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.

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.

Last week I talked about why I don’t read Kristen Britain anymore. You should read it! It’s another example of my carrying through with strong reactions to things most people don’t care about. This week, other stances authors have about people writing fanfiction of their work and why I like them better for it.

Sherwood Smith‘s attitude towards it makes a lot of sense to me (bottom of the page): alternate universes only, because you as a fan don’t have enough information to write in the universe completely accurately. That makes sense, and gives everyone boundaries they can stay comfortably within while still allowing a great deal of leeway to write fantastic odes to Sherwood Smith’s work.

J.K. Rowling has a slightly different boundary: she loves fanfiction, but is disturbed by the porn and wishes people would stop. Given that she originally conceived Harry Potter as children’s book, and a lot of the characters can remain under the age of consent even in the more explicit works, this makes sense to me, too.

Andrew Hussie is probably the most generous with his creation: he encourages people to play all they want as long as they’re not profiting from it (it’s how he makes his living), but he sometimes lets fanart be sold through the shop, fan art gets put in the calendars, and the latest soundtrack is going to be all fan contributions. He has also unilaterally declared that all fan things are canon to the story. Given the sheer range of stories, this was most likely at least partly sarcastic, but it was hilarious and inclusive and pretty much a gift to the fandom.

They have different comfort levels in terms of fanfiction, and slightly different boundaries, but they’re all engaging their fandom about fanfiction. It works for them: people stay engaged between books/movies/updates. Of course, some fans are still going to be jerks and be impatient for new installments and express it inappropriately. But a fandom where people connect positively keeps interest up and keeps everyone happy, which is something to consider in terms of engaging readers long-term.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.