In case you’ve missed the news, the powers that be have decided to shoe-horn yet another genre in between children’s books and “adult” books (maybe I should call them “grown up books” as “adult books” sounds like 50 Shades of Gray). “New adult” is the new genre, and in case your powers of deduction are failing you today, it describes books between young adult and old adult books, (which I will henceforth just refer to as “boring books”) and as far as I can tell is basically defined by having a protagonist of late high school or early college age.

In principle there is nothing particularly wrong with this and it might actually help me eventually sell a book as this is the range I sometimes I write in. Like I said, there really are uses for genre distinctions. But I can’t help but feel that this “new adult” genre is either a) just a way to get adult readers to feel less embarrassed about reading books described as “young adult,” or b) write more salacious and “adult” scenes in YA books while still being able to maintain that they aren’t targeted to young adults.

Why can’t we just get to a place where we agree that every book is its own and defining it by its fellows constrains it as often as not? Is the defining characteristic of a book the protagonist’s age? Do we really want to pigeon-hole books based on a single factor? Am I asking too many rhetorical questions?

All these thoughts were running through my head when I realized that the problem isn’t too many genres but too few.

Bring on the genres! New adult, young adult, old adult, in-between  adult, nearly-dead adult. Horror? No there are at least twenty genres crowding in there. Vampire, werewolf, Lovecraftian, aliens, noir. Let it all hang out. It’s not science fiction, it’s space opera, steampunk, cyberpunk, apocalyptic, hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi, or time travel. We’re nearing the genre singularity! The point at which we have so many genres that once again there are no genres at all, just books full of stories worth reading.

Okay. I got a little carried away. But only because I dream of an idyllic, post-singularity day where I can sit in a treehouse and read any book for any age group without pretension, while drinking a bottle of wine, .

What do you think? Do you like genre distinctions? Do we need more? Fewer? Do you feel like they help guide people to the right books or keep readers from breaking out of their established reading norms to try something new?

Intentional writing time is something writers talk about (or at least blog about) a lot. They say that if you want to be a writer (at least in a professional or semi-professional capacity) then it’s important to set aside time specifically to write. It’s not time to check facebook or respond to emails or to organize your messy desk (times when I’m suffering from a case of writer’s block are the only times cleaning sounds appealing), it’s time to sit in your chair and scribble or type, even if it feels like the worst thing you’ve ever written.

I took that advice a year and a half ago and started making writing part of my morning routine.  Right after a quick breakfast I wander down to my basement office and hammer out some words. It’s been instrumental in helping me finish my first novel and several short stories. That said, the last couple days I’ve been lagging in my daily word count. 2,000 words a day is my pie in the sky goal and I feel pretty good about myself when I crank out 1,500, but yesterday I looked down at my count after more than an hour of writing (almost time to call it quits for the day) and I was only at 800. That was a pretty disappointing figure to see, especially since I’m pretty excited about my story right now and not suffering from writers block. I was just writing slowly.

This morning I checked myself half way through and was on track for another disappointing day when I realized the problem: I was just drifting through my writing. Sure I was getting up and making the effort to get some time in, but I wasn’t making the most of that time. By simply being–dare I say it–more intentional with my time and not letting myself drift between sentences or paragraphs and making sure that my fingers kept moving across the keys I managed to not only get back on track, but even make up for lost time and hit my 2,000 word sky-pie.

That I’ve been drifting through an activity I’m so passionate about (passionate enough to sacrifice my precious sleep for it) makes me wonder what other activities, times, and relationships I’m drifting in right now. For as much as I use the word “intentional” it seems that I could use a bit more intentionality in my own life.

Sorry to be so philosophical today. Must be lack of sleep. (If I believed in emoticons, I would use a smiley face here [is it cheating to say that?])

To elaborate on what I find objectionable: just because a book has more copies sold, does not necessarily mean more people have read those books. For example, it’s not unusual for a family to own multiple copies of the Bible, while ever member of a family might not have a personal copy of Gone With the Wind, even if they’ve all read it. That could also skew up the perceived readership of books like Harry Potter where some families bought two copies (or more) of the book so they could read it at the same time.
On which subject, what book are they evaluating when they say “Harry Potter” or “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Twilight Saga”? Does it count total sales for the series? If so, a book like The Alchemist would be more read than any single Harry Potter book (as 400 million divided amongst seven books is only [pssh, "only"] 57 million books apiece).

I could go on, but you get the point. All that said, I still think it’s interesting to see. The Alchemist has moved way up my “to read” list.

As an aside, Hello! It’s been a long time and I’m rather happy to be back. The break was necessary for me as I was reassessing priorities in life. Blogging time was coming directly out of my writing time which, once I stepped back and got a little perspective, didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Hopefully this is the beginning of a new season of blogging for me–assuming I can strike a better balance with it– so check in again sometime relatively soon. As always, thanks for stopping by!

When the packaging or promotion materials ruin plot points of a book (or movie, or story of any kind).

I’m the kind of guy who avoids reading the backs of books and won’t watch trailers for movies that I’m excited to see. I go out of my way to avoid knowing anything about the stories I’m about to read, watch, or otherwise experience, so I find it rather frustrating when my efforts are thwarted by the people at publishing companies.

For example, I recently read (and loved) Kenneth Oppel’s Matt Cruse Trilogy, and I highly recommend for anyone and everyone as it’s a great story of adventure and airships, with a sprinkling of romance for good measure, but when I got to book two, Skybreaker, the cover showed an ornithopter (similar to an airplane but the wings move up and down) with four occupants inside. I naturally assumed the aircraft on the cover was the Skybreaker mentioned by the title and that we would be introduced to it in the first few chapters. I was wrong.

(Spoilers coming here that the packaging more or less gives away, but I find spoilers so opprobrious that I feel obligated to tell you anyway. Skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.)

The whole story is about trying to find a lost airship, The Hyperion, that has been circling the globe at an altitude higher than most aircraft can fly and that is supposedly brimming with treasures. Only Skybreakers, a special kind of airships can fly this high. It probably won’t surprise you very much to learn that our hero sets out to find The Hyperion and, just in case you had any doubts about their eventual success, the first pages of the book has a map of The Hyperion so you can easily track characters’ locations once they find the ship. Now that I could have forgiven, after all, it’s assumed that the main characters will be at least moderately successful, but up to this point we still haven’t seen the ornithopter from the cover. Then, about halfway through their exploration of The Hyperion they happen upon, you guessed it, a four-seater ornithopter docked aboard the airship. At this point any remaining doubt I had about the conclusion of the story is eliminated: some disaster will befall our heroes and they will be forced to escape aboard said ornithopter. So when things start falling apart and it looks like there will be no way for our heroes to escape in one piece, I’m yawning while I should be on the edge of my seat.

I might be a little bit more discerning (my wife says “nitpicky”) than the average casual reader because I’ve spent so much time plotting my own stories, but some packaging just cooks my grits. For example: The Warded Man. I loved this book, demolishing it in a single day last summer (which for a reader as slow as myself, means a lot of hours), but the title compromises a major plot point. For three quarters of the book they ward doors and posts and the ground, but no one even thinks about warding themselves. As much as I loved the book, I found myself constantly waiting for the main character to ward his own body. It’s like if the first Harry Potter book had been called (spoiler alert) “Harry Potter and the Stuttering Professor of Dark Arts Who Was Also Voldemort”.  Fortunately there were enough other things to love about the book that it didn’t ruin the experience, but it would have been such an awesome surprise… if I hadn’t been waiting for it.

My wife says thinks I’m perhaps a bit too hard on these folks and that most people don’t care as much as I do about this. Thoughts? I’d ask you for other examples of books ruined by their promotions or packaging, but honestly I’d just as soon rather not know.

In my endless quest for books for young adult boys, I was referred to Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel. It had airships and adventure, which made it easy for me to pick up, but once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down.

Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city. It is the life Matt’s always wanted; convinced he’s lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. It is only after Matt meets the balloonist’s granddaughter that he realizes that the man’s ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious.

In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Oppel, author of the best-selling Silverwing trilogy, creates an imagined world in which the air is populated by transcontinental voyagers, pirates, and beings never before dreamed of by the humans who sail the skies.

In Airborn, Kenneth Oppel strikes a perfect balance between a fun voice and characters I really cared about. I can’t remember the last time I actually laughed out loud during a book, but with the dry and witty dialogue it was a regular occurrence while reading Airborn. There’s a bit of romance thrown in for good measure, but the love-interest is far from stereotypical as is their relationship.

Airborn is a great read for anyone looking for a good adventure and a bit of fun, and, while it’s a great book for boys, my wife also read and loved it.

Or: The Narrow-Mindedness of the Literary Elite

Yesterday the New York Times published an essay entitled “Adults Should Read Adult Books” by Joel Stein. The gist is obvious from the title, but I posted most of it below (and if you’re like me, your irritation will carry you through it quickly):

The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.

I’m sure all those books are well written. So is “Horton Hatches the Egg.” But Horton doesn’t have the depth of language and character as literature written for people who have stopped physically growing.

I appreciate that adults occasionally watch Pixar movies or play video games. That’s fine. Those media don’t require much of your brains. Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

There are so many things that I object to about this article that I don’t even know where to begin.

First of all, it suggests that every adult book ever written is more literary and worthy of note than every young adult book ever written “I’ll read ‘The Hunger Games’ when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”

Apparently books written for young people can never have “the depth of language and character as literature written for people who have stopped physically growing.”  Clearly we should all stop reading books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hobbit, and Catcher in the Rye because apparently the arrogant gentlemen near us on planes think it’s embarrassing. What’s that you say Mr. Stein? Oh, there wasn’t a “young adult genre” when those books were written? Oh, I see now. So when book sellers decided to start putting books they thought would appeal to young people on a shelf labeled “young adult” that’s the point after which all books written for “young adults” would be considered second-class literature.

I should also note that girls definitely get the short end of the literary stick here because “people who have physically stopped growing” are expected to read more refined and literary works and most girls stop growing around age thirteen while boys can grow until their twenties. Though I must admit physically stature seems like a strange determinate. Why not something like age? Or foot size? Skull shape?

Now it would be one thing if he were making well-reasoned arguments for why adults should be reading whatever “literature” our dear Mr. Stein is reading, but he’s not. “I have no idea what ‘The Hunger Games’ is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character… I don’t know because it’s a book for kids.” Oh I see Mr. Stein, you haven’t read books like The Hunger Games; the books you are passing judgement on.  He sounds like a five year old child, insisting that he doesn’t like broccoli though he’s never had it, and in doing so he’s shaming people away from reading.

To quote C. S. Lewis: “Am I to patronize sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?”

Mr. Stein, you may use words like “anomie” and “Pynchonesque,” but I’m not impressed.

Yes, if you’re looking for a book that you can read so that you can look down on everyone else, then young adult probably isn’t for you, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have complicated characters or meaningful plots. On top of that, reading is good period. The more literate a person is, the more likely they will be to get a job and the less likely they are to be incarcerated (in fact, many states decide how many prisons to build for the future based on the reading levels of current elementary schoolers). On top of this reading increases empathy–the ability for the reader to relate to (and care about) other people.

So if someone is either going to read one young adult book this year or no books at all, excuse me for encouraging them to read and practice those skills. Maybe they’ll even go on to read a second book, maybe this time one that you’d actually approve of, Mr. Stein. In a country with falling literacy rates and reading levels you can’t expect people to jump into War and Peace like it’s Dr. Seuss.

This brings me to a broader point in general. Almost all of us do this. We might not be quite as obtuse as Mr. Stein about it, but most of us do this nonetheless. We look down our noses at people who read fantasy or science fiction or women’s fiction or *gasp* comic books. Just the other day I was reading a blog (that I generally like) that was bashing books based on video games. If a person who rarely reads loves Halo so much that they choose to sit down and read the novelizations, more power to them. I know for a fact that for many, these books are a gateway into science fiction and reading in general.

A huge part of the reason that I like science fiction is because I loved Star Wars growing up and stumbled across the novels of the Extended Universe (there are a bajillion of them). I read dozens of those books and they weren’t all literary masterpieces, but they gave me an appetite that I then turned towards Heinlein and Asimov, Orson Scott Card and John Scalzi.

So let’s get over ourselves a little and if someone wants to read, not just let them read, encourage them to. There are important skills to build and amazing worlds to explore.

I’ll leave you with a great flow chart guide to picking the “right” books (borrowed from Book Riot):

On an unrelated note, I think it’s a shame that Mr. Stein doesn’t appreciate Pixar movies.

For example, 10 days to release, the original “Twilight” film had generated 98.5 million views. It went on to bring $69.6 million at the box office its opening weekend. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” had driven more than 136.2 million views 10 days to its release. It saw $77.8 million at the box office.

Ten days to release, “The Hunger Games” had produced 89.4 million views, putting it significantly behind those films.

Ad Age basically predicted, according to this type of reasoning, that The Hunger Games would bring in around $80 million its opening weekend.

Well, if you haven’t heard, The Hunger Games did considerably better than even the most wild predictions, earning around $152 million.

Where did this huge discrepancy come from? Well, people far smarter than me (in my first draft ‘smarter’ was accidentally misspelled. True story) are sure to be weighing in on it, it seems rather obvious to me: it’s all about word-of-mouth.

In the past few weeks, it’s seemed like everyone and their brother has been talking about this movie, posting memes on Facebook (there are so many that I had trouble picking just one), and rereading the books. I can’t say why there was so much more hubbub in the past several weeks (and even months) about this movie as compared to Twilight or Harry Potter, but there was a marked difference. On a half-dozen different occasions I heard other people talking about how excited they were for the movie and how their friend/parent/coworker/whoever needed to be sure and read the book first.

This shouldn’t come as too big a surprise to anyone really. I read quite a bit (shooting for 52 books in 52 weeks this year and so far I’m right on track) and I honestly cannot remember the last time I read a book that wasn’t recommended to me by someone. Sometimes those “someones” are blogs or book lists online, but I rarely pick a book off a random shelf in the library (and I’m certainly too poor to trust to luck in blindly buying books). There are just too many good books in the world spend time reading bad ones (and Lord knows that even with recommended books you catch your fair share of those).

This is even more true for people who only read a book or two a year. They hear all the hullabaloo about a book like Harry Potter or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or The Hunger Games and want to see what all the fuss is about, so they pick up the book. Given that readers are so accustomed to being guided by word-of-mouth regarding what to read, it should come as no surprise that they’re equally willing to go to a movie without watching and rewatching the trailers on youtube and then going to watch every interview with actors and directors. Why not just spend that time rereading the book? That’s what I did.

The moral of the story is if you love reading, get out there and talk about it. Read in public, asking what the person next to you on the bus is reading, encourage friends  to read the books that resonated with you. Not only does this get more people reading (which is a good thing), it supports the authors of books you like and shows publishers what kinds of books you want to see more of (even if that means that as soon as it gets popular enough they’ll go off and make a movie about it).

As for the movie, it seems to be catching fire? It’s shooting for the stars? May the box office be ever in its favor? (sorry, I couldn’t choose which terrible world play to leave you with, so I decided “hey, why not all three?”)

And I have to admit that it would be dishonest of me to say that I haven’t been stoked to see it.

So rather than get down about the fact that many times more people are going to see the movie than will ever read the book, I’m looking at the positive.

If you haven’t noticed, it seems like every year more books are adapted for the screen, and it’s not just the book industry that Hollywood is borrowing from. The past decade has been defined by superhero movies as well as remakes and sequels that rarely compete with the originals, not to mention basing movies on toy franchises. It’s gotten to the point that they’re making a Battleship movie, supposedly inspired by the board game… but with aliens. I’m not even kidding.

There are a lot of reasons for Hollywood to have adopted this business model, what with dropping movie attendance and technology in flux, and I don’t hold it against them, but there are two interesting insights that can be gleaned from this:

1. Young adult literature has just about the most rabid fan base around

The Hunger Games movie is set up to have a record setting opening night and weekend for a non-sequel, the Twilight movies have had movie goers attending in droves, and Harry Potter is the highest grossing film franchise of all time, above, for example, Star Wars. However you feel about movies based on books, it’s pretty exciting to see so many young adults fired up about their favorite books, characters, and worlds.

2. The world of young adult fiction (and fiction in general) is a creative boom town

I don’t want to over state this because there are an awful lot of derivative books out there and books that don’t push the boundaries (and even The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter do their fair share of borrowing), but we aren’t at a place where we’re rewriting classics to try and make a cheap buck. Even better, authors are writing books that resonate with people young and old.

So here’s me resolving to take it as a complement when Hollywood comes along and leeches off the publishing industry’s creativity and fan base, and in the future when people talk excitedly about the Hunger Games movie, with a smile on my face I will (do my best to) say there are a thousand other worlds to be explored that are just as good, and they can be found at their local library.

And hopefully I will sound less pretentious when I say it then it looks when I type it.

My the odds be ever in your favor.

Yesterday I told my wife that I need to start writing more short stories. She promptly responded that I should give her one each week and in return I would get, da-da-da-da, “the red plate”. Now the motivational aspect of the red plate is a curious thing. I can’t say why I am so covetous of it, but it holds some mystical allure for me. Growing up, whenever any of us kids did something worthy of praise like getting good grades or making a sports team we would get “the red plate.” It was a big deal. I don’t know why, it just was. So when I got married, my wife and I were given a red plate of our own, with which she can motivate me cheaply.

Really though, the red plate was just icing on the cake. One short story a week? That sounds nigh impossible. Challenge accepted.

I am about as deadline-driven as a person could be. I work harder and faster when I’m under a deadline and I think the quality of my work also improves as well. I work in a deadline-driven business (video production) and I often wonder whether I like my job because it’s deadline-driven or whether I am deadline-driven because video production made me that way. When I have almost more projects at work than I can handle, all with impending deadlines, I crank stuff out like there’s no tomorrow.

Of course there’s a delicate balance to strike because at some point too much work just starts feeling like too much work and I’ve talked before about how understanding the Three Stooges Syndrome has impacted my life (thank you Simpsons), but an impending deadline on a project where I have a lot of flexibility in meeting my goals is a recipe for success, especially when coupled with red plate goodness (and a happy wife). Coming at the tail end of three months of drifting with my writing in a boatload of half-finished stories, such clear direction is bliss. I feel so motivated that I even took the time to write a blog post!

There’s no deep insight here beyond simply being grateful for motivation and an insightful wife to encourage me and hold me accountable. Sometimes I get so stuck in my own head that I forget that all you have to do to be a writer is write.

As an aside: thank you to everyone who has let me know that you’ve missed my blogging the past couple months. It really has meant a lot and been more good encouragement for me.

First off, I apologize for the few new posts as of late. I’ve talked about the Three Stooges Syndrome here before, and I happen to be struggling with a bad case of it. I’m trying to crank out another short story or two to get in the submissions merry-go-round, finish the young adult steampunk novel that I’ve been working on for the last year (draft six, here I come), and a few new projects have come down the pipeline at work and are taking more creative energy than usual (which is a welcome challenge). Too many ideas have been trying to get out of my brain all at once, and hence none of them were making it through the door.

I had to cut back on something and, compared to work and writing, blogging isn’t my top priority. What that means is  for the next few weeks (or until things begin to lighten up) I’m going to blog only when I’ve got something demanding to be shared with you folks.

Which segues nicely into what brings me to my keyboard tonight…

I’ve had Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, a young adult fantasy book (and the first book of The Belgariad) sitting on my to-read pile for almost a year ago. A friend lent it to me saying it’s one of his all-time favorite series and that he reads it every year. With such high praise, I could hardly decline when he offered to lend it to me. Why did it take me so long to get around to reading it? Well, I mentioned not too long ago that I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy cliches, and Pawn of Prophecy not only has “prophecy” in the title, which bodes ill for it, but stars a young boy who is orphaned, lives on a farm, and is secretly the heir to the throne and the only person who can wield the most powerful sword ever created. So it’s pretty much the smorgasbord of overused fantasy tropes.

Still, one has to cut it a little slack because it’s from 1982, which maybe was before people knew better. Maybe.

Generally, the book had some good things going for it: it created an interesting world with enough detail to make it feel real, I liked several of the characters (even if they fell into rather prototypical molds), and the magic system wasn’t shamefully copied from Ursula K. LeGuin.

The thing that marred this book beyond my ability to make excuses was the prologue. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of prologues to begin with (though I must admit that I succumb to them in my own writing on occasion). I don’t like being introduced to characters who are going to die before chapter one or who we’re never going to see again, and I don’t like being told 10,000 years of world history before the first word of chapter one.

The prologue of Pawn of Prophecy was the second of these exactly. It was like reading a condensed version of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (if you actually finished that book, you are a better person than I) and explained the beginning of time and the creation of the planet, the races of man and the conflicts of the gods, yada yada, etc. etc. If that was the only problem with the prologue I could have skimmed it and happily moved on, forgetting all the nonsense that I would likely be shown again in more interesting ways in the pages to come. The true achilles heel that ruined the whole of the book was that in the prologue Eddings reveals all of the mysteries of the story to come.

Young Garion the farm-boy, king-in-hiding, raised-by-wizards, and only-hope-for-the-land protagonist spends half the book wondering who his “Aunt” Pol really is and what her relation is to Mister Wolf.  He spends the whole book wondering–and never even learns–what the stolen object is that they are seeking (the sword/orb of ultimate power) and who he really is (the heir to the throne). If you’re sitting there angry with me for ruining a book for you that you might have someday read, just remember that Eddings tells you all that in the prologue! Eddings is the guy in the movie theater who’s seen the film before and leans over to you at the very beginning of The Empire Strikes Back and says “Darth Vader is actually Lukes father. Also, there’s the funny green guy on Dagobah is actually the Jedi master Yoda, Luke gets his hand cut off in the end, and Han gets frozen in carbonite. Enjoy the movie!”

Eddings works hard to create mysterious backgrounds and relationships for his characters and then ruins the mystery. Dramatic irony has its time and place, but who wants to know the name of the murderer before the first chapter even begins in a who-dun-it? I found myself skimming ahead, hoping to get to a part where I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next while the characters asked redundant, rhetorical  questions.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the thought that once I got through this book I could at least enjoy the rest of the series because: how could they possibly ruin more? Then I got to the last line in the book, which read:

Book Two, Queen of Sorcery, will reveal Garion’s own dangerous powers of sorcery and more on his heritage, which underlies their quest.

AHHH!!!!! I don’t want to know what will be in book two!!! That’s why I want to read it! To find out what happens in it! (Note: I apologize for the proliferation of emphatic punctuation, but if there was a time for which the exclamation point was invented this is surely it.) Needless to say, book two is not in my future, and I don’t need a prophecy to tell me that.

Am I missing something here or is this just a terrible storytelling technique?