Idea Garage Sale: Being There. Or Not.

For years, I thought our family was waiting to change planes at D/FW airport on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

We were not. I had conflated a couple of different family stories and tied them together with general historical knowledge to come up with a single coherent narrative more interesting than reality.

Because that's what I do. Only on this occasion I had no idea I was doing it and was accidentally lying to people, which is never my intention. I was also being sort of precognitive, as I was in fact waiting to change planes in D/FW the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

A lot of history has happened during my life, and I'm seldom there for it. It happened again this week - I could have been in the gallery at midnight shouting behind Wendy Davis, but I wasn't. I could be in Austin on Monday, rallying again, and have the feeling I ought to be - but the world spun around my head a little this morning and I bet I don't. I sometimes feel bad for not being a history-making sort of person, even in the mass-movement background sense. If I can support a cause by clicking links, signing petitions, and occasionally donating money, I will; but my attempts to hit the streets always fizzle. Moving with large groups of people - I can't do it. But that's not the point of an Idea Garage Sale, and the point is this:

We are all alive in history. We don't have any long perspective on it, and many of us who are interested in history find current events annoying and exhausting. That's because we can't get closure on it, and because so many people who are into current events, particularly the kinds of people who start petitions and lead rallies, are pretty annoying and exhausting, themselves. (Well, they have to be, don't they?) But current events become history more quickly than we guess; and we begin unconsciously making story of them long before they are suitable for "historical novel" treatment.

What happens if you stop being unconscious about this process?

I have done this once, in Switching Well. The concept didn't work if I didn't anchor both ends of the story firmly in a specific place and time; and the only possible way for me to anchor the "modern" end properly was to set it during the time I was writing it. But that time hurried away at time's usual relentless pace, so I had to diarize intensely, observe things I would normally have noted in passing, follow the news, and generally pay attention to things I otherwise would not have, in ways I otherwise would not have. Even by the time Switching Well was published, its "present" was two years in the past; and now, twenty years - twenty years! - after its first publication, it is the story of two girls swapping places from one point in the past to another point in the past.

And this is a strength because, even though I came across causes worth fighting for in the course of writing that book, I didn't fight for those causes in the book. Ada and Amber weren't in position to reform the child welfare systems they got caught in. They could only deal with them, and do a good turn to one or two other people. Which is all most of us ever manage. If people who read the book internalize some awareness of the perpetual inadequacy of child welfare systems in the United States along with the rhythms and textures of daily life in 1891 and 1991, good. It will be because I told the truth as plain as I could tell it and they did the rest.

You can tell the truth, too. Look back in your life. What bits of it rise up and become history, and what were you doing then? What's happening now that will become history by the time you can finish writing a book? How is that history working away to change your life even as you ignore most of it?

What literary capital can you make out of that, setting passions and causes aside, and viewing it from four feet above street level, where a child protagonist's eyes are?

Stop trying so hard to be universal, for a minute, or a book. You will only ever achieve the universal through the particular, so sort through your life. What are your particular parts of history? What happened to you in the cracks between the big events?

What could have happened?

This week's accomplishments

One query in the mail.

The front walk cleared.

It doesn't look like much. And next week I'll need to send out another query. And in a few months you won't be able to tell the walk was ever cleared. And let's not talk about the back yard sidewalk.

Finished = Dead. So this beats the alternative.

Happy Friday!

Spreading the joyous news, and an observation

First of all, the really important thing: We're getting one more Diana Wynne Jones book after all! She wasn't finished and hadn't left any notes but there was enough of it that her sister gave it a shot. And then apparently started channeling her or something; we'll see.

Excuse me while I jump up and down some more.

Okay, I'm back. And I have sent out another query today.

I could probably get more queries out there if I didn't stress over each and every one, changing the pitch and the synopsis and the query and the everything every single time, so that the process at minimum takes two days.

But the thing is, the synopsis and the pitch get better, very gradually, over time.

As I move on to agents that are more and more long shots...

Life is rough, so let's not think about that. Let's think about getting a new Diana Wynne Jones book in 2014!!!

Idea Garage Sale: Sandwich Generation

Chalk one up for real life: the local independent newspaper ran a feature with blinking red lights all over it this week, about a woman whose mother was accused of hiring a hit man to murder her father, and whose son is in prison for murdering her daughter.

She does a lot of volunteer work. She used to do a lot of drugs. She's had to face in real life a lot of things that most of us get to work out safely within the confines of a work of fiction; and she's had to transcend conventional responses like revenge, loyalty, and even forgiveness.

For someone living such a situation, writing a novel about it would be unthinkably painful. Writing out the facts would be difficult enough.

But for someone not living in such a situation, writing a novel about it would be almost the same as a white person writing a story about a person of color: potentially fruitful, clearly necessary, and potentially insensitive and casting more heat than light.

If I were to do this, and I have no intention of it, I'd have to change up the details and the plot so that Charity Lee and her family could relate to the characters, but not feel too closely identified with them. How to go about this would be a crucial writing problem.

As an aside, this week I also checked out Caroline Cooney's final (?) Janie book, Janie Face-to-Face. The Face on the Milk Carton came out in 1990. So we should all be aware that, if you go into these dark corners of the news, if you send your imagination behind the headlines and imagine yourself into an emotional space that the circumstances of your life have, thank heaven, spared you - you may never come all the way out.

Which may be good for your career.

But may trap you.

And either way is kind of scary.

Brevity Sucks. But Achieving Brevity is Fruitful.

I'm writing a one-sentence pitch.

No, really.

I know it looks like I'm updating my blog and my simblr and catching up on newsgroups and running to the post office and rubbing cat tummies and staring hopelessly at the jungle aka my yard and wondering how to tell the oregano from the horseherb at this stage and reading e-mail and - but the backbrain is on it and I can't focus too hard on anything else while it's working.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The trouble is, the plot is complex and fantasy and backstory-heavy and the character arc is gritty-realistic and not foregrounded because Galen doesn't talk about his inner life or even admit he has one so back off Jack, let's talk about something important, like Anything Else. And the entire story is Galen's POV. I hadn't realized till I started trying to distill it down to one enticing line how masculine Galen is, and by "masculine" I don't mean macho and tough and all that BS, I mean needy, inarticulate, and deeply embarrassed. I mean he wants to Fix Things without talking about them. I mean desperate for someone he can trust enough to Protect and Serve. I mean convinced that it's nobody's job to take care of him and if he doesn't look bulletproof, if he doesn't do everything exactly right, if he ever admits even to uncertainty, he'll be rejected and left to rot alone.

You know that self-abnegating, angel-in-the-house, everyone-else-first, I-have-no-needs thing women do? Galen does the male equivalent of that. The big difference is that women will talk about the fact that they do it and men won't.

And so far figuring out all this is no help whatsoever in creating a pitch line. Because the pitch line will work at the same level at which Galen is willing to talk about things, the surface level about turning into a vampire assassin in a high-fantasy setting and completing the job and dealing with the consequences.

And how to cram all that into a sentence without sounding merely silly? That is the question.

Excuse me, I have to go check newsgroups and e-mail and pace and find out what the cat wants and eat chocolate. The debt the publishing industry owes to the ready availability of chocolate is staggering.

Back in the Mailroom Again

Here's a little blast from the past: I have a manuscript waiting to be mailed, from the post office, in a box.

One of my market guides alerted me to this (non-genre, non-YA/MG) contest for a short story collection, and it has no fee, and I have a bunch of old short stories that don't suck but are still looking for homes in this strange new market, so I rounded 'em up, organized them, and sent off my entry in the literary lottery. I will probably never hear from this particular manuscript again, but the potential profit-to-effort ratio is way more in my favor than usual and things can't happen if you don't give them a chance. I don't know why they want hard copy but I'm fine with that - the fact that I prefer an "outmoded" (i.e. perfectly functioning, comprehensible, and non-annoying) word processor isn't an issue in hard copy!

The stories in question are half genre and half mainstream (or literary; I've never been sure of the difference), they're pretty good, and I was able to arrange them in a way that creates a dialog of themes between the fantastic and the realistic. At least, I could hear one and if the judge can, too, so much the better. The oldest was first drafted in the mid-eighties, the newest in 2011. A surprising number of the older stories have middle-aged or old people as POV characters; one of them never came together till I aged into the correct viewpoint character's head; some draw directly from my own life and a couple prefigure things that have happened since I wrote them. I paired them according to obvious themes - marriage; mothers; adoptive fathers; crime - but the inobvious themes connect across the pairings. The title is Brief Lies because I think that's the perfect name for a short story collection.

I might get $15,000 for it. I might get zip.

That's the kind of business this is, y'all. Formats, genres, track records, procedures - you adapt to them from moment to moment. You revise stories and revise them again and grow into and out of themes. You write a story and it comes true, sort of; you toss off a joke and it comes circling back to hit you in the face. You send them out and get rejections and send them out some more until you run out of places and then they sit, for years, until an opportunity comes along and you haul them out and sort through them again, and you just keep trying.

But you never succeed, because if you're a success you're all done. You will never be a success. At the same time, you will never be a failure. Not while you live. While you live, you're just a writer, writing, and mailing, and e-mailing, and attaching, and if you have to attach it to a sled dog's collar to comply with the guidelines, you do, because if you don't comply with the guidelines, the person with the money will not give you any. He may not anyway, but you give the person with the money every possible chance to give you some and if he doesn't - then if he's contractually obliged to do so you go after him and if he isn't, you shrug and forget about it.

You can't afford to stress about this stuff.

You just do it.

Idea Garage Sale: Other Loves

So I'm working on a synopsis of a YA book, paring it down to two pages and now I get to make those two pages interesting, and the thing is, there's no "love interest" in this book. The protagonist, who is male, has an intense personal relationship with a foster-sister but it's not sexual and cannot be sexual - he recoils from the idea of it, because of her history. He has an (unspoken) crush on another female character but it's not something he's ever going to act on. And he's got a lot of other crap going on in his life and, though he spends some time thinking about sex (of which he has little to no experience) he doesn't think about romantic love. There's no room for it in the story.

And that could be a problem, selling this thing, because our culture is aggressively romantic. You only have to look in the fandoms to see that we want our close personal relationships to be romantic and if they aren't in the story, we'll invent them. Any close male/female friendship will be cast as a romance by fans (and usually by the source, if it's a series and goes on long enough), which is explicable as heterosexism rearing its ugly head; but the fans will also ship male/male friends, partners, colleagues, and particular types of enemies; and female/female ones, on those rare occasions when they get the chance. One reason for the rarity of female/female friendships of the Holmes/Watson variety seems to be (but I haven't run statistics and this could be perceptual bias) the tendency of People Who Make Decisions to see them as "dykey," as if there were something wrong with that.

Personally I think we could use more girlfriend bonds in media along the lines of Holmes/Watson or Kirk/Spock, and of course I think we need more variety in our romantic pairings, too. But I am not comfortable with the projection of romance into every pair bond, or the universal treatment of The Romantic Relationship as the single most important one in life; and certainly not with the automatic equation of love with eros. Eight-year-olds should be able to hug each other without being mentally married by the adults around them; adults should be able to love children and express it with asexual physical contact without squicking everyone around them; a man should be able to look after his mother in her old age without everyone assuming that she's controlling and stunting him; and adults and teens should not feel that lacking a romantic partner is the same thing as lacking the emotional core of their lives.

The centrality of the romantic relationship to life is a recent invention, coming in with companionate marriage (of which I thoroughly approve, being in one; but if I weren't I bet I could find other emotional outlets), but you'd never know it reading historical fiction. Although the great love stories of the past tended to be tragedies, and in many cases should be read as warnings against letting one relationship consume your life, historical fiction, and fantasy fiction using the imagery of the past, overwhelmingly subverts that cultural reality. Lovers tend to be sympathetic protagonists and the tragedy arises, not from their stubborn persistence in clinging to each other in the face of all the reasons not to, but from the wickedness of the opposition and oppression of a hidebound and tyrannical society. As if our own society were any less hidebound and tyrannical in its way!

We do see, especially in sword-and-sandals and horse-opera types of stories, brothers-in-arms scenarios in which romantic relationships are backgrounded by the simple expedient of backgrounding all the women; I need hardly say that this is not a satisfactory corrective. I wouldn't mind seeing the background of one of those epics brought to the fore; see what the women are doing while the men muck about making what is assumed to be the important plot (but which is generally a frenetic destructive chase after goals that, even if achieved, lack the strong emotional payoff of a good romantic plot). If the men are out searching for treasure or revenge or some damn thing and only coming home to get laid and swap out their laundry, the women, if they have any sense at all, will be doing the things that build and maintain a society - not only raising the children, but building the infrastructure, creating and maintaining the traditions, producing the food and material goods, and forging the emotional bonds that keep us healthy as individuals.

So I think what I'd like to see is some world-building that rearranges priorities so that the reader can internalize a non-romantic relationship as the important one. If a society is matrilineal, the important male authority figure in a child's life may be the maternal grandfather or uncle(s), not the father; and the emotional bonds that trump all others may be between siblings, or children and grandparents. The core familial relationship of mother/child may be less sentimental, more practical, and/or more honest. Can we go there; can we recreate a mental medieval universe in which nets of obligation are more important than personal relationships, and believe in characters who find emotional fulfillment that way?

And can we sell it, if we do?

I think it is incumbent on historical novelists to at least give it the old college try; and I think SF and fantasy authors would benefit a great deal from the effort, anyway.