Now That's Some Serious Self-Promotion

How Writers Build the Brand suggests that we are all sad PR amateurs compared to the writers who came before us.

You Know, The Guys Can Have Curious George

New Study Finds Gender Bias in Children's Books in The New York Times. I don't doubt this, but I can't say I ever felt any loss because Curious George is a guy. He's kind of a bumbler.

The comments after the article are more interesting than the article, itself.

A New Penderwicks

I just heard on facebook that there's a third Penderwicks book. That's one of the better, more useful, things I've heard on facebook.

Is To Kill A Mockingbird Love A Generational Thing?

The Long Life of a Mockingbird appears in the most recent The Horn Book. In it, author Chelsey Philpott talks about Mockingbird's impact on popular culture and young adult literature.

I find To Kill a Mockingbird a lot like Catcher in the Rye in that it is an adult book that has cast a very long shadow on YA literature. Just as there have been many books in which unhappy teen boys have discovered that life sucks since Holden Caulfield whined his way into American literature, there have been plenty of books in which girls learn something big and meaningful about life while living in small towns, surrounded by eccentric, kind of mystical, small town characters. That business about learning something...anything...may be the reason these adult books became part of the high school canon.

But questions have arisen over just how meaningful young readers find Catcher. To Kill a Mockingbird came up in a recent booky correspondence with my nephew, the elementary school teacher, and he described it as a title that was shoved down their throats when he was in high school. He definitely didn't seem to find it highly significant in any way, and I haven't run into any other people his age who embrace it.

Certainly not the way I embraced it when I was in my early teens and reading it on my own, before anyone started teaching it. It was probably one of the first "literary" adult novels I read. I'm guessing my experience was similar to that of many readers my generation--the generation that places books on reading lists and approves them for teaching in classrooms. We loved it, we think we learned something from it, so it must be important enough to teach to another generation.

When I reread Mockingbird a second time, maybe twenty or thirty years after my first reading, it held up pretty well. But I didn't see it as some meaningful work about racism. Instead, it seemed like a daddy book to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But wouldn't father worship make an interesting class discussion with YAs. "What? There are people who worship their fathers? Why?"

My experience teaching Sunday school in a main stream Protestant church also raised a big question for me regarding Mockingbird. "'Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something...," Scout says. As a Catholic child at the time I was reading the book, that was a powerful statement. But my children didn't hear a lot about sin in their religious instruction, and I suspect our church wasn't alone in avoiding discussion of that concept with the young. "Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." What does that mean to someone who hasn't had a good, strong education in just what sin is and what it means to be a sinner?

If To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye don't maintain their position in the YA canon, and I, personally, think they won't, it will be interesting to see what adolescents are being taught in another twenty years or so.

Oh! Oh! A Literary Fight!

Well, it's not a truly literary fight the way the Lillian Hellman/Mary McCarthy thing was, because Neil Gaiman was the only literary figure involved. And he wasn't really fighting, he was just laughing at the Minnesota politician who called him a "pencil-necked little weasel" because he accepted a payment from a Minnesota state arts fund for speaking at a Minnesota library. But the politician did say he hates Gaiman. And it was all very entertaining.

The question that arises for me (And I always have a question, don't I?--Oh! There's another!) is did Neil Gaiman hold a gun to someone's head and say, "Stand and deliver, your money or your life?" I understand that people involved with providing funding for organizations that engage speakers may not want to see a lot of their money going to any one individual speaker. (Gaiman was not poorly paid.) But isn't their issue with the organization's policies and not with the speakers who enter into contracts with the organization? The organization did not have to hire Gaiman. He was not forcing anyone to do anything; he was hired to perform a job.

Don't get all riled up, anyone. I'm not saying funding should be cut for anything. I'm not stupid. I'm just saying the complaint here should have been addressed to the administrative organization that wrote the check and not to the laborer who received it for his work.

Oh, The Humanity!

If you don't follow my personal facebook page, which is not to be confused with my professional facebook page, where all the photos are, you don't know that I was quite seriously traumatized yesterday. I realized that I had lost Chapter 11 of a fifteen chapter (to date) work in progress.

I understand how it happened. It's totally logical. A couple of months ago, I started working on the bedroom laptop for a half an hour or so first thing in the morning. This has really improved my output. But on the laptop I save directly to a flash drive (also known, I'm told, as a thumb drive, and, at our house, as a sticky thing). I also work on a desktop in the office where I save to the computer's hard drive. I save the hard drive's work to the flash drive and transfer the flash drive's work to the desk top's hard drive, thus, presumably, always having two copies of everything.

Things became more complicated about a month or more ago, when I decided to write a new Chapter Six. Each one of my chapters is kept in a separate file. So once I did a new Chapter Six, the original Chapter Six became Chapter Seven, and everything had to be moved from that point.

I am sure there is some logical, techie way to have renamed everything, but I shuffled instead. Between the moving back and forth between drives and the shuffling, Chapter Ten, which should have become Chapter Eleven was lost, and Chapter Eleven and Twelve were duplicates.

Sad, sad, sad.

Well, guess who saved the day. Yes, yes, that's right. Computer Guy. He backs up the desktop's harddrive every week, but he doesn't override past backups because...Well, we won't get into that. It is enough to say that he was able to find the missing material in the back up from a few weeks back.

I didn't work much today because am still recovering from this experience.

Yes, YA Is About Identity

Chris Barton on Unbridled Silliness & Carefully Researched Truth-telling is an excellent guest post at Cynsations. Chris, who I kind of know in that weird Internet way, writes about how his new book, Can I See Your I.D.? came to be and says that the book is about identity "a theme that a YA audience, especially, can relate to. They’re at a point in their lives when “Who am I?” is neither an idle nor an uncommon question."

I've never thought of nonfiction as having themes, but it's an interesting idea. Just at dinner this evening, a couple of us were talking about documentaries, and one I saw that I always describe as being just random information. "It had no point," I said. After reading Chris's piece, I think what that documentary was missing was some kind of thematic organization.

Now I will look for that in my nonfiction reading.

How Lovely Are These?

Camille at Book Moot linked to A publisher's postbag--in pictures, a selection of illustrated envelopes sent to a British publisher.

Was anyone else reminded of Griffin & Sabine?

I Need To Come Up With An Answer For Those Questions

While I was at that shower yesterday, I met someone who asked me both of my least favorite questions. She was a family member of a family member, so she knew I was a writer. In fact, when we met, she said, "Oh, you're the writer," which sounded as if we were getting off to a great start because, believe me, I very, very rarely hear that. Even after someone learns that I'm a writer, they're rarely impressed because I didn't write Harry Potter or Twilight. (Believe it or not, in the circles I travel in, no one has heard of The Hunger Games. Maybe after the movie comes out.)

Anyway, we're talking a bit about how I may have visited one of her kids' schools, and this woman says, "So you make a living writing?"

Awkward.

I said, "Well,it's definitely not a living. I don't know any writers who make a living writing."

That was a very defensive thing to say, but it's also true. The most successful writer I've met, personally, was still working part-time as a technical writer. I'm not talking about writers sitting up on panels at conferences, of course. (I've been in the same room with Rick Riordan, and once I was so close to Tomie DePaolo I could have hit him.) I'm talking about writers who ate lunch with me at conferences.

How Authors Get Paid by Cinda Williams Chima explains why so few of us make a living writing.

Okay, so after we've made clear that I can't support myself, she asks me, "What else do you do?"

In case it's not clear, she meant "What else do you do that generates income?" Now that's another awkward question. And it's not awkward because I do a lot of traditional women's homemaking/family care-type work and feel that that is unworthy in some way. I am a feminist. I hold traditional women's work in high regard. No, this is not a gender thing by any means. That second question is awkward for me because it is usually, if not always, asked by people who I know do not have the luxury of living in a home with one breadwinner. Most must have two. And, in this case, the question came from a single woman who absolutely had to work and make enough income to live on.

So I have to tell these people that I am supported by a male worker so that I can choose to work in a field that pays too poorly to provide for myself, forget about a family. And, yeah, I don't like having to do that.

Every time these questions come up, I promise myself that I will come up with a stock answer that I'm happy with. But always, after a couple of days, I'm busy with other things and forget about it.

You Never Know Why Someone Might Like Your Work

Yesterday I spent three hours at a bridal shower. I've written before about how lame I am at conferences. Showers, the same thing. There is some question about whether or not I have a hormone defiency that makes it impossible for me to get all excited when some poor engaged woman has to cut a ribbon on a package and everyone cheers because that's supposed to mean another child for the happy bride. What the hell century are we living in, anyway?

Here's what's weird, though. If you look at the picture at the right taken at the shower, you will see that it looks amazingly like lunch at a writers' conference. Seriously. I'm not making this up. Other writers--am I right?

But that's not the point of this post. The point is...is...yeah...here it is:

One of the other guests was a reading teacher from the local middle school, whom I just happen to know. We chatted for a bit, and she told me that she's still using The Hero of Ticonderoga with some of her slower readers, even though it's a middle grade novel and thus somewhat young for her seventh graders. She says that what ups the difficulty level for this book and her readers is the father's dialect. He speaks with a French accent, him.

The fact that Nancy, she grew up in Vermont, her, with two Franco-American parents who spoke like that is a draw, too.