Posted on by Eileen Young

Half Price Chocolate Day

Today is one of two iterations of my favourite holiday of the year: Half Price Chocolate Day. The other is November first. Apparently there are other holidays preceding these two days, for which people pay full price for chocolate. I do not understand this logic, and will comfort myself for my lack of understanding with offensive quantities of chocolate for which I paid very little money.

Oh, right, I also have a guest post up on my friend Patrick Thunstrom’s blog. It’s about linguistics and word choice again, since that’s one of my favourite topics. If you like that sort of rambling, you should also check out Speaking Human, the irregularly-updating sociology, linguistics and signalling blog I contribute to.
Tumblr is something I’ve been getting more involved in recently, though my initial impressions of it still stand: it’s much more functional as a tool for connecting and getting involved in a community than it is as a tool for sending forth material into the world. Blogger’s archives are significantly more easily navigable unless you are tracking a specific tag on a specific tumblr. Once you’re caught up, though, I find Tumblr’s dashboard much nicer than Blogger’s Reading List. This could be simply because the only time I look at the Reading List is when I’m on Blogger’s back end, instead of on Google Reader.
They are definitely different modes of communication. If you’re thinking about starting your own, or an additional, blog, I’d recommend examining your goals and your style as well as all the options out there.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Pop Culture

As writers, we deal in stories. Regardless of genre or medium: whether we’re writing episodic non-fiction for our blog or screenplays or children’s stories for the iPad or novels we want out in every format known to Man, including dead tree, we want to have a story that makes people come back for more.

How do we figure out what makes them come back for more?

Obviously, knowing who you’re writing to is key. Writing letters to our grandmother is different than writing letters to the IRS agent who just completed our audit. Writing to a group of people can be a little more difficult. I talked last week about romance novels: in some ways, they’re probably one of the easier genres to write, because readers are vocal about what they want. Steampunk has a similar strength of readership, though feedback there is more direct: forums and fan letters as opposed to simple numbers (did you know that romance novels account for 55% of total paperback sales? There are a lot of numbers there).

But what about other genres, or maybe those not as well defined? Those can be more difficult to pinpoint an audience for, to determine who you’re speaking to. What’s winning literary awards or flying off bestseller lists can be a good indication of the sort of stories that are engaging to people, but when we look at books alone we miss out on a lot. Many people – I’d even venture to say most – in North America also find a lot of the stories that engage them on television. Which means that, for anyone who generates stories, television, and pop culture in general, are invaluable tools for researching story structure.

I’m not saying we should all be writing magical children going to boarding school. Far from it: derivative is not exciting or intellectually stimulating. But if there are several shows with real science taking a reasonably prominent role (NUMB3RS, Criminal Minds), then maybe that’s an element we can draw on when writing our own works.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Gareth Gaudin: The Graphic Novel as Literature

The first Wednesday of the month brings another Victoria Writers’ Society general meeting. This month, we have Gareth Gaudin, owner of Legends comic shop and creator of Magic Teeth, an ongoing comic series.

Eight years ago, he started doing a daily comic strip. He’s made himself do a comic every day since. Creating every day based on what he’s done has lead to saying “Yes” to a lot more – like speaking here, or being a pallbearer. It’s an interesting phenomenon, that there are a fair number of people who put themselves out there every day who feel obliged to be interesting and try to stay that way.
The difference between a comic and a graphic novel was brought up, and Gareth’s answer was simple: “Nothing,” and then elaborating that the term originated with Will Eisner, who was having a hard time selling his serious comic relating to the death of his daughter and rebranded it to get in past the door.
He talked about publishing the daily strips, and having to move on when it’s done, and we digressed into creators who come up with the pictures and words at the same time, and circled around the idea of drafting. In comics, especially daily, you create and move on. It’s interestingly opposed to the frequent approach in writing of drafts and edits and drafts again.
It was a fantastic presentation.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Romance Woes

I can’t tell if the book I’m reading is self-published or not.

This could be considered a great stride in self-publishing: a book put together by someone who respects their work enough to hire a good editor and a good designer, someone who has been paying attention and decided to do it on their own and doesn’t see any reason there should be any qualitative difference from something put out with the totality of A. A. Knopf’s editorial team behind it.

In some cases, it would be.

But this is a romance novel.

So the cover’s pretty okay, and the layout’s pretty darned good, but the editing . . .

To be fair, if the editor did what I would have been tempted to do and took a shot for every sentence fragment, they’d have been dead of alcohol poisoning by Chapter 3 and none of this would be their fault.

The plot revolves around two lovers separated before they had closure, and their reunion and presumed eventual resumption of relations (I haven’t read that far). She is in a non-threatening caring profession (she’s not a cardiac surgeon or a Special Education teacher, but somewhere in between where the audience can nod along that yes, she has obvious nurturing qualities and no, we don’t need to think about anything too difficult). He is in a highly-paid and highly-respected field that leaves him feeling somewhat isolated (sports star, business tycoon, whatever: that’s not important either except for props). Her son is in the requisite 6-10 age range, smart and quiet (quiet because we can’t have one of the obstacles to their relationship taking up too much dialogue).

This plot, with these characters, are practically a genre unto themselves. If I kept track, I could probably name a dozen with the same setup. Most of them are probably put out by some imprint of Harlequin. To give credit where it’s due, Harlequin romances are often well-written. Rather, actually, comprehensibly written, because I am quite aware of the literary merit of cotton candy nailed to a page.

But with other romance publishers, I have encountered nightmarishly bad editing. The rub of it is, I wasn’t particularly scandalized. If a sci-fi novel had been published with a similar startlingly vast array of problems, I’d have politely tweeted to the author that they had gone insane. But these are romance novels. So I take the warm-fuzzies of the inevitable happy ending, go to the next one, and forget I ever read it.

This time, I’ll try to include a note to self that just because it’s free from the Kobo bookstore does not mean I  am obliged to download it and read it.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

Tomorrow

I usually post on Wednesdays. I’ve been in a pretty good groove about that the past six months or so, including queuing my friend Pat’s post for the week I was on vacation.

I won’t be posting tomorrow.

In fact, none of my blog is going to be visible tomorrow. I’m joining up with a whole bunch of other sites and going dark for tomorrow in protest of SOPA. A whole bunch of people have made more cogent arguments as to why it’s bad than I have, and you can read some of them here and here. Wikipedia explains why it’s going dark here. Read quickly, though: you only have three hours until it’s down for the day.

Posted on by Eileen Young

‘Conventional Wisdom’

There’s this conventional wisdom that a YA novel should be between 40k and 60k words, and a adult novel 70k to 80k. The thought process seems to be that young adults have shorter attention spans, and want smaller and more easily digestible bits of story.

Then conventional wisdom meets YA bestseller lists, and that all falls apart. Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games – all ridiculously long books, part of even longer series. Harry Potter was particularly eye-opening: after the series became a success, Tamora Pierce, one of my favourite authors going up and a mainstay of fantasy YA, brought out her new series as two long books rather than four short ones. The page count for the pair was higher than her quartets usually are, too. Harry Potter opened people’s eyes to the fact that yes, young adults are willing to read much longer stories, and will in fact devour them.

This brought on another change, as well: YA has traditionally been defined as aimed at 8-12 year olds, or at least was in the labeled sections of Waterstones. Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter and much of Tamora Pierce’s work certainly fit that bill. But The Hunger Games certainly speaks more to a slightly older audience. So there can be seen to be two general audiences for YA: those graduating from our childhood reads of Berenstein Bears and Le Petit Prince (what, not everyone read this in French at age six? I don’t understand), and those who read it because, while they are older, they still very much identify with being young and overcoming odds and still looking for a future.

It’s this latter category that in some part explains the number of twenty-somethings who will happily dress up as Harry Potter or Luna Lovegood for a movie premiere. This category has free time and long attention spans. And it’s as a sometimes member of this latter category that I hope more writers realize that YA means Young Adult, not child. Don’t dumb down your prose. Don’t limit your vocabulary. For the sake of all that’s good and true, don’t simplify your ethical conflicts.

And don’t let ‘conventional wisdom’ dictate your word count.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Victoria Writers’ Society AGM

I’m up for re-election again for my position as webmaster of the Victoria Writers’ Society. Everyone who arrived at the meeting with their membership form already filled out was eligible to be entered in a draw. I, of course, despite putting that announcement on the website, completely forgot. We’re having a reading after, an open mic night for all members. Up for re-election are all of the executive, including the members at large, and we get to approve the budget for the upcoming year.

The exec for 2012 stands as follows:
President Carol O.
Vice President Michael Mcgovern
Treasurer Laura Smith
Secretary Sheila Martindale

Members at Large:
Edeana Malcolm
Margo Malcolm
Eileen Young
Derek Peach
Jerry Hayes

Sheila Martindale won a thirty dollar gift certificate from Bolyn Books from the draw.

Posted on by Eileen Young

First Of The Year

My year began with champagne, sleep, and my mother pounding at my front door to make sure I was awake.

Once I was dressed and out the door, we went to the levee at the Bay St Armoury, where I had breakfast in the form of athol brose. It has oatmeal in it, so it’s breakfast. And probably healthy, too. One of the kilted officers in the Officers Mess ladled me some, and I got to wander the Mess. It has the feel of a gentleman’s club as portrayed in a spy film set in the 1950s: billiard table, covered for this occasion, fully stocked bar that has won awards for its single malt list, heavy leather furniture and a large portrait of Princess Mary on the mantle. We proceeded to the NCO Mess, which is larger and brighter, with a TV and a smaller bar. I got to discuss the origin of the last name Young with a bekilted Sergeant-Major of the same name.

Then we went to Government House, which is the big one. We parked about a block and a half away. We were herded into a short tour of the downstairs, culminating in a coat check, before being herded back upstairs and through a receiving line to the ballroom. The receiving line was a few officers, including the head of the BC Ambulance Service for the South Island, and the Lieutenant Governor. The ballroom was stuffed with people and coffee and sausage rolls. The view from the veranda is spectacular: all the way to the water and the Olympic Peninsula.

I also managed to find the best cure for crowd anxiety: a pipe band in an enclosed space. Really. It was fantastic. They played a couple songs I didn’t know, then Amazing Grace, and a few people were singing along, including me, though I forgot most of the second verse. Then they played Auld Lang Syne, and at least half the crowd sang along, and it was beautiful. A lone piper piped in the Lieutenant Governor and his party, and the Lt. Governor paid the piper – which involved sharing a stiff drink on stage. It was charming. The address put a good start on the year, too.

As we were leaving, there was a woman collapsed in the parking lot. I went to help, though there wasn’t much I could do. I helped keep her propped up, got her a tissue from her pocket, and made sure she was breathing and had a pulse. I also made sure someone had gone for the head of the ambulance service, because, while I have my certificate, I have no license as a paramedic and no cell phone to call an ambulance.

The ambulance arrived quickly, and she was bundled on to the ambulance. A fire truck arrived as well, so they had plenty of help, and I left. The ambulance pulled out, and didn’t have the lights and sirens on, so she’s most likely going to be okay.

As an example of the upcoming year, I’m okay with this morning. I spent the early part reading, and I want to do more of that, and more writing. I very much want to get more into my paramedical training, and start working in the field – I think this morning will be impetus to do my licensing sooner rather than later.

And I can always appreciate more men in kilts.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Fandom

It’s time to come clean: I am a Homestuck.

What, that terminology means nothing to you because you are not already a member of the fandom?

Wikipedia explains: Homestuck, the current adventure [in MS Paint Adventures], began on April 13, 2009 and follows many teenagers as they play a reality-altering video game that brings about the end of the world.


Fans tend to refer to themselves as ‘Homestucks.’


Being a part of the fandom has drawn me to join Tumblr, as the creator, Andrew Hussie, updates sporadically there, as well as the creator of one of my other favorite webcomics, Kagerou. But what really sealed the deal for me was that Tumblr is where the creator of Kagerou writes fan-fiction of Homestuck. Called Brainbent, it really deserves a post of its own, but I’m trying to contain my fandom. Brainbent explores the adventures of the Homestuck characters if they all lived in the same place and that place was inpatient psychiatric care. The story is well-written and entertaining in its own right, but the strength of it lies in that using familiar characters and only going slightly farther in their original Homestuck characterizations contributes to an intensely non-threatening space for people to read about and ask questions about mental illness. Because the moderators reply and repost a lot of what fans contribute, I can’t even count the number of people who have openly expressed that Brainbent inspired them to take more action in their own mental health.


I’ve seen fanfiction derided for lazy world-building or character development quite a bit, and it’s often true. But in the good ones, using a pre-existing work largely just provides context. Fanfiction lets you use people or places or both that are already familiar to you and many of your readers. It also means readers have a head-place they’re already familiar with, already comfortable with, when you want to address something specific or difficult. Brainbent tackles mental illness using the familiar context of Homestuck, Wide Sargasso Sea tackles colonialism and assimilation in the context of Jane Eyre, and a short story we ran in Theory Train in Issue 2, called “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” touched on Stockholm Syndrome in the context of Greek myth.

Sometimes, though, it’s not high-minded and thought-provoking. Sometimes fanfiction is fun, further exploring a universe you love. The one I’m working on with my friend Tristan, Here Be Dragonflies, is more in that vein.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Kobo Vox

When my boss said he’d arrange for me to spend some time with a Kobo Vox at our staff Christmas party, I thought he was going to borrow his girlfriend’s.

He didn’t.

He gave me one.

It’s pink.

I made noises of enthusiasm that I’m reasonably certain my coworkers had not previously produced by a human.

The Kobo Vox is a backlit ereader with wifi accessibility. This means that, whenever I am in range of a wifi network (school, home, Starbucks, the library), I can download as many books as I like directly to my ereader. It also means that I can check my email, browse the web, and watch Youtube videos, if I like. One of the highlights so far is that it lets me read Google Docs easily, so I can read my friend’s novel-in-progress on the bus to work.

Having not had a cell phone in three years, I was a little concerned that a touch-screen, and especially a touch-screen keyboard, would frustrate me beyond all rationality. But the keyboard has proven well-spaced, so I mis-type only about as often as I do on a physical keyboard.

The automatic bookmarking is a nice feature, as well. I find I’m curling up more frequently and more easily with my ereader than with a book or my laptop, and it’s fantastic.