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?

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I got hacked this weekend.

My pal René Walling let me know about it in an email Sunday morning, and I immediately phoned up my host to ask for help. I’m hosted through Superb, a company recommended to me by the late, great Emru Townsend (through whom I met René). When Emru made this recommendation, I had no concept of the scope of his illness, or how very dearly it would cost him and his family. If I had known, I wouldn’t have nagged him for web help. But on Sunday, I was grateful that I had.

The site was hacked by a person claiming to represent the “Lebanese Cyb3r Army.” (During the examination of my corrupted files, I hesitantly asked my tech support serviceman, “Is it covered in L337 speak?”) The graphic taking the place of my site made reference to the FlotillaFAIL. Ironically, I had met a very sweet Lebanese couple Friday night after seeing Splice. They offered me a lychee cookie, and then we talked about our favourite desserts. They recommended some local Middle Eastern restaurants. “Go to Jerusalem,” the husband told me. “The restaurant! Not the city.”

“No, not the city,” I said. “The city would be too stressful.”

I said this casually, but perhaps I shouldn’t have. The truth is that people navigate the streets of Jerusalem daily. They work and dance and pray and have families there. At some point, the reality of war must fade, like the high-pitched ringing of tinnitis, into something shrill and persistent but easily forgotten during moments of pleasure. At least, that’s what the recollections of my friends Kung Fu Jew and Miriam Libicki would have me believe.

KFJ has been to Jerusalem. Multiple times. He’s volunteered there, studied there, dated Israeli girls there. The first time he returned, he said, offhandedly, “You know they’re bulldozing homes in Gaza.”

“Empty homes?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

He later went on to say this:

What Israelis and conservative American Jews don’t seem to care is that a surfeit of dignity for prolonged periods of time foments extremism and increases hatred. If Israel was looking for a policy that would enable it to be rid of Gaza, then it chose the stupidest one possible.

It’s safe to say that I’m with KFJ on this one. I hate what happened aboard that ship. I advocate a withdrawal from Gaza. I advocate peace and dignity for the people who live there. I think Israel’s government should listen to its young people in the diaspora, who are steadily refusing to “check their liberalism at the door” when it comes to Israeli politics. I think KFJ is right when he says that the conflict is not between nations, but between innocent people and purveyors of violence.

I don’t know why I was hacked and I still don’t. But if it forces me to express myself on this very thorny subject, so be it.

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So glad you asked. Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about modifying Miranda warnings, or the warnings suspects are given upon arrest in the United States that inform them about their rights to silence, an attorney, termination of questioning, and possible contact with a consular authority. Current Attorney General Eric Holder is pushing Congress to modify the rules for terror suspects, specifically to change when Miranda warnings can be read, and to whom they apply.

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Peter Watts has been convicted of a felony.

Since Tuesday morning when the trial started, my week has felt like the moment between feeling the pain of cutting yourself, and looking down to see how bad the bleeding is. Well, now we know. Sort of. Sentencing isn’t until late April.

I haven’t felt this same anxious ache since my immigration experience — the waiting, the wondering, the knowledge that I might not see my family for years. Even after obtaining my Permanent Residency card, I was afraid that my newfound country might for some reason close her doors to me, that I might be forced out, pushed away from everything and everyone I’d come to love here. In customs lines, I could barely breathe. Shopping at an IKEA, I felt anxiety triggers fluttering across my heart. Why are you so afraid? I asked myself. Oh, that’s right. The lines. The numbers. The herding.

I was such a fucking wuss. I was so worried about myself. My fears. My needs. My inconveniences. They seem so little, now. Now Peter is facing a possible jail sentence, and I’d give anything — anything — to keep that from happening. “There’s always the Devil,” Dave told me, this afternoon. “Yeah.” I nodded. “One thing you can say about that motherfucker. He gets the job done.”

I wish I could tell the Devil about Peter. Actually, I wish I could tell his jury: “You don’t get it. It’s bad enough that you don’t understand the concept of jury nullification. But what’s worse is that you don’t know the person you’ve done this to. The person who dropped everything when I fainted at a blood donation clinic. The person who rescues cats. The person who fixed the strap of my dress with a safety pin and his teeth. The person who stands up for me in critiques even when he thinks I’ve fucked up the ending (because I always do), who talked me through the ideas of my novel. The person who gives the best hugs. That guy. My brother.”

And I wish I knew how to feel about my country, too. Somewhere, there’s video of me crying on the day of Obama’s inauguration. Dave shot it. I wish I could grab the person in that footage and shake her. I wish I could slap her in the face and tell her not to let her guard down, not for a minute, not ever. I wish she’d known. I wish everyone knew.

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Okay, so you want to read some manga online. Good on you. It’s a rewarding pursuit, engaged in by millions of readers globally, of all types. You’re sure to find something that suits you: manga about flying, manga about fighting, manga about fucking. Different brushstrokes for different folks. You’ll love it.

Wait. What’s that you say? You want to read licensed manga online? From commercial distributors?

Well, that’s very noble of you. Let’s give that a shot. Let’s pick a proven winner, a manga-ka who has always managed to sell despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she returns to the same themes, over and over, with increasingly delicate and ornate artwork and equally precise worldbuilding: Yuu Watase. Viz has recently begun publishing her latest, a shounen title called Arata: The Legend. Before you buy the paperback edition, you probably want to sample it online. Come with me, to the Viz Online Manga Viewer.

…What do you mean, the print is too small? What do you mean, the screen is absurdly sensitive? What do you mean, the zoom—>grab function works better on your iPhone than it does on the publisher’s website? I thought you wanted to do the right thing, here! Don’t you know that doing the right thing is always harder? Viz has to make it difficult for you. Otherwise you might not feel self-righteous enough, each time you visit their website.

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Nick Simmons, son of Gene Simmons, apparently writes comics. And apparently, those comics flagrantly plagiarize panels, character designs and dialogue from Tite Kubo’s manga Bleach. The parallels are so close, Simmons’ publisher has halted production on his comic, pending an investigation.

Pro-tip: if you plagiarize (jackass), make sure you go after small fry, and not, say, one of the top-selling manga in Japan and North America. And not copy the design of, say, one of the most popular cosplay characters ever. Seriously. I know Bleach is awesome and everything, and we’d all love if we could draw half that well and write characters that compelling and build worlds that complex. We’d all love to have Kenpachi Zoraki — that spiky-haired fellow laughing insanely, in the panels linked above — wandering around inside our heads. After all, he’s an indestructible badass who bears a striking resemblance to Ian McShane, and his best friend is a cute pink-haired girl who rides around on his shoulder, occasionally steering him toward “play dates” that involve obscene amounts of blood and pain. Evidence:

Unfortunately, Nick Simmons didn’t come up with Kenpachi himself. And while there is an argument to be made for the long history of pose grabs and tracing in comics (you can read about it in the comments thread at this Comic Book Resources post), the truth is that if Simmons were half as talented as the manga-ka he lifted those poses from, he’d have come up with something that could stand on its own merit. I’d have no problem if Simmons were at Comikket, selling Zoraki doujins for the cost of printing just like everyone else. Then he’d be a fan artist. Then his position in the creative ecosystem would be perfectly obvious and, strangely, more secure. In fact, he could forge an apprenticeship out of his fan works, and move on to commercial material if and when he was ready. He’s just not ready, yet, and the editor who approved these drawings should have recognized that.

Because really, what self-respecting comics editor doesn’t know at least a little something about manga, these days? What, there’s this whole wave of material out there that’s devouring the youth market and the female market and Simmons’ editor didn’t know about it? Really? Really? Well, maybe. Radical, Simmons’ publisher, is no stranger to copyright suits. Maybe it should come as no surprise that someone waved these drawings through. But it means that if, on the vanishingly small chance that Simmons did this unwittingly, his comics career will have been tarnished from the very beginning by accusations of plagiarism. And not just plagiarism, but stupid plagiarism.

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Yup. This is why I married him.

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Over the past several years, I have avoided blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like for one very simple reason:  I am very sure that there just is not a sufficient number of people in the world who actually care about what I am thinking or doing on a daily basis to justify the effort.  When I was much younger than I am today, my brother described the internet as follows:  “It’s just like tv, if there were millions of channels but almost all of them were static.”  Do I want to become one more channel of static?  Not really.  But once in a while I do feel the need to say something, and I do wish that I had a platform on which to say it.  So, just this once, I have asked my lovely wife to post this minor rant on my behalf.

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Tuesday night, my friend Peter Watts was beaten, pepper sprayed, and detained by US border security.

Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him. At the end of it, local police laid a felony charge of assault against a federal officer against Peter. On Wednesday, he posted bond and walked across the border to Canada in shirtsleeves (he was released by Port Huron officials with his car and possessions locked in impound, into a winter storm that evening). He’s home safe. For now. But he has to go back to Michigan to face the charge brought against him.

The charge is spurious. But it’s also very serious. It could mean two years in prison in the United States, and a ban on travel in that country for the rest of Peter’s life. Peter is mounting a vigorous defense, but it’s going to be expensive – he’s effectively going up against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and he needs the best legal help that he can get.

…On Tuesday, I received a panicked email from Caitlin Sweet, telling me about Peter’s arrest. She told me to find Dave and I did, and for the next two days the two of them wrangled lawyers, called jails and judges, and focused on bringing Peter home. They barely slept. (I know I didn’t.) Tuesday afternoon, I burst into tears just thinking about my friend in pain and in cuffs and in jail. Finally, Peter was allowed to leave. But as Dave points out above, the fight is not over. Peter needs money.

Thankfully, he has a PayPal account where you can give him some.

I don’t really want presents for Christmas. I don’t really need more DVDs or more books or fancy soaps or a new pair of boots. All I really need is the knowledge that the best damn lawyer money can buy is working his ass off to keep my friend free. Mom, this means you. Do not get me anything for Christmas. Please donate it instead. I can go without, this year.

The same goes for everyone here. I don’t really have any concept of how many readers I have, but let me put it to you this way: a lot of my stories are free. Consider this your opportunity to pay for them. Because if you ever liked them, if you ever derived any enjoyment from them or if they ever made you think, it’s partly Peter Watts’ responsibility. Peter is a member of my writers’ workshop. We get together pretty regularly for anime binges and beer. He’s the one who always asks the tough, nagging questions that make my stories better before they’re even written. I don’t do everything he tells me, story-wise, but I know I’d be a poorer writer without his influence. And every minute he spends helping me is another minute he’s not working on his own revenue stream. So please, even if it’s not very much, give it.

When I needed Peter, he was there for me. I phoned him last October after fainting at a blood donation clinic, and he dropped everything to come and get me. Then he spent the afternoon fetching me food and blankets and episodes of True Blood. That’s the kind of man he is — the kind of man who takes in strays. I know that if our situations were reversed, he would do for me exactly what I am doing now.

More fundraising will follow. Those efforts will be promoted here, and I’ll let you know if there are other ways that you can help. But for now, please just think of this as a gift to me.

UPDATE: My mom, the lovely and talented woman who raised me, has in fact donated to the cause. Thank you, Mom. I love you.

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Via BB, we have this article from Wired about the anti-vaccine movement (specifically the movement which blames childhood vaccinations for autism). As a consequence of my time at OCAD, I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about H1N1 and when I’ll be queuing up for my vaccine. At the same time, I’ve been utterly agog and aghast at the sheer number of people phoning the CBC or other news outlets with questions about the vaccine that are based solely on innuendo and hearsay. It’s absurd. Actually, it’s worse than absurd. It’s potentially lethal.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

Vaccination works. The people telling you otherwise are probably trying to sell you something to take its place, be it oil of oregano or coral calcium or special diets or books about their experiences or the opportunity to hear them speak at greater length during a more expensive seminar or conference designed to “give you the tools” to “take charge” of “your family/child/community’s health and wellness.”

Try “taking charge” when your kid gets polio. See how well that works out. Hope your health insurance is paid up.

Health insurance is something that the Wired article doesn’t bring up, but should. As of the 2007 US census, 47 million Americans were uninsured, including 11.7 percent of American children. How many of those kids get vaccinated against illness? I’m not sure. Maybe they do, when their parents can scrape together enough to make it happen. Or maybe they’re just forced, by bad luck and bad circumstance, to keep putting it off and putting it off and putting off, until one day Junior takes a slurp from the wrong can of soda and wham! sorry buddy, it’s meningitis. In the face of that reality — hordes of people who can’t access doctors — it’s no wonder that sales of snake oil are on the rise, or that snake-oil imbibers are out in force defending their snake-oil pipelines. Health insurance is for platinum customers only, but snake-oil is something everybody has access to. Everybody can tune into Oprah and watch Jenny McCarthy talk about how she doesn’t need science, because she has anecdotal evidence. Everybody can walk into a supplements store and pay the same amount that they would at a pharmacy for a different kind of pill in a similar-seeming bottle — but without needing a prescription, co-pay, or monthly premium. Flim-flam men don’t discriminate. They don’t exclude. Your money will always be good to them, no matter how low you’ve sunk.

Not that I don’t love me some vitamins. I do. I understand the need for them. And I understand the need — the raw, desperate, soul-sucking, brain-hacking need — to do something when your loved one is diagnosed with something terrible. But that something shouldn’t be the wholesale rejection of the scientific method. It shouldn’t be the careless dismissal of double-blind trials, or years of research, or the stats mentioned above. Vaccination saves lives. If you think otherwise, it’s probably because you don’t remember a time before vaccinations, when people actually got polio. You probably think that FDR just liked living in his wheelchair, because it was fun.

Some vaccinations do carry risks. Those risks are sometimes infinitesimal when compared to the risk of the ailment the vaccine seeks to prevent. And yes, as a parent, it’s your “right” to decide which risks your child should endure. It’s also your right to decide whether to put your baby in a car seat or just let him flop around the back every time you make a left turn. It’s your right to let him play with matches. It’s your right to throw him down the stairs if you think it’ll build his character. Go ahead. Do it. I mean, he’s not going to catch autism if you throw him down the stairs. You only get that from vaccines.

Right?

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“We are evolving every year, every decade. That’s a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment….”

–Canadian Science Minister Gary Goodyear, responding to criticism about his refusal to answer whether he believed in evolution

It would be easy to criticise Minister Goodyear for not “believing” in evolution despite his position as an alleged scientist. Many people already are. But evolution is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of decision: one either decides that the theory is valid based on meticulously-gathered evidence, or one doesn’t. Belief and faith should, ideally, have no bearing on whether a theory is sound. A well-constructed argument needs no faith on the part of the reader — it is persuasive enough on its own without appeals to the intangible. (Years of watching Law and Order have taught us otherwise, I know. But it may shock others to learn that some people can recognize sophistry, and “I shouldn’t be asked about my religion” is it, not least because none of the major religions I’m familiar with emphasize privacy of practise. God does not like it when you pretend to be strangers in the hallway outside homeroom. This allegedly hurts God’s feelings.)

What one can criticise Minister Goodyear for is not knowing what evolution is.
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