Middle Grade vs. Young Adult

A combination of bad advice and bad writing as a result of that advice has kind of got me stuck on PRINCE OF CATS. I have two other projects I'm working on right now, but in a few months, I'll be back to it, and I'll have to fix it, which is a daunting prospect.

An agent who is always full of good advice is Kristen Nelson, and she touched on the subject in her new Friday video blog series. Check it out:

Exploring the Subgenre

An agent asked me at the end of last year, "Do you have any sword and sorcery?" I love sword and sorcery. Okay, I love Conan. I have extolled the greatness that is He-Man and Thundarr the Barbarian here before and they're both just rip-offs of Conan. If you say sword and sorcery, I think Robert E. Howard. I'm sure other people have written sword and sorcery. Other people than Tolkien have written epic fantasy, but unlike him, I can't tell you a single sword and sorcery author that didn't make his mark by writing pastiche Conan stories first.

And that's a problem, isn't it? Do you have any sword and sorcery? No, because I don't read sword and sorcery. I read Conan. I don't think I could write one without just telling a similar story, I said.

That's what I said, and I meant it. But dammit that agent asking for it seemed like the excuse I needed to tell the story I had been wanting to tell for so long. Fuck it. I'm going to write sword and sorcery and readers will see the influences and that's okay. Hell, John Scalzi went so far as to mention STARSHIP TROOPERS at the end of OLD MAN'S WAR (of which the ties become very obvious a third of the way into the story). I can do the same. It'll be okay.

So here we go, miss agent. I'm writing you a Conan story.

...

Wait, why is my protagonist a 20-year-old woman? How did that happen? Where's Conan? This is a Conan story. What are you doing here, lady? Oh, you want to be the main character? Okay, I guess that's fine. I don't usually write females as main characters. It's not a matter of gender, just a matter of the stories I choose to tell. Klara was supposed to be my first female main character, but that's the second book of a trilogy that isn't being published. She's like Hilary Clinton and you're like Elizabeth Warren. I've been assuming Klara was going to be first for so long that I didn't notice Amelia just walking up and saying, "This is my story."

But hey, my Conan story has turned into an Amelia story, and that's pretty cool. I think it'll be better for it. I still have a Conan-esque character (and an Ookla-esque character for that matter, if the reference makes sense to you), but they're there to further Amelia's story. Oh, and sorcery and lasers and radiation and a post-cataclysm world. Let's rock this thing.

I don't usually love a story this much this early in the draft. I hope that's a good sign.

Transcending Genre

I'm not a huge Neil Gaiman fan. I do not dislike him, but in the scale of fandom that belongs to him, most everyone I know falls into the "I would give him a kidney if he asked for it" category, and I'm not there. Not all his stories resonate with me. And while my wife owns all his books, and I am thus at my liberty to try them all, I tend not to finish most I start.

The exception to this is Neverwhere. I love me some Neverwhere. I love it so much because if I was going to write that story, I would write it pretty much just the same. (That's big praise from me because I write the stories I want to read, thus he's doing all the work for me and I can sit back and relax as a reader unconcerned with being the writer.) I used a rarely used word today to fit into Twitter's 140-character limit, elseways. It reminded me of Neverwas (a good movie, check it out) which sent me on to Neverwhere.

I would love to write a book named Elseways, but I think if I did, it would end up being a lot like Neverwhere. That got me thinking on what kind of story I would write for Elseways. I bounce around within fantasy a lot: traditional, pre-steampunk, post-apocalyptic pulp, sword and sorcery, epic, contemporary. The one I never write on is urban. Urban is not my cup of tea. And too often, people use urban when they really mean contemporary. Urban fantasy deals with worlds within worlds, most often fairies, vampires, and/or werewolves, but regardless, it includes a Venn diagram of a world laying on top of our own that of which the average citizen is unaware.

Neverwhere is Urban Fantasy. But because Urban Fantasy is not my cup of tea, I balked at it and thought to myself, really, isn't it more contemporary? That was an unfounded claim because clearly there is a Venn diagram of worlds going on, which is the requirement I just put forth. So what's the problem? Well, so much urban fantasy is about fairies, vampires, and/or werewolves that something like Neverwhere just seems like a high-quality contemporary fantasy. And I'm really loving contemporary fantasy right now. Thus, I want this book I like to fall into a genre I like. Logic be damned!

I think if I were to ever write an urban fantasy, it would be Elseways. That's a title that could get me over that hump. The real goal wouldn't be to write in a subgenre that isn't tea, but to write a book that isn't Neverwhere. I already associate them and I just came up with the damn title. That's not a very good sign.

That and I don't actually have a story. But I have a title now, so dibs. I call dibs. Go find your own title.

(And happy new year.)

Keith Mars on Flashpoint

Have you seen Veronica Mars? Let's assume you have. If you haven't, go watch it so my assumption will be correct. You can thank me later.

Okay, now that we're all up to speed, who is one of the best characters on the show? Keith, the dad, played by Enrico Colantoni. If I could rent a father, I would rent Keith Mars. He's that awesome.

Well, Veronica Mars ended, but Enrico Colantoni is an actor, so he went on to other things. (You also saw him as Mathesar, the head of the Thermians in Galaxy Quest--but that was before VM.) You may have seen him in Flashpoint.

You probably didn't though, not a lot of people saw it. It was a summer-released show to see if it would take in the regular CBS fall schedule. Premise? Toronto, Ontario, Quebec SWAT team is trained in negotiating tactics to attempt to settle volatile situations without unnecessary body count. Redubbed the SRU, they get to be all empathetic and polite while reserving the option to shoot you in the head.

I gave the show a try because it's Keith Mars and Keith Mars deserves a shot. Unfortunately, it wasn't that good a show. I stalled out by the third or fourth episode and that was that. It went for three seasons and got canned.

Well recently, we got our basement repaired and set the TV back up. I was looking for something to watch and was in the mood for some Enrico Colantoni. I decided to skip the first season and see if season 2 got any better. Sometimes shows do that.

Oh how I wish I hadn't stopped watching! About episode 7 or 8 of the first season, the show REALLY found its groove. My wife and I just watched the entire second season in the span of a couple weeks (and I watched half the first season as well).

Here's the standard breakdown of the show: start with out-of-context climax then flash back to a few hours before. Introduce situation, respond, try different methods, resolve the situation, make you cry.

That last part happens enough that it is part of the standard show outline. My wife says the show could feature a goat in a pudding factory and it would still make you cry. She is not wrong about this.

The thing is, it breaks a lot of stereotypes in the procedural drama realm. The big tough guy doesn't have to be closed off emotionally. The sniper doesn't have to want to kill everyone and everything. Shooting the bad guy isn't always the best solution (rarely is), and just become someone is a bad guy doesn't mean the cops will look the other way while a victimized citizen introduces him to Old West justice.

We like to say it's because they're Canadian, but really I think it's just snappy writing. I love taking an established genre and turning it on its ear without clubbing it over the head with a baseball bat. It's good to see characters portrayed as human and the hardships they endure having to be in a job where their decisions can cost people's lives. (Lewis! *tear*) I wish it had hit its stride sooner. I would have watched it while it was on rather than a few years later when it was too late to give it my support.

Anyway, if you have Netflix, it's available for streaming.

Toof Fairy

Someone tell me if this has already been made into a horror movie. It sounds familiar. A friend suggested a story idea while we were goofing around, but it's one that's really stuck with me. The tooth fairy takes kids teeth because there's a bit of youth stuck to the tooth that the fairy can extract, ensuring it lives forever.

Is that a movie? It seems so simple that I figure someone else has to have thought of it. If not..DIBS! ;)

Pacing, Fantasy, Authors, and Agents

I received feedback on one of my manuscripts from an author. She said the pacing at the beginning was too slow. It had been an issue during earlier drafts and I had thought I had resolved it to my satisfaction. I do not immediately agree with feedback from an agent and I don't believe you should either. You should take it for the seasoned, experienced advice that it is and then decide what's best for your story. In the end, you're the author after all.

But remember, they are seasoned and experienced (assuming they are seasoned and experienced, otherwise I can't help you there). Do not dismiss their comments because it doesn't jive with your original vision. An agent's feedback is A-list beta reading. Think of it that way. A strong recommendation to help you make the best choice possible.

It took me awhile to see it, but I finally saw where I went wrong. The pacing was off and I knew just which chapter needed to be rewritten to fix it. In fact, I there must have been a concern there from the beginning because some indescribable concern I had about that part of the book resolved itself as soon as the chapter was rewritten.

The trick is, while the agent was correct that the pacing was an issue, I don't agree with the degree to which the agent said content needed to be cut to resolve the pacing. That's making me nervous. I'm about to go back to the agent and say, "I've rewritten this part of the story and tightened things up, really improved the pacing." But if she does not agree, then that is the end of the line with that opportunity (and it's a good opportunity which is why I'm nervous).

The trick is, I know this is right. I've ditched some setting background, a little more than I would have liked, but it does improve the pacing. A lot of it was able to be shucked off and some can be introduced in later books if I have a chance to write them. Even if this opportunity ends, it made for a better book. The best book, really. Without concrete feedback that says x, y, z, I have reached my capacity for abstract revision. This is the story I want to tell.

It reminds me of a blog post Kristin Nelson made last week about her feedback to an author and how she could not quantify her concerns for the pacing. Ted Cross mentioned in the feedback that fantasy was getting shoehorned into pacing models for other genres. While I'm hesitant to allow an entire genre be an exception to a rule, in this case, I agree with Ted. At least somewhat. There are plenty of anecdotal examples of slower pacing still available in fantasy, but rarely are those examples first-time authors. New fantasists have a run-and-gun structure to their stories. Is it because of the stories we grew up on? The MTV effect? Or is it the industry imposing those standards on a genre? Or is the fan base of said genre wanting something new?

It could be all or none of those things. Sometimes I wonder if agents who represent multiple platforms might have some leakage, some preconceptions based on their work with MG/YA that imposes itself on fantasy where the world is sometimes as important as the story. (Incidentally, I don't like those books. I want the story to be more important than the world.)

I don't think it's one thing. I think it's a lot of things. A big Venn diagram of things. But I lament the difficulty of creating a slower work. Sometimes it's good to feel a story inhale and breathe life into a whole new world and culture.

For those of you who read fantasy, have you noticed anything similar? And for those of you who read other genres, have you noticed anything like that in your chosen genres?

If this is YA, Society is Coming to an End

I have mentioned previously that despite the popularity of YA, I have little interest in trying to cash in on the genre. I like writing adult work. I like deep moral and ethical exploration that comes from an environment of violence, sex, and all the topics that a YA book can ricochet off of but never delve into too deeply.

Admittedly, the genre has been getting grittier. I continue to claim that Janice Hardy's Healing Wars series has become too violent to be considered Middle Grade. That's YA. And YA is getting more violent as well, but it hasn't reached where I write yet.

I'm revising JEHOVAH'S HITLIST to submit for querying next week. The story is much more solid than I remembered and I am pleased to find it so. The main character (Jehovah) is 15 years old. This is perfect for YA, yeah? Teenager. Protagonist. YA dystopian is hot. Here we go! Of course, he kills four people in the first chapter alone. The book has profanity, public nudity, drug use, prostitution, slave trafficking, masturbation, underage sex, racism, and lots of killing. It's a dirty, gritty world, and I would not diminish that a fraction to cash in on the YA market.

...now, if the publisher thinks parents won't mind their teenagers reading about a Nevada Avenue fuck whore or a marginalized too doped up on spike to get hard, then I wouldn't complain about the higher advance that comes with a YA sale. ;)

This has to have been told somewhere

Okay those of you who read sci fi, tell me the name of this book. There's no way this hasn't been written before. It's so fundamentally classic that I'm surprised I've given it a second thought.

Idea for a new story came to me on Friday (third of the week, actually, but I didn't write the other two down because they didn't seem like they had enough to flesh out to a full story). This one is about a person who uncovers a vast conspiracy. Robots are infiltrating humanity. What he sees as familiar coworkers are actually just cyborgs. When one malfunctions, he learns the truth and the chase is on. The robots are coming for him and he has to flee and find others who know the truth so he can save humanity!

Pretty standard stuff, yeah? In the end he discovers that they robots aren't coming after him to silence him but because he's a malfunctioning robot himself. In fact, there are no humans left. They died off a long time ago. He and those others he meets that "know the truth" are in fact all malfunctioning.

So there's no way someone else hasn't written this story. I don't read a lot of sci fi (I stick more to fantasy), so someone tell me the name of this novel so I don't invest the time to right it only to find out it's a novel by John Scalzi or something.

Captain Majors and the Super Squad: Soldiers of Tomorrow!

So I don't know where this idea came from. It hit me while I was driving home from work. It's incomplete, though. Still, it's worth writing down so that I can work on it later if the mood takes me. The interesting thing is that it's not a fantasy book. I don't get the sense that it's sci fi either. It feels more like a popular fiction where there are sf elements in it but it has a broader market appeal so they call it "fiction" and be done with it.

ANYWAY...main character is a decorated Iraqi Freedom vet. He survived the worst fighting in 2003-2005 including all the fighting in Fellujah. His platoon was ambushed by insurgents and only a handful of them survived. He's cycled back to the real world and is off his tours while he goes through physical therapy over some kind of injury that prevents him from being sent back to Iraq/Afghanistan.

It's not your typical, "I'm scarred by war" kind of story. While it's not easy to just reinsert yourself into a non-war environment, he has a wife and family and friends and they have enough experience as a military family to help him work his way back to equilibrium.

One thing he likes is golden age television. All the early black and white stuff right after Vaudeville. All the way up to the pulp sci fi of the 50s. All the space ranger and silly stuff like that. While garage saling, they find a DVD boxed set of "the greatest shows of public television." It's a collection of public television programming from across the country.

One of the shows is "Captain Majors and the Super Squad: Soldiers of Tomorrow!" After gaining a cult following, it aired only one episode on national TV and was cancelled. It was seen as not futuristic enough.

When he watches the episode, he sees that Captain Majors has a cell phone and a blue tooth. There aren't flying cars and they're not on the moon. They're dressed like Marines, carry modern rifles, and use modern military parlance. Then the "action" begins and Main Character sees that the episode is a perfect reenactment of one his own missions from Iraq. He gathers a few other episodes and finds them to be perfectly accurate as well.

I am waffling on how this is happening. I'll have to make a decision later. That's what I got for now, though.

Timing is Everything

Like the classic joke goes, "In comedy, timing is...

...

...everything."

I'm reading the last in the Shadowmarch tetralogy by Tad Williams, SHADOWHEART. It's a less than stellar name and most people don't know that a four-book series is a tetralogy¹, but Tad Williams is the reason I write fantasy--the reason². So we're going to give him a pass on that.

I have to admit, though, between Williams and Martin, I'm starting to get worn out on epic fantasy. Their stories are the epitome of epic, but frankly, there are characters whose chapters are fundamental to the resolution of the entire thing and I could care less. There are just too many people. As I wade through this lofty tome, after having consumed the three before it, I find myself impatient for the end. I want that long-awaited climax and resolution of the various characters I've come to care about. And having to read through yet another chapter of a character I don't care about where content that I know well is repeated (and repeated) in internal dialogue is getting frustrating.

That is not so much the focus on today's writing, just an observance. Perhaps that's why my word counts have been shrinking. Not so much an intent to cowtow to the industry and its word limits, but the desire to tell a more compact and immediate tale. I will ponder this in the future and see if that's the case.

No, the focus of today's telling is timing. This is crucial in any work, and the more characters you introduce, the more difficult it can be to align character actions to further the plot but to remain consistent with the story's own chronology.

Specifically, there are two characters who will influence other characters who will influence other characters. They finally make their trip to Southmarch and I am enthused becomes here comes the domino that will set the whole chain a falling! Woo hoo! Here it comes.

...but it doesn't come. Now granted, this is an epic fantasy, so while characters A and B swim across the bay to the nearby island, the author can focus on characters C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J without losing any time in the total advancement of the story. It can maintain the preferred pacing of this rumbling epic without losing track of the domino that is about to set the chain falling.

But then Character E gets another chapter. And then Character H gets two more chapters. Too many things are happening. Why haven't we gone back to characters A and B?

Well, the obvious thing is that when next we see them they won't still be swimming across the bay. They will have done other, irrelevant things necessary for their trip but unnecessary for the enjoyment of the reader.

That doesn't happen. In fact, when we finally return to characters A and B, they are finishing their swim across the bay. This is offensive to anyone paying attention. Some stories may play loosely with the passage of time, but most don't. So unless you're slip-streaming back and forth, be mindful of your timeline. When characters begin moving at different speeds, the reader can see the hand of the author in the story. You're this giant distracting thing like a boom mic that falls into frame. You're holding onto the characters while their legs turn so you can have the plot play out how you want.

And that's a funny thing. While you're the author, when a reader invests, the story becomes theirs. They don't want to see your hands in their stories mucking everything up. You need to be invisible. You are the mirror in which your readers see your story. There may be glass and silver there, but all they see is themselves.

Timing...

...is everything.


¹ Instead of a tetralogy, people try to call it a quadrology.

² I can tell you plenty of influences, but I know when the light bulb turned on. I was thirteen or so reading the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy and knew this is what I wanted to do. No hemming or hawing. Tad Williams showed me the path.

Waning Fanaticism

I follow George Martin on LiveJournal. I thrilled to see the amazing actors that will perform in "A Game of Thrones." (Peter Dinklage!!!!) I have watched the trailers and am anxious to see the finished product in hopes that it will be as great as it appears. I even follow A Game of Thrones on twitter.

Sometimes I see responses to that twitter account by other followers and it reminds me, I'm just not into the story as I once was.

Friends introduced me to the series when A FEAST FOR CROWS first came out, and I bounced on it. I read all four books in a row and was just as enthralled as they were. But now? By the time A DANCE WITH DRAGONS releases, it will have been a minimum of six years since CROWS came out. I say minimum because there's no guarantee the book will actually release in 2011. It was supposed to release every September for the last three years.

There's a lot of "don't judge until you've been there" about this whole thing. How could anyone understand what it takes to...blah blah blah. It's an invitation for fate to smote me with their lightning bolt of humility, but at the moment, I really don't care. Six years for a novel that doesn't even advance the plot from where the previous book ended. It simply parallels it.

I fully expect this series to go unfinished or to follow THE WHEEL OF TIME and require a different author to finish it. This also influences my interest in the TV show. If it's a rave success and they cover a book per season, and (assuming DANCE comes out this year), the next book won't be released by the time the series has run its course.

Two years used to be a standard for fantasy. When I was growing up, an author had two years to put out the next installment of a series. Somewhere in the nineties that started to balloon. In the aughts, turn around time for the major names has become ridiculous. Of the major best sellers, only Williams and Sanderson seem capable of producing content on any type of schedule.

As a fan, this is incredibly frustrating. As an aspiring author, I cannot fathom how a person is managing their time if they write full time and cannot produce a finished book in over half a decade.

I list Martin and his series on my website as a favorite. And he is and it is, but the more time goes by the more this changes. I can't really call myself a fan of a series if the series no longer exists, can I?

What about you? What are your thoughts?

Hurry Up, Technology!

I've made this complaint before, but we need those dream records they have in "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within." I had a sequel/continuation to a previous dream. Both of them were awesome. Both of them vanished from my brain the moment I woke up. I have little broken pieces, images mostly, floating around in my brain. But it was SUCH a good story. It focuses on a young adult and given how dark YA has been skewing lately, I think could be fit in that genre. The protagonist is a young girl, maybe 14 or so? New Zealander I think, or somewhere around there. She's put in a facility for problem children and...something.

This story blew my mind. It was so heart wrenching and poignant. I don't think I could ever just take these few scraps and craft the story that I saw. Sometimes it feels like I'm not even dreaming, that I'm watching someone else's life. That if I could just record it, I'd have a story more true to form and detailed than anything I could craft with my imagination.

But it's in a dream! It's trapped there, and I can't get to it!!!!

Little pig, little pig, let me in!!!!!<sup>1


1</sup> Not by the hair on my chinny chin...frontal lobe.

Dystopia, Genre, and Finishing the First Draft

You may find yourself asking, where has Joe been? He hasn't been posting three times a day. That's night like you.

You may also find yourself living in a shotgun shack. You may find yourself in another part of the world.

If it's the former, December is when I have to work. And not just show up at the office, but actually work. If the latter, you have a beautiful wife, so congratulations!

So what's been going on with you? With me? On Friday I finished JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. On Sunday I began revising. I am into chapter 4 of 39 (technically 38 with an epilogue, but that's pretty much the same). I decided on voice (HUCKLEBERRY FINN is in first person, which is why its voice works when it bleeds over into the narration). I have to align later chapters with early chapters in that certain resources (like glass) were referenced early and then effectively removed due to their scarcity. At two chapters a day, I should be done in just over two weeks. Of course, Christmas is in there. But then, I hope I can manage more than two chapters a day. That might be difficult with the voice clean up, though. Lots of weres need to be changed to wases.

With all luck, by the time it's done, sent to beta readers, and revised again, I'll have an agent and won't need to query. But if I DO have to query (boooooo), I'll need to list the genre. And that's awesome because this work's genre is well timed.

Dystopian fiction is a thing right now. Because it's such a new subgenre¹, there is still some debate over just what does and what doesn't qualify as distopian². Here's the general breakdown

A dystopia is considered the opposite of a utopia, an oppressed existence usually caused by an overbearing state. Think 1984 or the United States in 2004³. ;)

In JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, it began as a conceptualized post-apocalyptic world, but I reduced the scope because the main character had no reason or need to know what happened to the Asian coastal cities when the oceans rose, the ice age-like temperatures that killed Europe, the draught that killed the United States, or the middle east that killed itself. He knows the Nation, 53 avenues east to west. 53 states north to south. That is his world. It's a violent world with a lot of rules, none of them documented, all of them reinforced by the barrel of a gun.

Some might say that the absence of a government precludes the story from being dystopian, but I disagree. In fact, the utopia/dystopia comparison is overtly made by the existence of a platform city above the Nation. These are the people that drop a provisions box 10x20 once a week full of food, medicine, clothes, weapons, and ammunition. The urban jungle environment is propagated by the utopian society supposedly helping the refugees that live below it.

I enjoy this kind of dystopia more. There's some irony of the situation going on in that the character is oblivious to the larger menace of the regular insertion of firearms and ammunition in a limited-resource environment. His enemies are rival gangs, the Lawrence Park Jayhawks or the Manhattan Park Mongrels. Up Above doesn't really factor into it. The drop box has been the drop box his entire life. What cause does he have to question the positive or negative effects it has on his society?

If I spelled it all out, JH would be a dystopian, post-apocalyptic, alternate-history science fiction. Here's the trouble with that. Too many genres look like you don't know what you're writing. What is it? If you boiled it down to its essence, what is the genre of your book? With modern writing blending genres, it's easy to tell an agent you've written a young adult, dystopian, sci-fi thriller. But you look dumb when you do. Make a pie chart and pick the biggest piece of pie.


¹ Sure dystopian stories have been around for a long time, but we've never segmented publishing into specific metadata for easy online searchability like we do now, so the subgenre is itself new.

² Yeah right because age has anything to do with it. Epic fantasy is still being debated and it's been around for decades!

³ Yeah, I went there. I'm such a hippie<sup>4

4</sup> Although in 2004, I was called a pinko commie because I didn't believe we should have invaded Iraq, so...yeah, I'm a contradiction.