The Fates Are Working Against Me

Last week, as I may or may not have mentioned, an editor said she'd be happy to look at a new manuscript I've completed. I've been struggling to put some finishing touches on the thing so I could get it out in the mail to her. I was printing it just now when...you guessed it...the ink cartridge gave up the ghost. Unfortunately, the only way I can make my printer stop printing is to turn it off. Sounds simple, right? Except there doesn't seem to be any way to give the thing instructions. So when it is thwarted, it goes over the edge. When it's turned on again, it spits out pages with lines of gibberish. I try rebooting. I try rebooting again. Sometimes a day of rest makes it feel better.

Yes, I know I need a new printer. I am not a big fan of shopping, and shopping for a new printer? The word deadly has got to describe the experience.

It's That Time of Year Again

No, I don't mean Christmas. I'm already sick of that. I mean Buy A Friend A Book Week. It comes around four times a year, and the next one is the first week of January.

Remember, this isn't about birthday presents, anniversaries, or anything like that. It's about buying a book you otherwise wouldn't have bought. It's about going out and putting out some cold, hard cash for a book that you think would be the perfect match for someone.

Yeah, you're right. This is a made up event like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day...I could go on and on. But it's also a chance to support an industry that's supposed to be struggling these days. (Oh, please tell me I don't sound like a fundraiser for National Public Radio.)

Here's the thing--if we do enough to promote Buy A Friend A Book Week, maybe at some point friends will start buying books for us. And it's not as if we aren't out spending a fortune on gifts this month, anyway. What's one more?

If Only Lindsay Lohan Were Six Years Old

Ramona Quimby is going to be in a movie.

This series of children's books is so old that I should have been reading them when I was a kid. Instead I was introduced to them much later while reading with young relatives. I can't say I was ever terribly attracted to young Ramona, but the younger members of my family were very fond of her.

All of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books will be rereleased in honor of her (Cleary's) 90th birthday. I've got a birthday coming up. I hope I get something like that, though I'm really just expecting a new CD or a magazine subcription. (Thanks to Book Moot for the link.)

Now You, Too, Can Hear J.K. Rowling

BBC Radio 4 carried an interview with J.K. Rowling. I haven't listened to it yet because it's 30 minutes long.

She is interviewed by Stephen Frye who is the voice of the Harry Potter audio books. (At least the ones sold in England.) He is also an author of a couple of novels, one of which I read and enjoyed. It was a book about a school boy that is totally inappropriate for schoolboys to read. (Thanks to Kids Lit for the link.)

Treading Water

I'm not getting a whole lot done on any front. I do hope to get a new manuscript out to an editor this week and to send ARCs to three magazines. Those are my total writing goals. Tragic, just tragic.

I'm reading The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer. I was finding it flat and disappointing and only kept slogging along because it's this month selection in the YA Forum at Readerville. Then the Vikings came. I'm much happier now.

Can't We All Get Along?

Check out the November 30th and December 2 entries in Meg's Diary, as in Meg Cabot of The Princess Diaries and other books. She clearly has her knickers in a twist over literary novelists. I've never been clear on what literary novels are, though Meg Cabot would argue that they're books with unhappy endings.

Meg gets the ball rolling by complaining that Curtis Sittenfeld called Melissa Bank's book The Wonder Spot chick lit in a review. Them's fighting words!

She seems to think Sittenfeld is a literary author (also fighting words, at least to Meg) though I'm not sure why. Because Sittenfeld's book Prep is about a private school and not a public one? Because she's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop? It can't be because Prep has an unhappy ending because Meg hasn't read it so she doesn't know how it ends.

I want to be clear here that I haven't read Prep, either. Not because I don't like literary novels, but because I don't like books about private schools. Looking for Alaska was the last straw.

But back to Meg. She quotes Sittenfeld as saying in her review of The Wonder Spot "“To suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut -- doesn't the term basically bring down all of us? And yet, with ''The Wonder Spot,'' it's hard to resist.”" Then Meg says that she's pretty sure that Sittenfeld inferred that Melissa Bank is a slut.

If I were being catty, I'd point out that I'm pretty sure (though not positive) that Meg used "inferred" incorrectly. But I hate it when someone makes a big deal about pointing out another person's slip-ups with words. I also hate the whole chick lit vs literary lit battle. Also the highbrow literature vs lowbrow literature battle. All readers are important, valuable people. What they choose to read is what makes a piece of literature valuable, if only to them. We don't have a right to knock readers' taste by disparaging what they choose to read as chick lit or...what? Shall we call it lit lit?

The whole chick lit/lit lit and highbrow/lowbrow argument isn't about books. It's about authors' egos. Everyone wants to be better than someone else. Or, at least, not worse than someone else. Name calling (chick lit, lit lit, slut) does not make anyone a winner. This is a battle that can't be won. Let it go.

Of course, I'm speaking as someone whose work has never been accused of being chick lit or literary.

Thanks to A Chair, A Fireplace, and A Tea Cozy for the link.

Does This Sound Familiar to Anyone Else?

In The Fiction Machine, The Workshop and the Hacks Sam Sacks says of Best New American Voices 2006"All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator's difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity.

Isn't this a common complaint of YA fiction? Perhaps it's not a problem specific to YA but to fiction in general. (Thanks to ArtsJournal.com for the link.)

Maybe the Book is Different

Yesterday I watched Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen while I was ironing clothes. I haven't read the book of the same name by Dyan Sheldon. I definitely liked the main character, but I think it's fair to describe the movie as a formula high school story. Not very subtle in the message department, either.

Sheldon also wrote Planet Janet, which I couldn't get through because it seemed like too much of a clone of the Georgia Nicholson books.

Speaking of which, the Georgia book in which she goes to Hamburger-a-go-go Land is waiting for me in my To Be Read basket.

Let's Visit Some Other Bloggers

Pooja Makhijani, author of Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, has a page at her website called South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora in Children's Literature. Fortunately for me, she defines "diaspora."

I lost the URL for this site and tried googling "South Asian Children's Literature." I only came up with two pages. So there's not a lot of information out there on this subject.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned Your Fairy Bookmother here before. It's one of the kidlit blogs that I'm watching. She has an entry Goodbye wardrobe, my old friend that, thank goodness, doesn't address the religious aspects of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Instead, she talks about the quality of the writing. She also makes a distinction between fancy and fantasy, which I found rather interesting. Especially since I'd never heard of writing described as fancy. At least, not the kind of fancy Bookmother is talking about.

An Interesting Evening

Last night I had to spend the evening reading over a hundred pages of a book that was overdue at the library and that I couldn't renew again. I stretched out on the couch next to the woodstove, listened to the radio, drank a cup of hot chocolate...It wasn't a bad time. What's more, out of the blue I came up with a way to end the new book I'm working on. Maybe those people who insist we should all turn off our televisions are on to something.

Nah.

Here's Something Different

youngadultARCs is a website devoted to sharing ARCs. ARCs are advanced reader copies (my publisher refers to them as bound galleys) that are distributed before publication to reviewers, librarians, booksellers, etc. The idea is to give reviewers an opportunity to read the books and write a review that will be published around publication time, to give librarians an opportuntity to decide whether or not they want to purchase the book for their collections, to give booksellers...well, you get the point.

ARCs are not for resale or for use in library collections. They are bound from uncorrected galleys so there may be all kinds of printers' errors, the authors and editors may make changes, and they may not include illustrations. To treat these as a finished book is unjust both to the author and publisher and to the reading public. The book just isn't finished.

So what should people with access to arcs do with them after they've read them? Well, the folks at this website came up with an idea for sharing them. The site looks as if it serves primarily young adult librarians. It looks to me as if this is an attempt to pass arcs around to exactly the people who should be reading them.

Arcs shouldn't be sold on ebay, people!!! They shouldn't be shelved with library collections!!! (I saw 3 arcs on the new book shelf at a nearby library last September. One of them wasn't going to be published until next month.) They should be passed along to librarians, teachers, booksellers, anyone who is in the business of talking up books.

Good luck, youngadultARCs.

I found youngadultARCs through bookshelves of doom, which I found through Kids Lit.

Kidlit in the News

The Brits are still going on and on about Narnia. Perhaps nothing much is happening over there right now.

We, on the other hand, tend to drone on and on about what children's literature should be. In Reading Kids Books Without the Kids in The New York Times, Edward Rothstein objects to what he calls teen pulp.

He quotes Dr. Alison Gopnik, who he says is a cognitive scientist who has studied children's learning, as saying "that children read the way scientists work: they experiment with different ways of ordering the world, exploring alternate modes of understanding." But then he objects to teen pulp (which he doesn't actually define, by the way), because "Those books are meant to be close reflections of their readers, mirrors of their fantasies. The characters are just different enough from the readers to spur curiosity and sexual interest, and just similar enough to guarantee identification."

If by teen pulp Rothstein is talking about "realistic" teen fiction or what Moira Redmond at Slate calls dreadlit, then I think he's got it totally wrong. Books about teen angst and suffering definitely give teen readers an opportunity to explore alternative lives. Come on, how many real kids live like the teens in Looking for Alaska?

In the very next paragraph of his New York Times article, Rothstein says, "A great children's book, though, does not reflect the world or its reader. It plays within the world. It explores possibilities. It confounds expectations."

Ah...no. Maybe to an adult that's a great children's book, but don't kids want to read about people like themselves just the way adults want to read about people like themselves? They may enjoy having their expectations confounded, but so do adults. We're not talking about something unique to children here.

Rothstein's take on kidlit seems like another example of romanticizing children and their reading. And there's something about romanticizing children that seems both patronizing and controlling to me.

I Don't Know Why I'm Doing This

For someone who didn't get The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I'm spending an awful lot of time reading about its author. This article doesn't seem to have anything new to say as far as I can tell.

I Do Know Why I Did This

As part of my never ending quest to become a better human being (by which I mean a more productive one), I just finished skimming Organizing for Your Brain Type: Finding Your Own Solution to Managing Time, Paper, and Stuff by Lanna Nakone. I don't know if reading the book is going to help me (one family member suggested that instead of reading it I should have used the time to clean the kitchen counter), but it may have clarified my problems with disorganization.

According to Nakone, there are four brain types. I took the quiz in her book, and the results indicate that I am a maintaining style. That means I am "organized--in the traditional sense of the word." (Does anyone else get the feeling that that is a bad thing?) Maintaining style types like myself have all kinds of wonderful characteristics--we're detail-oriented, practical, accurate, disciplined, able to think ahead. I could go on and on about how wonderful we are.

All of which leads me to wonder--how come I'm not writing a book a year, cranking out publishable essays and short stories, and coming up with highly original and successful marketing schemes for my writing?

Here's my theory: The quiz showed that I have a lot of characteristics of the innovating style thinker. I'm artistic and all that, but I'm also easily distracted when I'm not too absorbed in one thing. (Usually something like reading magazines or surfing the net.)

So what I think is happening is that my innovating style self is torturing my maintaining style self.

Nakone talks a lot about to do lists and calendars. Hey, she doesn't have to convince me. A couple of years ago I had about six weeks when I was really organized and doing well. I was working with three to do lists--a weekly list for the house and family, a weekly list for work, and and a daily list that combined both. I also had two calendars--one for the house and one for my purse. I'm going to try to go back to that system, but add a third calendar dedicated specifically to work.

Today I will be able to finish all but one item on my to do list. That was figuring out what we're going to be eating this week so I'll be prepared and not have to take time making the decision each day. If you can't get to one item on your to do list, that's the one it should be. Because who are we kidding? Of course you're going to eat every day anyway, right?

I Guess I Won't Tell You About That After All

I was going to tell you about how my bound galleys for Happy Kid! arrived today and my plans for publicizing the book. But then I went to ArtsJournal.com. The folks there linked to a San Francisco Chronicle article that included the following: "Writing is not an inherently interesting profession. It's very boring to watch...It's paint drying." So I thought better of my plan.

The author of The Chronicle article also said, "Writers do not dress well, and they frequently mumble." All too true, I'm sorry to say.

Perhaps Not the Best Time to be Writing a Picture Book

Over a year ago, my editor rejected my picture book submission saying it wasn't a good time for picture books. Publisher Weekly says she wasn't just blowing me off. As luck would have it, in the next week or two I'll be contacting my new editor to see if she's interested in taking a look at the chapter book that picture book manuscript evolved into. Oops! More boring writer stuff. (Thanks to Chicken Spaghetti for the link.)

Sometimes a Kid Just Isn't in the Mood for Art

Yesterday I was getting all teary-eyed while writing about my family's experiences with The Berenstain Bears. Bet the guy who wrote this "appreciation" didn't have that problem.