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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.
Cary asked: “Can you tell us anything more about the killer unicorn book?”
Yes…and no. The book is entitled RAMPANT, and it will be on shelves in June of 2009. The book is a contemporary, Rome set fantasy about killer unicorns and the virgin descendants of Alexander the Great who are charged with hunting them. It incorporates real unicorn myths and legends from around the world, which you can read about by going to the “unicorn research” page on this site, Greek mythology, Alexander romances, and lots of European and Christian history. It’s a fast-paced fantasy adventure in the vein of Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy or Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series. The heroine’s name is Astrid and the bulk of the action takes place in a ancient monastery called The Cloisters of Ctesias, which is modeled after real churches and cloisters in the neighborhood of Rome in which its set.
I received an early take on cover copy, but I don’t yet have permission to share. I saw some outtakes from the cover shoot recently, and they are to-die-for gorgeous. I also have heard descriptions of the actual cover and the interior design and I cannot wait to get my hands on them for real. I also can’t wait until this book is on the shelves. It’s been a real labor of love and I’m bursting with excitement about this project!
Brenna K asks: “I know you are writing the books about unicorns for kids. Do you have any more adult books coming out, or non-paranormal?”
Next year will also mark the release of the last book in the Secret Society Girl series, Tap & Gown. After that, we’ll see! I definitely want to write more books in that vein, and I have a few projects in the works.
As for the unicorn book, it’s written for teenagers and I think fans of the Secret Society Girl series will love it. It’s more action-oriented, and somewhat darker than SSG, which are comedies, but it’s still a Peterfreund book, so all the trademarks will be there.
Lauren asked: What kind of book deal (advance, royalties, etc.) can a first-time chick-lit author expect? Also, what do you think about hiring a copyeditor to look over your manuscript before submitting it to an agent? Thanks!
That first question is actually a pretty complex one, so let me break it down into parts.
Royalty rates have very little to do with genre or how many books you’ve sold (unless you are one of those huge, huge authors like Stephen King or Michael Crichton who write tent pole books and can negotiate accordingly — if you are underwriting your publisher, you can probably get higher royalty rates. There are maybe a dozen authors in the world who do that). So, royalty rates vary VERY little by genre. Mostly by the format in which your book is published.
Most chick lit books come out in trade paperback. Standard royalty rates for trade paperback is 7-8% of the cover price. Sometimes (rarely) chick lit books are printed in mass market paperback, and more commonly, they are reprinted in mass market. Mass market royalty rates can be anywhere from 6-10% but standard is 8-10%. In many cases, contracts come with escalation clauses, which sound like this: “8% to X copies, 10% thereafter.” If your publisher puts your book out in hardcover, your royalty rate will vary between 10-15% based on said escalation clauses. If your book is published in electronic format, royalty rates vary WIDELY depending on publisher.
Okay, now that we’ve got that behind us, let’s talk about advances. An average advance for a first time author publishing in adult trade paperback chick lit with a large NY publisher, last time I checked, was somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. HOWEVER (and this is a biggie), the last time I checked was 2004. Before the chick lit market crashed. Because I don’t know very many people who have sold chick lit for the first time since sometime in 2005, which is when I sold mine. The market crashed that summer. And most of the people I know who were writing chick lit are writing something else (YA, romance, urban fantasy, mysteries) or not writing at all. And most of the publishers publishing chick lit have stopped, or at the very least, stopped or cut back immensely on their chick lit publishing programs . I wasn’t at RWA this year, but it’s been several years since I’ve heard any editor or agent not at a YA house (most publishers of chick lit publish it through a program connected to their romance editors) say they were looking for chick lit. (People who were at RWA this year: has it changed?)
The market crash basically has two effects: the subsequent advance is either pretty big, because the author is bringing something to the table that is NOT the “average” chick lit (i.e. a platform of celebrity, etc.), or the advance is miniscule, because the publisher feels there is no market for the book and therefore, it won’t sell many copies. More likely, the advance is $0, because there is no offer for the book at all.
I hate to sound so discouraging, but the numbers aren’t pretty. Since April of 2005, when I sold my book, I know of about four non-celebrity, non-platform (in the “I’ve got a weekly column in the New York Post” sense) authors who have sold first time chick lit. In contrast, I know at least a dozen published chick lit authors who have been unable to get back under contract, and more than a dozen more who are now writing in a different genre (occasionally under a pseudonym). That means I know six times as many established chick lit authors who are unable to hold the market as I know people who have been introduced to it. Look on the bookstore shelves. Whose chick lit do you see? Candace Bushnell, Emily Giffin, Lauren Weisberger. The midlist is mostly gone. From a market perspective, if I were a first time author, the last genre I’d be trying to publish in is chick lit.
But maybe you’ve got the special book, and you’re the next Emily Giffin who will burst on the scene and hit the NYT bestseller list. Think big, I say! And if you have a chick lit book, there’s nothing to lose by trying to market it. But I don’t know what the market is for that kind of book at the moment, and I think the advances, even if you can sell it, will likely be far lower than they were a few years ago. Markets are cyclical, though, and I keep hoping they will uptick again in chick lit, because I love reading it!
As for your second question about hiring a copyeditor before you submit your manuscript….um, I guess so? I don’t see anything wrong with it, but I have never done it and I don’t know anyone else who has either. The job of a copyeditor is to check for spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes, as well as continuity or logic errors (e.g., “she was wearing a green shirt on page six and a blue dress on page twelve” or “how can he have one hand on her face, one hand on her breast, and one hand on her back?”). I don’t think the occasional little mistake like that is a dealbreaker for acquiring editors, though of course if you have a ton of them, it is a symptom of a sloppy author and the editor might not be able to tolerate them long enough to see your story. (I know of at least one writer who never got anywhere with her great ideas because her grammar was so bad that the writing was unreadable.) You do need to attain a certain level of professionalism in your writing before your submissions will be taken seriously. Basically, the response you’re going for is “this is a typo,” not “this is an author who isn’t acquainted with standard English.” So I’m not really sure what the point is of hiring a copyeditor at that stage of the game, since no doubt your manuscript is as clean and spell checked and typo-free as it can be by your own hand.
Please note: this is what a COPYEDITOR does. A much more common question is, “should I hire a freelance editor?” (i.e., a book doctor). Jury’s out on that one. Personally, I’m against it, especially for a first time author. I think freelance editors have their uses under the following situations:
1) You are a celebrity, professional, or other non-writer who, because of their platform or profession, has a need to write a book despite their lack of writing skills. Therefore, you hire a book doctor to smooth over the rough edges.
2) You are a contracted author whose overworked publisher is not editing your books (yes, this happens) and you know this, and you need to substitute this. (Please note: this all starts to get very sticky when you get into the realm of vanity publishing, etc., so unless you’re a long established author with dozens of books under your belt, this will likely not apply to you.)
If you are a writer (i.e., your job is to make words fit together coherently), then the words you present to publishers for acquisition should be yours. Not the ones you hired someone to make for you. Especially as a first time author. What happens when your book doctored book gets bought, and then your second book comes in and the editor is like, “Um, did she forget how to write?” Or maybe the changes the freelance editor wants you to make will destroy the very thing an aqcquiring editor likes about the book? I’ve heard too many stories about ham-handed book doctors or scam book doctors or etc. I’m very very wary about the idea, even though I know there are well-respected book doctors out there.
That’s my (likely controversial) feeling on the matter. Far better than HIRING someone, I think, is to work (for free) with a critique group of other authors.
Lord, I’m really little mary sunshine today, aren’t I? “Chick lit is dead” “don’t hire freelance editors” “wah wah wah.” Sorry to be such a downer! The bottom line is that you need to follow your gut. If you feel your manuscript has a better chance if it has a professional eye on it, do what you need to do. Research THOROUGHLY. Get recommendations. make sure you aren’t being gouged. Editors can get PRICEY. I saw manuscript critique quotes recently in the $3k range. That’s going to be a huge chunk of your advance check right there. So it’s something to think about very very carefully.
The winners of yesterday’s JESSICA Z Giveaway are:
Leslie of cuteonthecheap.com
and
Maureen McGowan
You know the drill!
In passing, if you are one of the winners of previous days’ giveaways and you do not contact me by Monday, I’ll draw new names. I’m totally hard core like that.
So if I’d been on my game, I’d be having a fun guest blog with the author of today’s giveaway right about now. Unfortunately, between deadlines, the new house, Rio, and family emergencies, it kind of got away from me. Bad, Diana.
 Today’s giveaway is two copies of the debut novel CYCLER, by Lauren McLaughlin. The book has one of the highest-concept premises I’ve heard in a while (unsurprising, given McLaughlin’s screenwriting creds): Once a month, teen Jill McTeague becomes a boy for four days.
Talk about a bad period.
Her family’s horror at their daughter’s “condition” has led them to take extreme measures. Jill’s “boy self” is imprisoned in her room during his cycle, and Jill is instructed to repress all memories of her time spent as a boy. But their actions backfire, creating in Jill a split “boy” personality named Jack who is not only interested in Jill’s portion of their shared life, but doesn’t want to be imprisoned anymore.
Sailor Boy and I both devoured this novel, and I was fascinated with its exploration of gender identity. From the description above, you might imagine that this is a very dark book. Not at all! But there are some chilling underpinnings to the story. In an effort to make sure that Jack doesn’t “bleed” into her portion, Jill — in concert with her anti-feminist mother — has ruthlessly excised any aspect of her life or personality that may be viewed as “unfeminine.” Stuff like sports. Yeah, you read that right. Scary.
I was regularly reminded of the activities in those “scared straight” camps, where the instructors are under the delusion that men who act like men and women who act like women are no longer homosexual, as if forcing traditional gender roles will have an impact on sexual orientation? If Jill acts “like a girl” will the boy inside her disappear? As the first in a series. many of these question are not fully answered by the end of the book.
As my books regular deal with issues of the intersection of feminism, femininity, and cultural expectations of the same, I was fascinated by this exploration. (More on that when I talk about RAMPANT. RIght now we talk about CYCLER.)
It’s a great book for discussion, and we definitely had a lot in my living room after we finished!
Read more about Cycler and the story behind it on Scott Westerfeld’s blog, and at John Scalzi’s Whatever, and leave your comment here to be entered into the giveaway.
Remember that scene in the movie of Bridget Jones’s Diary where poor Bridget is forced to stumble her way through introducing the publisher of “Kafka’s Motorbike: The Greatest Book of Our Time” in front of Jeffrey Archer, Salman Rushdie and other literary luminaries, and — understandably — keeps apologizing. “And, Mr Rushdie, yours aren’t bad either.”
That scene never fails to crack me up, and it was in my head all afternoon. Which was a nice distraction, because between the book deadline and the huge non-writing-related thing going on in my life, I’m getting a little bit overwhelmed. It may be why Sailor Boy sat me down yesterday with a glass of wine and a DVD of Mean Girls.
What a funny film. My favorite part is where Cady recognizes that in “girl world,” Halloween means dressing up in lingerie with animal ears. It’s so true! When my best friend and I were looking for costumes for the Masquerade last New Year’s Eve, the costume shops were filled with boy costumes, and girl costumes that could all be categorized under the heading “Boy Costume Wench” and looked like your average sex shop costume with corset tops and super short flippy miniskirts. You could be a pirate wench or a medieval wench or a Tarzan wench or a Revolutionary War (complete with tri-cone hat) Wench. In the end, my friend bought a pirate wench outfit that she proceeded to wear as a vest, because that’s how skimpy it was, over a puffy shirt, a pair of black pants, and kicking boots, thereby creating a slightly more feminine equivalent of the boy costume you could buy ready made. So frustrating! It’s kind of sad when the entire social paradigm shifts toward “all girls want to dress up like streetwalkers” to the point that you actually can’t find a costume that doesn’t fit that mold.
I had a great lunch with a writer friend yesterday, and we talked about feminism and why a lot of young people refuse to refer to themselves as feminist or even people our age (Gen X) tiptoe around the phrase or think that to be feminist means “you won’t get a date” or you don’t wear dresses or makeup or whatnot. Or how things that are classified as “for women” are things that society — even supposedly enlightened, intelligent society, feels comfortable denigrating. Men will avoid it and women will avoid it as well. We’d apparently both taken classes in college that came under fire for using “women” in the title of the class. In her case, the men in the required course couldn’t stop complaining about being forced to read “girl stuff.” In mine, the class was eventually titled something else, and the applications went through the roof.
Sad.
And then in Mean Girls, Tina Fey’s character is telling the girls, “You guys have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores; it just makes it easier for men to call you that.” I used to do that all the time, both in jest and affection with my girlfriends and as a pejorative. That women choose to denigrate other women, as well as things that are considered “for women” isn’t really helping matters.
There’s a scene in SSG where Amy calls herself a slut. I threw it in for laughs, and because it seemed authentic to the voice of that character. She’s describing how she made out with one guy at a bar, then met another back at her dorm room and spent the night with him. Back when I was in college, they used to send around these things called “purity tests” and I always remember one of the big “OMG, no!” questions was “Did you ever hook up with two people in one 24 hour period?” I think that Amy, in retrospect, would be a little uncomfortable with that choice (especially given the repercussions), and “slut” is the term applied by and to girls who do things like that.
Boys? Yeah, there is no term.
However, it doesn’t seem as funny to me now. I still think it’s authentic for Amy to make that self-deprecating comment, and to use that term, but I also think it’s unfortunate. These are some of the choices you make as a writer: because your characters aren’t perfect. They aren’t always going to make the “right” choice. Even if they believe (as Amy certainly does) that her sexuality is just fine, thank you very much, it doesn’t mean she’s free from what our culture thinks girls should be. Maybe she calls herself that so no one else can do it first, to own the phrase on a level that renders it toothless. Because if she thinks she did anything wrong that night, it wasn’t hooking up with two people, it was that one of the people would view it as a betrayal. Maybe classifying herself as “slutty” is an easier thing for her to swallow (perhaps because she and her girlfriends have been tossing the term around, Mean Girls style, for seven years) than “cold-hearted.” Or “unfaithful.” Or anything else that the betrayed party would be more likely to say than “slutty.”
Yes, these are the things I think about. Especially as I bring the series to a close, and I think about where Amy is now, vs where she was at various points in the previous books. Amy is thinking about it too, much as I look back on that girl I was in college, who threw “slut” around with abandon and wonder why in the world I’d do something like that.
(My pal Vicki is starting on a quest in the fabulous world of manuscript submissions — head on over and wish her luck! Sailor Boy and I are heading on our own adventure this weekend. It’s entirely possible that we’re nuts, but here goes.)
 I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while (in the sense that I’ve had this jpg on my desktop forever), but I keep forgetting. Who here has read the Shopaholic series? I had a really tough time with the first one, in that is scared the daylights out of me. I didn’t go to Starbucks for a month.
Now, I’ve never been in credit card debt. School loan debt? Yes, ridiculous amounts. Credit cards: not so much. I use my card in place of cash and pay off the balance every month. In fact, the year I graduated from college, this was a major problem, since my $500 limit wasn’t quite covering my monthly needs in Manhattan, and the company was refusing to up my limit, as I was “not a good credit customer.” I had no idea what they meant, since, according to what my parents had always taught me — I had great credit. Turns out, having great credit does not make you a good customer of the credit card company. So my friend convinced me (and it took a lot of convincing) to leave a small balance on my card for one month. Lo and behold, they upped my limit several thousand dollars.
Yes, it’s a ridiculous world we live in. Which brings us back to Becky Bloomwood.
Unlike a lot of chick lit heroines, I couldn’t get behind what I viewed as her extremely self-destructive behavior. I couldn’t identify with her, which I believed was the kiss of death for a book in this genre. However, I found her adventures hilarious, and I kept reading. And that’s when all that fancy lit analysis that had put me in school loan debt came flitting to the surface and I realized that though the Shopaholic series was packaged as chick lit, it was actually social satire. Becky Bloomwood was not an “everywoman” heroine like Bridget Jones or Amy Haskel. She was, in the literary sense, a clown. Not Helena, but Bottom.
Once I realized these things, I enjoyed the series much more. In fact, I loved it. Kinsella’s writing is brisk and amusing, and her take on the credit crisis is funny because it’s so spot on. My favorite was Shopaholic and Sister, where we got the fabulous foil of the frugal sister, Jessica. Though not quite as unkind to frugality as she is to shopaholism, Kinsella does have a few barbs toward those who make it a religion.
So now they are making Shopaholic a movie, starring Isla Fisher, who I think is a great choice, as she played such a fabulous clown in Wedding Crashers. (No, I haven’t seen her in anything else.) I’ve heard that they are relocating the film to New York, which is a wee bit appalling, since I think that of the two, Shopaholic is way more relentlessly British than Bridget Jones’s Diary was. All the stores she shopped in and the upper-class git she dates named Tarquin of all things, and etc. But I guess they can just change Liberty’s to Barney’s or whatever.
No, what really gets to me is the clothes. Listen to a description of a standard Becky Bloomwood outfit:
I’m wearing all black — but expensive black. The kind you fall into. A simple sleeveless dress from Whistles, the highest of Jimmy Choos, a pair of uncut amethyst earrings. And please don’t ask how much it all cost, since that’s irrelevant.
In this scene, she also states that she’s spritzed with Chanel.
The point is, Becky’s wardrobe is classic. She’s all about brand-print scarves and cashmere sweaters and designer black dresses and Armani suits.
And then this is what they put her in for the movie:
 Well, they got the clown part right, at least.
Seriously, what’s with that? I heard the costume designer is the same chick who did Carrie on Sex and the City, which is pretty obvious, but Becky is not Carrie. She doesn’t dress like Carrie. She’s not a Carrie knock-off. I don’t think Becky Bloomwood would ever wear this outfit. I’m hoping it’s some sort of elaborate dream sequence.
Keeping my fingers crossed.
Oh, Maureen Johnson, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…
So when everyone was debating about “Chick Lit,” I was probably off eating a sandwich somewhere and missed the whole thing. Which was fine by me. Except that I kept getting these interview questions over and over again, people asking me about my favorite “fellow Chick Lit writers” or how I felt about something “as a Chick Lit writer.”
::snip::
The only thing I really did know was that a lot of people spoke derisively of Chick Lit, basically using it as a synonym for trash and often connecting it to the word “mindless”. I heard there was a whole book dedicated to NOT being Chick Lit, and that Gloria Steinem was quoted on the cover and everything.
Why was everyone lumping me in with this? What a conundrum! I figured I’d better ask around and get more information.
“It’s your covers,” someone told me. “It’s because the girls have no heads. Well, they have heads, but they don’t have tops of heads.”
I wrote this down.
“It’s the romance,” someone else said.
I wrote this down.
“It’s the light, breezy tone you adopt,” said someone else. “Humor.”
I wrote this down.
Unlike Maureen, I have actually described myself as a chick lit author because my SSG books are about a young woman’s journey to self-discovery and adopt a breezy, humorous tone. They also feature covers sans heads (or pink, and yes, I got letters saying “I don’t usually read pink books, but I loved yours!”), a healthy smattering of romance (you know, like The Matrix), and of course, is about and written by a woman. That’s the real issue here.
Like Maureen, I have been told that my book are not chick lit, because they don’t contain that holy triumvirate of chick lit stereotypes: shoes, cities, shopping:
Someone else told me that Chick Lit is about shopping, but I don’t write about shopping. And yet . . . I am Chick Lit. Yet another person told me it was about sassy young women in the city, which I never wrote about until Suite Scarlett. And yet, I am Chick Lit. Person number fifty-seven told me it was something about women who work for magazines, which I have never written about. And yet, I am Chick Lit.
And I’ve also been asked about the shoes, cities, and shopping in my books, by people who have obviously never read them. In fact, when my first book came out, it was promoted by someone who said, “I don’t read ’shoe’ books myself, but this one looks interesting.”I think the word “shoe” may appear once in my novel.
 So my problem was not calling my books chick lit, it was the fact that my definition of chick lit (i.e., “humorous story about young woman’s journey towards self-discovery told in a light, snarky tone”) did not match the stereotype everyone was deriding. When your definition of a word differs from everyone else’s, you’re in trouble. This is how I felt when people started referring to “floppy disks” as the hard ones, instead of the seriously floppy disks I used to use in my Texas Instruments LOGO.
Though since Pantalaimon the laptop only has drives for “discs” and not “disks” then I suppose the point is moot. My brother tells me that USB is the way to go anyway and something about Apple Air Jordan, but I digress.
The point is, it’s difficult to have a conversation wherein the people involved are defining the terms of the topic differently. Yesterday, SB and I saw a bumper sticker: “You say PIT BULL like it’s a bad thing.” I feel that way, and have for years.
Keris Stainton of Trashionista writes:
I’ve recently been asked elsewhere to define chick lit and … I can’t. Apart from that it will probably (but not definitely – see Lisa Jewell’s A Friend of the Family) have a female main character with a relatively snarky tone, I think the genre has widened enough that you can’t set any parameters on story, setting, age of characters, anything … particularly not the wine they drink or shoes they wear. The best I could come up with was that I know chick lit when I see it (which isn’t at all helpful to anyone else, of course). Which brings me to my second point…
I also loved The Spellman Files and, while reading it, kept asking myself whether it was chick lit. I think it does fit the genre to a certain extent – snarky heroine, challenging romantic relationships and even more challenging family members – but I still struggled to decide whether to review it as chick lit or not. Eventually I decided that if Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series is chick lit (and I think it is) then so is The Spellman Files.
But genre is damn slippery, even at the best of times, as pointed out recently by Justine Larbalestier, David Moles, and Maureen Johnson (in the same post as above: “If established literary terms are stable as jello molds, then Chick Lit is a soufflé sitting on a fault line. It only means whatever the latest and most effective argument says it means. Or whatever you guess it means. Or whatever Wikipedia says it means. Whether the books under the banner are in any way similar (except for the sex of their authors) . . . well, that’s another question.”)
To quote Maureen’s agent:
To be brutally honest, I see no problem in the term “chic lit,” or “chick lit,” or whatever else they choose to call it. Young women’s fiction, if you will. Pink covers, pictures of shoes, female protagonists having existential crises over glasses of chardonnay. But some have decided that description is deader than last season’s flats, so we come up with synonyms. “Witty women’s fiction” is one. “Upscale commercial fiction” works just as well.
Lately, when people ask me what I write, I tell them I write a series about a girl who joins a secret society at her Ivy League University, and it’s kind of like Bridget Jones. They’ve heard of Bridget Jones, because there was a movie.
(Seriously, though, how funny would it be if I said it was kind of like The Other Boleyn Girl, Stardust, and No Country For Old Men? I’m occasionally tempted to be dadaist, because cocktail parties in DC can get a bit predictable. There was a period of time where I started telling people I was a professional smoke jumper, but then Sailor Boy threatened to lock me in the house.)
I did an interview a while back where all roads led back to this discussion of chick lit, of the value of chick lit, and, like Maureen said, how I feel about such-and-such “as a chick lit writer.” (It even went so far as to make a bizarre claim that the unicorn book, a young adult fantasy adventure with gorings, decapitations, and extended hunting sequences, was “chick lit.” Someone picking it up expecting Bridget Jones’s Diary is going to be pissed.)
I don’t do the genre snobbery thing. Good books, bad books, all over the place. There are genres that aren’t my cup of tea, but I’ve pretty much learned never to say never on that one, because one will presently come along to make a liar out of me and I’ll adore it. And, like Maureen, I’m fine with being called a chick lit writer, because I do think the SSG books work as I define the term. And I’m fine with not being called a chick lit writer because someone thinks books without shoes or shopping don’t count.
I’m not so much fine with calling the unicorn book chick lit though, since I don’t see it matching anyone’s definition of that term.
It’s more like Jellyfish Lit. (Sorry, Maureen.)
So I’ve been pretty good at keeping out of the newest tired, dead-horse version of “fun books, especially those by women, mark the end of Western civilization” kerfuffle. What is there to say on the detractors’ end that hasn’t been said over and over since Daniel Defoe was slamming Aphra Behn? Has civilization been steadily crumbling since then? Has the state of the novel? (Hope not,s icne it was just invented around that time!)
It’s a stalemate, folks. You know that scene in Twelve Angry Men where the racist just starts ranting away and instead of attempting to argue logically with him anymore, all the other jurors realize he’s a brick wall of idiocy and just walk away? That’s how I feel. There’s no point in trying to respond logically to people who honestly believe that the text of Hamlet is somehow tainted by being on the same shelf as the text of Shopaholic, or that there is an automatic devaluation of any book encased in a cover reflecting an unsaturated orange hue of 620 nm (i.e., “pink”).
But then I read Bookseller’s Chick’s well-reasoned defense, and I just want to say: right on, my friend! Telling an adult reader that she is incapable of making good decisions about her reading choices is tantamount to saying that if candy is available on the shelves at my local Giant, I won’t buy Brussels sprouts. Hey, guess what? I’m a grown up. I know the difference between vegetables and chocolate. I don’t need them to be on separate aisles or color coded for me to be able to tell, either. I also happen to love vegetables and I find it laughable that you assume, because you see me with a Snickers bar, that I don’t eat vegetables too. I happen to love vegetables, especially Brussels sprouts.
I was a Literature major at Yale. I can shoot my mouth off about the Western Canon enough to satisfy even the snobbiest of lit snobs. At one point, my friends and I estimated that we read between four and ten thousand pages of literature for every class. (The Russian Novel class was a particular bear, though Women and the Rise of the Novel was no slouch in terms of doorstoppers.) That means that over the course of my college career, I probably read about 200,000 pages worth of literary classics. Two. Hundred. Thousand. And that’s not including the books I read in high school, in childhood, and the classics I’ve read for fun. (Yes, I read all kinds of books for fun.)
Thanks for your concern, but I think I’m good, really.
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