I am a big, big fan of retellings, in general. I think the first time I was aware of one was when my parents introduced me to West Side Story. My dad is not the biggest musical fan, but he loves West Side Story, because ballet-dancing gang members are totally awesome. I saw West Side Story way before I saw or read Romeo and Juliet, in fact.
(My husband, Shakespeare lover that he is, is probably even now drawing up divorce papers. Nah, just kidding. In fact, last year, he got me tickets to the new bilingual WSS when it was in DC gearing up for its Broadway run.)
Anyway, thus began my long love affair with retellings. I love Clueless, I love Bridget Jones’s Diary, I love Valiant, I love O, Brother, Where Art Thou.
And of course, given my long and devoted love, I’ve come to several conclusions about what makes for the best kind of retellings,or indeed, what even constitutes a “retelling” as opposed to an “adaptation” or a “reboot.”
For instance: The Baz Luhrman film Romeo + Juliet is not a retelling. It’s an adaptation. Though set in modern day California, it uses Shakespeare’s dialogue. West Side Story, on the other hand, takes the general plot (two young people from feuding groups fall in love, igniting street warfare and death) and certain character relationships (the “Romeo” and the “Mercutio” are best friends, the “Juliet” and the “Tybalt” are closely related) from Shakespeare’s play, and creates something entirely new.
On the other hand, I think the Drew Barrymore film, Ever After would definitely count as a “retelling.” The framing device reveals that the story is going to be about the “truth” behind the legend of Cinderella. There’s no magic, and the fairy godmother is really Leonardo Da Vinci. (Oh, and the prince recognizes a heck of a lot more than Cinderella’s slipper!)
It starts to get a little sticky at times. Now they’ve even got these “remixes” — stuff like Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, which takes the actual text of P&P and mixes it up with original material. (And no, since i get asked this all the time… my book is not one of these.)
Adaptations (by their very nature) and “reboots” (due to the rights issues involved) are much more common in film than in books. (I say, just as John Scalzi announces his sale of the “reboot” of the Little Fuzzy series.) So what differentiates these things? Might be one of those “I know it when I see it” things. It usually requires a very different setting. Batman Begins is a reboot, because there have been other Batman film franchises. Otherwise, it would have been an adaptation, because it was adapted from the comics.And yet, Ever After, which takes place in a frocks and swords European fairy tale-ish setting, is a retelling.
Gah, now I’m even confusing myself. Perhaps I should just stick with “I know it when I see it.”
How excited am I about the movie adaptation of the Beauty and the Beast retelling BEASTLY, by Alex Flinn? 1) I totally loved the book, 2) I love how many adaptations are coming out of YA novels these days, 3) Neil Patrick Harris.
Also, dudes in hoods are hot. I think I spent four books detailing that little insight into my psyche.
In passing, is it me, or does Beauty and the Beast, in particular, lend itself very well to retellings? I can’t tell you how many romance novels I’ve read that are retellings of that book, and one of my favorite YA novels of all time, Valiant (my troll love is vast), is also a retelling of that story. I think because it has a really great theme about loving someone for their insides, and the magic in that story is so metaphorical in nature, that it can truly be whatever you want it to be.
Speaking of Holly Black, I definitely credit a few conversations I had with her in Ireland last year with my decision to move forward with this project. Holly has tacked several retellings, and done it so skillfully that more than one person I know has said to me, “Oh, yeah! Valiant *is* Beauty and the Beast! Now I see it!” Her newest retelling is, of course, White Cat, which is based on the (rather obscure) fairy tale by the same name. Having read both Holly’s incredibly awesome fantabulous book and the fairy tale, I would argue that even fewer people would make the connection. You know, if they’d ever read the fairy tale. Which most people haven’t.
My point being, is that Holly’s way of thinking about retellings freed my mind from some of the doubt demons I had about tackling my own. And basically, what I got from the conversation was this: fair game. No matter what the source material, that’s THEIR story. Your story is your own, and you can feel free to jettison, combine, and remix whatever elements you need to to make your story the best it can be.In fact, the more it is your own, the better I like the retelling.
For instance, the troll in Valiant (unlike the boy in Beastly) is not under a curse. He is, in fact, a troll. True love will not make him “beautiful” again. Because that wasn’t the point of Black’s retelling, which was more about Val (the “Beauty” character) and her personal journey. Whereas it is the point of Flinn’s retelling, because her story focuses on Kyle’s (the “Beast”) personal journey and how his “curse” was the catalyst for that to occur.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s not Bridget’s little sister who runs off with a disreputable man, thereby ruining the family’s reputation, it’s her mother, whose lover scams the Jones family friends out of their savings. (If you’ve only seen the movie, you are probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about, since they cut this plotline.) But in both cases, the fact that Darcy (it’s so convenient when characters get the same names in retellings, isn’t it?) tracks down the scoundrel in order to save Bridget/Lizzy’s family is the catalyst for them to reunite. In West Side Story, Tony (Romeo) still kills Maria’s (Juliet’s) beloved relative after the man kills Tony/Romeo’s best friend, sending him on the run and forcing Maria/Juliet to make a horrible choice between her family loyalty and her one true love.
The point is, in a retelling, you are taking a particular part of a story (a plot, a character, a story question, a theme) and using it as a jumping off place from which to create something entirely new. West Side Story used the plot and characters of Romeo & Juliet to talk about race relations in mid-century Manhattan. Valiant took plot elements and themes from Beauty and the Beast to tell a story about dark fairies, murder, and drug addiction. Clueless cut and combined and jiggled around character relationships from Emma to fit into a late 20th century lifestyle. And you can do those things because you are serving the needs of your story, and in order to create that omelet, well, you might have to break a few of the old story’s sacred eggs.
In other words: No fairy godmother? No problem. Use Da Vinci.
There has been a lot of chatter on Twitter lately about the role of gender in YA books. On one hand, women writers and female-centric books dominate the YA market. (An interesting phenomenon given the “general knowledge” that a girl will read a book by or about any gender, but most boys will only read books about–or sometimes by–males.)
On the other, there’s still a lot of sexism. Female characters are held toridiculousstandards (especially by female readers!) and vilified for having faults. In YA fiction, as in adult fiction, male writers are showered with praise and awards while comparable books written by female writers are not. Year after year, critics “best of” lists are all about the men. In that post, critic Lizzy Skurnick writes:
I got a glimmer of an answer last year as I sat in a board room hashing out the winners for one of the awards for which I am a judge. Our short list was pretty much split evenly along gender lines. But as we went through each category, a pattern emerged. Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow . . . “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam –” what’s the word? “– bititous.”
Oh, those damn scribbling women and their little domestic novels!
A few months ago, I visited the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York City. The exhibit displayed some of Austen’s letters, first editions of her works, things like that. But the exhibit that stuck with me the longest was on on Nabokov. Seems he wasn’t such a fan of Jane (along with Emerson, Twain, and other males):
“I dislike Jane, and I am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class. Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice.”
He was called out by Edmund Wilson, a famous literary critic. Great, huh? Well, wait until you see the manner of the calling-out:
“You are mistaken about Jane Austin. I think you ought to read Mansfield Park. Her greatness is due precisely to the fact that her attitude toward her work is like that of a man, that is, of an artist, and quite unlike that of the typical women novelist, who exploits her feminine day dreams . . . She is, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest English writers.”
So she’s good, but only because she writes like a man. Astounding, huh? Because no male writer (and certainly not Nabokov), ever made a great work of literature out of exploiting his own daydreams. Right? Anyway, Nabokov revisited Austen, found an appreciation for Mansfield Park, and proceeded to teach it in his lit classes at Cornell. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.
As I said in yesterday’s post, I watched the new PBS version of Emma. I have to say it won me over in the end, but only because I am a sucker for the proposal scene and the way the two characters, who have had such an unequal relationship throughout the entire book come together in a moment of true mutual respect. Yes, it’s due to a big misunderstanding, but it’s quite moving, and it makes you realize that when they are married, he won’t treat her like the child he spent the first half of the book treating her as.
But I digress. My point here is that each episode of the mini-series began with actress Laura Linney addressing the screen and lecturing: “Is Jane Austen too ordinary and narrow for today?” she asks us. Linney’s point turns out to be that Emma Woodhouse is not Harry Potter or Edward Cullen or Wolverine. That she’s just a normal human with normal flaws. (Those magical guys all have “normal flaws” too, though.) However, the use of the word “narrow” is suspect. Ordinary? Fine. But narrow far too closely echoes another famous critic of Austen’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is . . . marriageableness . . . Suicide is more respectable.
Oh, Ralph, tell us how you really feel!
It must be nice to live in a world where your options are wider than “marriageableness” or not. I feel like Emerson must have read the first line of Pride & Prejudice, took it at face value, and then went for a walk in the woods. The women in Austen are concerned about marriage because marriage was the only “business” they were allowed to conduct. And Austen’s characters do in fact realize the folly of bad marriages. Elizabeth Bennet would rather risk the kind of poverty that ends up befalling the Dashwoods than wed Mr. Collins. Her friend Charlotte decides that the stigma of being an old maid rates higher on the humiliation scale than that of being married to a fool with good prospects. In Austen’s novels, the onset of love goes hand in hand with the onset of respect. They are romantic within the realm of practicality. Talk about a woman’s daydream! Those were high hopes for the 18th century gal. (And if you want to read about how easily it can all go wrong, check out Millenium Hall by Sarah Scott.)
So Austen is narrow. But it doesn’t stop in the 18th century. I recently read a New York Times profile of the writer/director/producer Nancy Meyers. Meyers is famous for her women-focused domestic comedies. She writes about affluent women and their families and their romances. Sounding familiar? Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated — these are hers. The first page of the long article is devoted to talking about how Meyers was asked to move from her table at a tony LA restaurant. Ha, see? Even powerful Hollywood moguls get no respect — you know, if they’re women.
Then the writer goes on to talk about how important and influential and successful Meyers is — never letting go of the fact that gosh, it’s hard since she’s a chick. In response to a complain about the number of takes she likes to do of every scene, her (male) agent is quoted as saying there wouldn’t be a complaint if Nancy was Mike Nichols. And gosh, Jack Nicholson respects her, too! I especially loved this bit:
It would be tempting to attribute Meyers’s uninflated manner to her being female — to having been trained from birth in the art of the soft sell — except for the fact that she is more straightforward than girlish, more clear than coy. “She’s just really smart and doesn’t seem to be impeded by all the weirdness that everyone brings to whichever gender they are,” says Helen Hunt, who starred in “What Women Want.”
In other words, just because she’s powerful, don’t fear that she’s that horrible, aggressive kind of female. Don’t fear that she’s a bitch.
Later, the writer, Daphne Merkin, calls Meyers’s women-centric, romantic films “retro” and “post-feminist” — tags I find rather shocking. Because they are romantic? The women in Meyers’s films are successful and (usually) wealthy from their own accomplishments. Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give is a hit playwright with a tenured professor (in Women’s Studies, yet!) for a sister. Cameron Diaz’s character in Holiday owns her own movie trailer production company (and a mansion in Beverly Hills). Diaz puts it bluntly in that film when she tells Jude Law’s single-dad character that she feels comfortable telling him about her success because she knows he won’t be intimidated, having been raised by a mother who was a high level executive editor at Random House. The romantic elements of the film do not detract from the feminist ones.
And the writer momentarily agrees:
“These women are self-sufficient and notably energetic. They may not have men, at least when we first meet them, but they make do with friends and children and siblings, for whom they whip up tasty dinners and homemade pies and laugh over their own situations. When men do appear on the scene, whether in the form of a babe-chasing player like Jack Nicholson’s Harry or Alec Baldwin’s renewedly impassioned Jake (or Dennis Quaid’s Nick Parker in “The Parent Trap,” for that matter), they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives.”
But then she spends a few pages obsessing over the filmaker’s focus on set dressings. She criticizes the thread count in the upholstery as being needlessly lush and overindulgent. Let us unpack the following quote:
“Whether her insistence on “softening the message” [Meyer's quote, which I for one believe was taken out of context] through plush surroundings ultimately weakens the films — renders them more glossy and insular than they need be, even for a genre that is inherently fizzy — is a question I have debated with myself and others.”
So, because women-centric romantic comedies are “inherently fizzy” we should make doubly sure to grit them up in a visual sense? I wonder how many other filmmakers are asked not to put their characters in fancy cars or film in exotic locales in order to, you know, make something real. These damn domestic female stories!
“At worst, her films can give off an air of tidy unreality — and it is this unexamined aspect, I think, this failure to even hint at darkness, that most fuels critical ire. Richard Schickel condemns Meyers with faint praise, hinting that she and the studios have struck a devil’s pact of sorts. “Clearly there is an audience for sweet little middle-class romances of the kind she makes, and it pleases the studios to indulge a woman, whom they would not trust with more vigorous projects. It’s as if they’re trying to say: ‘Hey, we’re not sexists. We make Nancy Meyers movies.’ ””
“Sweet little middle class romances.” (First of all, anyone who lives in a house like the Hamptons mansion in Something’s Gotta Give is NOT middle class, fwiw.) But can’t you just hear Emerson’s or Nabokov’s dismissal of Austen in those words? Can’t you hear the dismissal of that roomful of critics deciding on literary awards? Why is domestic a dirty word? Why is a character driven movie about a successful person dealing with their personal lives a Best Picture nominee if it stars George Clooney, but not if it stars Meryl Streep? I think I’m inclined to agree with Meyer’s agent. An article like this would never be written if Nancy was Ned.
I leave you with this (there’s a little bit of language at the end):
ZvU was recently featured on Entertainment Weekly’s Shelf Life. Though the article calls the collection a book of “essays,” do not be fooled. I think it meant that the essays were the connecting bits written by Holly and Justine, on the specific merits of the beasties of their choice. The actual contributions of all the writers are fictional.
Well, not my story, of course. As always, I am your faithful documentarian of all the human stories caught up in the fight against the growing unicorn menace.Yes, this is what I do for you. No need to thank me. Or, you know, if you do have the need to thank me, you can do so by buying a copy of Rampant. Or ZvU. Or Both.
I’d tell you to preorder it on Amazon, but then you might end up in the same boat as me, whereby you have preordered and paid for something on Amazon which they will now not deliver because they are in a little snit with the publisher and yet have not offered to refund your money. So I don’t recommend that. And I think it’s probably a tad too early to put in an order for ZvU at your local indie. Though you can order Rampant from your local indie here. I have a friend who was in the MIDDLE of reading a Macmillan book she’d bought and paid for on her Kindle and it vanished. That seems really wrong to me. And yet Amazon is painting itself as the wronged party! (Oh yes, they say they capitulated, but Macmillan print and ebooks have not been re-listed yet.)
Zombies Vs. Unicorns is being published by Simon & Schuster. I don’t know what their plan is regarding the pricing of kindle versions. Rampant is published by Harper Collins and yesterday, Rupert Murdoch, the big boss, announced he was having a sit-down with Amazon to renegotiate. We’ll see how that shakes out. I know I’m not buying a kindle, though. I like to own the books I buy, not rent them at Amazon’s pleasure. I’ve got a library down the street for that.
So, interesting commentary on my New Adult post. I’m not sure if my thoughts were quite as collected as I wanted them to be for a Sunday morning. I do wan to add that I think in many ways that it’s a difficult category to market, and I believe that Tiff’s comment on that post really illustrated why.
“It was like English literature was some sacred thing where no one could ever read or study anything that wasn’t “important.” So, of course, the second one gets out of college, one stops reading because reading has been so “important” and such a job for the past four years. And I think that’s where adult fiction is losing readers. Reading for fun becomes a kind of foreign concept. When you go out to brunch with those post-grad friends, and you talk about books, people don’t want to talk about the Dan Browns because, of course, you can’t learn anything from that (and don’t even get me started on YA books). It’s better not to have read anything at all than to have read something “trashy” or something off the bestseller list/front table of Chapters (or Borders, or Barnes and Noble).”
“‘New Adult?’ Really? Because when I was between the ages of 20 and 26, I was fine with reading adult novels. I didn’t need something that was more mature than YA, but not quite an adult novel yet. It sounds like a marketing ploy and a slightly insulting one at that.”
“WTF?!? Seriously???
The idea may be good, but the age range is ridiculous. When I was 20-26, I would’ve been seriously pissed at being targeted for “mature writing and ideas, but not full on adult stories.” Seriously. Pissed.
Who are these 20-26 year-olds? College students, possibly graduate students, studying science, philosophy, medicine, etc? How many are married and have children by 26? How many soldiers are that age? And they’re not ready for “full on adult stories?”
I find the whole idea distasteful.”
And I have to say I’m with them. I think they are misreading what is meant by “full on adult stories” however. It’s like the people who think that because a book is categorized as a YA it can’t have mature complex themes. (Guys, To Kill a Mockingbird is YA. Just saying. It’s an issue of subject matter, not of maturity level. Even if I am a married-with-kids soldier at 22, I’m still probably going to want to read about married with kids 22 year olds than 40 year olds. (And indeed, some of the books that SMP uses to illustrate this “new adult” range features teens who are married with kids — Hello Ice by Sarah Beth Durst.) Or I’ll want the escapist facotr — not being married or with kids. What SMP is saying is that there seems to be a gap in books ABOUT people that age, written for an adult audience.
That why it was so hard when my book came out to figure out who exactly our market was. Bridget Jones was ten years older than Amy. The Gossip Girls were six years younger. My book wasn’t as fluffy and brainless as some, but it was a far cry from serious literature. There weren’t other books out there like my book. And as chick lit crashed and there were fewer and fewer books that were “like mine but slightly older” most of the comparisons for my book came from “like mine but slightly younger” direction. They were frequently compared to the Kate Brian “Private” novels or Maureen Johnson’s books, all of which are YA.
I think it’s going to be a challenge to market “New Adult” as such. The last thing a 22 year old college graduate who just wrote her thesis on Proust is going to want to be told is that she’s not ready for “real books.” Part of the success of chick lit was because the packaging treated it more seriously. It was in trade paperback form, it was shelved in the “fiction and literature” section in the bookstore, it had Book Club questions in the back. People who would turn their nose up at a romance novel would have fun reading a chick lit and not feel guilty about it.
I’m a big believer in not talking down to readers. I write commercial fiction and I’m proud of it. I’m in this biz to show readers a good time, but I don’t believe that commercial fiction equates to brainless fiction, and I don’t “dumb down” anything I write, whether I’m writing it for an audience of forty year olds, twenty year olds, or 14 year olds. The only difference is the situations my characters are forced to face (if anything, my teen characters are in a much more mature and dire situation than my 20-somethings — but that’s a product of the type of story I’m telling) and the resources they’ve got on hand. I don’t take my readers for granted, I don’t believe that a touch of romance or humor brings the level of a book down, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading for fun.
Sailor Boy and I have an old joke based on something we once saw on Felicia Day’s blog, or perhaps twitter feed. Day said something to the effect of “Saw an audition announcement looking for ‘a Felicia Day type.’ Guys, I am a working actress.”
So according to all those Q&As, which time after time name-checked Secret Society Girl, I’m New Adult.
I’m intrigued by the team at St. Martins’ new mission. Intrigued because my standard answer to the dozens of emails I get every year from aspiring writers frustrated by all the rejections they’ve received from editors and agents calling their college-set books too old for YA, not of interest to adult readers and how did I do it is: it’s not an easy sell. The fact that my book sold in a week and a half after submission in a six way auction is a bit misleading and more a factor of the time period in which we sold the book (YA heating up, adult chick lit winding down, my book straddling the fence) and the subject matter of the book (not just “college” but “secret societies” in a year that The Da Vinci Code was king, and a short six months after 2 Skull & Bones members were vying for the US presidency).
Most of these writers end up revising their books down to high school and selling them as YA. I know one who revised it down to middle school and has a crackerjack MG series going on right now.When I sold SSG, we got rejections from YA houses for being “too old.” Some YA houses offered, and one even offered upon the condition that I rewrite the characters to be 18 year old college freshmen.
Those of you who have read the SSG series (oh, and I wholeheartedly recommend that each and every one of you who hope to write New Adult for St. Martins run out and buy the entire series right away — you know, for research purposes. I only have your best interest at heart) know how vastly that would have changed the tone and storyline.
When I wrote the proposal for SSG, I thought (like all those people who email me) that it was young adult. My agent very wisely realized it could go either way, and the rejections we received from young adult houses bore that out. After we sold it as adult novel, it was developed as such, completed as such, and the series was written with a slightly older audience in mind. If you recall, PREP was really big then. It was a story about a high school girl written for adults.
When SSG was sold and then came out, we were living in a very different literary marketplace. Young Adult as a marketing category to be reckoned with was just starting to heat up. Twilight came out late in 2005 (I sold SSG in April of 2005) and though a bestseller very soon after its release, was not the market juggernaut we know today. In the adult writing community, you were just starting to see established writers jumping the chick lit ship for YA: folks like Jenny O’Connell, Sarah Mlynowski, and Ally Carter. YA was still pretty young. You didn’t see quite so many –if any! — plotlines revolving around marriage and motherhood (hello, Breaking Dawn, Impossible, Ice, A Curse Dark as Gold, Madapple). It was an entirely different landscape.
Chick lit, which has enjoyed an enormous popularity for the first part of this decade, was also just fizzling out. The summer my book came out, marketed as chick lit, Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the aforementioned Prep) called chick lit writers sluts in The New York Times and participated with several other women writers in an ill-tempered anthology mocking and degrading their fellow writers who did write in that genre. Urban fantasy, which has now stepped in as the genre of choice for 20-something women, was barely a blip on the radar. The backlash against “pink books” (my hardcover was pink) was intense, and intensely disturbing for a baby debut author who got shoved into the middle of it and was asked at every interview to respond to the allegations that I was single handedly destroying the face of literature as we knew it. A New York Times bestselling author who gave my book away on her blog on its release date admitted it looked good, if you liked books about shoes. (Though my characters wear shoes — a common trait of characters in books of all genre — I don’t think they ever mention the fact.)
In passing, it’s interesting to me the way that urban fantasy has become the new chick lit. You’ve got the same, young, usually first person, almost always snarky, female voice. You’ve got the twenty-something character usually stuck in a scut job (before she realizes she’s the last in a long line of vampire slayers/werewolves/fallen angels/what-have-you), you have the romantic subplot, and you have the mockable/interchangeable covers (instead of candy colored headless chicks wearing high heels, you have magenta and indigo colored headless chicks in leather pants with swords).
Anyway, Secret Society Girl came out, an adult book in the adult section. Adults read it. And teens read it. Lots more teens, I htink, than anyone expected. It got named in the NYPL’s Books for the Teen Age list. My publisher looked at how well YAs like Gossip Girl and Traveling Pants were selling to the adult market (see, it was heating up) and rebranded my paperbacks with Gossip Girl style covers, hoping to hit a crossover market. They set the price of the trade paperback at a teen-friendly and “I’m living in a fifth floor walk up closet with three friends and eating ramen” post-grad-friendly $10 (except for the fourth one, and that’s a whole other story). Young, post grad, ramen-eating young adults read it. More teens read it. Some adults read it and were totally disgusted that it was not marketed to teens. Some adults read it and were totally disgusted that they thought it was marketed to teens.
In some places, it is. Many of my foreign rights sales were to teen imprints, and the books there are released as young adult novels. This is not unusual, in either direction. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is published as teen here but adult in Australia. Ditto Graceling and Fire (teen here, adult in the UK). Some independent stores here in the U.S. (as well as a few chain stores where they know me) cross promote the books in the adult and YA section. I watch with interest the rebranding of Maria V. Snyder and PC Cast’s old adult novels as YA novels in the new HarlequinTeen imprint, and wonder if that would benefit the series.
And I watch with interest the creation of this new marketing category. “New Adult.” As with the explosion of chick lit in the early part of this decade, there are some YA titles out right now that probably shouldn’t be classified as such. Fire of Fire is a teen, I guess (barely), but I read plenty of “adult” romances where the heroine is nineteen as well, and they aren’t YA for all that. The ubiquitous talk of taking lovers and controlling one’s own landed property and armies and who sired who else’s illegitimate bastard children in Fire just didn’t have a YA feel to me. I mean, Hamlet’s a teen too, you know? (Cf. with Graceling, where you got the sense she was a child under the thumb of her uncle and how the book was about her escaping that). Fire, note, is not published as YA overseas. There are other books out, especially of the “I’m a successful UF writer doing YA UF right now” variety that read just like the adult versions of those authors books, except they say the protag is 16. There are “adult” UFs, like Rachel Vincent’s bestselling STRAY books that read younger to me than some of these new YAs. Faythe starts her journey from grad school.
I suppose that would fall under “New Adult” too.
I am curious to see how this does. I’m curious if, when there’s a place that the target market can go to for books, if it will increase the sales (much like creating a YA place did with YA). (however, it didn’t work for Dorchester’s Shomi line, though that might have been too focused on the niche market of futuristic cyberpunk, and did not have the leather-clad covers that were selling so well for the UF crowd).
I like that when people email me now I can tell them that there is possibly a place for their college-aged protag at St. Martins. Many of their strategies seem familiar to me: lowering the price point on the paperbacks to YA-friendly/ramen-friendly levels, marketing to a crossover audience while shelving in the adult section and hoping teens read up. And hey, if this becomes a thing, perhaps it will widen the audience for my SSG books. I’ve already seen folks going out to buy it because of the online discussions (thank you, St. Martins and everyone else, go check them out!)
And thank you also for making me feel, even for a moment, a little bit like Felicia Day.
Hi, everyone, it’s me, your absentee blogger. I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting this place of late (I know I’ve owed folks more on the “nice guy” thing for, like, weeks) but I’ve been so busy! Florida, St. Louis, New York City, the KidLitCon — and then revisions, revisions revisions! It’s been a whirlwind.
For instance, this weekend I spent all day Saturday (from about 6 AM to 10 PM) at the KidLitCon here in DC. I attended panels on how authors, bloggers and publishers can work together, a panel on the new FTC guidelines work (and “guidelines” is really the appropriate word here, because the takeaway message I got from the very nice FTC rep was that everyone needed to chill out), and got to hang out with some amazing authors, including Laurel Snyder, Amanda Brice, Caroline Hickey, Pam Bachorz, Paula Chase Hyman, and Varian Johnson.
Varian Johnson, me, and Paula Chase-Hyman at “Meet the Author” at KidLitCon
On top of that, I met some amazing librarians whose blogs I totally intended to come straight home and check out… except:
My train to New York City left at 7 AM the next morning. Yikes.
So, after sleeping all the way to New York, I arrived, checked into my hotel (Luggage = one tiny suitcase and one enormous bag of killer unicorn cookies) and betook myself downtown to Books of Wonder. The other authors at the signing included John Connolly, Marissa Doyle, John Hulme, Daniel Kirk, Sara Beth Durst, Dan Poblocki, and Michael Wexler — and I am now the proud possessor of all their books.
Also at the signing: my editor, Sharonluvscats (in her awesome unicorn jacket!), Cassandra Yorgey, my uncle Tom (who drove down from Buffalo to see me!), a whole bunch of my college friends, and Mitali’s dad.
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO BRAVED THE CRAPPY WEATHER AND CAME!
It was a really fun signing. Instead of doing a reading (which always makes my palms sweat in fear), we all got a chance to talk about the kernel of the idea behind our books. And regular blog readers know I can go on forever about the ideas behind killer unicorns. After our presentations, a school principal came up to me and said she was buying Rampant because it sounded very educational. I hope, upon reading it, she decides there’s enough mythology, monasteries, and museums mixed in with the making out and the manslaughter.
See what I did there? What a wordsmith.
After the signing, Sarah Beth Durst and Sarah Cross and I went to a nearby bakery and had ridiculously rich hot chocolates with ridiculously large marshmallows in them. Then Sarah Cross and I went to dinner and caught up, since I hadn’t seen her since Team Castle. We caught up for, um, five hours. Eventually, the people at the restaurant took our teacups and water glasses away and refused to keep refilling. Getting the hint, we betook ourselves to Grand Central Station and kept catching up in the lobby until we finally, reluctantly, admitted we should both probably go home and get some sleep.
The next morning, I woke up, packed up my killer unicorn cookies:
And headed off on my day of extra special secret fabulous promotional events. I did a television appearance (more on that soon), a video interview (more on that a little less soon, but still not so long from now), and had nice long chats with my editor about — ahem — secret books I may or may not be writing (see column at right).
And then I came home to Sailor Boy and Rio and TempDog #4, who all missed me madly. And I spent all of Tuesday playing catch-up.
So, there you have it! Why I’ve not been around. Sorry.
In other news, I’ve got winners of the fabulous Kristin Cashore Giveaway, and here they are:
MICHELLE OF THE SPIRAL PATH (comment #7)
SARA OF THE HIDING SPOT (comment #16)
And here’s how it works. You two email me and tell me whether you want Graceling or Fire. First come, first served.
Particularly self-censorship (i.e., we shall not include this book in our library collection for fear of the ruckus) and the topics that often provoke this action. Read now!
This article is the topic of much discussion amongst the YA writers I know. One writer, who has experience with her books being challenged, wondered if she should move to adult lit. Others reported that their editors stuck their oars in before publication, concerned about how certain words or topics in their books might “limit the audience.” The thing that is so insidious about self-censorship is the way it can’t be tracked. You don’t know if your books are being “limited” due to so-called objectionable content. A few choice quotes:
“one 2007 study by the University of Central Arkansas shows that less than one percent of school libraries in that conservative state have books containing gay subjects or story lines.”
“Interestingly, [David] Levithan says he intentionally wrote Boy Meets Boy as clean as possible so that if the book were ever challenged, the only logical reason would be because it features ‘happy gay characters in love.’”
My first four published novels are adult novels, and so these issues did not concern me during the writing, despite the fact that books contain many of the hot-button issues the article discusses: sex, homosexuality, religion, etc. They do enjoy a large teen audience and are often recommended for teen library collections. Given that, in my high school, we read classic works of literature dealing with rape, incest, sexual abuse, war, death, impotence, adultery, violence, racism, religious strife, murder, torture… I’m not sure exactly what teens can’t handle. The Crucible, The Magus, and The Sun Also Rises are way more intense than anything I’ve written!
Yes, there is a fear that saying that is going to cause some parent to run into a library and rip Arthur Miller off the shelf. Some dude gets tortured to death by having rocks piled on top of him in the last act of that play. I wonder if people forget sometimes that most of the classic works of literature touch upon these subjects. Romeo and Juliet weren’t playing Parcheesi that night. Neither were Calypso and Odysseus. (Penelope, of course, played Parcheesi and did her weaving. Poor girl.)
Which is not to say that I think my books are for everyone. I recently received a letter from a father who wanted to know if Secret Society Girl would be appropriate for his 13 year old. Personally, I wouldn’t give the book to middle schoolers, though I know some who read them. As I read Clan of the Cave Bear at twelve, I’m not going to freak out over that. I related to him the mature content in the book so that he could make his own decision. But it’s difficult. Asking whether a book is appropriate “for teen readers” (which he did) is a far different thing than asking if a book is appropriate “for a 13 year old” which he later clarified. I think my adult books are appropriate for older teen readers (let’s say 15-16 and up) but not for the younger, “tween” market. I recommended Ally Carter’s spy school series instead, as it has many of the same “classmate camaraderie, comedy, and zany antics” aspects as my books, but in a sweeter setting (with younger characters!) more appropriate to young teens.
But that is not self-censorship. I’m giving my recommendation to a parent. The books are adult books, not YA. (The characters are in their twenties, have been living on their own for years, and hang out in bars legally. Does the thirteen year old watch How I Met Your Mother? There’s a good litmus test.)* However, I’m not in charge of making the books available or not avialable to the reader, as well as there being no expectation that I wrote the book with that reader (middle schooler) in mind. The father is free to make his own decision. A friend of mine gave my books to her 13 year old with no problem. Parents get to make these decisions for their kids.
Of course, then you see in the SLJ article:
“Librarians need to remember that it’s not their job to impose their own ideologies on the kids they serve or to parent or protect them, Scales says. And even though schools are required to act in loco parentis—Latin for ‘in place of parent’—the doctrine only applies to school librarians when it comes to the safety and health of their students, not when it comes to censorship, she adds.”**
Now, my YA novel is written for a teen readership. It’s about teens (the main character is 16), and it’s told in a fashion that takes that sensibility into account. It does deal with mature themes, such as death, violence, and sex, though it does so in a young adult tone, for a young adult audience. Unlike the heroine of the secret society girl books, who is an adult (a young adult, struggling with the trapping of adulthood, but an adult all the same), Astrid is a teenager, who very much lives within the world of childhood and being a minor. She is subject to the will of her mother, of her guardians, or her teachers. She is not ready to face many of the things in the adult world (though she is asked to face far more in terms of life-and-death choices, than the heroine of my comedies is!).
And of course, there’s that strong abstinence message.
The word “edgy” is batted around a lot in YA circles. Books like 13 Reasons Why and Living Dead Girl are pronounced “edgy,” whereas there is also the “sweeter” fare of I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have to Kill You or Twilight. I was having a discussion with another author last weekend who asked if my YA book is “edgy” or “sweet”. I didn’t know what to say. There are long battle sequences in Rampant, with a fair amount of blood and injury to the main characters. There’s a body count, both human and unicorn. The storyline deals with the question of sex (though, so does Twilight), though it does come down pretty strongly on the side of chastity (they are nuns, after all). A friend told me that in the US there is more tolerance to violence in books than sex, while in the UK, it is the opposite. I wonder, then, if my book would be considered more edgy overseas.
__________
* Interesting note: it is published as a YA novel in Brazil. As I do not speak Portuguese, I couldn’t tell you if there is any substantive editing going on.
**Hee hee. Does anyone remember that scene in A Series of Unfortunate Events where Mr. Poe (I believe?) is trying to explain to the children what “in loco parentis” means and the kids are like, “drop dead? We know!”
I just read an article about nine companies who have never had layoffs. Lately, it seems like every time I turn on the news, they are talking gloo and doomand irresponsible CEOs driving their businesses into the ground and screwing over their workforce so they can throw enormous parties for their wives on the company dime with dancing midgets and champagne waterfalls. So it’s nice to read about companies that are fiscally conservative, who care about their employees. A pattern that emerged in the article is that most of this companies are family or privately-owned. That makes a lot of sense to me. Too often the people who are in charge of making financial decisions for the company don’t know or care more about it than its stock price.
As the sole employee of my own company, I’m free of the layoff conern, but not of the “going out of business” one. I’ve been reading lots about how to survive in bad economic times, and it’s nice to read something that doesn’t scare the pants off me about the impending apocalypse.
Speaking of saving the world, does anyone else (other than me and Julie) love the animated show AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER? I just discovered this (sadly, due the to the controversy over M. Night Shyamalan casting the live-action version entirely with white people, depsite the fact that all the characters on the show are recognizably Asian and come from distinct and recognizable Asian cultures) and I LOVE IT. It’s funny and exciting and creative and the world it builds is such a beautiful blend of fantasy and borrowing from legend and culture. (Those of you who know more about the unicorn series are already aware that I’m a huge fan of that sort of fantasy creation.) For example, one character, Aang, is the “Avatar” of the title. According to the legend, the Avatar is the one person in all the world who can learn to “bend” all four elements (earth, air, fire, and water). When the Avatar dies, he is born into the next of the four tribes of the world in a particular pattern. They recognize the avatar because, as a child, he will pick up the belongings of the previous avatar, which is a tradition of Tibetan Buddhist lamas as well. (Aang has the appearance of a Buddhist monk — he wears saffron robes and shaves his head). I’m about halfway through the first season now, and the other two main characters are from the “water” tribe, who seem similar to the Inuit people. (By the way, they cast “Jasper” from Twilight as the Inuit boy, which, ::goggle::). The coolest part so far is that all the different “bending” styles are based on different types of martial arts. I’m no martial arts expert, and I woudn’t think you’d be able to do this in cartoons, but you can totally see how different the fighting styles are. It’s amazing.
Anyway, I’m totally loving it. It’s available on DVD if anyone is interested.
Great discussion in the comments thread yesterday (that I wasn’t able to participate in because I’ve been running around, trying to get stuff ready for our first ever Christmas Chez Diana). There must have been something in the air, because Jen Hayley was talking about the very same thing on her blog, and then later, I had a conversation with a YA writing friend who admitted that she didn’t want to say the words “young adult” when talking about her book because she was worried it might turn off potential readers. She said that some adults have dismissed her books out of hand when they hear they are “YA.”
I wonder if some of this can be tied to the whole myth of the “reading level.” I am constantly hearing proud parents declaring that their 10 year old reads “at a ninth grade level” and bemoaning the fact that books about 15 year olds are too mature in subject matter to match the “reading level” their children should be engaging in. I’m no educator, but I heard this whole reading level thing is actually describing the ease in which the average ninth grader would read the same material. It’s about phonics, not about books.
These people who are adults now (and dismissive of YA) were told growing up, exactly how old the books they were reading were through the calculation of some voodoo syllable-per-sentence mathematics that really had nothing to do with the book’s actual meat. When I was in middle and high school, we’d brag that we weren’t reading teen books, but adult books. The same group of friends who flocked to see TOY STORY on opening night were shocked that I, the English teacher’s pet, was still re-reading Narnia. They’d go to see SCREAM but would scoff at my Christopher Pike novels (they might, under duress, admit they read Stephen King). Entertainment designed for children or teens was totally appropriate, even cool — unless it was books. Having been trained to look on the back all our lives and press our “reading level” — books couldn’t be for fun. They needed to have bragging rights attached.
I think this attitude has abated somewhat in the face of the worldwide phenomenon that was the Harry Potter novels. I remember seeing fifty-something businessmen with Pentagon employment tags carrying their latest HP around the Metro a few years back. But at the same time time, I lost count of the number of articles saying that reading a chick lit book was rotting your brain. The New York Times was so distressed perplexed by the endless presences of Harry Potter on the bestseller lists that they made a whole new list just for kidlit. The prevailing opinion about books is that they are not supposed ot be fun. They are not supposed to be entertainment. They are supposed to be high art. No one talks down to you if you unwind after a long day by watching Desperate Housewives, How I Met Your Mother, or Lost. But if you read a chick lit or a romance or a science fiction novel, you’re clearly low-brow. Stupid. Pathetic.
And you wonder why adult publishing is in grave peril.
Children’s publishing is doing better, perhaps, because kids have not yet been trained to think of reading as something they only do under duress so they can sound erudite at cocktail parties. “Oh, of course I read Proust!” (I don’t know why I’m picking on poor Proust. I’ve never read him. For all I know, I may find his books to be fascinating page-turners.) Kids meet in school yards and talk about how much they love Dumbledore. In kids publishing, it’s okay to be both highbrow and still tell a good yarn. Look at the Prinz winners and the National Book Award Children’s recipients.
One more note: in the comment thread yesterday, katayoun asked why books need to be split into all these different genres. It’s really a marketing concern. If you walked into a bookstore and you saw a huge wall marked “fiction” it might overwhelm you. But you read one book, and you like it. Say it’s a romance. You go to the romance section, where you figure there may be other books like that book, and you’ll like those. Ditto for fantasy. Or books for teens. Or mysteries. or so on and so forth.
And now, the winner of THE HUNGER GAMES is: Tez Miller. (Tez, hon, you are so getting this slow-boat-to-Australia method. I am researching my Amazon options as we speak. Serves me right for including the overseas folk).
Today’s giveaway is Maureen Johnson’s SUITE SCARLETT. Leave a comment here to enter.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s not Bridget’s little sister who runs off with a disreputable man, thereby ruining the family’s reputation, it’s her mother, whose lover scams the Jones family friends out of their savings. (If you’ve only seen the movie, you are probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about, since they cut this plotline.) But in both cases, the fact that Darcy (it’s so convenient when characters get the same names in retellings, isn’t it?) tracks down the scoundrel in order to save Bridget/Lizzy’s family is the catalyst for them to reunite. In West Side Story, Tony (Romeo) still kills Maria’s (Juliet’s) beloved relative after the man kills Tony/Romeo’s best friend, sending him on the run and forcing Maria/Juliet to make a horrible choice between her family loyalty and her one true love.
One more note: in the comment thread yesterday, katayoun asked why books need to be split into all these different genres. It’s really a marketing concern. If you walked into a bookstore and you saw a huge wall marked “fiction” it might overwhelm you. But you read one book, and you like it. Say it’s a romance. You go to the romance section, where you figure there may be other books like that book, and you’ll like those. Ditto for fantasy. Or books for teens. Or mysteries. or so on and so forth.
