alanajoli: (Default)
I have a post I intend to make that has actual thoughts and ideas in it -- two of them in the works, now that I think about it. However, they require me to have time to sit down and think those thoughts, and then change them into words, and as I'm in the middle of an upcoming deadline for a somewhat intense project, that time just hasn't been available.

So instead, I present you with interesting things around the Internet.


  • The Guardian published a chat with cast and crew members of the Harry Potter series about coming to the conclusion. Favorite quote, unsurprisingly from Rupert Grint (regarding Alan Rickman/Snape): "Alan sort of stayed in character between takes. I mean, he wasn't evil or anything. But he's quite intimidating."

  • In the Telegraph, Booker prize winner Penelope Lively criticizes e-book readers -- but then goes on to say that they'd be useful on vacation, or in the hospital. I find the pairing of those statements silly. You can love print books and find e-books incredibly convenient and it doesn't make you a "bloodless nerd."

  • In TV tie-in news -- no, it's not a new Richard Castle book this time. It is from NBC: they're publishing a fictional history book about Pawnee, the setting for Parks & Recreation. Meta, meta, meta.

  • Rose Fox at Genreville does the update on the latest gender disparity in an SFF anthology, showing how the conversation progressed among writers online quite nicely.

  • Lastly, a good friend of mine passed along this essay on productivity for creative people by Alexander Kjerulf that I find brilliant. I'm trying to implement some of these philosophies into my own work-flow.


So, that's the Internet from this week in a nutshell, according to me!
alanajoli: (Default)
[livejournal.com profile] sartorias wrote an entry a few weeks ago that I missed until now, mostly wondering about whether male writers and female writers create epic fantasy differently. The conversation threads are great -- much literary analysis on the meaning of epic fantasy happens in one thread, which I found quite engaging and informative, and then wrote my response based on gut instinct rather than analysis anyway.

Here's something I've been thinking about on and off since Twostripe told me I was being ridiculous by not considering Hermione Granger a "strong female" character. (Edit: He was right. Just to make that clear. I agree with him after our conversation, and realized I was falling prey to the equation I point out below.) A lot of the definition of "strong female" character that's expected right now equates to women-who-can-kick-butt-and-take-names. It is, in fact, a kind of masculine definition of strength. In what I see as the general way this plays out is the following equation:

women with swords > women with wands > women with hearths

A homemaker is not typically thought of as a strong woman. She has a traditional female role. She's not fighting against gender stereotyping, or against orcs or monsters. She's taking care of the home front.

But you know what? That hearth is important. While men and women with swords are out there saving the kingdom from external forces, the woman at the hearth is making sure they have a kingdom to come home to.

When I responded to [livejournal.com profile] sartorias's post, I was thinking about the Brian Jacques novels, and about how some of the female characters are go-getters, fighting on the front lines. (In the first novel, two of the most valuable fighters are Constance Badger and Jess Squirrel; in later stories, heroines like Mariel fight with improvised weaponry to carve out their own way home.) But there are also a lot of female -- and, actually, male! -- characters who aren't fighters. They're peace-loving creatures, many of them monks, who are healers, community builders, scholars, caretakers. They're not just strong because they give the heroes strength in the this-is-what-we-front-line-warriors-are-fighting-for way. They're strong because they persevere, because they don't lose hope, and because they are able to keep hope alive for others. It's a quiet kind of strength, but it's one that I think often gets discounted (considering I have been a guilty party on that myself).

There's a lot to be said for a Hestian grounding and for strength of hearth. Since I'm coming to appreciate that idea more as a parent, I wonder if there's an additional pertinent question to tag onto [livejournal.com profile] sartorias's gender question: do fantasy writers who are parents write differently than fantasy writers who are not?

Link Soup

Oct. 4th, 2010 09:22 pm
alanajoli: (Default)
I've been building up links to share in my e-mail (I always e-mail them to myself until I have enough for a post). I was thinking about reviewing Breaking Waves, which I've just finished, but that may wait until tomorrow. Short version: really worthwhile anthology with a wide variety of stories.

But here are your links for digestion:

  • Apparently, the Man Booker Prize committee has a thing against books in the present tense, according to an article in Salon. I tend to prefer books in the past tense, myself, but every so often there's a present tense story that proves me wrong. (As I explained to a friend, if it's written in present tense, the narrator can't die -- or the book would just stop. Which, I suppose, would be an interesting conclusion to a first person present tense story.)

  • Josh Jasper at Genreville, among others, has blogged about Sir Terry Pratchett's sword made of star metal. That he forged himself. No, really. I salute you, Sir!

  • I'm, of course, posting behind the ball on this, but Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is under attack. It looks like yet another case where the person trying to censor the book didn't even bother to read it.

  • An impressive statistic: one in ten Americans uses an e-reader.

  • PW did an excellent long article about Top Cow's new book, Artifacts, which I reviewed at Flames Rising.

  • Comics and lit crit intersect with American Vampire, by Scott Snyder, who teaches courses like "The Monster Under Your Story." Sounds like fun, no?

alanajoli: (Default)
Some of you may have caught the two columns I wrote for Flames Rising (with the intention of writing several more) about the differences in the types of paranormal romances and urban fantasies that make up the scale of books inside the boundaries of the genre (or expanding them). After a conversation with my library boss, I decided to start putting together a big ol' list and synopsis of sub groupings for her, since it's what I read, and I recommend a lot of titles to our patrons. Just because someone digs vampires in Sookie and Anita Blake doesn't necessarily mean it's the vampires they're after -- in fact, the last person I was giving recommendations to started out from those two series and ended with, "Actually I'd like to have something a little more light hearted and funny," and so I sent her in the direction of [livejournal.com profile] shanna_s's Enchanted Inc. So in my list, I'm trying to suss out the qualities that might attract someone to a novel -- maybe they are vampire crazy, but maybe they're looking for something snarky with a Sex and the City vibe (in which case they need Happy Hour of the Damned by [livejournal.com profile] mdhenry). Maybe what they loved about Jim Butcher's Dresden Files was actually the private investigator angle, in which case you could go with [livejournal.com profile] devonmonk's Allie Beckstrom books, the Connor Grey series by Marc del Franco, of [livejournal.com profile] blackaire's Nocturne City series. (There are actually scads of PIs in urban fantasy -- I've just named a few.) Do they want an urban fantasy series with a con artist? Try the WVMP novels by Jeri Smith-Ready. And from there, if they love the radio angle, try Carrie Vaughn's Kitty the Werewolf books or [livejournal.com profile] stacia_kane's Megan Chase series. Maybe they totally dug the government agency aspect of Hellboy and B.P.R.D. in the comics, in which case, they should be reading [livejournal.com profile] antonstrout's Simon Canderous series. I could keep on this thread for some time -- the point is, while some people are vampire nuts, a lot of UF and Paranormal Romance readers might get a kick out of different aspects of the novels than just vampires vs. werewolves -- which is sort of a non-UF reader way to boil it down.

So, I thought it was hilarious today when Jackie Kessler posted a parody song about urban fantasy (using the tune for "Popular" from the musical Wicked). Did I make sure to include everyone on that list in my list? Who of those famed urban fantasists have I yet to read?

(Of course, I disagree with his looking down on Paranormal Romance, but that could be a whole other entry.)
alanajoli: (Default)
[livejournal.com profile] lyster wrote in response to my last entry:
My sense, based on the books I've seen self-identified as UF, is that few UF readers would recognize any of these three as Urban Fantasy, or at least as "their" urban fantasy. Am I correct? If so, where's the line? If not, whence this perception?

There's a lot of marketing that going into defining genres. I was heartbroken when Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell came out and was shelved in the fiction section at Barnes and Noble, rather than in fantasy where it belonged. Michael Chabon supposedly commented to someone at a conference that he's delighted he's been getting away with writing genre fiction for years, and people think he's writing literary fiction. (While searching for an exact reference to that, rather than a memoried retelling, I came across an article from Salon explaining why Chabon is both literary and genre fiction, comparing him to Michael Connelly. In this case, it's a murder mystery being discussed.)

The truth about urban fantasy is that it's a handy replacement phrase for anything set in a contemporary world, which may be divergent from our own or may be twisted due to a magicopalypse of some kind. It encompasses everything from Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, and Emma Bull (who are sometimes considered progenitors of the current genre) to the current trend of sexy vampires and werewolves and covers featuring women with tattoos on their lower backs. Any genre that can include both Neverwhere and Twilight without people blinking is a genre so broad that its label is almost meaningless.

The same could, of course, be said of fantasy in general (or, worse, the fantasy/SF designation used by most bookstores and libraries). I think Josh Jasper's division between UF and horror is, perhaps, the best designator I've seen -- the major difference between the two is the purpose of the setting. Otherwise, how do you determine that vampires, which for years belonged in horror (or, thanks to Anne Rice, the general fiction section), are now a UF trope?

The term literature might be treated in the same way. There may or may not be a handy definition out there of what "literature" actually means (since, if it means "worthy of being discussed in a college classroom," Buffy and Patricia Briggs's "Mercy Thompson" series are among the titles I've seen on course syllabi). If there's an official definition inside the publishing industry, I'd love to hear it! My own associations with the term are somewhat troubled (in no small part due to the condescension with which the literary establishment, whoever that is, addresses genre fiction on the whole, which Genreville has covered in other entries -- that sort of attitude seems geared to make genre writers go on the defensive). In a conversation over on [livejournal.com profile] sartorias's blog, I commented:

[Literature] as a word tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It conjures up assigned reading, a list of white-male-dominated classics, and books that are read because then you can say that you've read them (rather than books that are read because the reading of them is worthwhile). "Literary fiction" seems to be synonymous with "depressingly hopeless" in some circles.

If by literature here, however, we mean "good stories that somehow reach toward a greater meaning and enrich the lives of the readers" -- well then, perhaps even those of us who are hoping to entertain may be striving for that in the end.


In the case of Michael Chabon, it tickles me that he feels he's getting genre fiction past the literary establishment on the sly -- that he's really "one of us," but is walking in "their" world without "them" realizing it. In the case of may really excellent fantasy novels that end up getting published as "general fiction" instead, it typically makes me irritated -- the idea seems to be that "normal" readers will only pick up books from the fiction section, so we can pass off this book, which is really fantasy, as "normal" and appeal to the general (or possibly literary) market, when really, the fantasy section is where it would find readership. (It seems to me that the greatest disservice I've seen in this scenario is to [livejournal.com profile] shanna_s's Enchanted Inc. and sequels. They were published to hit the chick lit audience, which dried up, but they remain helplessly shelved in fiction, where fantasy readers, who would really enjoy them, won't necessarily find them.)

What I tend to look for in fiction, in terms of depth, thinking about "big thoughts," or making me question my assumptions about how I understand the world (things one assumes that literature is supposed to do, while "hack fiction" is not), tends to revolve around my interest in how people/characters deal with concepts of the divine, or deal with their own mortality. I've found people writing about those topics across all sorts of genre lines, from the novels of Charles Williams; to the exceptionally wonderful collection of artificial intelligence stories by Jeff Duntemann ([livejournal.com profile] jeff_duntemann), Souls in Silicon; to, both surprisingly and delightfully, several of the novels published in the roleplaying world of Eberron. Stylistically, of course, there is a shift from one to the next. But stylistically, I see the novels of Catherynne M. Valente and Caitlin Kittredge's Street Magic in particular being written in a poetic, metaphoric style -- which I simply call beautiful language, but others might call literary. Is it the depth of meaning that brings the sense of literary, or is it a stylistic quality?

Really, rather than a death match, it makes more sense to me to acknowledge that the boundaries between the world of literature and the world of genre fiction -- like the barriers between this world and the next at places like Glastonbury -- are thin. If there's a herm that stands between literary and genre fiction, Hermes is guiding writers right past it all the time, and the folks who are leaving him libations are finding an audience on both sides of the "us vs. them," "pop culture vs. establishment" divide. To them, I offer my heartiest congratulations.

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Alana Joli Abbott

November 2023

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