So Wouldn't Selina Meyer's Office Be Hysterical In Publishing?

First off, let me set the stage for you. I've been working in bed, and now on the couch, today because I'm fighting off a cold that I just can't succumb to because I'm running a family thing this weekend that I will probably tell you all about because it totally relates. So while I was soaking in the tub, trying to sweat out whatever is bothering me, I was reading a book review in a popular magazine. The YA book being reviewed sounded pretty ho-hum to me, and the one-line quote? I looked at it and thought, This is mindless B.S. What does it even mean?  What @#!! thought this was something that should be pulled out for promotion? Who the #&** are they promoting to? 

Then I realized I was channeling Veep. I've been binge watching it this week during a TV Watchathon. In fact, I'm binge watching season two right now because of that business of trying to convince my body not to get sick.

What I'm thinking now is Selina Meyer running her own book imprint. The entire V.P.'s staff could be her editorial staff. Instead of Selina always asking Sue if the President has called, she will ask if the publisher has called. The staff can fight with marketing. Selina can fight with other editors over authors. She can try dumping authors she thinks won't earn back their advances onto other editors.

And, get this:  Julia Louis-Dreyfus used to play an editor!

This could work.  

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Five: Eco-humor

Part of Michael's job as office peon at the editorial offices of The Earth's Wife is to screen in-coming e-mails, which is how he stumbles upon a plot involving a major manufacturer and insulation. But he has to read a few e-mails before he gets to that point. Both the e-mails in this post illustrate humor that comes from the disconnect that occurs when two unrelated ideas/events come together.

The following e-mail was funny at the time because when Saving the Planet & Stuff first appeared in 2003 fiction about the environment wasn't common. The term climate fiction was still a few years away. Nature writing tended to be Thoreau-type essays. Journalists covered the environment. So the idea of eco-fiction was funny because it didn't exist.

Now eco-fiction is a term that is used and discussed, so the idea of eco-fiction is no longer funny. The humor in this first e-mail now relies pretty much on comparing eco-fiction to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Dear Earths' Wife,
Kudos on another wonderful issue!
One suggestion—Have you ever considered doing a fiction issue? No one is publishing eco-fiction right now. I don't know why. You could do a special issue once a year on ecologically themed literature the way Sports Illustrated does a special issue once a year on women's swimsuits. Look how much people look forward to that!

This next e-mail illustrates why hypocrisy can be funny.  Totally clueless characters who say one thing but do another can often be mined for laughs because they are providing that disconnect between two unrelated ideas/concepts.

To the Editor:
I very much enjoyed last month's article on the pollution caused by vehicles using drive-up windows at fastfood restaurants and banks. You only have to sit in a line of cars waiting ten minutes or more for a couple of burgers and a shake, as I have done many times, to realize our atmosphere is being poisoned. Last week I used drive-up windows at a bank twice and a drugstore once. Isn't it awful that you can get your prescriptions at drive-up windows now? It ought to be a crime, all those cars sitting there with their engines running. I counted eight the last time I was at Burger King. I wouldn't have used the drive-up that day, myself, but it looked as if there was no place to sit inside anyway.

Additionally, drive-up windows are a particular environmental complaint of mine. Why does no one do a study on the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere because tens of thousands of people can't get out of their cars to buy a Big Mac? I can't be the only person who wonders about that. Can I?

The Environmental Book Club

I have finally found an environmental book for older readers, and it is terrific.

Sixteen-year-old Laura, the journal keeping main character in The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd, is a member of a punk band. She has an appalling older sister, and her parents are falling apart. Sounds pretty generic YA, doesn't it? What makes this book riveting is its setting and its main character.

Are Good Environmental Books All About Setting?

The 2015 Britain of The Carbon Diaries is one suffering from energy shortages and horrific climate problems, as is the rest of the world. Britain, however, is the first country to start carbon rationing. The book is Laura's account of her family and neighbors dealing with limited access to energy while suffering through an extreme winter, a drought, and torrential rain. Her older sister is appalling because she is bitter and angry about her gap year in America being cancelled. Her parents are falling apart because they're having trouble coping with the social change they're being hammered with. Dad, for instance, is the head of a travel and tourism school. With carbon restrictions, people can't travel. That pretty much puts an end to the tourist industry in Britain, and he loses his job.

The book isn't a cautionary tale, in my humble opinion. It's much more of a thriller. What's going to happen next and how will the characters survive it? Though Laura comments on the selfishness of others a couple of times and wants very much for the rest of the world to get on board with carbon rationing, this is not a "Let's save the planet!" story. There is no instructive message.

I'm sure many reviewers probably write about The Carbon Diaries' environmental themes. I always have trouble determining what an environmental theme would be. I've seen some writers calls The Carbon Diaries' theme "climate change." That seems more like a subject to me. I would say the theme of The Carbon Diaries involves a teenager struggling to find her place as an older person in her family and her place in society, one that is dramatically changing. Those are traditional YA themes, not environmental ones. It's the environmental setting that makes those traditional YA themes interesting and makes this book environmental.

Isn't climate fiction, fiction dealing with climate change, all about setting?

A Good Character Always Does Wonders For A Book

Laura is like an edgier, smarter Georgia Nicholson. The format of the book is even similar to the Georgia Nicholson books. It's a journal, of course, and there are several pages at the end translating British terms for American readers, which you find in Georgia's books. This is not a complaint. I like Georgia. I like Laura.

A Good Book Doesn't Have To Teach You Anything

Though The Carbon Diaries doesn't insist that readers do anything, the characters' struggle was so intense that it has an impact. I hadn't read much before I started obsessing about whether or not I'd turned the heat down at night. I freaked out a bit over that power outage in Washington earlier this week. And, yikes! They're rationing water in California!! 

Very few people like to be preached at or taught. If a piece of fiction is well done, it creates a response in readers without doing either of those things.

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Four: Older Characters And Ignoring Beta Readers

Kathy, my editor, said she didn't think she'd ever seen older characters like Walt and Nora in a children's book. I wanted to create characters with powerful personalities who had interests with which they were totally engaged. At the same time, I wanted to be clear that these were not young people. Nora's hair has faded and her face is lined. Walt is balding, has a bad eye, and is losing muscle tone.

Michael has to see both those aspects of Walt and Nora, that they are aging but that that doesn't change their commitment to and interest in the world. That is the point of the following excerpt.

    Spandex girlie things on an old lady, Michael thought. Oh, jeez.
    He supposed that for a woman of her advanced years Nora looked pretty good in her skimpy workout wear. Her upper arms, Michael couldn't help noticing, were in much better shape than his own, and there was nothing hanging over the top of the little panty/shorts/whatever she was wearing. That was as much as he could take in before his vision began to blur.
    I'm being struck blind, he thought hysterically. Thank God.
    "… and lifting weights maintains bone density," Nora concluded as she switched to bicep curls. "If you can maintain bone density, you can eliminate a lot of health problems that require prescription drugs. If you can stay off prescription drugs, you can avoid supporting the pharmaceutical industry, which is making a fortune off our medications. We did an article on that in The Earth's Wife, oh, just last year. Honestly, who really wants to support the pharmaceutical industry?"
    Michael—who was quite certain that if he made it into some third-tier college, his mother's investments in pharmaceutical stock would be paying his tuition—smiled and nodded without committing himself to anything.

I had three teenage boys read Saving the Planet & Stuff before publication. At least two of them insisted this scene had to go. One of them was very insistent. He was kind of horrified, to be honest.

Do other writers ignore their beta readers the way I ignored mine?

Time Management Tuesday: So Just Do Less

I've written about the busyness issue here before. Being busy, which is often different from working hard, is a common condition that, oddly enough, can keep us from actually doing things.

Well, I'm going to write about it again.

Finding Your Sweet Spot: How to be Happier and More Productive--By Doing Less appeared in The Globe and Mail earlier this year. It's an interview with Christine Carter, a sociologist at UC Berkely who has written The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and at Work. According to the article, "the sweet spot" is a sports reference, the "ideal place where power and ease meet." Carter suggests that people identify the minimum they need to do in order to be effective, presumably their sweet spot. More is not necessarily better.

Carter uses the terms “maximizers” and "satsificers".  She says maximizers are people who collect all the information they can find before making a decision. Satsificers are people who determine criteria for success and then  stop looking for information once they meet it. If I end up reading this book, I'd like to see how these two ideas can be applied to writing.

I tend to become interested in concepts I've already dabbled with myself. A couple of years ago, I had to determine a baseline of home maintenance I could live with and just work to that, because I had only one day a week that I wasn't working or doing elder care. I couldn't do my share of house and yard maintenance in one day and have any kind of a personal/recreational life. Last fall when I came back from vacation I was in better physical shape than I'd been in before I left because of all the biking and walking I'd done while I was away. Since I was stronger and had better endurance, I tried to exercise harder so I could exercise for a shorter period of time each day.

So you can see that the concepts Carter writes about grab my attention.

She is a supporter of the unit system, too. Like Tony Schwartz, she advocates 90-minute units.

Finding Your Sweet Spot could be a good summer time management read for me.

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Three: Autobiographical Details

By the time Michael Racine reaches the Vermont border with Walt and Nora, he has figured out that spending time with these two isn't going to be more of the same for him. After his first meal in their solar home, which he thought was chicken parm until he realized they were vegetarians so God only knew what he'd just eaten, Nora takes him upstairs to what will be his room for the next month or so. She was unprepared for a guest, and Michael was unprepared for what he found.

    There were two small, horizontal windows crammed between two narrow closets and above a set of built-in drawers on the exterior wall across from him ("Built-in furniture provides extra insulation," Nora explained). Michael barely noticed them because he was so busy taking in the bed, the floor of a closet—its door couldn't be shut—a little table with an arrangement of cobweb-draped dried flowers, and an armchair with a matching footstool, which were all covered with … stuff.

    "I'm afraid we've collected a few things over the years," Nora said apologetically.

    "Wow. You collect bags of Styrofoam beans," Michael said, pointing to four bags filled with them.

    "They aren't biodegradable, so we didn't want to throw them out when the town still had a landfill. We use them as packing when we want to mail something," Nora explained.

     Michael lifted a roll of used bubble packaging off from the bed. "I guess you don't mail stuff very often, huh?"

     Nora took the roll from Michael. "I keep meaning to take them into the office. They'll get used there. Maybe we could bring them with us tomorrow."

     The rest of the room's contents would not be as easy to dispose of. There were a couple of bundles of brown paper bags, and plastic sacks filled with more plastic sacks. There was a pile of very ratty bath towels, a half dozen decorative tins of various sizes, partially burned candles, empty cardboard boxes, a variety of canvas satchels stamped with the names of various organizations, two partial sets of dishes, stacks and stacks and stacks of magazines, three …

    "You see," Nora began awkwardly, "we're trying to control waste by diverting materials from landfills—which are reaching capacity in a lot of places, you know—and the regional incinerators that are replacing them. We did an article in The Earth's Wife on that in, I think, June of '98."

    So they're diverting materials from the landfill to their spare bedroom? Michael wondered.

Okay. So this is kind of autobiographical. I don't so much try to divert waste from the transfer station, which is what our community has now, as keep it from going there for as long as possible. I hold on to things like Nora does so I can use them again or find a way to pass them on to some unsuspecting soul. It's kind of like the Schroedinger's Cat thing. So long as these things are somewhere in my house, they have the potential to be either useful or solid waste. It could go either way.


Here, for instance, is my most recent bubble wrap collection. I have used hoarded bubble wrap for mailing packages, though I'll also admit that I dumped some during a time management clean out binge. The wrap you see in this picture all showed up in one order that was shipped in four different boxes this past month. It's as if these people sit down and think of ways to generate waste.





And here are two different views of our box collection. Yesterday a house guest told me she was leaving me a gift box for my collection. I particularly like gift boxes, and she knows it, so it was a touching moment.

Like Nora, I have a bag collection...





...and a decorative tin collection...






...and here are my back issues of Yoga Journal.








All these things can be used again, so there's no reason for them to be trashed. Except for the Yoga Journals. That's a really fine magazine, which is why I hold on to them, but I am planning to weed through those things because you can't really use them for something the way you can those tins, bags, boxes, and bubble wrap rolls. To be truthful, though, I'm three months behind reading the new issues, so it will be a while before I see any progress on the back ones.

Unlike Walt and Nora, I do not have all this stuff spread over a spare bedroom. But I like humor that comes about when two conflicting thought processes/world views come together, and a little hyperbole is very helpful in creating that.

Additionally, though, with scenes like this one I wanted to illustrate the effort and attention to detail that goes into an attempt to live anything approaching an environmentally sound lifestyle.

If any readers are Noras and have collection of useful items they are keeping from transfer stations, feel free to share in the Comments.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? April 3 Edition

Yikes. I'm having a rough couple of weeks with family commitments and holidays, and it will continue next week. I'm still trying to focus on just a few things, or at least focus on narrowly defined aspects of more than a few things.

Goal 1. Mummy Book. Tweaking, reading a new book for research, and planning scenes. Next week the scene planning will be what I concentrate on.

Goal 2. Short Pieces. I did manage 20 or 30 minutes on an essay, nearly finishing it. I also did a little market research and stumbled upon a new journal I might submit to.

Goal 6. Marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff. Lots of work on this one with this month's Annotated Saving the Planet & Stuff series here at the blog. I've been planning excerpts and linking the posts at appropriate places on social media. I guess we could consider this also Goal 5. Community Building.

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Two: Using Digital Communication To Tell Story

In Saving the Planet & Stuff Michael communicates with friends through Instant Messenger (this book was originally published in 2003, remember), and uses e-mail with family and at work. I was influenced by Walter Dean Myers' Monster, in which the main character uses the screenplay he's working on and journal entries to tell his story.

In the following conversation between Michael (MP3 for Michael Peter Racine III) and his friend (who is off working on a paleontological dig) we learn why Michael doesn't have a summer job.  That is the situation that leads him to accept Walt and Nora's invitation to go to Vermont with them.

MP3: I WASN'T FIRED!!! I was working for my uncle. what kind of jerk can't keep a job working for his own uncle?
ProfBlakie: Well, ah, you, I thought.
MP3: who told you I was fired? everyone we know is out of town.
ProfBlakie: My mother.
MP3: !!!! and she believed it? after all those years i spent drinking her soda & eating her potato chips she'd believe a story like that? about me?
ProfBlakie: I think she believed it BECAUSE of all those years you drank her soda and ate her potato chips.
MP3: I WASN'T FIRED!!! the job ended. that's entirely different.
ProfBlakie: Okay.
MP3: it's true! word got around that uncle bobby's landscaping business wasn't in good shape and no one wanted to hire him so there was no work for anyone who worked for him.
ProfBlakie: Why wasn't his business in good shape?
MP3: Uh. … he was passing bad checks.
ProfBlakie: Oops.
MP3: you should hear my brother. 'you mean you can get in trouble for not paying your bills?' if I live a hundred years I will never understand how Eddie got classified as gifted.
ProfBlakie: Clerical error. Those things stick with you for years.
MP3: so I wasn't fired.
ProfBlakie: Okay.
MP3: I wasn't

The point to keep in mind when using devices like this is that the device must carry the story. It must be part of the story telling/narrative and not there as a gimmick. It also can't just repeat information that appears in the traditional part of the narrative, as if it's just illustrating something that has been said in some other way. Using it as a gimmick or an illustration will slow down the narrative drive, the flow of the story.

Because these different types of formats were used in STP&S,  it was included in the bibliography/ article The Text Generation: Fiction That Incorporates Digital Communication by Melanie Koss, which was published in Book Links in 2008. That was two years after the hardcover edition went out of print.

Koss compared books using "e-mails, instant messages, chat room conversations, electronic newsletters, text messages, and blog entries" to "the traditional epistolary story told in letters."

The Environmental Book Club

The 2015 Green Earth Book Award shortlist was announced last month by the Nature Generation.  Winners will be announced on Earth Day, April 22.

And in other environmental booky news, I stumbled upon a review of a book called Violet Mackerel's Natural Habitat by Elanna Allen at Chapter Book Chat. I'll look for it.

By the way, I found that Chapter Book Chat post at the March Carnival of Children's Literature.

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part One: Finding Characters In A Specific Place And Time

It's the first day of April, people. April means...Earth Day! I will celebrate it all month with excerpts from Saving the Planet & Stuff and other STP&S-related material. The excerpts will include additional information, links, and sometimes pictures. Think of it as being like those DVD commentaries.

Don't like DVD commentaries? Original Content will be carrying other material this month, too.

We're getting started today with a piece from Chapter One. Our hero, Michael Peter Racine III, has just arrived in Vermont with two much older environmentalists he's known for less than twenty-four hours. They're not people he met on the street but friends from his grandmother and grandfather's (Poppy) youth. One of Michael's first acts upon arriving in Walt and Nora's 1970s-era solar house is to call home and voice his second thoughts to his mother.

     "Somehow I got the impression that Walt was going to be a fun guy," he complained. "But believe me, it was not fun having to listen to him drone on and on about this solid-waste crisis that I'd never even heard of and the number of pollutants emitted by gas-powered lawn mowers. It was like being with Poppy, if Poppy cared about solid waste, which he doesn't. What is it with old men? Walt did flip off a bunch of truck drivers who were working for companies he doesn't approve of, though. That
would have been fun if I hadn't had to concentrate so hard on staying on the road. And then Nora got going on fluoride for some reason. She says the Chinese believe it lowers IQ, and then there's been some kind of study with rats' brains …"
     "Your grandmother says they live their values," Ms. Racine said. "Some people like to talk about saving the planet. This Walt and Nora supposedly live their lives in such a way as to actually do it. You did bring your own toothpaste, didn't you? You know your father believes fluoride was one of God's greatest gifts to mankind, and if they don't use it—"

Nora Blake and Walt Marcello, the two environmentalists Michael takes off with because they offer him a summer job, come out of 1970's Vermont counterculture. The Vermont Historical Society is presently doing a series of forums on the decade and its impact on Vermont. According to an article in a recent Seven Days (my favorite newspaper when visiting northern Vermont), VHS curator Jackie Calder "says the changes initiated in the '60s received institutional expression in the following decade." Meaning that the changes of the '60s actually were changes because they became part of the norm during the '70s. From things I've read elsewhere, that is probably generally true, not just in bobo Vermont. The '70s aren't remembered for great fashion or music, but they had an impact historically.

Saving the Planet & Stuff was written as YA. But the very nonYA characters, Walt and Nora, were crucial to the book. For many years all I had was an idea for a situation--a young person thrown in with much older strangers. As I am sure I have said before, it wasn't until Walt and Nora came into the picture that an actual story began to evolve.