Posted on by Eileen Young

Island Writer Launch

Last Wednesday was the launch of my last issue as Editor In Chief of Island Writer magazine. It was a good run: I started as Editorial Assistant on Issue 8.1, was Managing Editor for 8.2, and Editor In Chief for 9.1, 9.2 and 10.1. I learned a lot over that period, and contributed to the magazine, I think. Island Writer is now available online: you can download it here. It wasn’t, before. Island Writer has six staff now, instead of three as when I initially started on it. I am not the person who instigated that change, but I campaigned for it and helped find some of the wonderful staff we have now, including Simeon Goa, our Art Director, who also did the cover you can see at right, and Kim Nayyer, the very steady Creative Non-Fiction and Writer’s Life editor, whose support has been invaluable. Lana Betts, our efficient Editorial Assistant, does not have a personal website. Nor does Lynnette Kissoon, our fearless fiction editor whose daughters I accidentally traumatized by inviting to a launch at which there were readings not suitable for young ears (sorry). Sheila Martindale is the poetry editor, and a venerable poet in her own right.

I started everyone using Google Docs for those things edited by multiple people online, and worked with Simeon to try to streamline a lot of that process as much as possible. We started having editing parties, which got us through copy-editing and proofreading in record time, without anyone feeling too much of a stress-crunch.

In addition to any contributions I may have made, I learned a lot while working on Island Writer: I learned the mad giddy rush of making changes to ones house style-sheet, I learned about formulaic rejection letters, I learned about being very polite under all circumstances (which, if you read last week’s post, you’ll note is not a skill I choose to exercise at all times). I learned about organizing book launches, and the fact that there is such a thing as too much cheese, but not such a thing as too many post-it notes.

It’s been a great run.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Check your privilege

This post has a context. The context of this post is best summarized here: Suzanne is quite articulate, and one of the bloggers I follow who mentions social justice who doesn’t also post a lot of material that’s not safe for work.

I dislike being white being made out to be the biggest part of privilege that we have to look at. Yes, I am a white, cisgendered, reasonably neurotypical (I’m smarter than you), middle-class, heterosexual female. But just because I have privilege does not mean I am part of the problem.

Probably one of the reasons so much of the social justice stuff I read rankles is that it focuses on race, and is written by Americans. Americans have a different experience of race than Canadians from small, northern, west coast cities.

To illustrate, let me tell you about the city I grew up in.

Quesnel when I was a child had one black family. They were the dark-dark skinned East Indian pharmacist couple and their two kids. Their girl was a couple years younger than me, but their boy was my age and in my class. He was all into sports and whatever, which was irrelevant to my reading-obsessed self, but he was also good at math. My biggest awareness of interaction with him was beating him in a national math competition that we both competed in, at a grade level above ours. I was smugly satisfied when I beat him, because everyone knew he was smart and I’m absurdly competitive. We had one openly lesbian family. They were friends with my mom, they had two adoptive kids. It apparently never occurred to my mom to explain what lesbians were, so I just found my sense of narrative incredibly confused by the fact that the one with cropped hair who always wore plaid lumberjack shirts was significantly shorter than the soft one with curls around her face. In the stories, the manly person is always taller than the womanly one, and so it was very weird. The population of the town was primarily Scottish-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Sikh Canadians, and First Nations. My family, good Catholic Scottish-Canadians who had been there for generations, was related to a lot of people, and had longstanding connections in the community. Like the Keens, a Chinese family who’d been there for ages. Harry Keen gave the eulogy for my great-uncle. The Hoys, another long-standing Chinese family, had at one point owned about a third of downtown, including taking family portraits of practically every family and miner passing through to Barkerville, the big Gold Rush town. Oh, and there were the Metis, who are the reason I was reasonably certain for most of my childhood that all French-Canadians were really tan. My mother’s graduate work in First Nations studies meant I spent a fair amount of time on the reservations, and we were invited to potlatches. I also went to the open community days at the Sikh temple, and looked forward every year to when my mom got huge batches of pakora from a woman who made them by the lot in her kitchen at home. I saw a lot of 30-something First Nations men with alcohol abuse problems, too, that awful stereotype and social justice hot topic. Including two of my cousins.

Oh, right, I should mention: I’m the only one of my first cousins on my mom’s side without First Nations status. I stand out at family reunions like undercooked fish.

On from race, as it is overstated: some of my closest friends are genderqueer and various shades of gay. Okay, yes, that covers most things I could say about that. I’m aware of issues around it, of the fact that a couple bi guys I know identify as straight on dating sites because they feel more secure in it.

When I was at my first high school, my first real friend was the apparently developmentally disabled girl in my theatre class: I only realized she was atypical when a teacher complimented me on my ‘outreach.’ The idea of it repulsed me: she was fun to hang around with because she was interesting and not obsessed with boys and drinking, not because it got me brownie points with authority figures. Awareness of neurodivergence is one of the reasons I contribute to the intermittent blog Speaking Human, which is partly dedicated at exploring and explaining why people act the way they do.

That covers everything at the top except class: I am intensely aware of class. I am aware that having an educated family has advantaged me (some people didn’t learn how to use semi-colons until university, and that’s just tragic), and that I will have a lot more opportunities if I complete a Bachelors degree at the very least. I connect class and education a great deal, because I value reading and erudition and good conversation and cannot comprehend that those might not be the essential elements of high society for everyone.

So now you know that I recognize privilege. But recognizing privilege isn’t enough: being a responsible member of society relies on doing something about it. I call people out on discriminatory language whenever possible, and explain why I am doing so. I have, in my cranky way, tried to educate people about various issues in the belief that most prejudice is xenophobia and knowledge will dispel it.

I have a whole other rant about ‘white culture’ being brought up as a primary privileged group and the fact that ‘white culture’ is a thing that does not exist, because one can hardly get two straight cis white Republican males from the same state to agree on anything, let alone all white people across three and-some-ish continents (I also have another about how awesome it is that someone I went to high school with is running for Governor and how it makes me feel unaccomplished, but this post is already possibly the longest I’ve ever posted).

So remember: I am not racist. I am not misandrist. I do not care whether you are gay or straight or bi or trans* or genderqueer or ace. I am a misanthrope: I hate all of you equally.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Binary Politics and the lure of Historical Romance

Many of my Canadian friends don’t understand how American politics can be so polarizing that discussing politics at all at family events is considered a bit of a taboo. Part of that, theorizes one friend, is that we have not had a viable third party in elections in 90 years.

To paraphrase one of my favourite authors, we tend to see zebras. Us versus them is a really easy conflict, even more so when we frame it as good versus evil.

Jedi versus Sith, practically everyone versus Nazis, British versus French in the Napoleonic Wars: these are conflicts easily understood as binaries. The only exception is the second world war, which was actually quite complex politically. Most of the stories we tell about it,* though, are ones about one aspect of conflict, with one enemy, easily identified. One possible explanation for this is that real life is complex enough, and fiction is an escape from that. Those stories with grand conflicts tend to be geared more towards entertainment than the elevation of society, because they provide that escape. Thrillers, military historical fiction, and a great deal of speculative fiction tend to all focus on the binary conflict.

Another genre that focuses on simpler conflicts is historical romance. One of the great tools of the romance genre is throwing together two adults and keeping them together through some plot device, and then having them fall in love through repeated exposure. One of the favourites of the romance genre as a whole is having two people married on a slim premise and fall in love afterwards. In historical fiction, we have a great many plausible options to force a marriage, from alliance to scandal. We have divorce as an awful scandal to be avoided at all costs, and heirs as the goal of all marriage, both of which encourage the wedded to get along with each other.

I know I go for simplicity sometimes in my reading material, because historical romance is like chicken soup for the mind when I am sick, and sometimes I just want the good guys to beat up the bad guys. But when I’m all here, I want more. I want the speculative fiction I read to give me something more than ‘us’, the living, versus all ‘them’ zombies,** unless the zombies have no fewer than three levels of social commentary.

Two requests stem from this:

  1. I would very much appreciate recommendations for fluffy historical fiction.
  2. If you’re a writer, don’t give me a binary! Find more nuanced ways to make great plots.
*Harry Turtledove’s In The Balance series is a notable exception, in which aliens arrive and it’s everyone versus everyone in an ever-shifting tessellation.
**Heinlein jokes are a thing that happen and I am not sorry
Posted on by Eileen Young

The More I Blog

The more I post on this blog, the more it becomes for my own enrichment.

When I started, I had grand visions of it helping me find clients and leveraging into an advertising revenue stream as well as sending people my way.

The fact of the matter is, though, that I don’t blog enough for that to happen. Blogging in a way that keeps people engaged requires doing so more often than I do: daily works well for many people, and microblogs like Twitter thrive on many more than that.

But I like talking to friends, or reading blogs, or writing fiction. When I have chunks of time I could dedicate to prolonged fiction writing or blogging or polishing my rusty art skills, sometimes I’ll just choose to watch a movie and knit (my well-used Netflix subscription can attest to how often ‘sometimes’ is). I guard my time jealously.

If I were spending a great deal of my fiction-writing time putting the finishing touches on something just about to hit the market, I’d spend more time researching it. If I encountered more new things I didn’t expect to have changed dramatically in the next few months, I’d spend more time researching that, too. But, with no pressing need to know exactly which channel for publication will work best for me (KDP Select looks best, especially if you make sure you get reviews before you use your promo days, but I’ve only spent a couple hours researching), it’s easy for me to get caught up reading social justice blogs or fanfiction or meta-analysis of video games.

And this post is my permission to myself to do just that.

This blog stands as a reminder that I should always be researching and trying to improve my writing, but it’s okay if I do other things sometimes, as long as I am still able to churn out a coherent chunk of writing-related non-fiction every week.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Labyrinthine

I had, until tonight, never watched Labyrinth. I’ve read things about it, seen meta discussions of it, and been subjected to pictures of David Bowie’s hair from it, but I had not seen the thing itself.

Since it’s rather ridiculously late at night, I figured I may as well liveblog it. And by ‘liveblog’ I mean ‘write it up and the queue it for like three weeks from now in case I am lacking in bloggable ideas.’

Seven minutes in, and Sarah is really ridiculously melodramatic. She makes me cringe. Liked the transition in the garden with setting jarring stuff, though.

The goblins are amazingly adorable.

David Bowie’s eyebrows are amazing, and I think it’s Sarah’s voice that I hate.

The Labyrinth itself is really, really neat.

Something I love about the visual medium more than the written one is clothes. Specifically, David Bowie’s coat. But also Seneca Crane’s beard. Reading about gaudy things and internalizing ‘okay, yes, ridiculous and blingy and wasteful’ and seeing absurd and fabulous are different things.

It’s like the problem of translating Lord of the Rings to film: long passages of the books are encompassed in a single long shot of New Zealand. As a corollary to that, an accurate description of David Bowie’s coat would most likely be boring and overdone and ruin the pacing of the story. The coat may be as awesome as the eyebrows.

I had been worried, momentarily, that at the end she would be required in proper bildungsroman fashion to leave childish things like goblins behind at the end of her journey. The dance party is excellent. I am glad she left David Bowie’s creepy love/possession thing behind, though.

Dance Magic is possibly my new favourite song.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

The Hunger Games

So, I just saw The Hunger Games tonight, but I’m delaying this post because, well, there are spoilers, and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who wants to see it in theatres still.

I really liked the movie, and Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. The scene where she volunteered instead of Prim made me tear up, and I loved the way she looked really tomboyish and aggressive and out of place in a dress when she was declaring herself.

I found myself both annoyed at how long it took to get to the Capital and disappointed that they took out the Mayor’s daughter completely. Taking out the Mayor’s daughter changes some of the symbolism of the Mockingjay pin – in the books, the pin was given to her, starting the cycle of all of her symbolism being given to her. Cinna does a spectacular job and makes her a symbol of District 12, Haymitch and Peeta make her a symbol of star-crossed lover (yes, she plays along, later, but she does it to please Haymitch: she understands PR pretty much as ‘things that will please Haymitch’), and pretty much everyone else makes her a symbol of rebellion, the mockingjay embodied. She plays her part, and largely fulfills the roles she’s given, but she doesn’t consciously or deliberately choose the roles themselves. She takes what is presented to her.

Without the Mayor’s daughter, she chooses her symbol herself. It’ll be interesting to see if that crops up later on or if I’m just a symbolism nerd. It was understandable from a time point of view to cut a very minor character, but the method of storytelling effects change even without that sort of cut.

Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss was not the only reason I liked Katniss more in the movie than the book. Not being able to hear her thoughts makes it a lot easier to like her. When we are in Katniss’ head, the thought that she can’t go home without Peeta because they’ll hate her makes sense: we understand it. But when all we can see is her face as she looks torn, it’s easier to be charitable to her. Empathetic characters, and first-person narrators, are not always as likable as third person characters. I really loved the cuts to the Capital, as well.

Especially Seneca Crane’s beard. Seneca Crane’s beard kind of stole the show. Which, it seems, everyone already knows:

Posted on by Eileen Young

Ender’s Game and character building

Ender’s Game and the subsequent books were important to me, not just as a smart, alienated teenager, but as a writer. The second point is less trodden into the ground, so let’s go with that.

Han Qing-jao of the novel Xenocide was one of the only reasons I enjoyed that particular installment in the series. She’s part of the nobility of the planet Path, a Chinese-inspired culture where nobility and meritocracy are comingled by means of genetic programming. The nobility of Path are known as the ‘godspoken,’ because along with brilliance, they are ‘gifted’ with crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that is understood as service to the gods.

In Xenocide, this was done deliberately by the government as a means of controlling their geniuses.

It was the first time I really noticed that many totalitarian shadow regimes – sometimes know as authors – cripple their characters in this way. Not all of them, and many times in novels starring primarily adults it’s backstory and not current concern, but enough that I have a long and thorough and distressing list.

I understand part of the motivation for crippling characters. We want to want to write characters readers will want to connect to emotionally, because nothing’s quite as satisfying as being told someone cried at something you wrote. A lot of the time, we do that by trying to create characters readers will not necessarily fall in love with, but will identify with.

Sometimes – often – this involves taking extraordinary characters and giving them quite notable flaws to make them seem more ‘human.’ Crippling flaws, usually. In the Enderverse, this is mostly shown through smart people having really, really awful lives. Like Ender, perpetually guilt-ridden over his xenocide. Like Virlomi, who’s smart enough to set herself up as a religious figure for political power, and stupid enough to get caught up in her own hype and therefore totally useless. Like Bean, the most brilliant character in the series and so also with a genetic condition like severe giantism, which will cause his body to break down and eventually kill him horribly. And like Qing-jao, slave to her own brain.

The flaws are supposed to make them feel closer to hand, partly because real people go through things that suck, too, but partly – and this is the important bit – because writers want to make being spectacular in some highly visible way seem as if it has a price attached. Making people reading political space adventures and also wars feel better about not proceeding to start a religion or contribute to a new world order or discovering a new life form (and then going crazy, but we don’t talk about that) encourages complacency.

Speculative fiction is about reaching out and exploring, and that shouldn’t be just an authorial privilege. Remarkable characters don’t have to be horribly flawed to be relatable, and achievement on a large scale doesn’t have to be made out as sin or suffering.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Hey, look, antitrust

When the US Department of Justice is investigating accusations of collusion among big publishers and Apple, it’s a sign that people still care about reading.

Agency pricing is what self-publishers traditionally have no recourse from: you set your price, the seller takes a cut, and you get the rest. Wholesale pricing is a matter of selling the book to the seller, and then they sell it to the customer for whatever price they choose. That’s kind of neat, because while self-publishers in particular don’t traditionally have access to reams of statistics about the best price to sell something for, booksellers do. Letting the sellers set the price means that they’ll optimize it to sell as much as possible, and takes some of the worry from you (under wholesale model pricing, you get paid the same not matter what, so you can quite gleefully cease to agonize over pricing). Amazon traditionally sold ebooks for very little over their wholesale cost. A lot of the shift to agency pricing as opposed to wholesale boils down to ‘wah, Amazon’s willing to make less money on this than me.’

This does raise some concerns: if ebooks are absurdly cheap, that makes printed books less attractive.

And then we take a break from numbers and theory and talk to real people. Jesse Hajicek and Cory Doctorow both have their books available for free, in their entirety, online. They both have many people who read them for free, in their entirety, online. They both also sell hardcopies. People buy the hardcopies. It’s a miracle!

But this post is not about the benefits of one’s work being available free. This is about colluding to make the work of the people one represents more expensive. The publishers accused of course have experience hiding collusion, so it’s possible nothing may come of the accusations. But lawsuits and expensive settlements and the possibility that the people who are handling your work are doing morally reprehensible things while not notably increasing what they pay you sure do make self-publishing more attractive right now.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Literary Conventions

Second person is a lot of fun to write, and I don’t know why it’s not more widely used.

Actually, I do, a little bit: Choose Your Own Adventure novels are considered a bit of a holdover from the 80s, and a lot of the people who find the form natural are going to gravitate to writing for video games.

This branches into two separate issues: literary conventions and differences between media.

Observant readers can probably guess what I’m covering today.

We have established storytelling forms, ways we make a story easy to parse for a reader. This tends to be through the employ of past tense, and usually either first or third person narration. Third person is far and away more common, even if we’re only seeing the inside of one character’s head. First person has recently become more popular for the Young Adult market, particularly in the paranormal romance genre (Twilight, House of Night, The Hunger Games), but third person past tense still dominates.

It’s common enough to be invisible, partly because that’s how it would naturally come out if someone was telling us a story about something someone else did. That is, quite often, the most comfortable position for a reader. I imagine I’d read far fewer romance novels if they were in second person: it would make them a decidedly uncomfortable prospect.

But readers have accepted and even embraced the conceit of the main character as narrator. Is it really that much of a step to ask that more accept the conceit of themselves as main character?

Posted on by Eileen Young

100

This is my hundredth post on this blog. I’ve been going for just about two years now, and a lot has changed.

I finished my first non-fiction book, Navigating the Ebook Jungle. That was last year, meaning it’s dated and needs editing, because such is the nature of epublishing right now.

I finished my first novella, Intervention, with my friend Mason Kochanski.

I finished the second draft of my first novel, which is still under revision.

I became Managing Editor and then Editor in Chief of Island Writer magazine.

I helped found Theory Train Magazine, now with its third issue out.

I spoke as part of a panel on getting your book out there for the Victoria Writers’ Society.

I started writing fan-fiction which I’m actually showing to the public.

I won the first season Anything Goes Writing League, earning the Faulkner Prism.

I finished Emergency Medical Responder training (still need to get my freaking license, but we’re talking accomplishments here, so never mind that).

It’s been a pretty good couple of years, all told, and it’s only looking up. I have several writing projects in various stages of completion, and have discovered the many and varied joys of outlining first. The publishing industry appears to be stabilizing more in favor of epublishing (now watch as the next couple of months make me look back on the word ‘stabilizing’ in shame). I’m excited for what the future holds for the writing world.