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!

Convention Time!

Just because you don't have a big name or a current book doesn't mean you don't get invited to cons. It does mean you get invited to small, regional ones that don't pay guests, and that's fine.

Science fiction cons have only recently started including writers for young people in their rosters, anyway, though a big chunk of the speculative fiction field has always "really" been YA, in the sense of being read by young people and written for folks whose minds are still growing. More people are bringing their kids to cons these days, and despite a certain amount of moaning about the aging of the fandom that I've been hearing for 20 years, I've never been to one that didn't have a lot of teens and college students. You can count on the college students in Austin, certainly. If you're ever invited to one, I say go. It's fun, you connect with people, have a chance to expand your audience, and there's always indy booksellers and cool t-shirts in the dealer's room.

Anyway, I'll be at Armadillocon in Austin this weekend. We leave tomorrow, in time to catch some evening panels. I'm on a few panels on Saturday - apparently I also have a signing at 10 and a reading at 5, which I didn't think I'd signed up for, but whatever. I've done enough school visits to roll with the punches. (Note to self; bring box of books in case none of the dealers has any of mine - nothing feels stupider than showing up for a signing, and nobody being able to buy any books.) Sunday we'll attend another panel or two, hit the dealer's room one last time, and come home. So either no Garage Sale, or a late one. Probably none, as I expect to be tired and shaky. There's this post-con letdown period I have to go through, during which everything I've said and done for the last 48 hours suddenly seems oppressively embarrassing, and all I want to do is hole up and recover.

Today is all about packing for the con. Box of books, con-appropriate clothing (will it be too warm or too cold this time? It's always one or the other.), emergency food, budget, business cards, freeze some emergency water bottles for the cooler. What else?

The Happy Media

In one way, I am a fortunate individual. I always knew, and so did everyone around me, that I was going to write stories. And by always I mean, always. I was a writer before I could write things other people could read. This was so plain and obvious that everyone around me conceded it as a given, too. This or that individual person may not have thought I'd be any good, or that I'd make any money, or that it was a worthwhile endeavor - but nobody ever disputed that I would do it.

Not all writers know their destiny so well, or manifest it so clearly, from the git-go like that. They flounder in search of their purpose, or they are actively discouraged from it by those around them, or they mistake their calling and do something else for half their lifetime until the day they wake up and start writing, or realize they've been writing all along and it's time to take that somewhere.

I didn't, however, always know that I would write for young people. For a long time I thought I'd be one of those novelists who's also an academic (that was before I experienced academia and how little I am suited to it), or I'd write science fiction and fantasy, or - something. I had a leg up on my period of experimentation because I knew my medium and my skill, but I still had to find my subject and my audience. My niche only became clear after I had - first of all - realized that I prefer books written for young people to books written for adults, for the most part (and once I realized that most genre fiction is "really" YA, in that the qualities I enjoy in it are the same as the ones I enjoy in YA literature); and - second - that I did in fact write well enough to produce them.

This is another way in which I am fortunate. These two discoveries were easy enough to make, since I already knew what form my artistic expression would take and I could focus my experimentation on finding my niche within that form. A lot of people have to experiment on their form, their subject, their audience, and their genre all at the same time. Even more people are raised with the idea that they aren't creative, or that there's some qualitative difference between messing about with creativity, and actually being an artist, a writer, a musician, a dancer, or whatever.

Some people even have to muddle along without access to their form and audience. The world has more essayists now than at any time in the past, if we concede that bloggers are essentially essayists, freed from the limitation of needing someone to pay them to write essays for a periodical. The first people with a talent for programming computer games were born before computer games were invented. The modern world contains far more talented actors, scripters, costumers, prop builders, and effects artists than the related drama industries could ever support; hence the existence of historical recreation societies, cosplayers, and gamers. I've known many people for whom their game of choice is their creative outlet - on tabletop, playing field, or computer, they flower.

This is why fandoms proliferate. People who for one reason or another cannot use their native talent professionally can find it avocationally, in the company of a sympathetic audience, in the context of a fandom. Some of them pass through their fandom and come out the other side as a professional, and good for them (Cassandra Clare being a prominent current example, but hardly the only one). But many, many people do professional-quality work in the context of a fandom and never get paid; either because they never think of going pro, because they try and fail, because they're afraid they'll fail, or because they decide that the effort of going pro would spoil the activity for them. Sometimes it's because their talent lies in a niche so narrow that professionalism is unlikely, or unlucrative, or unacceptable - many gamers reject the restrictions that would be placed upon them, were they to enter the corporate structure of the gaming industry.

I happened to think about this in the context of poking around simblogs in an idle moment. (Okay, idle afternoon. Look, the floor's going to get clean; I was just a little giddy and needed a break. Of several hours.) People document their games online, with pictures, dialog, and snarky asides; make their favorite sims available for others to play; create new clothes, objects, even modifications to game code, investing hours not even playing their game, but playing with it. Their only audience is other players, but that's all right. They like it that way.

There's a person writing an extended fanfic about how a particular iconic neighborhood, with which everyone who plays Sims2 is familiar, got itself into the starting situation for that neighborhood. She writes it in chapters, formatted as screenshots from her game accompanied by blocks of text; and setting up the screenshots is obviously not a matter of playing the game at all, but of performing elaborate maneuvers with custom clothing, objects, modifications, and something called poseboxes to take a number of different pictures of the characters and then discarding most of them. Not too different from the process by which Dare Wright wrote The Lonely Doll and its sequels, in fact, except that this person has nothing tangible to work with, just a game designed for an entirely different purpose.

I can, just about, see how Dare Wright got pleasure out of her process. I can't see how "Skelljay" does; but I don't have to, either. Apparently, this is her medium and she likes working in it. It seems to me she could have finished the story by now if she hadn't mucked about with all those pictures but maybe she couldn't have. And maybe - who knows? How would we tell? - she's building skills in this medium that will enable her to be more profitably creative in another one. But if she's not, and she's satisfied, that should be enough for anybody.

But it raises the question: If you think you're not creative, is it because you haven't experimented enough and found your medium? Is it because, though you've found a medium, it seems silly to you?

I know that voice. Filking isn't really songwriting. Blogging about your hamster isn't really writing. Your elaborate macaroni sculpture isn't really art. You should do something more worthwhile with your time.

Don't listen to that voice. If something makes you happy, it is not a waste of time.

And if it brings pleasure to others, even just a small handful of others, it is a positive boon to society.

(While I'm doing this, let's have a couple of links to my two favorite simblogs, in one of which we get the story of Barkertown, the other of Ste. Margo. Warning: This game is rated T for Teen for a reason! Don't worry, you'll get most of the jokes and follow the story just fine without knowing the game.)

Love, not Romance

So I sat down to rewrite the Helotes scene in the lesbian western, in accordance with my new information, and instead I spent the entire morning staring at maps and thinking about Love. This made for a disappointing word count, but since the love story - or rather, the story of how Len and Di get to the point of being able to have a love story - is an integral part of the book, and I've neglected it in my quest for historical accuracy, I can't accuse myself of wasting the time.

I am not a romance reader, except in the strict critical sense in which "romance" is used to indicate a story in which incident is emphasized over character. In this sense, "Jack the Giant Killer" is a romance because Jack undergoes lots of interesting adventures, but no character growth to speak of. I can read critical-sense romance all day, but I was once left alone in a parking lot for half an hour on a rainy day with a grocery sack full of Harlequins, and I couldn't get past the first paragraph on any of them. I like books, like the Vorkosigan saga, in which love relationships are an integral and important part of the protagonist's life, but one reason I prefer young adult to adult literature is that adult literature tends to be much less subtle and realistic about those relationships.

My ideal of a literary romance is Muggles and Mingy in Carol Kendall's wonderful The Gammage Cup. If you haven't read this (not nearly enough people have), I cannot recommend it too strongly. The plot and its themes of rebellion, conformity, freedom, and heroism play out with domestic Muggles and grouchy Mingy providing the practical guidance their more conventionally heroic friends require. In the last chapter, Muggles - in the middle of hospital duty - says to him: "You haven't a thing to do. And you'd better come back here and let me dress your foot properly. And so as not to waste your cantankerous time, I'll tell you right out that if you want a wife, I'm it!" Only then did it dawn on me (the first time I read this, when I was 12) that from Mingy's first appearance in Muggles's house - complaining about frivolous public spending, letting Muggles feed him, warning her about impending social upheaval, engaging in surreptitious charity, and mending her rickety stool - Kendall was prepping us to accept this unromantic couple as a couple. The young, artistic, charismatic pair, Curley Green and Gummy, are taken for granted. Of course they get married. But Muggles and Mingy provide all the chemistry.

I reread that book five times the first time I had it checked out of the library, and I don't know how many times since. I think I see how she did it. But can I do it? Especially given that Di and Len are nothing like these two, or like me and Damon. (Hmmm...Damon and Mingy have a number of traits in common, come to think of it.) Plus, Len is telling the story in first person, so I can't do that back-and-forth scene thing like when Mingy is captured by the bad guys and Muggles is under siege. Too bad; I'm pretty good at the back-and-forth scene thing.

Perhaps Jane Eyre, which I have been reading and re-reading almost as long, is a better model. First person, and secrets, and lots of Victorian dancing around the sexual tension, which naturally produces more of it; also, more humor than most people acknowledge.

It discourages me, the number of people who read Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen's body of work, and other novels of character with strong love elements, as if they had no more depth or emotional realism than a shopping bag full of Harlequins. And I know that this is egocentric favoring of my own reading over those of others, but I'm am convinced in my heart that nobody who came out of Little Women wishing Jo had married Laurie has experienced the full potential of that crucial work.

One of the things literature, and media in general, does is give the inexperienced a script to follow when encountering a common situation for the first time. How well we succeed in the hard labor of happiness depends largely, I have found, on our ability to adapt when these scripts clash with experience. Literature is full of good scripts, but under Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud), bad scripts outnumber them; and it is possible for the prepared mind to take a good script and read it into a bad one.

Charlotte Bronte, writing from the heart of the patriarchy, wrote a script that subverted the dominance/submission model provided to her by her society, creating a sexually-charged equality between the governess and her "master;" but romantic emphasis on the "Alpha Male" has skewed many readings of this book over the years. And the Alpha Male script, face it, is not a practical one that will lead to happiness. The women I know who insist on using it in real life don't prosper, not least because it's an onerous role to foist on one's partner.

By definition, the lesbian western can have no Alpha Males; but the script in Di's hands assumes one, and she doesn't want him. Len has written herself out of society's script for her and doesn't know how to write herself into anybody else's, so she assumes she can't have what she wants. Once I get them to the point of exchanging secrets, the answer to their problems will be as obvious to them as to me; but how do I lead up to that exchange in a way that persuades the reader they'd do it? And how do I make the reader (most of whom will be straight) fall in love with Di as the reader of Jane Eyre inevitably does with Rochester?

And where do the Cave brothers fit into all this?

No wonder I haven't been thinking about this. Compared to the love story, the action plot will be a piece of cake.

The Long View

So anyway I was reading Agent Kristin's Pub Rants earlier this week, and one day she had one about the trends she was seeing in the her queries and the next day she had one about how, sure enough, she found one of those trends in the queries she was reading last thing before bed that very night. (Don't get into any aspect of literature professionally if you don't love it. It invades the lives of everyone who works with it in this all-pervasive way, so you're never not working. Maybe not the accountants, but everybody who deals with books as books is going to be working in their sleep, I promise you.) The comments on the first one are full of relief or agony, depending on whether the commenter has a manuscript that fits into one of the noted trends, and the comments on both talk about examples of the trends, how old they are, how bad it is to jump on a bandwagon and why, what to do when you were on the bandwagon before it ever started but no one believes you now, and so on.

It's obnoxious of me, but I want to pinch the commenters' little cheeks. Some of them are probably older than me, and write better, and will sell another book before I do; but talking about trends and fashions and what's new and what's classic and how things used to be different always makes me feel old. When people say they're tired of vampires and the market must be saturated by now, they've been so ubiquitous for the last couple of years, blaming it all on Ms. Meyer, it really is all I can do not to roll my eyes. I was thinking "Vampires must be about to trend out" during WorldCon 1997. (Which I attended walking uphill both ways after a breakfast of ice cold gravel. You think I'm linking to a Python sketch there; but click it and see!)

Vampires had a big mainstream hit in 1976 with Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, which I remember seeing read in my high school by the same girls who read bodice-rippers. The fashion was current enough and vampire tropes familiar enough for everyone to get the joke when James Howe started producing Bunnicula in 1979. Vampires rode the tide of the mainstream horror fad of the 80s; got big among the fen starting in the late 80s when my husband started accumulating vampire series; ran underground among teens with the Goth fashion in the 90s; invaded the romance/soft porn market with Laurel Hamilton in 1993, and thus was created the atmosphere in which Stephanie Meyer could make absurd amounts of money. You won't hear the names P.N. Elrod, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jim Butcher, or Fred Saberhagen tossed around in most online discussions of the vampire bandwagon, but talk to serious vampire fans like Damon (who won't read Twilight and wants an abridged edition of Anita Blake in which four or five books have the sex scenes abstracted and are published as one slim all-story volume) and you'll see that the tradition has been developing right along under the mainstream's radar.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is often credited with beginning the connection of vampires with sex, but really John Polidori did that when he made Lord Ruthven a Byronic figure in The Vampyre (1819). Stoker's just the guy who took the sexy vampire mainstream. Take the long view like that, and it's much harder to get too excited about who's copying who, how long the trend will last, or how long it'll be possible to make money off of it.

Another of the trends mentioned, dead protagonists (as distinct from vamps) hadn't come to the notice of most of the commentors yet. Recentish examples I can think of off the top of my head: Neal Shusterman's brilliant Everlost (but Shusterman is usually more or less brilliant), Gabrielle Zevin's intriguing Elsewhere, and even my own The Ghost Sitter, though to be fair it has two protagonists and only one is dead. Some commenters traced the start of the fashion to The Lovely Bones (2002), but someone else compares that book unfavorably to Christopher Pike's Remember Me, 1989. I liked Lovely Bones, myself and don't see any need to force things into hierarchies; but that commentor is beginning to see the point. Only she doesn't go back nearly far enough. When I was in junior high my mother got me to read one of the few romances I've ever read: Tryst, by Elswyth Thane (1939), in which one of a pair of predestined lovers dies before he meets his soulmate but the romance carries on anyway.

The trope hit big once with The Amber Gods, by Harriett Elizabeth Prescott Spoffard, back in 1889. To be sure, it's more like The Sixth Sense the movie than The Lovely Bones the book, in that you aren't supposed to realize that the first-person narrator is dead until the realization hits you like a bucket of cold water in the last sentence of this warm, languorous, sun-drenched book. No one remembers it now, the prose style is hopelessly out of fashion, and only those, like me, who read voraciously and indiscriminately or, like the critic who brought it to my attention, systematically and historically, even know it existed. And this fate will befall Stephanie Meyers in time, and J.K. Rowling, and everyone else who makes huge money on trends.

It doesn't matter. We make a fetish of originality in our culture; but we don't know what it means or how to recognize it when we see it. I've seen Rowling extolled as a ground-breaker in children's literature (no, no, no - she wouldn't claim that for herself) and Shakespeare derided as a plagiarist (so what if he stormed folklore, history, and the classics for plots? Who doesn't?) and all you have to do is read a little outside a narrow window to see that it's all nonsense.

Back in the 70s, the "blank books" fashion started. Nowadays they're all hardbound journals, often better bound than real books, but in those days they were plastic comb bound with slick dustcovers and titles like "Some Incredibly Important Trivia." When I was satisfied with my verse (I hesitate to call it poetry these days) I'd copy it into one. The dustcovers had quotes on the flaps, formatted like blurbs: "I wouldn't care who wrote the laws if I could write the ballads" -- Thomas Jefferson; and "Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself" - James Stephens. I'm still not sure who James Stephens is, after googling it, but I expect he's someone to do with Virginia (Stephens) Woolf. Whatever, it's the best advice I ever got.

You can't control trends. You can't predict them. You can't worry about them. And if you don't limit your reading to the tiny narrow window of your lifetime, if you read broadly and deeply and alertly, you'll soon find that you relax about it all. The well of creativity is drawn from a deep, broad aquifer of experience and culture, most of it held in common. Of course trends emerge. Of course we are inspired by each other and draw from similar sources and get family resemblances among works.

What we read, we think about; what we think about, we write. The more vampire books there are the more vampire books there will be; because if you read a vampire book and like it, you'll get an idea for a vampire book. It's inevitable. So it's important to read the kind of thing you want to write. If you want to write children's books, read children's books. If you want to write fantasy, read fantasy. Stop worrying about what everybody else is doing. Stay aware of it, but stop worrying about it.

It's not easy to keep up the current publishing in any field, heaven knows, and we should be aware of what's out there. That's why agents post about what they're seeing a lot of. But stressing about it is counter productive. So take the long view and get back to work.

This, too, shall pass away.

Idea Garage Sale: Settings + TAS Field School, Day 2

Today we finished screening "the pile" and started actual digging. Cool finds to emerge from the pile: a glass marble and something the same size that might be round shot; the face of the pipe bowl from yesterday; a black bead; a portion of a china doll face (small, probably a 3" - 5" Frozen Charlotte or a penny doll); more buttons; and the star of the show, half a dozen carved wooden beads still strung on a brass wire, probably part of a rosary.

We have six units adjacent to the future BBQ pit. I stand in the pit and work on Unit 5. Unit 6 went down "to level" (10 cm below the surface) but Claire Younkin and I worked a little slower. This is typical and though it is possible to go too slow in a dig you should remind yourself, when you see someone else appearing to accomplish more, that it's not a race. A less-experienced digger who hasn't got the hang of trowel movement, a touch of arthritis, a site that is more complex or has more roots or is crumbling away and has to be supported - all kinds of things can slow you down. We aren't expecting much of the top level. Units 5 and 6 form the back of a former trash heap and abut the property line, from which a fence and a loose stone wall were removed to make room for us, so we found fence elements, baling wire, a plastic and a metal rod, screws, and some sort of machinery, a handle or a cog, that turned on a square axle and can probably be identified in the lab. And more glass. Lots of glass. The glass at this site, at least certain kinds, is going to be measured by weight, not per piece.

Screening the pile, we continued to find lots of bones, big and small - chicken and possibly other fowl, the broken ends of long bones of all sizes, ribs, and amorphous lumps of spongy inner bone with all the solid cortex eroded away. Early in the day, one of the people who wasn't at this site yesterday found a bone and asked about it. (To a first-day person, in any enterprise, the second-day person is an authority. This can be a heavy responsibility.) I explained about the smokehouse and said to dump it in the current field sack as it wasn't being curated separately. He said: "Even if it's a human bone?"

I answered: "If it's a human bone you yell out 'stop.' That's a game-changer."

He was joking, but the thing is, every episode of the TV show Bones begins with a similar scene - people going about their business and suddenly, shockingly, coming across a body in an unexpected context. A fresh body would transform the archeological dig into a crime scene; an in situ grave would change the entire nature of the dig; and an in situ grave of a certain vintage would become both a crime scene and an archeological dig.

It is a fact of literature that certain genres are as much about the setting and atmosphere as they are about plot and character. This is absolutely true of the mystery! This is not to say that the plot need not be clever or the character appealing, but do we not pick up a Jane Marple mystery desiring to visit St. Mary Mead and visit with her over knitting as much as desiring to have our brains tied in knots? Do we not choose to read about Sherrif Dan Rhodes for the appeal of his small Texas town and pawky humor, Phillip Marlowe to visit those mean streets, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to feel like insiders in the Checkerboard and the Big Rez?

A TAS field school would be a wonderful setting for a mystery. Every archeologist is a detective to a certain extent, and the relationships that develop at such annual events, plus the extensive supply of amateurs, professionals, students, children, teens, parents, locals, and landowners provide a dynamic cast of characters to fill roles as amateur detectives, snoopy sidekicks, comic relief, villains, suspects, victims, red herrings - anybody and anything you need. Once you decided to use the field school, you wouldn't even need a body. The mystery could be a disappearance, a series of theft, the identity of the looters cherry-picking the site overnight despite increasingly jacked-up security. You're spoilt for choice.

I often start a story like this, and the problem is to narrow the field. Before you can write the story, you have to decide which story you're going to tell. So ask yourself questions about what you want to do. What possibilities excite you most? To what audience do you wish to appeal? Do you want a short story or a novel, a series or a stand-alone? The answers to those questions will eliminate big swatches of possibility.

For instance, if you're writing a middle-grade mystery, the mystery absolutely must be solved by the protagonist child, so you need to choose a mystery that your audience will accept a child can solve. This is less restrictive than it sounds, because 11-year-old children are willing to believe an 11-year-old child can solve problems that an adult would consider it improper for one to even know about. If you're writing for adults and want to create a romantic crimefighting duo good for several books, maybe you'd have the new sherrif in town solving the mystery with one of the archeologists involved in the field school, striking sparks of sexual tension and sharing expertise.

Heck, this setting would probably be good for a romantic novel, though I never read those and wouldn't know. And archeological digs are such convenient launchpads for time travel stories that I've done it twice, myself. You could write a farce riffing off the social dynamic created by so many strangers, friends, and acquaintances camping together for a week with a common purpose. I'd kind of like to read a two-tiered historical novel/mystery in which the body is found and the mystery of who-this-person-is-and-how-did-he-die is worked on in the modern day and the story of the person the body belonged to is told in alternate chapters, each chapter illuminating the characters and events in the adjacent chapters. (Yeah, yeah, big bite to chew - remember, your reach should exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for?)

Like some of these ideas but aren't comfortable with TAS field schools? What's comfortable to you? Scout camp and conventions and recreationist groups offer many similar possibilities - cf Mary Monica Pulver's SCA classic, Murder at the War. Not all members of the Society of Creative Anachronism routinely read mysteries; but I never met one that wouldn't read Murder at the War, because it enters into a world and a cast of characters that is personal to them. They want to see if they recognize anyone, if the author has treated the subculture fairly, to laugh at the in-jokes and check for accuracy.

Thousands of people attend field schools and volunteer digs like this every year. All of them are literate. I just thought I'd mention that.

Idea Garage Sale: Enchantment Ave.

We have this class of silly and destructive people here in San Antonio called developers. Their job is to buy up agricultural or wilderness land, bulldoze off all the sorghum, grass, cedar, birds, mammals, etc., divide it up into winding inconvenient streets with ridiculous names, and build ugly houses that, in twenty years, will have already started to deteriorate into second class housing. But the developers don't care because they've long ago sold the lots and used the money to buy more land (preferably over the Aquifer, where they can pollute our drinking water and cause flooding by blocking the recharge processes with concrete). Yeah, I'm kind of down on the whole concept. But. The important thing here is the ridiculous street names.

Nowadays, the street names seem to be determined by a system. As far as I can tell, the developer has a list of street name words in his office - Vista, View, Valley, Ridge, Crest, and so on; and some kind of reference book which someone, I expect the secretary, lets fall open at a random page and sticks in a pin to choose a word. Or maybe it's a computer program these days. Whatever, the chosen word will be paired with all the standard street name words. The main entrance street into the neighborhood might be Whisper Lane, and all the streets branching off it will also be Whisper Something. Actually now I look at it the Whisper Group (yes, this is a real example) is more imaginative than most more recent subdivisions: no Whisper Vista, but Whisper Bow, Whisper Breeze, Whisper Fawn, Whisper Willow, Whisper Wood.

Anyway, these subdivisions tend to run to themes and some of the older ones aren't as bad, with straighter streets and less repetetive names. South of Windsor Park Mall, for instance, there's this cluster: King Arthur, Excalibur, Gawain, Crusade, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Prince Valiant, Round Table, Mordred. That doesn't suck. My inner ten-year-old even thinks it's kind of cool.

I think it must have been about 15 years ago that it occured to me that one of these subdivisions could be turned into a decent venue for a certain subgenre of fantasy chapter book or MG novel. There's an organizing entity - a Psammead, a coin that grants half-wishes, a magical chemistry set or nanny or even a fruit pit - around which are organized a series of adventures. These discrete adventures may be regarded as short stories with shared characters, though they might occur over multiple chapters. The adventures usually end when the characters voluntarily sacrifice use of the entity in favor of some larger goal, but sometimes they've been working toward a larger goal all along, and sometimes the organizing entity just calls time, like Mary Poppins does.

Say there's an Enchantment Avenue. Some sort of trigger (I decided on a meteorite) enables a group of children(I had two families of two, a white military pair and a black home-schooled pair) to access places in thematic synch with the name of each street in the subdivision. Castle Street, Fairy Circle (don't tell me no developer would be that cutesy! I know better), Wizard's Tower Road, Unicorn Way.

I think I still have the draft I started of this in a file somewhere. It's hopeless. I still think the idea is viable, as far as it goes, but I immediately ran into a couple of problems.

First - I don't know if you've noticed this - I, um, I write long. At that time I'd accepted as part of my process that first I had to write down everything, and then I had to go back and cut out whatever detracted from the story. I'm not as bad now as I was then (is that screaming I hear in the background?), but writing long is a basic fact of my existence. At that time, I would write down a list of chapter headings to guide me through a story and keep it pointed toward its ending; and I took it for granted that every chapter heading represented three chapters of book. Enchantment Avenue was worse about this than anything I'd written since I was 14 and finished my Tolkien rip-off. I took too long getting my two families together; I spent too much time describing the castle; the action took forever to get to.

Second - I couldn't get a handle on how the two families related and what solving the challenges of the adventure together would do for them. The homeschoolers were more interesting than the military family; but the military family was the one with the problem I could articulate. And I couldn't make the adventures suggested by the street names tie in to either. One reason it took me so long to write anything was that I kept trying to explain these things to myself, and failing.

The first problem was soluble if I solved the second one; but I never did. I set this aside years ago, and have since grown past trying to write these kinds of stories.

That doesn't mean I have outgrown them - when someone else writes them. It's a classic form and when done well - The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones, for example; The Enchanted Castle, by E. Nesbit, the grandmother of us all - they are things of beauty and a joy forever. But although I managed something resembling it once, in A Dig in Time, it doesn't come naturally to me. I'm a novelist. I should write novels, not short stories with a frame. Not even when the frame has a plot arc of its own.

Sometimes, we read a lot of books that follow a certain form or contain certain elements, and we internalize those forms and elements as rules. Like: Children's fantasy should consist of an interconnected series of adventures. They should involve magical journeys, quests, a cross magical entity, objects of power. There should be a family of five, or an interracial cast of friends, or one character who suffers a crisis of conscience and gets a big character arc, or a parent in danger, or -

All of these elements have worked in the past and they could work again. But the editors and agents have seen them before. Even at chapter-book level, so have a lot of the kids. If you're setting out to be compared to Diana Wynne Jones and E. Nesbit on their home turf, you better be on your best possible game. You won't do that by imitating the masters or by following rules, no matter how carefully you've figured them out by studying the work. But it doesn't hurt, in the privacy of the rough draft, to try out those rules and see if they apply to you. That's what drafts are for.

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.