The Literary Line

A discussion over on Catherynne Valente’s livejournal has me thinking about what distinguishes literary fiction with genre (i.e. speculative) elements from genre fiction as such.

People approach this in a lot of different ways, of course. There’s value in saying, if it has a genre element — ghosts, vampires, time-travel — then it’s genre, and enough with all this waffling. (Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you.) Otherwise this notion of “speculation” loses all real meaning. There’s also value in saying the real line lies in shelving: it’s all about what publisher will pick you up, what audience they think they can market you to. That, more than the actual content of your book, determines which camp you belong in. This ends up being a fairly accurate descriptor of how society creates the divide, after all.

But I do think there is something within the stories that separates Is Genre from Contains Genre. Some people say it has to do with the centrality of the genre conceit: if you could pull out that thread and still have a coherent story fabric, what you have isn’t really science fiction or fantasy. This almost but not quite hits the mark I’m looking at, and I can give a good example of how.

I mostly enjoyed the movie Stranger Than Fiction. If you haven’t seen it, this is a story about a man who suddenly starts hearing a woman’s voice narrating everything he’s doing in his life. He comes to discover that the woman in question is a writer, and what she’s writing is a novel about his life — a novel in which he’s going to die.

This is not just genre but as central as you get. Pull out that thread, and you have no story left at all. But in the end, I felt dissatisfied with the film, and my dissatisfaction grew directly out of the fact that I wanted it to be a genre story, and I don’t think it was.

What made it not genre, for me, was its utter lack of interest in the cause of its own conceit. Why had this strange connection happened? Did the writer’s imagination create that man, summon him into reality, or did she somehow tap into the life of a pre-existing individual? Did her work control or merely reflect him? Stranger Than Fiction doesn’t care. What it cares about is the moral question of that connection: once the writer discovers her character exists outside of her head, what will she choose to do with her story? She insists the death she has planned for him — a meaningless, random demise; I think he’s supposed to be knocked down by a bus — is a powerful ending, the one the story has to have. Which I found to be an interesting nod toward the conventions of literary fiction in general, the notion that an ending where somebody dies is somehow more meaningful than one where the person lives.

The moral question is an engaging one, certainly. But it wasn’t enough for me. I want not only to think about the ethical ramifications of our fascination with watching characters suffer and die, but also the metaphysics of how a writer might be confronted with her own protagonist. Otherwise — in strange contravention of mainstream opinion — the story feels shallow to me. Its own world feels like a painted backdrop, rather than a reality.

Which brings me around to the division I like best, where narrative content is concerned: genres as conversations. Stranger Than Fiction is talking to litfic, not specfic. It’s debating this whole notion that telling a story about some schlub who wanders through his life and then gets knocked over by a bus is inherently better than telling a story about that schlub living, which is very much a litfic kind of issue. If it were a genre story, the conversation would address the matter of causation. Is her typewriter magical? Is that man some kind of tulpa, called into existence by the power of her thought? Is this some intervention on God’s part, or a weird experiment conducted by aliens? The moral relationship between author and character could still figure into it, but the manner of that figuring would be shaped by the cause.

It isn’t that a genre story absolutely has to explore the causes of its own science fictional or fantastical elements. Not every narrative needs to be about its own foundations. But Stranger Than Fiction‘s complete disinterest in its own fantasy was a clear signal, at least to me, that its conversational partners are not mine. This is also what annoys sf/f readers when a litfic writer decides to write a book with (say) time travel in it: in most cases it’s painfully obvious that the writer is ignorant of the long-standing conversation on that subject. As a result, you get novels where the author seems to think they’re the first person to discover the grandfather paradox or branching realities or whatever, and their community celebrates it as this awesome new thing, while the specfic community yawns at the sight of Yet More Old Hat.

Who’s involved in the conversation? Which writers and works is a story responding to, agreeing with, counteracting, poking fun at? It isn’t just a litfic/specfic divide; I suspect, for example, that you can use the same principle to sort urban fantasy from paranormal romance. And it’s probably a rare story indeed that can talk with equal facility to more than one community at a time, however much the basic content of the narrative may look like a hybrid of two worlds.

For me, that’s where the line really lies. Sometimes it’s useful to say “if it contains genre, it is genre,” and sometimes it’s useful to look at where a work is shelved, but ultimately, it comes down to the conversation.

irony

And after that last post?

Two e-mails have shown up in my inbox, advertising Black Friday special offers. Granted, for online shopping rather than some doors-open-at-midnight riot, but still.

Reminds me, too — I need to get myself taken off those lists.

stomach-turning

It occurs to me that it’s more useful to post this today than two days from now.

I’ve condemned Black Friday before. This year, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden at Making Light does it way better than I can, focusing on Wal-Mart and the company’s persistent refusal to institute measures that would decrease the frenzy and protect both customers and employees.

It isn’t like this takes them by surprise, people. That post documents a four-year history of injuries and property damage, hospitalizations and crowd violence that takes police to shut them down. And there are well-defined methods of reducing that risk.

They do not include tossing laptops at the crowd like t-shirts during a rock concert.

When your employees are making statements like “They trampled each other for ’em, […] It was great,” then something has gone horrifically wrong. Wal-Mart’s corporate masters create and feed the mob mentality, because it benefits their bottom line. But the cost to the rest of us — including their employees — is sickening.

so much for my standard

It appears that some time between the last time I used Nero and now, it has turned into a bloated, computer-hijacking piece of crap. Ergo, I do not want to buy it.

I do, however, want a program with which I can design CD labels and case inserts. There are free ones out there, but all the ones I’ve seen are extremely limited. I need something that will allow me reasonably full functionality from a graphical and text standpoint — not full-scale image manipulation, since I can do that in other programs, but (at a minimum) the kind of control you’d get out of, say, MS Paint. I don’t mind paying for this; I just don’t want to pay for 270MB of crap I don’t want in order to get the 30MB I do want.

Any recommendations?

dude.

I wrote 5,661 words today on the Silly Project.

If I kept that up for the rest of the month, I could finish NaNoWriMo in a third the time.

(This is not going to happen.)

unexpected

On the one hand, this is so not remotely any of the projects I intended to be working on right now.

On the other hand, it’s 3,854 words so far today, and I’m having fun; which is worth something all on its own.

since people appear to be confused . . .

Let’s take a quick moment to review the basic differences between trade publishing, self-publishing, and vanity publishing.

In trade publishing (which is what the majority of the books on your shelves probably went through), you write a book, and the publisher pays you money for it. You retain copyright, and license some number of sub-rights to the publisher. They then pay other people for printing, cover art, copy-editing, etc, and when it’s done they recoup those costs (hopefully) by selling the result to bookstores, who sell them to readers. You may be asked to contribute to marketing, or choose to do it on your own. The overall financial risk is shouldered by the publishing company, and they split the profits with you, the writer.

In self-publishing, you act as your own publisher. You contract with people for the above-mentioned services. You retain copyright and (aside from whatever is necessary to get the books printed) retain sub-rights. Once you have books, you a) give them to family and friends (if this was done as a purely personal venture — like, say, a genealogy) or b) start working your tail off to market the books to a larger readership. Bookstores will probably not buy them from you unless it’s local history or some other niche market they have a strong reason to believe will pick your work up, but if you’re really good at marketing you may still move enough copies to recoup your costs. The financial risk is shouldered by you, and you keep your profits.

In vanity publishing, you pay a company to act as your publisher. They provide variable services, depending on what you’ve paid for, usually at low quality and a fairly high markup (since they are now acting as a middle-man between you and the cover artist, etc). You have less control over the result than in self-publishing, and depending on the contract may have signed over a portion of your rights to the company. They may also require you, in that contract, to buy a certain minimum number of your own books. Bookstores will again probably not buy them from you. The company may sell you marketing assistance (again at a markup), or you can take on this burden yourself again. The financial risk is shouldered by you, and the company keeps some percentage of your profits. A vanity press makes its money off writers, not readers.

Harlequin Horizons is a vanity press, not a self-publishing company. It is the monetization of Harlequin’s slush pile. Removing the name “Harlequin” from the company is insufficient; they need to stop advertising their vanity press in rejection letters, and implying that paying them to publish your book may result in you being later picked up by a proper Harlequin editor. They are trying to take advantage of aspiring authors, and their spokespeople have consistently and disturbingly worked to blur the clear facts of this case with half-truths and statements that are either outright lies, or demonstrations of resounding ignorance as to how the industry works. RWA has rightly condemned this, and MWA and SFWA have their back. Trust the professional writers’ organizations on this. Harlequin has not launched some brave new venture in twenty-first century publishing; they have launched a scam, and it should be condemned as such.

If you want to see the story you wrote printed up as a book, and aren’t looking to make a career out of this, go to Lulu. They’re honest. Harlequin isn’t.

Nebula update

I didn’t realize the transition to the new Nebula rules means stuff published after July 1st of last year is still eligible, so my list also includes “Kingspeaker” and “A Heretic by Degrees.” (Possibly also “A Mask of Flesh,” but it’s right on the borderline, so I’m thinking no.) You can read or hear the first, and hear the second, in their entirety; details at those links.

on the topic of Nebulas

If you’re eligible to nominate for the Nebulas, you might be interested in an offer from Mike Allen, editor of Clockwork Phoenix 2: he’ll provide a PDF review copy to any SFWA member who wants to give the anthology a look. (Details about halfway through that entry.)

That antho, of course, has my story “Once a Goddess,” which has been getting some very pleasing attention in reviews. Other stories of mine out this year are:

Those first two and “Waking” are free to read in their entirety online; click through to find the links on their respective pages. Also, of course, I had a novel on the shelves this year.

Here endeth the obligatory Nebula-eligibility post.

it begins

Okay, so, researching the Victorian book. I’ve decided my first priority is to come up with something to call it other than “the Victorian book.”

The simultaneous convenience and inconvenience of the Onyx Court books is that I know where to go looking for a title (period literature), but I have to go look. I can’t just make one up. We therefore come to the first Request for Help of this round: what mid-Victorian literature should I read in search of a title?

My preference is for poetry over prose, because it’s more likely to have a short, evocative phrase that I can spin out; fiction (especially in the Victorian era) is rather too fond of going on at length. The book will probably start circa 1870, so I’d like material no later than that. No specific limit on how early it could be, but I’m trying to avoid going as early as the Romantics. So who was writing good (and preferably non-pastoral) poetry around 1840-1870?

apropos of absolutely nothing

I would pay money to see somebody choreograph a contemporary ballet pas de deux to the song “Gaeta’s Lament” from Battlestar Galactica. It would be a beautiful adagio, morphing into something huge and powerful when the drums kick in. Alternatively, do it on ice, with some really athletic side-by-side and throw jumps at the end.

I never had it in me to be a professional dancer, but there is and always will be a choreographer living in a back corner of my head, drafting movement to the music I’m hearing.

Metallica covers

I’ll use my French horn icon because, well, it’s what I use for music. But given that I’m talking about Metallica, it might not be the most appropriate choice.

Or is it? You see, this post is about one of my odd collections: Weird Metallica Covers. I’m not just talking about S&M, though since we’ve brought that up let me take a moment to drool over what happens when you pair a metal band with an orchestra. (The band acquires body and the orchestra acquires teeth. Oh yeah.) No, I’m talking about piano solo, grand harp duet, cello quartet, plus Rodrigo y Gabriela tackling the odd song here and there.

(For the curious: the most frequently-covered song I’ve got is “One,” which clocks in at four and a half renditions, not counting the original. [“Half” because the Rodrigo y Gabriela version segues into “Take 5” partway through.] It’s narrowly trailed by “Enter Sandman” and “Master of Puppets,” with four apiece.)

Can anybody recommend more of this to me? Or, y’know, odd covers of things other than Metallica. I have a string quartet doing Evanescence, Richard Cheese doing lounge-singer covers of all kinds of random crap (including “Down with the Sickness,” which is freaking hilarious in lounge style), Rondellus doing early medieval covers of Black Sabbath in Latin. Techno remixes of opera, shamisen duet of Radiohead — if it’s a weird mashup of instruments or styles, I’m there*. What should I look for?

*(I haven’t actually soundtracked any of my Driftwood stories, but in the back of my head, this is what it calls for.)

another one-book question

Similar to my Gunpowder Plot query — if I were to read only one history of the Napoleonic Wars, which one should it be? I’m specifically looking for a history of Britain’s naval campaign. The kind of thing that would be useful background for reading O’Brian, Forester, et al.

Awesomeness in the Old West

If nineteenth-century America is something you know something about, this post is aimed at you.

For the second time in my life, I’m gearing up to run a game. The first one was Changeling (and resulted in the Onyx Court series); this one is Scion (and god help me if it tries to turn into a novel). For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Scion is a role-playing game where the characters are the half-mortal children of gods. Think Hercules, or Cú Chulainn, or the Pandavas, running around in the modern world. Except that my game will be set, not in the modern world, but in the nineteenth-century American frontier.

Larger-than-life personalities doing over-the-top deeds? Nah, there was nobody like that in the Old West. 🙂

I’ve already got a nascent list of people I can reinterpret as half-divine, but I’d like more. This is where you, O internets, come in: who really seems like they might have been the child of a god? Who excelled in their chosen field? Whose deeds acquired legendary status?

The game will likely take place in the mid-1870s, so while people who predate that point are okay (they might fit into the backstory — or not be so dead after all), anybody born later is out. Mostly I’m looking at the frontier, but will also entertain suggestions from back east; the game may wander there at some point. I am especially interested in people from the groups more often overlooked by history: blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, etc. One of the things I want to look at in this game is the way in which a wide variety of cultures collided in the space of the frontier. (Adding a mythological layer should make that extra interesting.)

Bonus points if you can suggest a possible divine parent along with the Scion. Whose kid is Doc Holliday? How about Marie Laveau? Pretty much any god is up for grabs; the books provide rules for handling nine different pantheons, and I’ve found decent-looking player-created material for three more, so I can field most things.

Suggest away. The more names, the merrier.

Took the damn thing long enough.

I spent a stupidly long time wrestling with the last paragraphs of this bloody thing — write two grafs, delete one, write another, delete both, write one, delete it, replace it with the two previously deleted, wipe the first one out but leave the second, etc — before I finally hit something I was willing to hit “save” on.

But “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” is finally complete, at 3100 excessively difficult words. I suspect there’s some interesting theme buried in there, that I can try to unearth when I go back to revise, but for now, we’ll call that a draft.