News: Italian Witch Girl Burial

A Vatican archeological team has dug up an unexpected burial in northern Italy. In a privileged position in front of the church, the 13-year-old girl was buried in the disgraced face-down position, and she was not at all healthy while she lived.

Nothing revealed so far indicates why she was buried this way, but she's already been dubbed "The Witch Girl," and if you don't see the YA novel waiting to happen here, I don't even know why you're at this blog.

The Andre Norton Award Nominees Announced

Blatantly copy-pasting from the SFWA website:
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

Iron Hearted Violet, Kelly Barnhill (Little, Brown)
Black Heart, Holly Black (S&S/McElderry; Gollancz)
Above, Leah Bobet (Levine)
The Diviners, Libba Bray (Little, Brown; Atom)
Vessel, Sarah Beth Durst (S&S/McElderry)
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (Random House; Doubleday UK)
Enchanted, Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)
Every Day, David Levithan (Alice A. Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Summer of the Mariposas, Guadalupe Garcia McCall (Tu Books)
Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)
Above World, Jenn Reese (Candlewick)

Holey cheese, I've even read two of these already! (In italics.)

Running my eyes over the list, my bet is on the China Mieville because he's a name that will be familiar to the adult readership. But I also expect that to be the book I like least. David Levithan's will be the funniest. Beyond that, I'll have to read them, won't I? Oh, good, a project.

Sullivan's Cover!

I just sent off the galleys for Sullivan, That Summer and got a final of the cover in return. Not bad for a stock photo, huh?

Also, the release date has been moved up to February 17!

A Game of Categories

So, let's talk about SF, F, MG, and YA. And how they're all part and parcel of each other.

I used to be as annoyed as anybody else, back in the 70s, when I was a YA myself and found I had to visit the children's department of the library in order to get my fantasy fix. Patricia McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy wasn't written for children, nor was Foundation; nor was most of Ursula K. LeGuin. The Narnia books were; C.S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy wasn't, and neither was my favorite Lewis book, Till We Have Faces. The Hobbit was; LOTR wasn't. If you wanted to buy these books, you didn't go to the children's section of the bookstore, but to Science Fiction (and the absence of a Fantasy section bugged me, too), which was on the adult side of the bookstore. The adult fiction side of the library was often (but not always) divided up into General Fiction, Science Fiction, and Mystery, and if a fantasy happened to be overtly adult enough (like the Gormenghast trilogy, which I read and didn't enjoy) it would be under Science Fiction, but most of the good stuff was all tumbled together in alphabetical order by author on the kid's side.

But you know what was over there with it?

Dickens, or good chunks of him. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Jane Austen, in whole or at least in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. The Turn of the Screw. Gulliver's Travels. Robinson Crusoe. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Willa Cather.

My teen self thought librarians didn't understand fantasy and thought it childish. My mature self knows that librarians know what they're doing, and that they hit the nail on the head here.

What do all these works - fantasy, mystery, science fiction, "classic," juvenile, YA - have in common?

They are written for brains that are mature enough to handle complex concepts and are still growing; not for ones that have stopped forming new synapses and settled down to losing them. In other words, for brains under 25. Yet they are all still accessible for older brains, if those brains have kept limber by thinking of and about new ideas, concepts, and ways to enjoy fiction.

And this is why science fiction writers, and readers, and scholars, should pay attention to the Norton Awards.

Because in important ways, speculative fiction, when it's doing what it does best, is "really" YA/MG insofar as these genre divisions and categorization mean anything at all.

Sure, formula and potboiler and lowest-common-denominator YA/MG exists, which at best teach literary conventions and at worst are written for people who wish their brains would stop growing. These works no more define YA/MG than their equivalents in SF&F (and mystery, and romance, and literary fiction, and...), no matter how much they may leap to the casual and ignorant eye. Any genre repays looking for the good stuff; and I will go so far as to say that the Good Stuff is easier to find in books written for young people than in any other category.

Speculative fiction written for young people is the epitome of speculative fiction. Those who overlook it willfully cut themselves off from the Best Stuff.

That's really all I can usefully say on the subject.

Edited to Add: Silly Peni, forgot to link the rest of the Norton Blog Tour! Happy reading!

Idea Garage Sale, Reversed

So, I'm scheduled to be part of a coordinated blogging effort on behalf of the Andre Norton Award, as detailed at Erin Underwood's blog. My contribution will be on the 11th.

I volunteered from a sense of civic duty, but I don't have a clear idea of what I want to say on the topic. I'm sure I have something relevant and at least mildly interesting knocking around my head, but I don't know what it is yet.

So instead of putting up a garage sale idea, I'm browsing. Fiction ideas aren't the only ones out there. Anybody have anything they've always wanted to hear discussed about the Norton award, YA and MG speculative fiction, or anything related to them that I might be better qualified to discuss? Go ahead and run it by me.

Otherwise, there's no telling what I'll come up with.

Gee, I Love Language

My husband passed on a library book to me, Kat Zhang's What's Left of Me. He explained that the premise is a world in which everyone is born with two personalities, one of which fades over time and eventually goes away. Except this time, it doesn't. "The story's narrated by the recessive personality," he said.

It is possible that, until this book was written, or even until we had this conversation, the term "recessive personality" had never been used before. It wasn't needed. But as soon as we needed it, boom, it came to hand, perfectly comprehensible to anyone who grasps the premise.

That is one good tool we've got there.
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BTW, if you live in the US and are eligible, it's Voting Day! Have you done your bit to preserve democracy yet? Better get on it!

I Guess I Have to Buy an E-Reader Now...

Queer Teen Press's boilerplate is better than any big publisher's contract I've ever signed in a couple of respects. Every contract should have an "if publisher goes belly-up, rights revert to authors automatically" clause! It's never happened to me, but oh, the horror stories I've heard! No advance, but the royalty rate is generous, so we'll see how it goes. As I said earlier this week, I wrote this in the mid-90s and have never been able to shift it, so that makes it a good book to launch upon the dubious seas of the virtual book market.

Sullivan, That Summer made me write it out of the depths of my crush on Dana Scully on The X-Files (I would like to emphasize that the crush was on Scully, the character, not on Gillian Anderson; though I will happily watch anything GA is in.) It's about meeting your idols, mostly, and the fact that this happens in the context of a lesbian coming-out story is, not exactly incidental, but not the most important thing about it. But it's not edgy, which mitigated against it when I first wrote it, and it's essential to the story structure that an adult protagonist remembering the main action of the teen years intrudes occasionally, which mitigates against it these days, even though the difference between teen Cherry and adult Cherry is not profound. This, for example, is Adult Cherry:

When I get home, I stagger through the claustrophobic entryway to the living area. "I'm dead," I announce. "All is lost. Order my plot."
Chris, dressed for the office, but barefoot, continues tossing salad. "What's killing you this time?"

Obviously, she pulls this teeny drama queen stuff all the time. Mostly as a joke. Mostly.

I wish we had progressed to the point where this book could wind up in a place where a general audience, not just an LBGT one, was likely to find it, but after all we're in the age of the niche market, and after an eight-year gap in the career, I'm not going to quibble about where I make a sale, just so I make one!

I just hope there really will be some money in it.

P.S. Early voting this week! Have you gone out to save democracy yet? Better get on it.

Um - Yay for Me?!

Blink, blink.

I have a contract on the way. For a YA book. Called Sullivan, That Summer.

Well, for an e-book, which still doesn't feel like a real book to me. For a small press in a niche market. I've seen a sample of the company's contracts and it looks straightforward enough, though structured differently from previous contracts I've had with big New York companies for print books. The royalty rate is even generous, though industry standard is "net profits" and I've heard enough about how Hollywood works net profits that I wish the industry had a different standard. Still, this is a book I wrote in the mid-90s and have never been able to sell anywhere, through no fault of its own, and I'll be glad to have Sullivan out there working for me and giving pleasure to readers rather than rotting on my hard drive. And the fact that it's for a niche market should mean that it goes directly into the hands of the audience most likely to value what it is.

Probably because of the e-book factor, and the lack of advance, I'm not feeling any of the satisfaction I ought to feel right now. It doesn't seem like a real thing that will ever net me real money. When I have an actual printed contract in hand, or start getting editorial notes, it'll kick in. At the moment, though...

Well, put it this way. In our Pathfinder game this week, we located, battled, defeated, and my character personally beheaded the shapeshifter who enchanted our captain, wrecked our ship with all hands lost but us, and turned the captain into a ghoul. I feel a lot more like someone who just avenged all that than I do like someone who just sold a book.

Details forthcoming, after I sign the contract.

Aaron Williams Understands YA, Yay!

At last! Someone from outside the industry who grasps that YA is not watered down!

The First Read-Through

I just finished the first full reading of Len's story, the necessary first step in revision, and most of it doesn't suck. In fact, the first 17 chapters are pretty darn good. Chapter 18 is a mess, but I knew that when I wrote it, and the action stuff is better than I thought it was. Not good, by any means, but not as bad as I thought.

Now I'll have to see if I can get advice on the guns and horses and fishing, which is no small commitment as it involves asking non-writers to read parts of an unpolished manuscript. I've noted two places where I'll have to work backwards and fill in some earlier stuff, 18th Chapter needs its complete reengineering, at some point I'll have to cut length (I always have to cut length), and eventually I need a title. Then comes the really hard part - persuading someone that there's a market for a lesbian western.

But it's a good start. I'm pretty pleased with myself.

Sullivan, That Summer

That's the title of the work I tried to find a potential home for this morning. It's uphill work, as I've been shopping it for ten years and the number of editors that will look at unagented submissions who haven't already rejected it has shrunk to a nub. I'm convinced it's a good book, not anything that'll set the world on fire, but hey, who wants to live in a burning world?

The problems with it are:

1) Even by my standards, it's hard to cram into a workable synopsis. This despite the fact that it's, again by my standards, astoundingly short. About 35,000 words, as opposed to Len's story, which before cutting weighs in at 93,000+. But the structure is, and must be, wonky.
2) It's off-brand for me. No magic, no mystery, no mounds of research. Just a nice little story about friendship and meeting your idols. I only wrote it because it started pouring out of me and I don't argue with stories that want to do that even when I'm bewildered at how they got into me to begin with.
3) Though the viewpoint character is a lesbian and one of the arcs is her coming-out story, the book is not edgy. Nor is it as funny as, say, Boy Meets Boy (or, probably, David Levithan's grocery list). When I started it, all books with lesbians in them had Horrible Stuff happen in them and the crying need for a relaxed, ordinary teen story with a lesbian protagonist should have been obvious to everybody. Now it's less obvious and I've got stiffer competition. Life is rough.
4) Notice the adjectives I've used here. Nice, little, relaxed, ordinary - in a climate that's focused on blockbusters, those are not adjectives that are in demand. That doesn't mean it's not saleable or that no audience exists for it; but it does mean I have to find exactly the right editor who understands that audience and currently works at a house that knows how to make money from it.
5) Oh, and that house with that editor has to take unagented submissions.

And this is why I'm an optimist. I couldn't possibly get anything done otherwise.

Idea Garage Sale: Mining the Clutter

Most modern Americans have too much stuff. Boxes of clothes they can't wear anymore, photo albums they don't look at, tapes too degraded to play, tacky souvenirs,games they don't play, books and magazines they'll never read again, papers they don't know where to file, birthday cards, unfinished projects, unstarted projects, broken things that could be fixed but never are, presents we didn't know what to do with, collections, and on and on and on. I have bins full of old manuscripts in the attic, boxes of my own publications, a smaller fabric stash than a lot of people, file drawers of correspondence, a doll collection, character sheets, old diaries and notebooks and files and files and files of writing dating all the way back to my first filing cabinet obtained when I was 12.

Once in awhile you have to go through it. To whittle it down, yes; but also to rediscover it.

I had occasion this week to look at a couple of old stories I published in the late lamented Dragon Magazine. I'd forgotten how good they were. "The Waiting Woman," the one in Issue 159, may be the best short story I ever wrote. And there's a potential epic fantasy novel to be written after the end of it, too, when the predicted war comes and the sleepers get up and Lord Kettry wakes, the lone stranger in this tight-knit group of heroes, and meets the great-great-granddaughter of the woman he loved and his rival.

"The Waiting Woman" and "The River Children" are set in wildly different portions of a setting I started creating in high school, which I just called "the regions between the mountains and the sea." I had world-builder disease real bad in the wake of reading Tolkien (don't we all?) and I still have file folders stuffed with maps, folktales, ballads, history. I may even have the index card file of names and their meanings, somewhere. I left the regions behind as I grew less interested in sword-and-sorcery and wrote fewer short stories, focusing on the middle-grade books; but quite a few of my published short stories, in the late 80s and through the 90s, used the regions as a setting; and a lot of it (I found on rereading) is damn good.

During the recovery period from the Year From Hell, I returned to short stories for awhile and actually produced a regions short story, which I sold to Realms of Fantasy. It appeared as "The Singers in the Tower" in February 2009, and was an Honorable Mention for the Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction, so I know there's life in the old place yet. If I ever have to reinvent myself from scratch, the regions wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Yeah, a lot of my high school concepts don't stand up, and I've changed the way I look at a lot of the history; but that border area between the sorta-European-medieval countries of Vinland and Forblon and the psuedo-Aztec confederacy of the Karankan city-states; and the psychotic level of determination tiny landlocked Notrone had to retain its identity even as its more powerful neighbors conquered and reconquered it; and the way folklore and history and mythology all braid together - it all points in a viable direction, one I could have followed and didn't. Could still follow, if it comes to that.

When I'm writing YA I sometimes force myself to go through the old yearbooks and notebooks. It's painful and embarrassing and that's the point. Young adults lead painful, embarrassing lives. Try not to get caught up in the fashions and the fads. It doesn't matter about my hair: Did I really say that to this person? Did I really think anything as unkind as that? Did I really let that opportunity go by? Did I really waste time crushing on him? Did I really write that down? Did I really put up with that crap?

Yes. Yes, I did. And I need to face up to it, without judging myself, or I won't be able to face up to the choices and assumptions and feelings a 16-year-old character would naturally make, and follow where that leads, to a viable story.

When we're born, our brains are not fully grown in. They don't finish growing - temporal lobes come last - until our early 20s. That's why growing up feels the way it does and why such enormous differences can exist between, sometimes, one day and the next. Kids can't think in certain ways until they grow in the right equipment, and learning is a process by which the architecture of the brain is constructed. We make synaptic connections and we reinforce them; we lose connections we don't reinforce with use; and eventually we have all the brain we're ever going to get, and from then on life settles down as we consolidate our territory.

In practical terms this means that learning and creativity get harder as we get older; but we compensate for this with experience. Most of us have well-worn tracks in our brains from doing similar things in similar ways, over and over and over; and this is how we achieve smooth practiced elegance. Teen-agers and children are constantly reinventing the wheel. Adults are, ideally, perfecting it.

Both modes have their advantages and disadvantages. When creative people are young, they are fountains of ideas; so many they can't keep up with them. Some of these ideas will be wildly original, some will be derivative, some will be brilliant, some will be stupid. Most will be pursued until a brighter, shinier one comes along and be abandoned. It is easy to come up with new ideas; it is hard to get one out of the head and into the real world in usable form. Techniques must be learned and honed. Discipline must be acquired.

When creative people mature, they pick out the ideas that suit them best, based on whatever criteria - I can make more money like this, that ties in with what my spouse does, this is instinctive and easy, that is exciting and a challenge - and leave heaps of glittering random gold behind in disarray in order to concentrate on producing finished work and putting it to use. We polish our techniques. We live by our work habits.

But we are in danger of digging ruts in our brains so deep we can't dig our way out of them. We are in danger of getting tired, or bored, or smug, or lazy; or bypassing interesting sideroads, taking the easy path. How many of your favorite authors got predictable or sloppy as they got older? How many series turned into the same story over and over?

Sometimes you reach the end of the road you're on; or decide the scenery bores you; or strain a creative muscle and need to exercise a different one. Your habits won't help you then; but your younger self can. When you're tired, blocked, feeling like the well is dry - go back through those drawer manuscripts, the yearbooks, the photo albums: not to wallow in self-indulgent nostalgia, but to see where the turn-offs are, whether any of those roads not taken beckon to you now. Chances are you had an idea at 16 that only a 66-year-old could carry out to a satisfactory conclusion.

I've never regretted throwing away the Tolkien/Dickens pastiche I spent two years of my life on; but losing the maps and folklore and name index cards of the regions between the mountains of the sea would have been bad. If you had joy in the creation, keep it tucked away some where, against the day when you need to remember joy.

Idea Garage Sale: The Big Birding Trip

What with one thing and another, my husband and I haven't been birding this year, till this morning, when we carried the binoculars and the bird book across town to Elmendorf Lake, where at this time of year if nothing else we're guaranteed to see the egret rookery island in full swing (snowy egrets, cattle egrets, great egrets, little blue herons, and cormorants. Last year there was also a tricolor heron). We also got first-of-the-year sightings for local regulars like coots and yellow-crowned night herons; were teased by warblers; could not be sure of identifying a flycatcher, and found a tree full of cedar waxwings. All of which makes me want to go research a YA book I never plan to write.

Birders have this concept of the Big Defined Period of Time, during which you travel around relentlessly seeing as many different bird species as possible. A Big Day birder or birding group might start by counting the species at your own feeder at the crack of dawn and end by owling fifty miles away at midnight, with a rigorously scheduled round of Best Birding Spots in between. Big Years are huge time and potential money commitments, with a competitive element between individuals, trips to remote areas like the Aleutians to get birds with restricted habitats, and a certain amount of "twitching" (tracking the Rare Bird Alerts and standing ready to drop everything and race to an opportunity). The concept can also be used for scientific work, as Cornell does. But anybody can declare a Big Time Period for themselves just for fun - a Big Hour during migration, a Big Week for your birthday, a Big Month for family vacation.

It's the sort of thing Nancy Drew would do, breaking a record and solving a mystery at the same time. It also provides a viable framework for a journey-of-self-discovery novel. Maybe the protagonist is a birding enthusiast taking the summer between high school and college to backpack around America on a Big Summer, and also to figure out - something. (If this idea appeals to you, be sure and read Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway, telling how he hitchhiked around America birdwatching in the 70s.) Maybe she's got a dedicated birder or ornithologist parent who has pulled her out of school to accompany her on a Big Year, probably in the wake of some big life transition moment like a divorce or beating cancer or something. I even have the beginnings of an elaborate plan for a Big Spring Break trip involving an RV full of Little Old Ladies, and one 17-year-old who is for some reason stuck riding herd on them all because they need someone able-bodied and she's supposed to be looking after her grandmother. The Little Old Ladies (at least three!) are determined to fulfill their plan of birding the entire Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail during migration. You could do something funny and touching with that.

I suppose it's possible this notion will simmer under the surface for a long time until I finally see what I need to see in order to make it work, but I doubt it. That journey-of-self-discovery thing isn't my style. I intended to make one, in adolescence, but I never did; possibly because all those road trips I made as a child took the edge off the fantasy. Traveling isn't romantic to me. It's exhausting and uncomfortable and there's never enough time to look around you. If you're with someone, your enthusiasms never quite mesh, or you get tired at different times, or one of you gets food poisoning; if you're alone, you're - well, you're alone, aren't you?

I have no character for this. I have no firm idea of what the journey is a metaphor for, or how to make the events of it resolve any personal question the protagonist is likely to have. And when I think about it, I quickly start planning, not the book, but the research trip.

That's what I really want to do - the dream of birding every site along all three Coastal Birding trails, camping along the way, during migration, is mine. And I know I'm not up to it. Birding is a crappy hobby for someone with Meniere's disease - all that moving your eyes rapidly to track the Little Brown Jobs through the trees, all that leaning over backward with binoculars at your eyes to trace the flight of the redtail, or maybe red-shouldered, hawk that just went over, all that tramping through brush and swamp and then not being able to renew your snacks at the convenience store on the highway because anything you bought there would have more sodium than you're supposed to have in a day - I'd give it up if I could but I can't so I won't, and I'll never do a Big Anything because I would get so very sick.

Writing a story about something you can't do is a legitimate artistic choice. I write time travel stories because I can't do that; I write about magic because I don't believe in it. But you have to have something in hand besides wish-fulfillment if you want to write a story anybody else can read. Character + conflict = plot. Nobody wants to read my fictional travelogues, not unless I've got something else going on. So until and unless I find the person who belongs in this story, I'm not investing any labor in it.

Which in a way is too bad, because a Big Week Vacation would be a lot more affordable if I could deduct it as research expenses.

The Genre Fantasy

During the Andre Norton Breakdown, I eliminated 2 nominees as for being for adults, one (with some agonizing) as being for children, and was ambivalent about how to categorize one other. So it's fair to ask what my rules are for classifying something as YA.

This may be the hardest call to make in all of literature, at least since the advent of the YA (as opposed to "teen books") concept. Back in the 90s I had an opportunity to ask a buyer for one of the megabookstores how she selected which book went into which section, and her response was "Trim size." In certain bookstores I routinely find paperback Diana Wynne Jones books in the "Fantasy" section among adult titles, and hardbacks (sometimes of the same books) in the "Juvenile" section. Agents and publishers and authors, when asked, tend to go with the age of the protagonist, the cut-off age at the lower end being usually thirteen or fourteen, and at the upper anywhere from 17 to 21. And then you go into the library and find Eleanor Updale's Montmorency books, with their protagonist who is an adult in all senses of the word on page one, book one, in the YA section; and you read them and agree that's where they belong.

This is an extension of a situation readers of fantasy and science fiction have been wrestling with for a long time. Once upon a time, back in the 70s, a prime reason I never stopped going to the children's section when I hit adulthood was that, at that time, if a book was fantasy and had no overt sexuality, librarians automatically shelved it among the children's books. I think the Gormenghast trilogy, which I read all the way through and disliked, was the only fantasy I ever found in the adult shelves. The adult half of the larger libraries had separate science fiction and mystery sections, where you could find much that I would these days class as YA, but Patricia McKillip and Tolkien were on the juvenile shelves - in hardback. Lin Carter was editing the Adult Fantasy line for Ballantine Books, which got fantasy into the spinner racks. Come to think of it, that's how I first got into the adult section - checking the spinner racks for those back-to-back Bs that spelled "fantasy" on that side of the wall.

As the 20th century wound down, this became less of a given; more and more often, the fantasy I found in the children's section of the library was in fact for children; and the "science fiction" sections in bookstores became "science fiction and fantasy" several years before the signs began reflecting the change. For awhile it was popular among the fen* to gripe about this lumping, but either I don't hang out in those circles anymore or most people have relaxed about the distinction between the two genres. The term "speculative fiction" has arisen to cover the editorial behind.

But when you get down to it, the difference is primarily about imagery. If the bearded wise man wears a lab coat, it's science fiction, even if there's no scientific justification for what he does. If he wears a robe, it's fantasy, even if the things he does are rooted in theoretical physics. If time travel is accomplished by machine, it's science fiction in spite of having some species of archaic sapiens in America; if by dreams, it's fantasy, even if the author has spent seven years researching the archeology, paleontology, and anthropology to get her Pleistocene setting into line with what is known. (Yeah, that'd annoy me if I let it.)

Anyway, all genres are like this. Some horror is fantasy, some science fiction, some realistic, some realistic except for an occult edge. Some romance is paranormal; some fantasy is romance; some adult fiction is YA and some YA is for children. Bambi was published in Europe as adult fiction - my 1929 Simon & Schuster edition has a foreword by John Galsworthy - and became a children's book in America because books with talking animals are for children. Even the lines between "true" and "made up" blur sometimes.

In fact, all categories are like this. Half to three-quarters of the definition arguments on this earth could be eliminated if we'd face up to this fact: A classification is not a real entity. It is a convenient way to talk about real entities that share certain qualities; but which classification an entity belongs in will shift depending on which qualities are regarded as important at a particular moment.

Consider my button accumulation. As I am not a dedicated seamstress, I don't have what I consider to be lots of buttons; but I have enough (mostly snipped frugally from old clothes) that, to save time when I need one, I decided I needed to divide them up. I realized when I dumped them out that I had a number of viable ways to categorize them, all of which would be useful in a different situation. Size? Number of holes? Color? Plastic and metal? Flat or hemispherical or funky shapes? If there's a "funky shapes" category, might it not include other kinds of fasteners, such as frogs or hooks-and-eyes, that I had assumed didn't belong in the same container as buttons?

A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos -- or a shell is a house to a hermit crab -- or was to the mollusk that made it -- or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the sea-shore are seen to be continuous.
(Charles Fort, Book of the Damned, Ch. 1)

People sometimes resent having this drawn to their attention, and most of the time it doesn't matter. But in the endless discussion of whether a book is YA or juvenile or adult, fantasy or science fiction or magical realism, it saves time to face up to it. The important thing is to send the manuscript to the agent who will believe in it and knows the editor who will like it at the house that will publish it, and locate the book in the part of the library, bookstore, or catalog where the person who will like to read it can find it. That's all that matters. Once you think of it in those terms, everything looks much simpler.

Not easier, necessarily. But simpler.

*"Fen" is the plural of "fan," as in "science fiction fen," in case you aren't of that subculture.