The YA dilemma

Pop quiz: what's this book about?

‘I require of all my students,’ the saxophone teacher continues, ‘that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardour and uncertainty and gloom. I require that they wait in the corridor for ten minutes at least before each lesson, tenderly nursing their injustices, picking miserably at their own unworthiness as one might finger a scab or caress a scar. If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong. When she realises that her body is a secret, a dark and yawning secret of which she becomes more and more ashamed, come back to me. You must understand me on this point. I cannot teach children.’

Kiss-kiss-kiss goes the snare drum over the silence.

Question two: what is this book about?

Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her parents that everything was fine — just peachy — but, God, it had been a terrifying day, filled with other students jostling her in the busy corridors, teachers referring to things on blackboards, and doubtless everyone looking at her. She'd never felt self-conscious at the TSB back in Austin, but she was on display now. Did the other girls wear earrings, too? Had these corduroy pants been the right choice? Yes, she loved the feel of the fabric and the sound they made, but here everything was about appearances.

Trick question (I bet you saw that coming.) They’re both about teenaged girls. Yes, one is a staggering literary feast and the other is from some of the most interesting sci fi I’ve read lately, but what they have in common is their teenaged protagonists.

I juxtapose them to make a point (which I will arrive at soon, I promise. Here it is.) Teenaged protagonists do not mean a book is YA.

It’s a tough one. I’ve seen my writer friends struggle with it, and I’ve battled it myself, trying to reveal a story from a younger perspective without making it sound juvenile. Of course it’s possible. Look at my first example, from Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal, one of my favourite books from last year. You’d never call it YA.

Of course the split between YA and adult fiction is incredibly muddy. Few believe you have to be a certain age to read a certain type of book. Harry Potter and Twilight fixed that, as did any number of adult novels (adult, not XXX) that are enjoyed by younger readers. But from the writer's perspective it's trouble. Trying to market your fiction, trying to convince agent or publisher that although your protagonist is young it isn't YA, or it doesn't have to be YA, and if it is could it at least not have a pink cover? That's the trouble.

It can be trouble for readers, too. I started reading Robert J. Sawyer's Wake (my second example) not realizing that it was YA because it wasn't marketed that way. Since I hadn't been warned, the young protagonist's perspective annoyed me. She was always "made of awesome" and I didn't really care if the cute guy was mean to her at the dance.

Yet I still would have read it if I'd known beforehand, and maybe some people wouldn't have, and maybe that's the point. And it is great science fiction, so of course it's marketed that way. Lump it into YA and suddenly there is not much differentiating it from Knocked Out by my Nunga Nungas--until you read it.

Have you come across the YA dilemma, in writing or reading? Don't think there's a dilemma at all? Let me know.

How to start a good writing year

I appreciate the positive comments on my Writing year in review post, and I love that I can inspire a few people to set goals for 2011.  On that subject I have a couple of great ways to start the year with fiction writing.

100 Stories for Queensland is an anthology being put together to raise money for the Queensland Premier's Flood Relief Appeal for the flooding in Australia.  All proceeds go to the appeal, and there has been an incredible response to help out with its production.  If you have an uplifting 500-1000 word short story you'd like to donate to a good cause, submit it here.  The deadline is January 28th.

Five Stop Story is a recent addition to the publishing world, the brainchild of two British writers who are passionate about developing new writers and providing them with a springboard to start their careers.  The Five Stop Story is a bite-sized bit of a fiction that could be read on a five stop trip on the tube.  They're currently open for submissions for the very first time, for a 1000-2000 word Valentine's Day story contest. And since they're also looking into developing a mobile application, the winning story could be the first there, too. More details here.  The deadline is February 14th.


So it appears you could start off 2011 with publication or two, a bit of good karma and a spring in your step.  It sure beats gazing out the window at the poor weather.  Happy writing!

Library science, Part 1

Ever wondered what a librarian does aside from checking your books in and out? Why the Masters in Library and Information Science even exists?

I can tell you what I do. Right now I'm finishing up some research on folksonomies. You might not think you know what that is, but you do. When you tag photos on flickr, or when you label blog posts, you're creating a folksonomy: a collection of terms that describes the items, as assigned by the users (you) rather than professionals. Essentially you're doing something very much like what librarians have been doing for ages, but you're doing it possibly without considering what you're doing or what the result will be, whereas librarians generally index items with the specific intention of future information retrieval.

Folksonomies are a fascinating phenomenon for anyone interested in information and organizing information. And since most people are becoming more familiar with Google than they are with traditional public library catalogues, the effect these tagging systems have on users' expectations is very important. For example, if someone approaches a system expecting one result and it fails, often they give up. They assume that whatever they're looking for doesn't exist instead of searching further (it's a famous "fact" that most people don't look past Google's first results page.) So we want them to find it as quickly as possible, or at least understand how to find it most effectively. And this affects what new systems will or should be developed in public libraries and elsewhere.

My research centres on LibraryThing, a website that allows users to assign tags to books, very much like Goodreads.  The people at LibraryThing have created "LibraryThing for Libraries" that allows libraries to draw from the folksonomies that have already been created around the books on the site.  With that extra indexing information they hope that people will more easily find books they want to read. My research tries to illuminate how and why users tag books and how they expect to use the tags later. It's my hope that my results will help other people who are trying to sort out how this user-based tagging stuff works, and how it can be used to help those same users with whatever they want to do so future systems are even more effective.

And all that while most of the users involved don't even realize they're involved.  After all, most people don't know what a folksonomy is, even if they tag photos and books and blog posts on a daily basis. They just don't care. They do it for their own reasons--reasons that are fascinating to me, but maybe not to them. And that's how it should be. That's why I'm studying my Masters in Library and Information Science, and they aren't.

This concludes our first foray into the world of libraries beyond the circulation desk. And this is why it makes me laugh (and cry) when people believe that 1. All librarians are volunteers, and 2. Libraries are all about dusty old books.

You say goodbye, I say hello

On the left is my writing plan for 2010: marked up and finished for good, whether I accomplished all my goals or not. And on the right is my writing plan for 2011: started but mostly blank, waiting for the year to reveal itself as whatever it's going to be.

And that's how I did in 2010 from a purely numerical standpoint: wordcount per month. Obviously NaNoWriMo brought November to the top. I can see that I started the year writing one novel, and I finished it in March.  Then I had a lull during the early summer (I was editing) and began another novel in July that I finished in October. As for December... another lull.

This year? I have a few ideas and lines for my next project, and I have a lot of editing to do on the work I did last year. I have magazines I want to submit to and contests I want to enter. My oh my do I have books I want to read. And I sure as heck have a conference I want to attend (oh please oh please.)

As for this blog, I will continue to post about the writing life from my librarian perspective.  As ebooks become more prevalent and libraries fight for their lives, the world is changing so quickly it's a little bit amazing to me to go back even a year or two in my posts and read what concerned me then. Oh, how young and innocent I was, ha ha, ha ha. Anyway, as the man wrote: So it goes.

It's going to be a great year.