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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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.

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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.

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From Food

I’ve been on break from school for a while. I wish I could say that I did something truly amazing with my time, but I mostly focused on watching Twin Peaks, doing yoga, and finally figuring out how to make brown rice properly on a stovetop. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I seem to finally have discovered the method that works for me. The secret is washing the rice. Over and over. Three times, at least. You drop the rice in a bowl, run cold water over it, then polish it between your fingers like Ebenezer Scrooge counting the last of the day’s shillings on a cold December afternoon. When the water becomes cloudy, use your hand like a sieve and tip the bowl over, draining out the water between your fingers without losing too many grains. Lather, rinse, repeat. You are finished when the water runs clear. It’s slow, but it works. For one cup of rice, I use 1 1/4 cup water. I bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to the lowest possible setting, and do my best to wait patiently. It’s hard not to open up the pot and meddle with the process. But nothing destroys rice faster than over-attention; too much stirring and you have risotto instead of sushi.

This break I’ve also finally learned how to sear a perfectly moist chicken breast, and how to make the right macaroni and cheese. (I love macaroni and cheese. Without those crucial bits of butter and milk during my growing years, I’d have wound up even shorter. But now I make mine with broccoli, Worcestershire sauce, and my all-important Calphalon saucepan.) Nothing fancy, just techniques that make things easier later. It feels good, getting these small things right.

I also received Peter and Caitlin’s notes on the novel. I suspect that they had several “spare the rod, spoil the child” discussions before giving me those notes. For two people who approach their craft from such different points, they wound up agreeing on a number of issues. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a plan. I’m thinking of the story as a story again, and not a checklist, and remembering what made me want to write it in the first place. All the decisions I was loath to make earlier on are much easier and clearer, now, and it feels good to have it under my hands, polishing it, clarifying it.

It’s there when I go to sleep and it’s still there when I wake up. I missed it.

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Charles Tan was kind enough to interview me about The Shine Anthology, and you can read it here.

Snip:

CT: What made you decide to write science fiction?

MA: A lot of things. I was raised in a science fiction household. My dad had this copy of “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” under the bed, the one with Maureen doing her Birth of Venus thing on the cover. We also had the Dune and Foundation novels around, and we watched a lot of media SF on television. But I didn’t really want to write it until university, when I was studying it academically, and when I had already watched a lot of SF anime, which in my opinion is usually far better than live-action SF TV from the States or elsewhere. Plus, I knew it was an area where I could distinguish myself. There are throngs of women in their twenties writing about vampires and angels. But my thing is robots, and the humans who love them, right up until the moment their hearts are ripped from their chests.

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In case anyone’s curious, I’ve gotten feedback on my manuscript from both my agent and (most of) my workshop. I’m still waiting on a couple of opinions which really matter to me, and for this reason I’ve been reticent to attempt any re-writing. I’m waiting until all the science is in, to use a climate-denier phrase.

That said, I’m slowly growing more excited about the process. Everyone has a slightly different take on the book, but the good news is that they all enjoyed it (if for different reasons). It’s tough to reconcile all those opinions and desires and nagging questions, and I feel like I’m cooking vegan, kosher, and hypo-allergenic all in the same dish. But I know that the flavour is in there, waiting to be sweated out, and eventually everything will approach some semblance of cohesion. I think the first step might be re-reading it and making notes for myself, but not touching anything. It’s very hard for me not to fix and tweak as I go, but in this case I think I’ll have to sit on my hands. I’m not even sure I’ve read the whole thing in one go, before. I wrote it in isolated chapters, and at one point I went back and edited and re-wrote from the very beginning. I think the manuscript benefited from that, so in theory doing the same thing all over again with a more focused and informed mindset should help.

Still. I could screw it up.

In the meantime, there’s an absurd amount of homework to do. Seriously.

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It occurred to me this morning that yoga is a lot like writing. There are a hundred tiny movements in one single transition, and you must be aware of all of them to execute the total process (the series of transitions) to its best effect. Unfortunately, each of those tiny movements can be draining if not outright painful, and your awareness of this fact does nothing to build confidence.

Maybe you’ll understand if you try it:

The thing I both love and hate about yoga is how aware it forces the practitioner to be of all her failings. It can be easy to hurry through other workouts: when I lifted weights, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth and refused to breathe as I counted out each chest press. This is part of why I never got anywhere with it: the pain was negligible, but I deliberately made it unpleasant for myself. I put myself in competition with everyone around me (yes, I’m the psycho at your gym who stares at your toned shoulders and silently resents you for them, that’s me) for no reason. I made it impossible for myself to succeed, much less enjoy myself. I was focused on the numbers, raising them every week, but didn’t gain any sense of accomplishment from doing so. That’s because I hadn’t accomplished anything but putting additional pressure on my spine.

My spine and I have a weird relationship. You see, it’s curved. It used to be more curved, and when I was younger there was some debate as to whether I should be put in a back brace. I wished and hoped and prayed that this would not be so, and then it wasn’t. Now I wonder if maybe I should have just worn the damn thing. Orthodontic braces fixed my molars, after all — maybe a prescription corset could have fixed my posture. Today, at 26, I’m plagued with persistent lower back pain and occasional neck pain. Part of that is my inability (or unwillingness) to sit up straight as I’m typing. To date, yoga and Pilates are the only semi-permanent fixes I’ve found for these issues. Painkillers and hot packs work in the short term, but they do nothing to relieve the tightness in the muscles or the misalignment that creates it. To fix the problem, you have to address the root cause, and re-align from within.

I’d love it if yoga sculpted my body into something I could enjoy looking at. I’d love it if it made me measurably healthier, if it slowed my pulse or improved my circulation. But the real reason I do it is so that I won’t hurt any more.

I write for basically the same reason. I get the same sense of accomplishment from both activities: that awareness of incremental progress, the once-difficult stretches slowly becoming more fluid, the Hey, I kept my balance, this time, when it all works. By no means am I proficient, but I have a definite sense of improvement. I know I’ve succeeded if I can stretch just that little bit further or bend that little bit deeper. It has nothing to do with numbers. It has to do with me, alone on the mat, trembling. In the end, the blank page is not so different.

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There’s a poll up at Escape Artists asking which the best episode of Escape Pod was in 2009. Vote for “βoyfriend” (and Tina Connolly’s awesome reading of it) there.

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Recently, two separate posts have gotten under my skin and forced me to re-examine the book I’m trying to write. (I’m trying, I promise. Really. It’s just that everything I do looks wrong, and this is part of the reason why.)

The first is Jetse de Vries Christmas present to the genre: Should SF Die? Jetse distills his point here:

My viewpoint is that SF is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and that lack of relevance can be attributed to developments and trends already mentioned in the points above [SF is morally and ethically bankrupt; SF is monolithically angophilic; SF is commercially dead; SF has ditched science and become fantasy] and SF’s unwillingness to really engage with the here-and-now. That doesn’t mean that SF needs to die (actually, a slow marginalisation into an increasingly neglected and despised niche-cum-ghetto is probably a fate worse than death), but it does mean that SF needs to change, and that it needs to become much more inclusive of the alien (and I mean alien in ‘humans-can-be-aliens-to-each-other’ sense) and proactive, meaning it should not just shout ‘FIRE! FIRE!’ (and do almost nothing but), but both man the fire trucks *and* think of ways to prevent more fires.

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You’ll recall that “the airing of the grievances” is a Festivus tradition. At this moment, I have approximately an hour and forty-five minutes left of Festivus, so I intend to air a major grievance.

With myself.

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