells, she keeps 70%. Hocking tells USA Today: "To me, that was a price point that made sense for what I would be willing to spend on an e-book… I use iTunes a lot, and it's 99 cents and $1.29 a song."

That's so crazy! Naturally, because she's self-published, she's getting a lot of flak for it. The Jezebel writer makes an interesting point, one that reminds me of last month's post about loving 'bad' writing:

...It's strange that just because she's a popular writer, folks are expecting her to be an excellent writer. Is Britney Spears an excellent singer? Is Jersey Shore an excellent show? It doesn't matter. People like what they like...

Hocking is fairly thoughtful about the situation and reflects on it in her own blog with candor and insight.

For further reading, Jezebel also links to The Book Deal Blog's Book bloggers can help sell your book: Tips for authors.

Ray Bradbury Helps a Library

Ray Bradbury helps a library and really likes Bo Derek. He also hates the internet:

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

Does he know he can look up pictures of Bo Derek on the internet? Someone should tell him.

Tangent aside, Mr. Bradbury has high praise for the library:

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Cammie McGovern Talks About Why She Loves Librarians

I thought this was quite sweet. Cammie McGovern explains why she made the protagonist in her book a librarian, which somehow manages to encompass quite a few of the reasons I want to work in libraries.

How can we thank you collectively for all that you’ve done? It would be, for some of us, like trying to thank our parents for a life that contains many periods of quiet happiness. You give us all a place to come and be ourselves for hours at a time. You don’t judge our quirks or the number of hold requests we fill out every month. You honor our questions even when they are as random as the recent one my autistic son, who is now fourteen, asked the librarian who’d once praised his electrical skills. “Do you have any books about orange things?” he apparently asked. I wasn’t listening, I was busy with one of my other sons, but no doubt he was nervous, and not sure how to say what he was looking for. I wasn’t there to help her interpret. I only turned around and saw him about ten minute later grinning wildly with exactly what he wanted: an armful of picture books about pumpkins.

Thank you for giving us all what we need, even when we don’t have the words to say exactly what we’re looking for.

Twain 100 Years Later

Mark Twain decided his autobiography would only be published one hundred years after his death. Guess what time it is? Awwwyeah. Also, that is one of the best ideas ever and if I were more important I'd copy him, except I'd add a year or two just to one-up him.

The Power of the Single Story

A TED talk from Chimamanda Adichie about how limiting a single story of a place or person can be and the importance of noting similarities between people instead of just presenting the negative differences. There's a super awesome part about reading 'American Psycho'.

Stephen King on E-Books

Another quickie - an interview with Stephen King in which he talks about e-books. Apparently he wrote something exclusively for Kindle readers, which annoys me (I don't like 'exclusive' anything when it comes to books). I expect it has been transferred to other formats by now, though, so I'm okay with that.

All Hallow's Read

Blah blah blah Neil Gaiman blah blah blah All Hallow's Read blah blah blah give a scary book this Halloween. Post complete! Now it's time to cowboy up a Halloween event.

Red and the Comic Book Movie

On Monday night, partially to celebrate two midterms completed in one day, I went to see Red with some friends. Great movie, very funny, good action, I quite liked it.

Red was a brief comic book series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hammer. There's this retired CIA agent named Frank Moses (or Paul Moses in the comics) who suddenly finds himself pursued by the government - he's been reclassified to retired and dangerous, meaning he needs to be gotten rid of. He gathers his old team together and saves a girl he's interested in along the way.

At the end of the movie I turned to my friend and asked, "Is it just me, or have movies been a lot more fun since comic book movies started getting made?" He agreed. Movies made from comics do indeed seem fun, with a few exceptions (From Hell, I'm looking at you).

Much like the popularity of (or perhaps partly because of the popularity of) graphic novels, all of a sudden it seems like people are realizing that comic books have a lot of really entertaining stories to tell. And since they're already partially visual media, they've got that going for them in the transition to film. Comic book artists started borrowing 'camera shots' from movies, and now those angles and shots are being translated back to film, which is pretty cool.

(In a somewhat related aside, The Ultimates is an alternate version of Marvel comics where familiar faces follow different paths or are re-imagined. One such case of re-imagining came from changing Nick Fury, head of SHIELD, from a white guy with an eye patch to a Samuel Jackson in an eye patch. That was who they decided Nick Fury would look like. This paid off when Ironman was made and Sam Jackson signed on to be Fury. If you missed it in the first movie, it was after the credits and it was awesome.)

Warren Ellis commented about Red on his site. Also, take a gander at Comic Book Movies, a site devoted to comic book movies. (How surprising.)

E-Books, Money, and Authors

From the Wall Street Journal's site: the effect of e-books on the income of authors.

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America's top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

Kind of brutal!

Sir Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite authors. He's the creator of Discworld, a fantasy series with too many interesting and hilarious characters to count. His books take up the majority of one of my shelves; I own more books by him than I do any other author. And he got knighted! And then he forged himself a sword with meteorite ore! I love that guy.

$45 000 Author Visit

Author Neil Gaiman is in the center of a library-related stink. Apparently it costs $45 000 to have Neil come to your library. He explains why in his blog post, though the answers don't satisfy everyone.

I'm not really sure where I stand on this one. Neil Gaiman is a very popular author, and one whose work I have enjoyed. He draws massive crowds, which ultimately mean people in the library, which is good. If the library can even hold that many!

On the other hand, couldn't that forty-five thousand go elsewhere? Maybe to hire transportation and shipping of older books to needy places? Maybe not quite as big an event as having Neil Gaiman come in, but then if you advertise something like a Not-Neil fundraiser where people are asked to donate to help other libraries instead of paying to get Neil Gaiman...? I'm not sure.

William Gibson on Twitter

So somebody asked William Gibson if his latest book would've been written faster if Twitter didn't exist. (Is this blog going to need a Twitter tag? Ugh.)

“Twitter, or the internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write,” the Neuromancer and Spook Country novelist wrote on his official website. “Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). Access random novelty.”

That's a vote in favour of the Library of Congress keeping all tweets, right? I suppose for every person reporting on the kind of sandwich they had for lunch there's something a little more worthwhile. Or at least something I'd consider a little more worthwhile.

Harry Potter, Freedom of Speech, and Failure

JK Rowling gave a commencement speech at Harvard University about the fringe benefits of failure. You can also watch it here:

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

I thought one of the most interesting parts was when Rowling spoke of the time she worked at Amnesty International's headquarters in London:

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.