Going Postal

I suddenly realized today why the US Post Office is constantly on the brink of financial ruin. And its not because of the mismanagement or the rural post offices that operate for two people. It’s because every single office is either managed or occupied by lunatics. And I have had the pleasure of exploring this system in the past week, I figured I’d write up a little transcript to illustrate the problem.

The first time, I was mailing out a submission and wanted to know how many stamps (as I had a book of them already) I needed to use on it.

ME: Hi, how many stamps do I need for this?

HIM: (takes envelope, weighs it, then turns his back to me and mutters something unintelligible)

ME: I’m sorry?

HIM: (apparently thinking I’m deaf) THE COST IS TWO DOLLARS AND FORTY-THREE CENTS!

ME: So…five stamps?

HIM: (in a normal tone of voice, finally) It would be cheaper to pay the cost.

ME: Yes, I know, but I already bought the stamps. I don’t really care if five stamps technically cost a dime more.

HIM: But it would be cheaper to pay the cost.

ME: Yes. Yes. Could I have my envelope back to put the stamps on please?

HIM: That will be two dollars and forty-three cents.

ME: My god.

At that point, I just snatched the envelope back and slapped on the stamps, because there was a line of fifteen people behind me and I was pretty sure that they thought I was the crazy one, not the gainfully employed postal service worker. As I was leaving, I witnessed the other postal worker (the only other one working at lunch hour on a Thursday) trying to very calmly explain to a white guy with dreadlocks–and not the cool dreadlocks–that he could not reuse an old Priority Mail box and try to pay the same amount of shipping. Why this matters is quite beyond me (if he was still going to pay, why not let him reuse the old box?) but the fact that she had to explain it three times was extraordinary. Meanwhile, he kept repeating to her that he just had to ship out his band’s t-shirts. It was like watching two of those speaking dolls with the pull strings face each other–there’s an awful lot of dialogue but NOTHING IS HAPPENING.

Efficiency, USPS. It’s a concept that was developed after the fall of the mercantile system. You might want to look it up.

Artistic representation of a typical USPS consumer. By Random Acts.

The Perils of Censorship

Thanks to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for this comic!

Beautiful Dead Girls

There’s been some recent controversy over this essay by Rachel Stark, a marketer at Bloomsbury & Walker Books for Young Readers.  She noticed the recent trend of dead/pale-and-lying-down girls on the covers of YA novels (especially those aimed at girls). She sees this and a symptom of the sexualization of violence against women and of teen girls being molded into thinking that they are meant to be martyrs for men (see Bella’s emotionally abusive relationship with Edward in Twilight for even more evidence). Also–dead girls are just vessels, and can be safely sexualized as the souls or whatnot are gone. They truly become objects.

I don’t entirely disagree with her. There’s been an explosion of girls-in-coffins art lately, either from the mainstreaming of the goth subculture, or from Stark’s more deeply-seated cultural misogyny. I also don’t disagree that women’s rights are still very new in the history of the world. But being not so far from teenage-ness myself, I see a slightly different spin on it.

Firstly, let’s look at the covers Stark uses as evidence:

I’ve read about half these books. All of them (except for Imaginary Girls and The Unbecoming of Maria Dyer) are paranormal romances, a genre already pretty preoccupied with death. At least three (The Goddess Test, Abandon, and Imaginary Girls) have girls who don’t really look all that dead. Many of them (The Dead-Tossed Waves, Imaginary Girls, The Goddess Test and A Certain Slant of Light to name just the ones I’m familiar with) have plots where girls do die, which in my mind means the covers are at least an accurate representation of what’s inside the book.

But maybe this isn’t really about the sexualization of violence against women. I don’t dispute that that exists. These covers, though–especially since they’re in the YA genre–I think are more about the obsession and romanticism of dying young. What books are assigned to high school students? Romeo and Juliet. The Great Gatsby. The Handmaid’s Tale. The Book Thief. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jane Eyre.

Think of all the characters in these books who die beautiful, young deaths. I admit to still harboring a crush on the doomed Gatsby–a perfect romantic hero in the most Greek sense of the word. As much as I wanted to kill the idiotic  Helen of Jane Eyre, she died an example of piety and virginity.

Virginity. That’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? If you died young you die beautiful and stay that way. You never have to endure wrinkles or Alzheimer’s or your great grandchildren saying “Gramma Jenny always smelled weird” at your funeral. Dying young is honorable too–think of how the armed forces recruit people. All this talk of honor and serving. Hell, think Saving Private Ryan and tell me that movie isn’t hitting the same nerve as some of these covers.

So I don’t think the issue is so black-and-white as violence against women. Some people have begun to question if YA has gotten too dark (see #yasaves for this) but I don’t think it’s that, either. As a teenager I read and loved some stuff that I find almost laughably melodramatic now. Some YA is dark because teenagers like to read dark stuff. They’re not mature enough to go and watch a French art film to get their catharsis so they go read Twilight to feel Bella’s pain of Edward leaving her and dream about their dark knight. Heck, every geek girl on the planet has had at least a passing attraction to Batman (see what I did with that ‘dark knight’ line?).

So no, I’m not so worried about the culture as Stark and others are. I don’t think these books should take over the market. But honestly? I’m more concerned with the Kardashian and Jersey Shore influences.

***************

For more perspectives on this issue read here:

• Blogging book reviewer Yael Itamar and her interesting interpretation of it as girls being objects for admiration.
• Teen Service’s librarian Allison (this post was actually written slightly before Stark’s article)
• This blog brought up something I never even thought of–Lurlene McDaniel’s long, long line of overly romaticized books about teens wasting away from horrible diseases, notable for being written waaayyy before Twilight with titles like “She Died Too Young.” As the author points out, this never made anyone wish for cancer.
• The related #yasaves twitter-war.

 

You Are Not Special

Pretend there are 1,000 writers in the world. You are one of them.

Probably 50 of these people will be utterly un-salvageable writers. Just terrible. Another 50 will be shy people who harbor dreams of best selling novels but don’t ever want anyone to see their work.

Great. You’re better than 10% of your competition.

Maybe another 50 of these writers won’t follow submission guidelines and therefore shoot themselves in the foot. Maybe another 50, for whatever reason can’t work with editors–egomaniacs, asses, whatever.

200 will have good stories with a beginning, middle, and end that fail. Maybe the characters are two-dimensional, maybe it needs editing, maybe the plot is boring or repetitive or a rip off of Twilight.

Congrats, little writer. You’re now in the fortieth percentile.

The next 300 are probably perfectly fine stories–no major problems–but they don’t quite click. Either they don;t have the right voice or the right POV (or one of those other not-so-quantifiable things) or maybe just aren’t marketable enough for a cash-strapped publisher to take a gamble on.

Then there’s the 100 that are honest-to-god good books. But they don;t get picked up because the author doesn’t hunt down the right agent or maybe it’s not trendy right now or heck who publishes literary fiction when YA’s so hot?

Now there’s only 200 authors left, and they’ve all got good books, and smart brains and a marketable concept. Maybe 10 0r 20  will be insta-bestsellers, and another 20 or so will be series that build up enough steam as the second or third book hits for the writer to be comfortable upper-midlist.

Odds are you’re one of the other 160–good book, but no Dan Brown-style kick to make a publisher sit up and say “Oh yes, we must acquire this immediately.” You have to fight your way through the slush pile to get to an agent’s eyes and then shine through the dreck of hundreds of other worthy, eager books for an editor to look down and say, “This! I need this!”

So what can you do? Edit–make the book the best it can be until there isn’t a reason to fault it. Know your characters inside and out until they breath like real people on the page and live on inside your reader’s head long after the book is over. Tweak your plot until it’s as compelling as possible–until the reader feels like they need to continue, because this character/plot/relationship/conflict is just too exciting to put down.

Also: keep writing. You might not succeed your first time, or your second or third or tenth, but every word is you getting a little bit better.

What (and Why) is Genre?

While browsing through Border’s today, I was struck by how the Mystery/Crime section has a sign hanging from the ceiling ad labels across all of the shelves, while Scifi/Fantasy is stuck in a corner with no sign. And yet, both of these are considered “genre” while regular “fiction” is occupied by literary and the ‘mainstream’ fiction (because there is certainly a definition for mainstream that everyone agrees on these days). So the ‘fiction’ section encompasses everything from Gabriel Garcia-Marquez to Jodi Picoult to Jennifer Weiner.

Interestingly, this isn’t the case in Children’s (books are grouped instead by long series like Magic Treehouse, picture books, and older readers), and in YA I’ve seen all books together, or occasionally divided by Series/Non-Series. And therin lies the question: Why do we as adults feel the need to box ourselves into genre conventions, define ourselves as sci-fi geeks, literary highbrows, or mystery aficianados?

It’s not as if these genres are even definitive classifications for books. Take mystery: saying you are a mystery reader is like saying that you enjoy food containing meat. Is it likely you like all meat-containing foods? Of course not. So why, by god, is it assumed that Agatha Christie, Harlan Coben, Raymond Chandler, and Steig Larsson are similar enough to be grouped into a tiny section of the bookstore, when the only thing they have in common is a crime being a defining event?

For that matter, Stephen King, following genre convention, is clearly in the scifi/fantasy section, but he is shelved most often in Fiction because of his popularity. This may make his books easier to find (a boon for booksellers) but hurts lesser-known SF/F authors who don’t get the readers that may stumble across their books while looking for King’s.

I think this underlines a certain perversely pervasive thinking, that genre writing is somehow “lesser” that “real” writing and must be separated. Genres are arbitrary and murky at best–and often are mashed together based on authors not the context of the stories. They are largely a marketing scheme, a way of propelling certain types of readers to stocks of superficially-similar books, because adults have limited time and don’t like to experiment.

I am not opposed to genres. If every book in the bookstore were put all together, there would be an overwhelming selection. But I do think that the idea of genre needs to be rethought. If genres are to be adhered to, then something is SF/F, then that’s where it goes, regardless of whether it’s Stephen King or a one-book nobody. Otherwise, booksellers should foster cross-genre promotion and reading, like displays that have Pride and Prejudice alongside Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (one of my all-time favorite books, by the way) and Shades of Milk and Honey. Put some graphic novels in the Scifi/Fantasy section, and the Fiction section.

And for goodness sake, stop lumping literary fiction into mainstream and classics. That certainly deserves a ‘genre’ label.