Escaping the Trunk

These are the guidelines for Tesseracts 15, a Canadian anthology of genre fiction that is focusing on YA stories this year. I was really excited about submitting to this anthology, until I read the guidelines. (They’re available as a PDF on the website linked above.) Snip:

If yours doesn’t fit, please don’t submit it.

Whatever other definitions of a story suited to a 13 and older reader you may encounter or hold, the only ones that matter to this anthology are ours, plain and simple.

* No torture or explicit acts of violence. (Action/fights/struggle are fine.)
* No explicit sex. (Be romantic.)
* No obscenities. (Be inventive. Yes, kids swear. No, we won’t buy your story if your characters do.)
* No shades of what’s already been done in YA speculative fiction, i.e. schools for magic or vampire boyfriends, unless you are presenting a markedly different and original approach.
* No flat, clichéd characters or character place-markers, i.e. the lost little girl, the unhappy dad, the sandwich-fixing mom.
* No stories without a strong speculative fiction element that drives the plot, i.e., mom and dad getting a divorce on Mars won’t cut it for science fiction, unless there is something more to be made of the setting’s effect. The same applies for fantasy and horror.

I like how editors Julie Czernada and Susan MacGregor have already anticipated a lot of the arguments, here. I think they’re right to draw the line at their editorial privilege: what matters isn’t what other editors allow, but what they allow. It is, after all, their anthology and not someone else’s. Remember when your mom used to say “I don’t care what you get to do at Jimmy’s house; this is my house and you have to follow my rules”? This is like that.

The trouble is that I like Jimmy’s house more than yours, Mom. That’s where the Hugo nominees play. And as everyone knows, the Hugo losers’ party is way more fun that the winners.’

Taking another look at those guidelines, I realized that one of my favourite books in recent years, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, wouldn’t make the cut. Neither would M.T. Anderson’s National Book Award Finalist, Feed. Neither would either of Margaret Mahy’s Carnegie winners. And to me, that’s a problem. Because when your YA anthology excludes material found in award-winning YA novels, that’s like saying that you don’t want the best.

This isn’t to say that adult content makes a good story, or that all YA stories should dance on the knife’s edge. Heinlein, Bradbury, and LeGuin all wrote short stories that fit the guidelines outlined above. The book that won the Hugo last year, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, also fits the guidelines and is aimed at a YA audience. But I think those guidelines are stringent enough to stifle the writers who don’t have a “clean” story in the stable. There are only about two months to complete this story, if you’re starting from scratch. That’s not a lot of time to put down work that rivals Gaiman’s.

Say you want to submit, but you have to de-fang a story that might not make the cut in order to get it in on time. How would you do it? The line here seems to be explicitness. There’s a chasm between Holden Caulfield “feeling pretty sexy by that point” and Holden Caulfield being unable to get the image of underage prostitute Sunny’s nipples out of his mind. But these things happen by degree, and the terms “explicit” and “romantic” are inherently weaselly. One person’s explicit is another person’s romantic. This is the problem with all obscenity regulations. They’re deeply subjective and vulnerable to passing fashions, and they’re why even classic children’s literature is banned or challenged in multiple countries. The guidelines listed above (those that relate to language and depiction, not plot development) seem designed to make sure that T15 is never challenged, ever.

My friend and fellow workshop member Mike Skeet reminded me that there’s a big difference between “adult” material found in YA novels and the same material found in YA short stories. Obviously the latter are more condensed, and anything you add has to be done with more grace and wisdom. But the classics of YA literature, genre or otherwise, aren’t known for their…safety. Bad things happen. All the time. That’s sort of the point. Holden Caulfield tries sleeping with a hooker and gets beaten up by her pimp. Ender Wiggin kills two kids. Jerry Renault winds up a in a boxing match with public masturbator Emile Janza. Leslie Burke dies. “Alice” drops acid. Charles Holloway’s hand gets crushed. It’s called conflict, and it’s what makes a story. But a writer spooked by guidelines like these might find herself conflict-averse in her attempt to make a sale and build a name.

When I talked about these guidelines with my workshop in an email thread, the thing that kept popping up was worry for the Tesseracts brand. One parent in the group said that the guidelines read like recommendations for ages 10 and under, not ages 13 and over. I understand that an editor’s first job is to give herself the time and space to read and think, and that one way to do that is to lay down the law and filter out unwanted content. But I wonder if opening up the field would have guaranteed more quality in and among the quantity, while simultaneously preserving the editors’ right to reject stories they found offensive. Would allowing racier stories have circumscribed that right? Would it have limited the editors’ right to have a “let’s tone it down” conversation with the writers they wanted to buy stories from?

The answer’s in the anthology, of course. If these guidelines guide in quality material that young readers enjoy, then mission accomplished. But if those young readers are anything like the reader I was, the last thing they want is content that comes pre-sanitized. At thirteen, I was reading Stephen King novels. At fourteen, I was reading Michael Ondaatje. At fifteen, it was Sebastien Japrisot. Are you seeing a pattern, here? Kids like texts that are actually above the level most adults think they can or should be reading at. They like to be challenged. They hate being talked down to. Every writer should know her audience. I’m just wondering who the audience is, here. Kids, or their uptight parents?

Share/Save

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged very much recently is that I’ve been so damn busy. I went away for a while to a lake up north, where I worked on the story in this subject heading as well as a couple of others (I even did some foresighting work, if you can believe that). The good news is that all of the stories I was working on were requests from other people — this one came from Rudy Rucker. In his words on the story, Rudy called it “a profound and richly felt piece so closely rooted in reality that it barely feels like SF,” and “an important story-essay on women’s rights.”

This story actually came about as a consequence of my involvement in the Strategic Foresight & Innovation program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Initially, I wrote a fictional essay about the fall of Shenzhen from a systems theory perspective, invoking Donella Meadows and Jamshid Gharajedaghi and Clayton Christensen. It was an interesting exercise, one that I delayed starting for too long because I was stymied and had been working on my novel re-writes. I was in desperate need to write some short fiction, so (as I have done before) I turned in some instead of turning in a straight paper.

The story linked above has been cut significantly from that first essay, and a new subjectivity has taken the POV position within the story because the footnotes and bibliography and conceptual framing for systems theory has been removed. It took me a long time to re-frame the story appropriately, but I finally settled on a woman in the Quiverfull movement. Quiver-minded people follow Psalm 127:3-5:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

I felt that a Quiver-minded woman would be uniquely positioned to speak to China’s only child policy, because while she eschewed any form of birth control, the women of China are legally obligated to embrace it. I’ve always been fascinated by reproductive policy, and I thought it would be interesting to bring this dichotomy into focus. I also knew it would mean delving into two worlds that I knew very little about: the factories of Shenzhen, and the farms and households of Quiver-minded families.

Conditions in both environments can be terrible.

The reasons for this should be obvious. In the worst of both cases, rigid patriarchy oppresses women who live almost barrack-style, endlessly performing the same tasks during their sixteen-hour days for very little reward and with little opportunity for open communication or self-expression. I recommend reading No Longer Quivering for insights into the consequences of the Quiverfull lifestyle, and this Fortune City post about working conditions in Shenzhen. (Or you could just read Cory’s latest, For the Win.)

This isn’t to say that I’m some sort of moral authority on either subject. I’m typing this on a Mac, which means I’m a consumer of Foxconn products, products made in factories where conditions are so awful that suicide is a regular occurrence among employees. I also don’t think that the entirety of the Quiverfull movement needs to die. Mary Pride, the author who in many ways began the movement, has since spoken out against Biblical patriarchy. Some might see this as a reversal, but to me it’s a more nuanced understanding of one’s own opinion and its consequences. I felt that I hadn’t really nailed the voice of this story until I read Pride’s post.

I also think that there are a surprising number of connections between the Quiverfull lifestyle and the DIY maker/crafter one espoused at BoingBoing and elsewhere online by avowed atheists. Having a lot of children (some Quiverfull families can have more than twenty) means learning how to stretch a dollar (that’s putting it mildly) and learning how to make consumables as cheaply as possible. In particular, I was fascinated by the women of the West family, who have turned their DIY expertise into a profitable video series for the Christian market. (Their blog is great, too. Warning: music.) Here’s a taste:

This isn’t a lifestyle that I can see myself living, but it is one that I can respect, and it’s part of how I found my way into the story. Personally, I find the idea of life without birth control horrifying, in a screamingly awful “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” kind of way. But part of being pro-choice is believing in the sanctity of the choice. Our bodies are ours to do with as we will. Anything less is slavery. And slavery takes more forms than we know.

Share/Save

The other day, my husband and I caught a trailer for The Expendables, which is the cinematic result of a mad scientist’s attempt to mix the mitochondrial DNA of every American action star from the 1980’s into a sweaty, tattooed, bulging-veined chimera. We first saw this trailer during Kick-Ass, and my comment at the time (aside from my ceaseless laughter, which I think unnerved a few of my fellow theatre-goers) was: “Wow! It’s like the ’80’s mated!” As usual, my husband had a more measured reaction: “No action movie can claim to be complete unless it has Sygourney Weaver.”

Which got me wondering: if someone made a movie like The Expendables with a cast of female action stars, what would it look like?
Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Save

Please excuse the over-exposure of this photo. It’s the inevitable consequence of low lighting and late eating. For a recent family birthday dinner, we visited Ferro, and this drink, the Negroni, convinced me to blog the location.
Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Save

Note: My husband typed this during his usual comics-consumption time. If it was important enough to interrupt that, you should definitely read it.

This is Not a Digital Revolution

or

You Won’t Believe What Watching The Runaways Taught Me About the Fight Over Manga and DRM

In my last year of high school, I wrote an essay that used the French Revolution as a model to describe the fall of communism in the U.S.S.R. as a revolution. The realisation that all revolutions follow such a similar, and relatively simple basic pattern was one of those mind-opening moments that has stuck with me ever since. What does this have to do with anything? Maybe nothing, but I’m going somewhere with this, so stick with me for a few pages and see what happens.

Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Save

A while ago, my friend Sara gave me a free sample of Starbucks’ new VIA instant coffee. She’s not much of a coffee drinker, but I am. I take a double-walled thermos with me most everywhere, and I am deeply in love with the Cuisinart Grind and Brew we purchased last year as an anniversary gift to each other, and most often we use it to brew Kicking Horse’s Hoodoo Joe blend. But sometimes, instant coffee is all you have, so one day when we were running low I decided to try the VIA.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t awful. I wouldn’t drink it every day, but if it were between VIA and a raging migraine, I’d probably go with VIA. I tweeted this, and my friend Tamara Sheehan revealed to me that no, VIA is really just freeze-dried cat piss, and that if I had any self-respect I’d be drinking some of her coffee. You see, in addition to being a writer of GLBTQ fiction for the YA crowd, Tamara works for Discovery Coffee Roasters in Victoria. When I jokingly requested samples, Tamara very generously sent me three blends from Discovery’s lineup.

This, my friends, is what Twitter is for.

What follows are my impressions from the samples that Tamara sent me. I think each is already successful in the Victoria, but I think they would do well in Toronto, too. Although Toronto has plenty of good coffee places, they’re not spread around very well. They’re concentrated in the downtown area, which means that there are inroads to be made further north, east, and west as those areas gentrify. I’ve never visited Discovery’s locations, but they seem like the kind of places I’d enjoy, and if I’m ever in Victoria I’ll definitely drop by. Discovery has the kind of operation that I remember from Seattle’s Caffé Vita: roasting, distribution, and training coupled with a few storefronts. It’s a smart business model, because it means increasing the reach of the brand without investing in a huge number of brick-and-mortars. And offering a training course for baristas means that third parties like hotels, etc. can ensure the quality of their espresso drinks without training every single person on staff in a business with high turnover. But at the heart, there has to be good coffee. Luckily, they have that part nailed.

El Salvador Finca Alaska

Most “medium” blends are a little too light, but this one evolves from its malty whole bean into a strong wash with a sharp, bright aftertaste. That sharpness softens with the addition of milk and sugar, resulting in a surprising chocolate flavour. This coffee feels like a people pleaser, and might make a good brunch offering or Christmas morning brew. Lighter roasts also contain more caffeine, so if you’re looking for more bang for your buck, this is a good choice.

Costa Rica Bioli

This triple blend of Central American beans bills itself as a big, solid cup of drip, and I couldn’t agree more. This is the coffee you want when you enter a diner. Any diner, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. This is the coffee Dean Winchester orders when Dean Winchester orders coffee. The flavour is bold enough to stand up to any combination of milk, sugar, Bailey’s, Jameson, or whatever other flavouring agent you deploy. You could probably also use the dregs to make red-eye gravy, if that’s your thing, or pair it with sweeter recipes where a strong coffee flavour is needed to complement a dark chocolate (as in a flourless torte) or offset a white chocolate (as in a biscotti).

House Espresso Blend:

We brewed this up as drip because our espresso maker has a cracked O-ring. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it straight. Milk and sugar served only to throw it way off-base, and I think it’s best enjoyed without any accoutrements. I think it would also make a fine iced coffee for this very reason. (Iced coffee is almost impossible to sweeten appropriately without ready access to simple syrup or superfine caster sugar. But with really excellent coffee, this isn’t an issue.) However, my husband found it a little thin and generic. I suspect this was a function of brewing this blend as drip rather than espresso. Concentrated, this blend would definitely have more character and would not falter under pressure from milk, foam, or sweetener.

***

At this point, I should add that I’m obviously open to reviewing any other samples that are sent my way. I’m the kind of person who reads product reviews fairly regularly, and who thinks in granular detail about things like headphones, soap, and knives — the things I deal with on a daily basis. I have a small group of “favourite things” that I love interacting with and will promote to anyone who listens (including my Sony headphones, my Pacifica soap, and my Henckel knives), and I like adding to that list.

Share/Save

From Toronto

Photographing tall ships, getting sunburned, and coming home for our annual re-watch of JAWS.

Oh yeah, and finishing the re-writes of my novel. The latest iteration now rests comfortably in my agent’s inbox, and I would have done a celebratory dance of some sort once I clicked “send,” had it not been a quarter to five in the morning. I took a four-hour nap before we headed out to look at the tall ships, I’m exhausted, and my skin is far too pink, and I’m sure I’ll have some sort of sender’s remorse later. For now though, I have an air-conditioned bedroom.

The Bebop re-caps will re-commence very soon.

Share/Save

Share/Save

A magnitude 5.5 quake hit the Ontario-Quebec border region today. You can see the epicentre here, and read another article here.

Apparently it’s being felt as far as Ohio, but what I felt was one of those mild but noticeable “Is the earth shaking or am I having an inner ear episode?” kind of quakes. (Not that I have inner ear episodes.) That said, I still headed straight for one of the doorframes and stayed there, tweeting away and chatting to my brother-in-law before he evacuated from his building.

The lucky thing? It happened after I finished today’s yoga. Otherwise: epic balance fail.

UPDATE: Although there is no weather warning for my region, a suspected tornado ripped through Midland this evening. Here, we’re experiencing high winds but not much else. So no, the “fake lake” has yet to be sucked up by a funnel cloud. But give it time.

Share/Save

On June 14, a bystander shot this video of a Seattle police officer punching a 17-year-old girl in the face during an altercation with her 19-year-old cousin.

My pal David Forbes tweeted this bit of news to me this afternoon, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around both the video and the responses to the video ever since. The response is overwhelmingly in support of the officer. Here are a few choice snippets:
Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Save