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.

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.

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.

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

I don’t read Kristen Britain anymore.

Not because I don’t like her writing: Green Rider was excellent, First Rider’s Call was a delight to discover a couple years later, and The High King’s Tomb left me hungering for more in the series.

Because I wanted to know when I could get my hands on the next in the series, I checked out her website. All authors should have websites: especially ones that they update with the release dates of their next books. As I browsed around, looking for extras like Sherwood Smith has on her site (she has maps!), I found Kristen Britain’s FAQ, and her response to fan-fiction.

It confused me, at first. Fanfiction does not affect your copyright as the author, since, uh, you created it first, and everything is automatically yours. Most fanwriters will prominently label their works with at least the name of the original work, if not your name, because they want other fans to be able to find it. They label them as fanfiction. Of course, anyone trying to sell fanfiction is doing something illegal and violating your IP and should be reported, but non-commercial fanfiction is generally treated as falling into slim grey fringes of Fair Use.

But that’s the legal stuff, and has very little bearing on my decision.

Fanfiction is, at its core, a love letter to the original work. People write it because they can’t get enough of the world, they want more, they want to explore an aspect of it that won’t be further explored in the text (like someone’s ambition to become a pirate which is derailed by plot). Saying that it’s all unwelcome seems very much a denial of your fans’ emotional investment in your work. Obviously they will never be as connected as you are as the creator, but does that mean no one else is allowed to fall in love with it?

I thought that was king of the point of writing. Kristen Britain’s answer to the question of fanfiction struck me as very much a refutation of the validity of fans loving her work. Anne Rice behaved very similarly and was higher-profile, but I stopped reading her for other reasons, so this is prompted by Kristen Britain’s stance. From what I’ve read, we’re supposed to buy her stuff, read it, and care about it only as much as necessary for us to buy the next one and not one iota more.

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.

I was going to post about that, but already had my blog for that week finished, and wanted to sleep rather than double-post and not have anything lined up for the next week. Which got me thinking about the length of time it takes to get a book from concept to reader.

Aside from the time it takes to actually write a book, it takes a while to produce. If it’s a first book, there’s finding a publisher and that whole process, but even if you have a publisher and a deal, there is the editing process, the design, the cover, any pre-launch marketing and the arranging of launches and signings, and the printing time itself. So even if a reader picks up a book as soon as it is available, there’s still a lag time of, usually, several months.

This can lead to a bit of a disconnect. I find myself slightly confused when I pick up ostensibly modern mainstream fiction and characters aren’t visibly using cell phones, or all their phones do is call people: and this is as someone who does not own a cell phone. That’s just on the narrowest scale, though. The television show Combat Hospital is explicitly dated 2006, which gives the writers plenty of time to research what exactly is going on before trying to translate it to an audience, but also keeps the audience reminded that this is not supposed to be real-time, so there’s no subconscious expectation of the things we see about the Middle East on the news to be reflected in developments on the show.

The second part of that is most relevant to what I’m trying to get at: in 2001, all the books that came out that fall that were set in New York had major discrepancies. It’s a problem that authors will continue to face as the world insists on changing, and there aren’t any really neat solutions. Dating everything gets tedious, and never lets the reader feel they’re reading anything truly modern, and trying to push through faster publishing turnaround leads almost inevitably to more mistakes in production. Narrow scope works well, but leaves one with, well, narrowed scope. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files gets around rapidly evolving technology by having a main character who destroys technology by his mere presence, which leaves a narrative vaguely disconnected from the present. It works, as the world is full of magic and vampires and things that go bump in the night, but I think it says a lot about either technology and society or my particular technological addiction that the lack of cell phone stands out more than the rampaging werewolves.

I’ve recognized it as a truth in genre for a while, having watched friends dither about majors and colleges and coming out, but it’s been coming home rather unpleasantly recently. It is deeply embarrassing to find oneself whining like a sitcom teen about how the world is so complicated, especially when one has been part of the working world for a few years.

But there’s no dire pressure to grow up: I’m unattached and unfettered by debt or partner or children, so there’s not much to do but dither. There’s starting to be more fiction aimed particularly at my age group of aimless 20-somethings, things like Jeph Jacques Questionable Content, about us only in a more interesting world, things like the Machine of Death anthologies, people in general, but given at least one certainty: the method of their death.

Not new themes, but new vehicles and voices, which makes them a lot of fun.

Which is all very well for what it is, and can be helpful on a personal level. But then we encounter therapy writing pushed as literature: not necessarily because of the literary merit, but because it is ‘raw’ or ‘honest.’

Therapy writing doesn’t necessarily make for good literature, which is a point often overlooked. This is our rawest self, so of course it should be wonderful. Because we are so attached, it can be difficult to get the perspective necessary for editing, which means the end product will often be less than sparkling. No amount of emotional honesty makes up for dull writing, when it’s being presented to an audience expected to read out of enjoyment (which is everyone).