We're having a battle of wills in our house right now.
One of the improvements made during the work on the back of the house last year was a railing on the back porch directly under a window. When the screens were taken away for repair and painting, the cats found this to be an ideal arrangement, and when the screens were returned, they quickly broke through the screen to continue using what they had come to regard as their personal portal. We had the screen repaired with a more flexible mesh anchored more deeply.
The result is that they will now spend hours on that railing, or sitting on the cabinet under the window in question on the inside, glaring from window to nearest available human. When we open the door, they often refuse to go through it. Thai has gone so far as to grab me by the arm and lean her head against the screen. You don't have to be as practiced at projecting words into a cat's mouth as I am to get the drift here: "Mommy! How can you be so dense? I don't want to go through the door, I want you to leave MY WINDOW OPEN."
This is a picture book set-up. Cute cats (standing in for obstinate toddlers trying to impose their will on the world), human (standing in for parents trying to instill a certain behavior - in a picture book the human would almost certainly be a child), simple situation that can be elaborated to suit. Either the cat would come up with more and more ingenious and funny ways to make the human see reason and meet with more and more deliberately absurd obliviousness, or the obstinancy would spread around the house, with the cat also trying to impose her will on eating, sleeping, and playing arrangements. I can almost see it.
Almost.
Except for the ending.
In real life, sooner or later Thai goes through the door and there's no practical reason why this should not become one of our daily life rituals. In the story, there has to be some resolution which will satisfy the reader. Some compromise which allows the cat/toddler a degree of control over her own life at the same time that she learns she can't always have her own way.
Without the resolution, I only have a situation, not a plot. Nobody wants to read a picture book story without a resolution. That would be pointless.
So even if I could write picture books, it appears I wouldn't be able to write this one.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Hunting the Native Garden
I put together a picture book dummy once, to prove to myself I could do it.
In it, a kitten stalks the denizens of a Texas native plant garden. Each picture would show the kitten, the prey, and the garden feature; so, hummingbirds among Turk's cap and trumpet vine, cardinals and finches at the sunflowers, white-winged doves in the birdbath till the grackle chases them out to soak some dog food; barn swallows under the shed eaves; a cactus wren in the prickly pear; a blue jay in the woodpile; a woodpecker on the pecan tree; a mockingbird displaying in the top of the live oak; lizards in the rockpile; possums in the brush pile; a skunk in the compost heap.
Each creature escapes the kitten's attempt to hunt it, and the kitten finds some face saving reason why he didn't really want to catch that particular animal. The skunk encounter would be the ultimate one, with dusk coming down. The skunk is rummaging, the kitten is stalking, and the skunk says, as if to thin air: "Really? You're sure about this?"
And the kitten say: "I think I hear my human calling," and runs in to eat his Kitten Chow.
I couldn't possibly actually write this. I'd get sidetracked by the characters of the critters and everybody would have long conversations and then something would come up to throw a monkey wrench into everything and -
I just can't write short, or leave as much to the artist as a picture book requires.
A book like this would totally sell in State Park gift shops and through conservationist catalogs, though. I don't know how kids would feel about it, but there's a kind of grownup who'd love it.
In it, a kitten stalks the denizens of a Texas native plant garden. Each picture would show the kitten, the prey, and the garden feature; so, hummingbirds among Turk's cap and trumpet vine, cardinals and finches at the sunflowers, white-winged doves in the birdbath till the grackle chases them out to soak some dog food; barn swallows under the shed eaves; a cactus wren in the prickly pear; a blue jay in the woodpile; a woodpecker on the pecan tree; a mockingbird displaying in the top of the live oak; lizards in the rockpile; possums in the brush pile; a skunk in the compost heap.
Each creature escapes the kitten's attempt to hunt it, and the kitten finds some face saving reason why he didn't really want to catch that particular animal. The skunk encounter would be the ultimate one, with dusk coming down. The skunk is rummaging, the kitten is stalking, and the skunk says, as if to thin air: "Really? You're sure about this?"
And the kitten say: "I think I hear my human calling," and runs in to eat his Kitten Chow.
I couldn't possibly actually write this. I'd get sidetracked by the characters of the critters and everybody would have long conversations and then something would come up to throw a monkey wrench into everything and -
I just can't write short, or leave as much to the artist as a picture book requires.
A book like this would totally sell in State Park gift shops and through conservationist catalogs, though. I don't know how kids would feel about it, but there's a kind of grownup who'd love it.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Life in the Lab
A team of biologists/biogeneticists discover the secret of life by accident, creating a species of homunculi. Though kept in a "paradisial" aquarium/safe, they escape to live as Borrowers.
Of course, the scientists will be just fine with that!
There's a line to walk here. The appeal of Mary Norton's Borrowers, and all the other little people out there, is their juxtaposition with our everyday lives. We love pins used as rapiers, climbing the drapes by the bobbles, safety pins and flyswatters transformed into mouse-proof gates, shooting the rapids in silverware boxes and teakettles, the whole nine yards.
But if the story begins in a lab, with the origin of the species, the environment isn't our domestic sphere turned into a wilderness of giants, but the kinds of buildings labs are found in. Vast, intimidating structures in research office facilities. And bio labs in particular are far from cozy. Security has to be high enough to challenge everything from microbes to apes. Temperature and humidity are tightly controlled. Everything runs off computers. The challenge of creating an independent society inside such a building is fundamentally different.
Especially since they couldn't be secret. Pod, Homily, and Arrietty survive partly by flying under the radar of us human beans. Even if the author can contrive some sort of reasonable excuse for their creators not having published their results and gotten in peer reviewers as fast as they could (and come on - you create tiny humans in your lab you can't wait to tell the world!), their creators know all about them, and will not be sanguine about letting them stroll off into the sunset. Careers are on the line here. The research potential is staggering. You don't just shrug and kiss all that good-by.
The number of ways this story can go wrong (i.e. boring and stupid) are staggering. If you give it the standard blockbuster treatment you'd have either evil scientists or evil homunculi in a race against time, finally climaxing in some kind of nonsensical explosion. The family movie treatment, with happy endings all round, wouldn't be any better.
The setup involves real, serious issues that can't be solved in the course of a book and which therefore would be uncomfortable to explore. If the homunculi are fully intelligent, moral creatures with agency, then even if they form a sympathetic family unit they will have conflicts among themselves, with different ideas about what constitutes their best interests. Their skills and their society will have to evolve in the context of their situation. They will have relationships with their creators, both positive and negative. They will be computer savvy (how else to get around all that security?) and at least some of them will be ingenious. They will be capable of abstract thought and be interested in the same sorts of questions we are, but their situation necessarily requires a different set of answers.
And, oh yeah - they'll have, to start out with, an unviable population size and access to research notes about how they were created...
I get tired just thinking about this one. And yet, the premise is so simple!
Of course, the scientists will be just fine with that!
There's a line to walk here. The appeal of Mary Norton's Borrowers, and all the other little people out there, is their juxtaposition with our everyday lives. We love pins used as rapiers, climbing the drapes by the bobbles, safety pins and flyswatters transformed into mouse-proof gates, shooting the rapids in silverware boxes and teakettles, the whole nine yards.
But if the story begins in a lab, with the origin of the species, the environment isn't our domestic sphere turned into a wilderness of giants, but the kinds of buildings labs are found in. Vast, intimidating structures in research office facilities. And bio labs in particular are far from cozy. Security has to be high enough to challenge everything from microbes to apes. Temperature and humidity are tightly controlled. Everything runs off computers. The challenge of creating an independent society inside such a building is fundamentally different.
Especially since they couldn't be secret. Pod, Homily, and Arrietty survive partly by flying under the radar of us human beans. Even if the author can contrive some sort of reasonable excuse for their creators not having published their results and gotten in peer reviewers as fast as they could (and come on - you create tiny humans in your lab you can't wait to tell the world!), their creators know all about them, and will not be sanguine about letting them stroll off into the sunset. Careers are on the line here. The research potential is staggering. You don't just shrug and kiss all that good-by.
The number of ways this story can go wrong (i.e. boring and stupid) are staggering. If you give it the standard blockbuster treatment you'd have either evil scientists or evil homunculi in a race against time, finally climaxing in some kind of nonsensical explosion. The family movie treatment, with happy endings all round, wouldn't be any better.
The setup involves real, serious issues that can't be solved in the course of a book and which therefore would be uncomfortable to explore. If the homunculi are fully intelligent, moral creatures with agency, then even if they form a sympathetic family unit they will have conflicts among themselves, with different ideas about what constitutes their best interests. Their skills and their society will have to evolve in the context of their situation. They will have relationships with their creators, both positive and negative. They will be computer savvy (how else to get around all that security?) and at least some of them will be ingenious. They will be capable of abstract thought and be interested in the same sorts of questions we are, but their situation necessarily requires a different set of answers.
And, oh yeah - they'll have, to start out with, an unviable population size and access to research notes about how they were created...
I get tired just thinking about this one. And yet, the premise is so simple!
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Pseudonymity
The answer to having books all over the place is supposed to be using different names for different kinds of books. Like Victoria Holt was also Philippa Carr and Jean Plaidy, and none of those was her real name, but my Mom read them all anyway. And L. Frank Baum did series fiction under the name of Edith van Dyne.
Sometimes I amuse myself thinking of pen names. When I was six I selected the pseudonym Suzy Hannah Robinson - and no, I don't know what the chain of reasoning was there. I once seriously considered using my SCA name of Annalise, just because it sounds nice. Most Americans would have a hard time spelling it, though given how tenaciously I cling to my variant spelling of Penny in the face of all opposition you wouldn't think I cared about that. I could publish the lesbian western and any subsequent LBGTQ fiction under "Griffin Peña," and that would be both transparent and sufficient to separate it from my existing and very different middle-grade work. Or I could become Rae (or Rachel) Robinson, making use of my middle and maiden names.
I refuse to be Peni Robinson again; not that I minded, much, but I have heard "Danger, Will Robinson!" enough times in my life, thank you.
None of this, however, helps with the agent problem.
Sometimes I amuse myself thinking of pen names. When I was six I selected the pseudonym Suzy Hannah Robinson - and no, I don't know what the chain of reasoning was there. I once seriously considered using my SCA name of Annalise, just because it sounds nice. Most Americans would have a hard time spelling it, though given how tenaciously I cling to my variant spelling of Penny in the face of all opposition you wouldn't think I cared about that. I could publish the lesbian western and any subsequent LBGTQ fiction under "Griffin Peña," and that would be both transparent and sufficient to separate it from my existing and very different middle-grade work. Or I could become Rae (or Rachel) Robinson, making use of my middle and maiden names.
I refuse to be Peni Robinson again; not that I minded, much, but I have heard "Danger, Will Robinson!" enough times in my life, thank you.
None of this, however, helps with the agent problem.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Alternity
One doesn't see much, in juvenile and YA literature, of alternate history. Not even "The South Won the Civil War" or "The Axis Won World War II" You do sometimes get parallel universes, but they don't tend to focus on the splitting point, or even identify it. I first encountered the concept in science fiction and fantasy originally published for adults, which in many cases (especially back then) is "really" YA. I think Silverberg was the first author I saw do it. The Gate of Worlds, that would be. No, wait, I take that back! Joan Aiken had a whole string of alternate world books, in which the Stuarts ruled England in the 19th century and Hanoverians were a constant threat. I keep forgetting that's how it was, because my favorite of the books - The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - doesn't get into that at all. Besides, it's not as if I've troubled myself to keep track of the kings and queens of Britain.
There's two major questions we must ask ourselves before embarking on an alternate history. One is, "What's the decision point that changes?" And the second is, "How many worlds do we put into the story?" Because although the game of alternate history requires that it all be played straight, as Aiken does it, with the alternate world (or alternity as I prefer to call it for short) assumed to be the only one, this is not necessarily the best, most interesting way to do it for young people. The great fun of the alternate history game, after all, is opposing the known to the unknown - it is like this, but change this one thing, and it might be like this instead. The point is lost on an audience that isn't familiar enough with the turning point; and either a sufficiently obscure turning point, or a reader who hasn't done that unit yet, will be lost more than found.
The Big Two, as mentioned above, are the American Civil War and World War II, because those are huge events that loom large in relatively recent history; but they've been done so often, and have such obvious line-ups of heroes and villains, that from an author's or a serious history student's point of view they're not much fun. Personally I'd rather get into less-often asked questions, like: What if Tecumseh had succeeded? What if Fannin had been in charge at the Alamo? What if Napoleon won at Waterloo? What if the English were kicked out of North America and the dominant powers on the continent during the 18th and 19th centuries derived from the Spanish, French, and Dutch? What if Boudicca had driven out the Romans in Nero's time? Or the Bolshevik Revolution failed in Russia? How would the modern world look in any of those situations?
Those are all a juicy lot of questions you could spend months and years exploring, and which could create great backgrounds, particularly for genre juvenile fiction. Think of all the books about pioneers American children read, set on the Mississippi or during the gold rush or in the post-Civil War settlement boom, and how different they would look with an Empire founded by Tecumseh, or with the Dutch and Spanish former colonies dominating the market! But the natural audience for these stories would need to have the joke explained, and nothing spoils a joke like explaining it.
This is where communication between worlds would come in, which requires a different sort of story entirely. In such a work, the hero/heroine would be in contact with an alternate-world counterpart (it just occurred to me that it could be an opposite sex clone! Which just opens up more doors in this already too-open environment), and the two versions of this person - call it Chris, a nice gender-neutral name - would have similar problems, related to the mechanism that allows them to bridge the universes. Which of course brings up the question, How do they bridge the universes? Can they only communicate? Can they observe? Can they cross over physically and if so, do they have to replace each other, or can they meet each other directly? Is there perhaps a limbo in which they can meet each other?
So while having both sides of the alternity open provides necessary exposition without much fuss, it creates its own whole new can of worms; as if working out the logical results of the single major change the author posits weren't a big enough one.
You can see why I still haven't done this. Too many choices, not enough investment in any of them.
There's two major questions we must ask ourselves before embarking on an alternate history. One is, "What's the decision point that changes?" And the second is, "How many worlds do we put into the story?" Because although the game of alternate history requires that it all be played straight, as Aiken does it, with the alternate world (or alternity as I prefer to call it for short) assumed to be the only one, this is not necessarily the best, most interesting way to do it for young people. The great fun of the alternate history game, after all, is opposing the known to the unknown - it is like this, but change this one thing, and it might be like this instead. The point is lost on an audience that isn't familiar enough with the turning point; and either a sufficiently obscure turning point, or a reader who hasn't done that unit yet, will be lost more than found.
The Big Two, as mentioned above, are the American Civil War and World War II, because those are huge events that loom large in relatively recent history; but they've been done so often, and have such obvious line-ups of heroes and villains, that from an author's or a serious history student's point of view they're not much fun. Personally I'd rather get into less-often asked questions, like: What if Tecumseh had succeeded? What if Fannin had been in charge at the Alamo? What if Napoleon won at Waterloo? What if the English were kicked out of North America and the dominant powers on the continent during the 18th and 19th centuries derived from the Spanish, French, and Dutch? What if Boudicca had driven out the Romans in Nero's time? Or the Bolshevik Revolution failed in Russia? How would the modern world look in any of those situations?
Those are all a juicy lot of questions you could spend months and years exploring, and which could create great backgrounds, particularly for genre juvenile fiction. Think of all the books about pioneers American children read, set on the Mississippi or during the gold rush or in the post-Civil War settlement boom, and how different they would look with an Empire founded by Tecumseh, or with the Dutch and Spanish former colonies dominating the market! But the natural audience for these stories would need to have the joke explained, and nothing spoils a joke like explaining it.
This is where communication between worlds would come in, which requires a different sort of story entirely. In such a work, the hero/heroine would be in contact with an alternate-world counterpart (it just occurred to me that it could be an opposite sex clone! Which just opens up more doors in this already too-open environment), and the two versions of this person - call it Chris, a nice gender-neutral name - would have similar problems, related to the mechanism that allows them to bridge the universes. Which of course brings up the question, How do they bridge the universes? Can they only communicate? Can they observe? Can they cross over physically and if so, do they have to replace each other, or can they meet each other directly? Is there perhaps a limbo in which they can meet each other?
So while having both sides of the alternity open provides necessary exposition without much fuss, it creates its own whole new can of worms; as if working out the logical results of the single major change the author posits weren't a big enough one.
You can see why I still haven't done this. Too many choices, not enough investment in any of them.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Illumination Sucks, Take Two
Yeah, so, better today.
The thing that prompted the realization from last post is, that I was going through my dormant files, alert for what the next project might be, and was thinking that I'd found the character I wanted. Consider this exchange:
"Are you out of your mind?"
Pelin considered. "I don't think so."
And this one:
"Let me handle it. Speaking of handling, what was going on with the Dowager Grusia at your end of the table? I was terrified you were going to have one of your fits."
Pelin shrugged. "So was I, but it's of no consequence. She doesn't like the rising generation, that's all." And who can blame her? We're a sorry lot.
And Pelin's opening words in the story, which is all from his POV:
"Excuse me," Pelin said, in the frosty voice usually reserved for foreign princes of unusual stupidity, "but I believe you labor under an error. That appears to me to be a prisoner, not a punching bag."
Come to that, the opening two sentences aren't bad:
When Pelin spotted Hirca being led toward the prison in chains, his first reaction was clamped-down panic. Captured? How? Why?
His second reaction was: Where do I know her from?
This Pelin person is grouchy, sarcastic, misanthropic, a little prissy, widely disliked, humorless - and he knows all that, and accepts it, and works with it. He's fundamentally kind, if you don't mind how crabby he sounds when he's doing it. (Most people do.) When someone asks him rhetorically if he's out of his mind, he takes it seriously. He takes everything seriously. And he's walking in a minefield, fourth most eligible candidate for a throne he doesn't want, two candidates for which have vanished, and faced with a growing body of evidence that someone has been tampering with his memory.
I have ten chapters of this story, dashed off to pass the time between projects while stuck with no legitimate work at a soul-sucking day job - no plan, just a lot of throwing words onto a page and seeing where I wound up. So of course it's wordy and contradictory and, though I see where some bits of it are going, other bits flop around looking for some sense to make. Still, it should be a viable story with a sufficient amount of work. I'd have to do a lot of backstory work, figuring out exactly what's going on, how the magic functions, write the villain's plan out and note the places where it goes wrong.
In fact, I should be able to use a lot of the same skills I developed to write the lesbian western. From my personal point of view, Pelin's story is a logical next step after Len's, building on what I did there. But -
But it's a fantasy set in an imaginary country with kings and queens and nobles and peasants and a rising middle class and professional wizards and a Goddess who, once in a great while, answers a plea directly and obviously enough that there's not much doubt that's what happened.
It's not a lesbian western.
It's not a middle grade fantasy set in modern times, like the other book I'm trolling for agents with.
It could be grouped in the same category, and set in the same world (though not the same country or time period) as Disenchanter, another story I'm trying to peddle, but of course I haven't sold that one.
Harking back to my published books, and singling out the two most successful ones, the ones people squee over when they find out I wrote them, it's not a time travel story like Switching Well, or a contemporary ghost story like The Ghost Sitter.
How is an agent supposed to make anything out of a career that flops all over the genres and age groups and niches like that?
How am I supposed to write books any other way?
The thing that prompted the realization from last post is, that I was going through my dormant files, alert for what the next project might be, and was thinking that I'd found the character I wanted. Consider this exchange:
"Are you out of your mind?"
Pelin considered. "I don't think so."
And this one:
"Let me handle it. Speaking of handling, what was going on with the Dowager Grusia at your end of the table? I was terrified you were going to have one of your fits."
Pelin shrugged. "So was I, but it's of no consequence. She doesn't like the rising generation, that's all." And who can blame her? We're a sorry lot.
And Pelin's opening words in the story, which is all from his POV:
"Excuse me," Pelin said, in the frosty voice usually reserved for foreign princes of unusual stupidity, "but I believe you labor under an error. That appears to me to be a prisoner, not a punching bag."
Come to that, the opening two sentences aren't bad:
When Pelin spotted Hirca being led toward the prison in chains, his first reaction was clamped-down panic. Captured? How? Why?
His second reaction was: Where do I know her from?
This Pelin person is grouchy, sarcastic, misanthropic, a little prissy, widely disliked, humorless - and he knows all that, and accepts it, and works with it. He's fundamentally kind, if you don't mind how crabby he sounds when he's doing it. (Most people do.) When someone asks him rhetorically if he's out of his mind, he takes it seriously. He takes everything seriously. And he's walking in a minefield, fourth most eligible candidate for a throne he doesn't want, two candidates for which have vanished, and faced with a growing body of evidence that someone has been tampering with his memory.
I have ten chapters of this story, dashed off to pass the time between projects while stuck with no legitimate work at a soul-sucking day job - no plan, just a lot of throwing words onto a page and seeing where I wound up. So of course it's wordy and contradictory and, though I see where some bits of it are going, other bits flop around looking for some sense to make. Still, it should be a viable story with a sufficient amount of work. I'd have to do a lot of backstory work, figuring out exactly what's going on, how the magic functions, write the villain's plan out and note the places where it goes wrong.
In fact, I should be able to use a lot of the same skills I developed to write the lesbian western. From my personal point of view, Pelin's story is a logical next step after Len's, building on what I did there. But -
But it's a fantasy set in an imaginary country with kings and queens and nobles and peasants and a rising middle class and professional wizards and a Goddess who, once in a great while, answers a plea directly and obviously enough that there's not much doubt that's what happened.
It's not a lesbian western.
It's not a middle grade fantasy set in modern times, like the other book I'm trolling for agents with.
It could be grouped in the same category, and set in the same world (though not the same country or time period) as Disenchanter, another story I'm trying to peddle, but of course I haven't sold that one.
Harking back to my published books, and singling out the two most successful ones, the ones people squee over when they find out I wrote them, it's not a time travel story like Switching Well, or a contemporary ghost story like The Ghost Sitter.
How is an agent supposed to make anything out of a career that flops all over the genres and age groups and niches like that?
How am I supposed to write books any other way?
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Illumination Sucks
So, looking through my dormant files and notes and thinking about what the next project ought to be, I've figured out why I can't land an agent.
It's because I can't settle into a niche and brand myself.
My close calls with agents have all happened when they loved one project but were not interested in the others - any of the others - even as something to focus on later. And I'm not willing to abandon them. And we're both right on this.
I was going to expand and explain but that was before the ax came out of the air and split my forehead in two, without producing Athena. Stupid bodies, hijacking brains between one moment and the next...I'll do better tomorrow or the next day, I expect.
It's because I can't settle into a niche and brand myself.
My close calls with agents have all happened when they loved one project but were not interested in the others - any of the others - even as something to focus on later. And I'm not willing to abandon them. And we're both right on this.
I was going to expand and explain but that was before the ax came out of the air and split my forehead in two, without producing Athena. Stupid bodies, hijacking brains between one moment and the next...I'll do better tomorrow or the next day, I expect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)