Welcome Squid Overlords, indeed. Peter, come home soon.

NOTE: Mom, you can read the winning novelette here. I must confess I totally misread this story during its workshop stage. Luckily, Peter had the good sense not to listen to me.

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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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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.

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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?

The Expendables has seven action stars playing the heroes, the usual ragtag team of paramilitary ubers, with two boss characters played by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and four name-checked bad guys, most of them from the pro-wrestling world. So that’s a total of fourteen top-billed (or at least trailer-worthy) characters. Could I find fourteen utterly awesome women to fight their way through my XX-powered action film?

The Bosses

I started with the bosses first. I wanted two women who couldn’t just kill you, but could have you killed, with a simple nod. They are: Helen Mirren and Pam Grier. I see Helen Mirren playing the Bruce Willis role, here: the woman who hires The Necessaries to do a really tough job in a war-torn country. She’s icy, she’s efficient, and most importantly, she’s probably the only person in the world who could tell Angela Bassett what to do. (More on that in a second.) Pam Grier could play Schwarzenegger’s part as the former leader of The Necessaries, who got fed up with the incremental gains made by the group in similarly awful exotic locales, and left the group for a sweet slice of the consultant pie with a military contractor. Now she’s a desk-jockey, secretly yearning for the sense of thrill and accomplishment that her old job gave her.

The Leader

This was tough. Basically, I had to choose between Sygourney Weaver and Angela Bassett. And who better to take up the mantle of leadership than Ellen Ripley? After all, isn’t every Alien movie about how we all would have been so much better off if we had just listened to Ripley? Well, yes. But if we had all just listened to Ripley, there would be no story. Picture this:

Random Redshirt: “What is this?”
Ellen Ripley: “It’s a queen. She’ll breed. You’ll die.”
Random Redshirt: “No way, really? Well, shit, I guess we’d better get on that! Thanks for telling us, Ripley! We’re so lucky you’re around to help us through this little jam!”

See? No story there. Every Alien movie, and most Sygourney Weaver films, are all about how Weaver is the calm voice of reason who can still kick your ass when you ask for it. The central conflict in most of her films sprouts from her frustrated attempts to be listened to. No, really. Think about it. I’m not just talking about the Alien movies, here. It’s in Ghostbusters, Avatar, Gorillas in the Mist. She keeps trying to punch through, but it just doesn’t happen until the very end, when there’s a cathartic “She told you so, jackass,” moment. (One notable exception to this rule is Working Girl. It reverses the pattern somewhat, in that everyone listens to her until she’s proven to be a fraud.)

My point is that I’d listen to the wisdom of my elders on this one. I’d cast Angela Bassett as the leader character, with Sygourney Weaver as her best friend and lieutenant. Once again, Weaver would be playing the voice of reason, challenging Bassett’s self-destructive decisions to lead the team into danger but ultimately supporting her either way.

The Team(s)

This is where things got really fun. With four castmembers spoken for, I had ten slots left. I thought that this was the place for younger stars to really shine. I tried to find women with actual martial arts or weapons experience, who wouldn’t just look stiff and pouty in costume. We’ve all seen female supers in major Hollywood films by now, but a lot of the time I feel like the action is lacking. I mean, I want my action stars to be pure forces of nature, who aren’t afraid to do truly awful things to other human beings. I’m the person who laughed gleefully when a young Rorschach bit the ear off a bully in Watchmen. Once you see that moment, everything else his character does as an adult rings true. But Malin Ackerman just couldn’t convince me that she’d really been trained from birth to fight as the second Silk Spectre. In the case of The Expendables a lot of the castmembers are athletes, some of whom come from pro-wrestling or MMA. I felt like the women I cast would have to bring a similar level of realism to The Necessaries. Here are some names I had in mind. If you see names crossed off, it’s because these women are less inclined to do their own stunts.

• Michelle Yeoh
• Summer Glau
• JeeJa Yinan
• Linda Hamilton
• Yvonne Strahovski
• Milla Jovovich
• Uma Thurman
• Jodie Foster
• Katee Sackhoff
• Jennifer Garner
• Yoon Eun Hye
• Chloe Moretz
• Sarah Michelle Gellar
• Maggie Q
• Chiaki Kuriyama
• Jeon Ji-hyeon
• Rosario Dawson
• Angelina Jolie
• Zoe Saldana
• Charlize Theron
• Michelle Rodriguez

That’s sixteen names. Some of them are obvious reaches, like Yoon Eun Hye. She’s the star of Coffee Prince, a K-dorama in which she repeatedly lifts grown men and carries them on her back. She also boxes in The Story of Seven-Cutter, but she’s never played an action heroine before. So I feel safe cutting her out. I also wonder whether Linda Hamilton wouldn’t fit better in a cameo role; she hasn’t begun her stint on Chuck yet, so I’m not sure if she’s back in the action saddle. I’m also a little worried about Jeon Ji-Hyeon, the star of the live action adaptation of Blood: The Last Vampire. I did some reading and found out that she did her own wire-work, but I remained a bit ambivalent.

Looking at these names, I started getting pretty excited. I knew how I would feel if I saw all of them arrayed on a poster. The poster for The Expendables is full of bankable stars who have all headlined their own movies. And while I couldn’t necessarily do the same with The Necessaries, I could situate top-billed actors alongside actors who have always played more “token” roles, whether it’s the token woman, the token minority, the token bad-ass, or some combination thereof. For once, these women wouldn’t have to be the exception. They could work with their peers.

Seeing this list, my husband immediately told me that I should cut Angelina Jolie. “I’ve never liked her,” he said. I replied that I had liked her in some films (mostly Girl, Interrupted), but that I worried that casting her would mean that the entire film had to be about her. It was hard for me to imagine Jolie in an ensemble role. I found myself wanting to shrink her appearance down to the shortest possible amount of screen-time. But on the other hand, she’s a hugely profitable action star who does her own stunts. Not including her would be like not including Jet Li in The Expendables. “It would be total hypocrisy on my part not to cast her,” I told my husband.

The Story

Looking at my prospective cast, I worried about taking the obvious action movie route: cast the Asian minorities as the “bad guys,” and have a bunch of English-speaking “good guys” beat them up. An easy way to do this would be to send The Necessaries into China or North Korea on a Laura Ling-style rescue mission. Michelle Yeoh could run a prison camp where Chloe Moretz is held, with Jeon Ji-Hyeon, JeeJa Yinan and Chiaki Kuriyama playing her wardens and guards. (There’s another obvious problem, here: Yeoh is Chinese, Jeon is Korean, Yinan is Thai, and Kuriyama is Japanese. The only reason for them to play women born in the same country is because the casting director assumes that “Asian” is one identity.) There would be a lot of trial and tribulation as The Necessaries slipped beyond the border and into the camp, culminating in a knock-down drag-out final battle. There would be a lot of crazy bullet camera and wire-fu and snippets of Joan Jett and Courtney Love songs as Bassett and Weaver led Glau and Saldana, et al. into a firestorm of liberation, disproving the Communist agenda with sexy smirks and good old-fashioned American punching.

But I’m not M. Night Shyamalan, so I couldn’t go that way.

Another way to arrange these stars in a story is to keep the idea of two opposing teams, but to divide them along another binary: age. Bassett and Weaver would still lead a team, but it would be comprised of Uma Thurman, Charlize Theron, Michelle Yeoh, and Milla Jovovich. On the opposing side, Angelina Jolie would lead a team of Summer Glau, Rosario Dawson, Michelle Rodriguez, Chiaki Kuriyama, JeeJa Yinan, and Chloe Moretz. Each team could be on the hunt for the same MacGuffin, or one team could be guarding a MacGuffin while the other attempts to steal it, or the older team could even be training the younger team in paramilitary drills when the situation goes horribly wrong.

I actually liked that last scenario best. It doesn’t shout “BIG DUMB ACTION MOVIE” as loudly as the first scenario, but I think there’s a lot of potential for good set pieces and high drama there. It’s still a fairly classic plot: when one teammate winds up dead during a training exercise, the team has to decide whether it’s all part of the game or whether they’ve been betrayed. Add to this the natural tensions between the two teams, and you have an explosive situation. I think there’s still plenty of room for great fights and kills in a story like this, ideally set against the backdrop of an abandoned city, deep jungle, or other desolate place. Maybe these women are all military contractors, training before they hit the ground in Kandahar where their job will be to cultivate contacts among Afghan women. (Has someone tried this, as part of the counter-insurgency plan? If not, why not?) Maybe there’s tension between Bassett and Weaver’s visions for the team: one wants to expand it so they can do more good, and the other thinks they work best as a small, nimble unit. My point being, there are a lot of stories to tell here.

The Box Office

Would anyone besides me (and DeathRay) want to watch The Necessaries? I don’t know. I’d like to think that they would. The concept is just simple enough to attract attention, and the flavour is different enough to tempt traditional action fans. The charm of The Expendables isn’t just the action, it’s seeing all the action stars doing what they do best together. It’s a cumulative effect. And I think people would be willing to shell out to watch a similar film starring female action stars. Every woman on my list has proven herself in the action realm, and I think it would be really fun and entertaining to watch them all kicking ass together. I personally would love to watch Uma Thurman fight Michelle Yeoh. I think that would be an awesome match. I wouldn’t even care who won, so long as I got to see it. Ditto JeeJa Yinan and Chloe Moretz. They’re both such prodigies, both so committed to learning their craft and doing their own fights in their films, that I think any scene between them would be awesome. I realize that on a very basic level this is akin to taking action figures and smashing them against each other while making “ki-ya!” noises, but sometimes that’s what you watch movies for. Eventually, while dreamcasting, I lost count of all the women I wanted to include, and stopped mapping my list against that of The Expendables. After all, the point isn’t to improve upon The Expendables, or even to match it perfectly, it’s just to see whether I could do a similar film with women. And I feel like I answered that question in the affirmative. There are a lot of women out there kicking ass and making their names. They deserve their own place to shine, but that’s not why a movie like The Necessaries should be made. It should be made because it would rock.

Although I’ve been playing director in my mind, I listed Kathryn Bigelow as the director on my poster. This is partly to preserve the all-female aspect of the idea and partly because she’s done so much action direction in the past. She seems like a natural fit. She’s also worked with Angela Bassett before, and told stories about military contractors and other government authorities with divided loyalties. I’d really enjoy seeing her take something like this on.

And of course, I’d love to write it.

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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.

I didn’t start with the Negroni. I actually started with a pint of Neustadt Springs 10W30, a local dark beer that isn’t as thick or creamy as other offerings, but maintains flavours of maple and chocolate in its final stages. Hearing this, my mother-in-law took her first sip of beer in decades. She hated it, but I finished mine before everyone else did. Meanwhile, we were waiting for latecomers, so we ordered a pile of appetizers, including the bruschetta, the crostini all’formaggio, and the “magic mushrooms.” If you order any of the appetizers, order this last one. Goat cheese crostini, oyster mushrooms, garlic cream sauce. Roasted. Perfectly.

One of the reasons I decided to blog Ferro is the attention paid to the quality of every single offering, including the appetizers. I think a lot of restaurants in Toronto and elsewhere can fall down in the margins of the menu, but there was never a point in our experience where that fall happened. Everything tasted handmade, including the biscotti I finished my meal with. Unlike the majority of biscotti, it was not brick-like or dry, and it snapped easily in my fingers. It tasted of gingerbread, not almond “flavouring,” and actually felt like a dessert and not a fringe benefit. This same philosophy permeates the drinks menu, too: the mojitos are one big tall glass of summer, and my Negroni was searingly clean and fresh. I think it was made with Plymouth’s, because it was strong enough to keep me sipping. “Like a dainty old lady,” the manager chided me, when I complimented him on the drink. A squeeze of orange dulled the drink’s sharpness, but not its impact. It was the best mixed drink I’d tasted outside of Michael Skeet’s place.

A telling anecdote: the person sitting beside me asked for a substitution in her sauce, and was informed by the manager (who served us patiently the entire evening) that all sauces were made fresh to order, so substitutions were not a problem. (How that translates for people with food allergies, I’m not sure, but it sounds promising.)

The closest to failure that our experience ever came was in this dish, the Fusilli. For my taste, it was a tad too salty. I suspect that stemmed from the amount of smoked chicken in the dish. I could have done with a bit less. However, my husband noticed nothing amiss when he ate the remainder of my portion for lunch the next day. And it was all worth it for the perfect textures elsewhere: silky sauce, crispy broccoli, springy pasta. The broccoli sold me on the dish as a whole, because it’s so easy to screw up. It’s such a tiny, basic thing, but most of the time when you order a cruciferous plant, it’s under-done and bitter, or over-done and limp. Not this time.

In other words, you should go. St. Clair West is littered with restaurants, making it difficult to choose where to go when you’re hungry or tired or lost. But now you know: you go to Ferro.

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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.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how manga publishers have jumped on the litiginous bandwagon, targeting scanlation websites like Mangafox in a bid to win digital readers back to the paying model. I can definitely sympathize with this: I am a big fan, and I want the artists that I love to be able to make enough money to keep doing what I want them to do. If reading scanlations is taking food off of their plates, then that’s a problem, in my view. On the other hand, every time I see this sort of thing, be it from manga publishers, movie studios, or the record industry, I just know that it’s tilting at windmills. I can feel it in my gut that they’re going to fail. It will take years; they won’t go down without a fight, but they will fall. What worries me is that they may take a shitload of our digital rights and civil liberties with them, on the way. This fear occasionally tends to sound like paranoia: after all, I know that the record industry or the manga publishers really have no desire to become Big Brother. They just want to make the biggest buck possible. But their efforts to change laws in their favour, to make that buck, are having much more far reaching consequences than they intend.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about. For more on that, you can read the brilliant words of Cory Doctorow almost anywhere. There’s nothing that I could say on that end of the subject that he hasn’t already said, and better. What I am here to talk about is the movie The Runaways. It’s a hugely funny and profound look at the early career of Rock Legend Joan Jett, and Cherie Currie, the lead singer of her first band. This movie is non-stop brilliance, and I do highly recommend it, but probably my favourite parts are the scenes involving record producer Kim Fowley and his brutal attempts to whip these teenage girls into a killer gimmick. And it was a gimmick that he was after. One of the tragedies of the story is that he wanted a novelty act, whereas the girls were trying to develop an actual band. When Joan Jett first approaches him for a shot at the music industry, he is quite clearly dismissive, until he hears her idea of an all girl rock band. Similarly, when it comes time to choose a lead singer, he quite literally picks Cherie Currie out of a crowd based on her look and her attitude, with the tellingly gleeful comment “genuine f-ing jailbait!” He hasn’t got a clue whether or not the girls have any actual musical talent, in either case. What he has hit upon is the advertising potential of an all girls rock band with a killer attitude. The rest is details.

The featurettes on The Runaways DVD show several people involved in the production talking about this as a “period piece”. I found this really amusing at first, because when you say “period piece” you’re not usually talking about 1975. I mean, I’m old, but I’m not that old, right? What really brings home that feeling of history are the scenes from the early band rehearsals: instead of bringing out pre-packaged songs and an auto-tuner, he has to actually teach them how to sing, how to play, and how to write songs. These were the days when producers and managers scouted talent, and actually developed it. Fowley makes it repeatedly clear that he is selling the band based on how their image can fit an advertising gimmick, but they still need to be halfway decent musicians for this to work.

“So all this is fascinating” (I hope) you’re saying, “but what does it have to do with manga?” That’s an excellent question, and I am getting there, if you’ll stick with it just a little bit longer. Kim Fowley, in this movie, is a perfectly crystallized precis of how media was been marketed to us for a long, long time. Content producers, be they record companies, movie studios, or book publishers, would scout talent, develop it, and market it to us. We, in our insatiable lust for entertainment, would hear a song on the radio, see a movie trailer, or read the back cover of a book in the store, and buy the product if it seemed good. Aside from taking a book out of the library, or occasionally borrowing something from a friend, we had no way to know if the whole product was actually good or not until we got it home. There are certainly ways to hedge your bets: when I was a kid, I would make my weekly trek to the local bookstore. I would comb through the SF section and read the back of every book until I found one that I liked the look of to spend my hard-earned money on. If I read one or two books by one author that turned out to be good, I would go straight to his name on the shelf until I had bought everything thing there was to buy by that author. That’s how I ended up with boxes full of Asimov’s books in my parents’ basement. But this method is flawed: I had a shelf full of Heinlein, including two or three mediocre later novels, before I finally realised that he had fully made the transition from “fascinatingly and challengingly original” to “creepy” concerning family dynamics. Likewise, I have read many reviews of newly released albums that make them seem really cutting edge and original, only to finally listen to a few songs off that album and think “really, this is what you were so worked up about?” How many people have emptied their wallets based on this sort of hype, only to be a bit let down in the end? Would you have bought that album, or that volume of manga, if you had been able to give it a more thorough test drive first?

The key logical fallacy of every content producer’s estimate of how much money they have lost to free digital piracy is the claim that everything that was downloaded would have been purchased, if the free download was not available. I have shelves full of legally purchased Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, and other anime, but I am not the slightest bit sorry that I didn’t shell out a 100+ bucks on the box set of Scryed or Vandread. They were enjoyable shows, to be certain, but not that enjoyable. Likewise, how many of us have downloaded the greatest hits of Cheap Trick or Loverboy for an ironic chuckle or two on a long road trip? Would you have shelled out the $15-20 for that CD, if you had not been able to to find it for free? Unlikely.

Herein lies the interesting historical lesson from The Runaways: Fowley knew that the Jailbait With Attitude image would generate enough hype to sell some albums, but Joan Jett realised that she would need to be a good musician to outlast the hype and make a living in the industry. She worked hard, developed her talent, and made that happen, as history has shown us. As the music industry became bigger and bigger, the late 90s saw acts like The Spice Girls that were the horrible bastard spawn of The Runaways: all hype and little to no talent. Their songs were pre-packaged for them, and their lack of singing ability could be covered up with advances in studio production technology. Performers like Britney Spears were scouted, packaged, and sold; not developed. Although it’s true that this process has been going on since the dawn of popular music, the late 90s saw it elevated to a fine art, reducing the lead time from Band Formation Notice in your local paper to Pop Gods dropping to almost nil, and what happened? Justin Bieber and American Idol are testaments to the fact that this still goes on, but the fact is that most people got tired of it.

I am reminded of reading Schodt’s book “Dreamland Japan” in which he talks about the process of bringing manga over to North America. When the book was written in the mid-90s this was just beginning, and one member of the industry said that his biggest fear was that manga would become fashionable enough in North America to attract the attention of bigger money: they would start the wholesale importing of any manga from Japan that looked similar to the first popular series, without any effort to pick out works of real quality. This would glut the market with crap and, as he put it “thoroughly piss in the pool”, making people tired of the “fad” and ruining it for the people in the industry that wanted to bring over the truly good works of art.

I am shocked (shocked!) to see that this is exactly what has happened to the North American anime and manga market. To be fair, anyone who has done a bit of looking will find that in Japan this is still far worse. Go to Mangafox or some other scanlation site (if you’re worried about breaking the law, you can always pull the Bill Clinton excuse: “I looked at the titles, but I didn’t actually read any of the scanlations!”) and search on terms like “shoujo”, “slice of life”, and “school life”. For every great series like Fruits Basket, there are thousands of mediocre series that are veritable clones, indistinguishable from one another. The difference is that, in Japan, it costs you the equivalent of about $5 to buy a giant manga collection that will have chapters from several series. You can buy the collection for the one you know is worth it, and try out the others in the hopes of finding something good. Alternatively, you can spend $3-6 on a volume of the manga for a better look at it. Here, that same volume will cost you anywhere from $12-18 (before sales tax), and it will come out 6 months to a year later than it did in Japan. Or you can go to a scanlation site, and try it out for free, a few days after it was released in Japan. Is there any wonder that the publishing industry can’t compete? To make things even worse, my old stand-by for hedging my bet on a good product, buying more by the same author, rarely works because an author will often only work on one series for years at a time, and when they do have multiple publications, it is rare that they will all be localized to North America.

None of this is particularly new, I know. Most of these arguments have been made in some way or form already. Everyone knows that the best long term solution to this problem is for the content producers to stop peddling us quantity over quality: people are willing to pay for the things they really like. The epiphany for me was the realisation of what I believe to be the real crux of the matter: the record, the movie, and the publishing industries most likely know this as well as we do. What they don’t know, is how to do it. Picking winners has always been somewhat of a black art, but with the decline and fall of the part of the industry that actually developed artists, in the 1990s, there is nobody left who knows how to do it at all. They got so good at the process of packaging and marketing that they forgot how to develop the talent. Worse yet: they wouldn’t know how to market that talent, even if they could develop it. After all, they have been telling us all along that every new artist they brought out was “the next big thing that’s going to change your life.” Even if that’s true, now what do you say? “This time, we really, really mean it!” Once content producers stopped actually developing quality artists, and began to rely entirely on the hype-machine to convince us that each new work had that level of quality, whether it was true or not, it was inevitable that we would eventually become desensitized to the message. The thing is that it would have worked; it was working brilliantly, until the internet came along with cheap, easy-to-access digital downloads. Now we can try it out for ourselves before we buy, and all that hype loses its power.

If Marshal McLuhan were alive today, I think he would say “the marketing creates the content”. The industry markets content, they don’t produce it. They have always done the marketing, and hoped that the product turned out to be appealing enough to live up to the hype. So now, when the marketing fails, they they don’t know how to find or create the content that will inspire a new marketing model. All of the entertainment industry’s attempts to foray into the digital world have felt flat because they are still trying to apply the same marketing model to the new medium, without realising that it is the marketing model that promotes a product, regardless of content quality, that has failed, not the medium. MP3s are more convenient in some ways than CDs, and certainly more portable, but let’s be honest: you would still be getting the CD if you could get it as cheaply and easily as you can pirate an MP3 download, in most cases.

The big digital success story has been Apple’s iTunes: the product of a member of the electronics industry, not of the entertainment industry who was savvy enough to see what people really wanted out of digital downloads: cheap and easy to use. Also, their success has mainly been due to touting people’s fears over legal problems to get them to pay the small fees they ask for digital downloads. If you removed the threat of the law from free downloads, tomorrow, Apple’s consumer base would quickly drop to zero. That’s not a success story for the industry so much as it is a stopgap against the trend towards free downloads.

I am always nervous about using terms like “revolution” because they have been so over-played, especially by the afore-mentioned marketing machine, to have lost a lot of their meaning. In this case, I do think that it’s justified, however, and I have a bit of historical evidence to prove it. What I learned from my study of the French Revolution is that every revolution really boils down to a conflict between two incompatible methods of doing the same thing. In the case of the French Revolution, the emerging Capitalism and the nouveau riches that it created in France were at odds with the entrenched power structure of Feudalism over who got to run the country and how. It got to the point where too many established aristocrats had power without the money that the capitalist class respected to back it up, and too many capitalists did not have the power that they believed their money justified. Sooner or later, something had to give.

What we see in the entertainment industry today is a conflict between the industry, which wants to keep selling quantity over quality, and a certain class of consumer that does not want to pay for something unless they know that they really like it. Everything else is details. This is not about freedom of speech, or the ability to backup your files. This is not a moral issue, this is history. History is not moral or immoral. History asks “what happened” and “why?” not “was it right?” If you want to discuss right and wrong, then you’re talking theology or philosophy, not history. And that is why this is not a digital revolution. Everything to do with the electronic media here, such as DRM, faster internet connections, and the ease of copying are contributing factors, but they are not the crux of the matter. We are so insulted when content producers say things to us like “paying for this song just once is not enough, we want you to pay for every device that you put it on”, that we forget that this is not the key issue, any more than Marie Antoinette saying “let them eat cake” was the cause of the French Revolution. This is a Content Revolution: a fight over the right to know, before I buy something, whether or not I really want it. Any analog service out there that allowed people to read as much manga as they wanted with the same ease and cost as scanlation aggregators would have had the exact same effects on the manga industry as the internet. It’s just that the internet came along first and did it best.

I know that after all this buildup, that must seem like an anti-climax. You’ve stuck with me for quite a while now, and that is where I was going with this? It’s so simple and so obvious. But then again, if someone in Paris, in 1789 had said “I have managed to make myself rich by successfully developing my business enterprise from practically nothing. Have I not proven that I am at least as worthy to rule as that Upper Class Twit of the Year, regardless of who my parents were?” then it would seem like a no-brainer, but that really was the origin of the French Revolution, in a nutshell.

The irony is that the battlegrounds in this fight over content, like the long term effects on our civil liberties and the moral issue of paying for content will probably be more important in the long run than the real cause of this revolution, in the same way that the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napolean ended up overshadowing the cause of the French Revolution. Even so, they were results, not causes. If you’re asking yourself “why should I care?” then that is your answer. If you can get at the source of the problem, then everything else falls into place. Every legal battle with the entertainment lobby over this or that invasive DRM law is really just a game of whack-a-mole, unless you get at the source of the conflict. Even if you defeat them on this law or that, they will try to find some other way to game the system to force us into buying the cow without sampling the milk first.

Obviously things are a little more complicated than this simple summary thesis: all artists do get some development effort behind them, and the process has worked at varying speeds and in varying ways across different industries. It happened first and fastest in the music industry. The manga and anime industries are only the latest to follow suit. There are exceptions to every rule. Justin Bieber’s rise to stardom seems to fit pretty well into the old model of hype-machine over originality, while many artists that are promoted by Big Entertainment really are original and do have something of value to offer. So what’s the answer? Even if you buy my argument about the root cause of what’s going on here, that doesn’t really solve the problem. The entertainment industry is going to keep trying erode our rights to protect their bottom line, while internet piracy still won’t go away. Shutting down one “pirate” site like a scanlation aggregator is like squashing a cockroach: all you do is scatter the eggs on her back, so that a hundred more cockroaches hatch and grow in every corner of the room.

Part of the solution lies with artists themselves finding ways to circumvent the entertainment industry. Ironically, the afore-mentioned Justin Bieber (I believe) got discovered after posting himself on Youtube. Other artists, like Amanda Palmer, have made a career out of selling as much as possible, directly to the fans. If the marketing creates the content, then the entertainment industry could start by trying to actually change their marketing model. The previous model was always “we will do all the work to sift through the slush and find the content that you really want, just trust us.” When they actually did do that work, it wasn’t a half bad model. But people don’t need that anymore. Search engines and free downloads let us choose for ourselves what we think is good. Maybe they need to stop trying to pretend that they know how to scout talent, and start a model based on becoming aggregator sites. What about a site that was open to free uploading of music by artists, and offered the service of a really good quality search engine to help you find new music simlilar to what you like? Add in the possibility of buying a custom designed CD based of the songs that you pick out. Think of a scanlation site like Mangafox that paid the artists to upload their work directly, instead of going through a publisher. Maybe it could offer some editing help, pay scanlators to localize the work right away, and charge a reasonable monthly fee to viewers. Cut out as much as possible the cost of producing the manga, before the digital version. They could also offer print volumes produced and mailed to you on demand, rather than printing up huge amounts of stuff based on estimates of what they think will sell.

In short, “Only pay for what you already like” is the marketing model that has already been adopted by everyone who participates in the “pirate” market right now. And let’s face it, that’s almost everybody, at some point or another. Anything else you try to sell them is pretty much doomed to fail, regardless of whether you think it’s “right” or “wrong”. Even if you are right, morally speaking, that’s no guarantee that you’ll come out on top. Louis the XVI was probably absolutely convinced of his divine right to rule, right up until the second that his head dropped into the basket.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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