Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Just a couple of links today. PW blogger Peter Brantley wrote up what I think is an excellent entry about the problem with leaving libraries out of the e-book revolution. Brantley's assessment is that by making e-books unavailable through libraries, a whole class of Americans is denied access to those resources. If the market does shift so that more and more books are published exclusively in electronic format, I agree that this is going to become the problem that Brantley anticipates. In the mean time, thank goodness for paper books, Interlibrary Loan, and the host of other resources available at the public library.


(The rotunda at James Blackstone Memorial Library, my local source for research and reading.)

Who's getting e-books right? According to Kent Anderson, Amazon is getting everything about publishing right, and everyone else in the book world needs to seriously up their game. This is, at least in part, true: writer friend of mine Audrey Auden dumped all the other e-book retailers for her self-published Realms Unreel because Amazon's customer service and platform were by far more beneficial to her in convenience and sales. On the other hand, Jim Hines recently discussed how Amazon can change your prices without your permission, as recently happened with his Goblin Tales. I maintain my wariness around Amazon, despite finally jumping on board with Amazon Prime (as it keeps us comfortably in diapers here at Casa Abbott).

When Amazon first said that the Kindle was going to work with Overdrive back in April, I was excited. As a former library staffer, I thought this could only be a win for library users and libraries in general. Good for libraries how, you say? Circulation statistics help libraries get funding, whether those circs are from print books or e-books. More circs = better library statistics = better chance for grants. So, hurrah Amazon for helping libraries out!

But wait. As of last week, Penguin just pulled all their new books from Overdrive. Why? Apparently the new Kindle/Overdrive platform has increased concerns about security for their digital files. Apparently if you want to borrow a book for your Kindle, your library directs you to Amazon's site, rather than to the Overdrive program (and Adobe Digital Editions), which is how I've always used Overdrive. (This is conjecture on my part, based on news coverage.) According to a recent article in PW, libraries may end up on the losing end of this disagreement, since now only one of the Big Six publishers (Random House) is fully on board with library lending. And they're taking a look at their policy, so who knows, what that will mean for the future?

I hate to sound like I'm always coming down on Amazon. As a resource, I love Amazon. I use them heavily for publication dates and information, and I shop there for all sorts of non-book items. I rent digital-streaming movies from Amazon. I buy music there. I really want Amazon to be the kind of company that I want to shop at. And I don't think that the traditional publishers are automatically in the right. But it seems like there are just too many hijinks where Amazon is concerned to automatically assume that Amazon is the good guy.

Especially, it seems, for independent publishers in international circles. I forget where this link came from (possibly also the PW newsletter), but Mark from The Writer's Guide to E-Publishing breaks down what your book actually costs on Amazon if you're selling it abroad. If you've priced it for free -- or at 99 cents -- that's not what folks in Europe are going to end up paying (and remember, they've got the exchange rate in their favor).

Some day I want to open up the PW newsletter and find some really awesome, feel-good, heart-warming Amazon related news. But I'm not holding my breath.

I like obituaries. This is not out of any sense of the morbid (although people have accused me of that). What I think is neat is how a person's life can be summed up in two hundred, eight hundred, or two thousand words, and you get this snap shot image of who they were. I used to clip the obituaries from the old copies of the Branford Review as part of a library archive project when I worked at the Blackstone, and I learned some interesting things about Branford's history in the process. I'd not known previously that we'd had a watch tower in town during World War II, keeping an eye on the coast, that was manned mostly by civilians. This I picked up from the obituary of one of the women who volunteered her time to help protect the coast.

I write obituaries for Newsmakers, a project for Gale Cengage (the publisher I used to work for, and for whom I edit the autobiographies project). I've covered scientists and environmentalists, humanitarians and football coaches. Usually, reading the obituaries gives me this feeling of work well done. The people selected for the project tend to be people who accomplished good things with their lives, and lived to a ripe old age.

Occasionally, however, I'm assigned celebrities who have died of drug overdoses or similar before their prime. And I'm left feeling, "What a waste!" That's the only time that the job is irksome for me -- in part due to the added fact that celebrity obituaries are always more work (because they're covered in so many sources, and thus require sorting through many more articles before I can write my own). Which makes me think that with this last batch, I should have saved the conservationist who lived to be more than a hundred for the last essay I write, rather than the actor who died before he was forty. Alas.

In other news, it has been an exceptionally good mail week for me. I got paid (always a cause for happiness), I got a book (yay for DAW and jimhines!), and I got a mysterious envelope from an elementary school. The class I visited last month to talk about Branford history and writing sent me thank you letters for my appearance, which gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies. It's astonishing to see what the students picked up -- and what I should perhaps have phrased better when I was speaking, as some of the things they say they learned weren't things I quite intended to teach! I imagine that teachers get used to this sensation, but watching kids learn is still a real novelty to me. From watching Bug learn to blow kisses to seeing just what third and fourth graders find important -- it's this amazing window into the way that human minds work, distilled in a different way from what I see watching teens and adults. Kids are awesome.

The first question I'm answering for that class will be going up this coming week on "The Town with Five Main Streets" -- I hope I live up to their expectations!

I took a week off back earlier in January and just read library books and books from my TBR pile and a few old review books that I'd needed to finish up. It was nice. Then I got a gig for School Library Journal that involves reading a bunch of series titles on world history and writing them up, and so I've moved from urban fantasy books to titles on technology in ancient cultures, how children lived in different eras, and the most daring raids in history. They're an eclectic mix, and even though they're short, it takes a long time to get through a pile of 100 page books! (Some, of course, read more easily than others, which is part of why they send them off to a reviewer.)

In the process, I've discovered that the Romans, who previously held little interest for me, were fascinating. They're not as interesting in the way that other ancient cultures are, to me -- they're interesting because they're so much more like us than other ancient cultures. The Romans strike me as a very material culture, interested in contracts and business arrangements, even with their gods. That certainly feels a step away from the all-powerful Greek gods, who would smite you for thinking for yourself (unless you're Odysseus -- there's a moment in the Odyssey where some non-Odysseus character has the idea that he doesn't need the gods, and he's immediately killed). It also feels far removed from the ongoing interference of the Tuatha de Danaan of Irish mythology or the pervasive sense of the Land-and-King unity in British legend. The Romans appear to be individuals with practical, material thoughts and goals -- and a tendency to observe other cultures and write about them the way that 19th century arm-chair anthropologists did. (And then, like good imperialists, they'd absorb those cultures into Rome.)

So, yeah, Rome is now on my list of interests -- which means I'm digging an ancient culture for its History rather than for its Mythology. This is sort of a shift from my usual thinking.

I've also been reading some web comics lately -- I finally decided I should read Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler. I also discovered that Love and Capes is publishing old strips online, which is exciting -- I got an issue of Love and Capes as a trial, either on Free Comic Book Day or through a special at my Friendly Local Comic Shop, and I really liked it -- but then it wasn't ever in stock. So now, I can catch up on all the back story and enjoy updates on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Despite having now worked at a library for nearly four years, apparently my subconscious still thinks of me as a bookseller. (I worked at Barnes and Noble for just over four years.) Last night, I had a Barnes and Noble dream, one where I was working at a store that I've never worked at with a coworker of mine, not from a B&N, but from my college Tutoring and Writing Center. Instead of my normal B&N clothing, I was wearing my black gi top and bottom (which, because in my dream I had a shift in the cafe where we always had to wear black tops and bottoms, seemed perfectly reasonable).

Yeah. It's been almost five years, and still that's the job I have dreams about.

Quick thoughts:

My husband just got his second degree black-belt yesterday! In honor of that, any time I mention him on the blog from now on, I'll be calling him by the nickname Two Stripe. Mostly because it amuses me, but also because either listgirl or mechristy asked me to blog about the family more, and I haven't been doing it, because I didn't have an appropriate blog name for him. (Baby number one, who is thus far doing just fine flopping around inside the womb, is nicknamed Bug while she's in utero, will stay Bug until she's old enough to decide if she wants her real name to show up on the Internet.)

Don't forget to visit kickstart_tu! We've got some great items on the auction, including books, crafts, digital art, online advertising, and critiques from tiffanytrent and kimpauley. Stop on by and spread the word!

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 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 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 (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.

First, business. Tomorrow is the last guest entry I have stashed away. I've been able to secure quite a number in advance up until this point, but at last, I'll be running out. If you read this blog and are interested in writing a short piece about either the importance of mythology in your writing, how mythology impacts your writing, how you go about creating a mythology or cosmology in your fiction, or how you adapt myths and folklore to make them work in your story, please let me know. You can contact me via this post, or through alanajoli at virgilandbeatrice dot com. (And if any of you fangs_fur_fey members would be willing to post about this over there, I'd be mighty grateful!)

In other news, I officially created my first new d20 creature today, just months before d20 is no longer relevant. It's not even a true monster--just an adjusted creature based on stats and templates that already exist. Despite this, I'm excited about the new creatures, particularly since my editor has given me the go ahead on it in advance. We'll see how my playtesters react on Saturday!

Speaking of Saturday, I have officially been asked to pick up books by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (jenlyn_b) for the youth services department of our library at her local signing. She'll be at the Borders in Milford, CT (for those of you who are also local) from 2 to 4. I usually work until 3:30, so I thought I'd miss it, but my manager agreed to let me shift my schedule earlier in order to make the event. Hurrah! Perhaps if I am clever enough, I will take photographs and post them here, like blue_succubus and mdhenry are wont to do.

Last random thought for the day: Amazon.com (who is not the friend of small presses right now, so I'm a little torn about advertising for them) is holding a contest for a trip for two to London to "visit" The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J. K. Rowling's hand-written book. There are three essay-type questions that must be answered in 100 words or less. Finalists in the two age categories get $1000 in amazon gift cards. Not bad for 100 words or less.