Carolrhoda Books Blog

Conversations with her fake boyfriend

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:54:00 +0000

In addition to being the author of Sex & Violence, Carrie Mesrobian maintains a very funny Tumblr I’m not supposed to read:

But I do read it. I like the formula:

1. Find a picture of an attractive man. (The Internet haz these.)

2. Add a caption where he says something implausibly sensitive, solicitous, and/or witty about something you’ve done or that’s a source of consternation or whatever.

Even I can do it:

“Really. He made you watch that ugly old movie about freaks in nutcups beating up old men? Again? Forget about him. Tell me about those cowboy boots and Kenny Chesney’s mastery of the pentameter one more time?”

Except, apparently I failed on step one, because when I showed this to Carrie, she wrote, “Is that Kenneth Brannagh? Jesus.” (Maybe Dot Hutchison would have been more sympathetic.)

But maybe you can do better, and to incentivize you, I have five signed copies of Sex & Violence to give away to Carrie’s favorite entries. I’ll also give you a theme to focus your efforts:

Conversations with My Fake Boyfriend About
My Real (or Fake) Editor

My example above would work as an entry for Carrie if she acknowledged Mr. Brannagh as fake boyfriend material (which she apparently does not). Submit your entry here. Carrie will pick winners on June 1.

“How’s the Book Doing?”

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:48:00 +0000

The always provocative Cory Doctorow has a piece on book marketing that’s been making the rounds.
Much of it is smart. I have a few trivial quibbles that aren’t worth detailing. I’m sure he’s right about many of the things he has direct experience with (blurb-request spam), but I think he’s occasionally on thin ice in generalizing about things he doesn’t have direct experience of (inner workings of multiple publishing houses and how sales data gets reported).

There is one paragraph that I think deserves a close look. At least, it made me think hard (for which I thank him):

[A] few lucky times, I was able to score a few free minutes for a meal or a conversation with friends, and the number-one-champion frequently-asked-question they asked me was, ‘‘How is the book doing?’’
The honest answer to this is, ‘‘We’ll know in two to six months.’’ I mean, yes, Homeland was on the NYT bestseller list for four weeks, on the Indiebound bestseller list for three, and still carries a satisfyingly high Amazon sales rank, but none of this tells you anything particularly useful. Indiebound and BookSense tell publishers a bit about where books are selling, but compared to Internet businesses, publishers are almost entirely in the dark about their books. Even e-book reporting is frustratingly opaque: e-book retailers know which sites refer customers to their purchase pages, know those readers’ demographics and other purchases, understand which search terms direct the most traffic, and which subset of those terms generates the most sales. Publishers get little to none of this data. If I was negotiating with Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo, my top request would be realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services.

First, let us be thankful that publishers have bungled their negotiations with Amazon, otherwise Cory’s dinner guests would have their small-talk questions met with a stream of “anonymized aggregate data.”

More seriously, though: I don’t begrudge him the right to be frustrated about the relative opacity of sales reporting to authors (he’s wrong about publishers being in the dark—Bookscan?--but I’ll allow that even if he saw what we do know, he might still want more). But let’s consider a world of “realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services” for a moment. What would an author do with that data that’s better than what he’s doing now? What should I, a publisher, do with that data that’s better than what I’m doing now?

Can we entertain for a moment the possibility that a world where the best things an author can do after she’s finished a book are

a) go be an interesting, engaging person (note I didn’t write “salesperson”) in real and virtual communities of book lovers and
b) write another damn novel

is actually not a half bad world?

And similarly, let’s consider that a world where the best things an editor can do after he’s published a book are

a) go be an interesting, engaging person (note I didn’t write “salesperson”) in real and virtual communities of book lovers and
b) edit another damn novel

is also a pretty fine place to live.

I think Cory Doctorow is smart person who’s worth listening to on these subjects. (I think he does a pretty good job of succeeding in the world I mentioned above too.) And I also think data is good. I wouldn’t want to do my job without our many sales reporting tools (even the ones Doctorow seems to think I don’t have). I’m not naïve about where my paycheck comes from.

But I’m also not inclined to dismiss the elements of mystery and imprecision in measuring “how the book’s doing” at a given moment as bugs to be purged from the system with a fire hose blast of data. I have a sneaking suspicion the bug, as they say, might actually be a feature.

The winding road

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:27:00 +0000

One of the first questions I inevitably ask when I’m auditioning to be an author’s editor (what, you think you’re the only one who’s nervous in those initial conversations?) is “where did this manuscript come from?”

I love hearing about inspiration, about the unlikely kernels from which books grow. Sarah Aronson’s Believe has such a story, a Sarah tells it well.

Janine Collins, the protagonist of Believe, first took root in my mind thanks to a pile of tabloids. They were mostly People, and I was reading them in of all places, the hair salon.

It was May 2006. I was in a particularly open mood for inspiration. My creative thesis for VCFA had just been approved. I had one more packet before graduation. My advisor, Tim Wynne-Jones had encouraged me to have some fun—do something different—go out with a bang.

I opened the magazine. The first thing I saw was a retrospective of Jessica McClure. Almost twenty years earlier, on October 14, 1987, she became famous after falling into a well.

I remembered that story as well as the media circus that followed her. Back then, this kind of attention was unique. CNN was a fledgling network. The 24 hours news cycle that we all take for granted now had yet to mature. That day, as I read the newest update, I couldn’t help but judge what she had done with her life—how she had used this “gift” of fame. When I got home, I looked for more stories about her. To my dismay, I found out that one of the EMT’s who had saved her had killed himself—he became depressed when his fifteen minutes of fame ended.

Fame is a theme that has always interested me, particularly this modern kind of fame. I was also very interested in exploring faith. I asked myself: what if Janine was the sole survivor of a suicide bombing? How would faith communities respond to her? What if the bombing had crushed her own beliefs?

It took me many tries and many drafts to figure out how best to tell this story. I probably drove my friends crazy. At one point, in complete confusion, I deleted everything but the prologue. A few times, I wrote sections in third person. In general, I like to re-imagine my stories, but at times, this story shook my confidence. The first turning point came after Norma Fox Mazer read a chunk of the book. She sent me some ideas, but unfortunately, we never got to talk about the book as we had planned. After her death, I kept looking at her advice. It almost felt like I was decoding a secret message. I was determined not to waste her wisdom. At that point, there was no way I could forget about this novel.

In the end, I focused back on character. And motivation. And theme. I embraced the idea of a girl with a public story that had dominated and, perhaps, ruined her life. I immersed myself (without judgment) into our world of social media, reality TV, 24 hours news and religion. The story became clear.

I knew the book was ready to be submitted when People published another update about Jessica. This time, for Janine, I didn’t read it. I didn’t need to.

Needless to say, this is a story that captivated me. Not only was Sarah’s Janine caught in the maelstrom of our peculiar culture of celebrity, I thought Sarah captured beautifully the ways in which that maelstrom magnified an essential—maybe the essential—teenage question, which is, of course, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” What am I going to do with my life is a question every teenager faces in our culture. In Janine’s case, the answer is also the subject of great national fascination.

I’m thrilled with how Sarah’s “something different” came out, and I’m not alone in this regard:

“I was fascinated by this thoughtful, twisty, and convincing story about faith in the media age. Halfway through, I felt so deeply for Janine that I found myself looking at my own hands and wondering what I'd do if I were her.” -Nancy Werlin, New York Times bestselling author of Impossible and The Rules of Survival

If you’d like an early look too, name the source of my essential teenage question in the comments. First three get an ARC.

The Underdog

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:51:00 +0000

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s novel No Crystal Stair is the last book standing in SLJ’s annual Battle of the Books. I could not be prouder—especially given the stunning quality of the finalists* and indeed of the whole bracket.

NCS (because it was an all-acronym finals this year) seems to have been something of a surprise winner, if the comments are to be believed, and I think there’s a certain poetry to that fact. After all, Lewis Michaux was a man who, when applying for a loan to open a bookstore in Harlem, was told to sell fried chicken instead. “Negroes don’t read,” the banker said. No one would bet on Lewis.

A couple decades later, after selling precisely zero fried chickens and an untold number of books** to countless Negroes, things had changed for Lewis. I thought of this passage when I read Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Big Kahuna post on Monday morning:

Yes indeed, some respect for The House of Common Sense and Proper Propaganda. And we’re all very grateful for it.

* You know who’s classy as hell? Elizabeth Wein. Anyone who heard her Boston Globe Horn Book honor speech can attest to that. And now anyone who reads the comments on the Big Kahuna post will too:

** Literally untold, as in he wouldn’t tell anyone:

Lewis starts at around 1:00.

Free but not cheap (or trustworthy)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:30:00 +0000

My days as a heavy reader of RSS-supplied blogs are mostly in the past. Twitter has long since supplanted a carefully tuned “pub blogs” folder in my Google Reader, and I haven’t actually used the Reader interface to read blogs for a couple years (Feed Demon, Feedler, Reeder, NetNewsWire, and others have been my front ends of choice). However, like many others if Twitter and Facebook yesterday evening are to be believed, I use Reader every day—even if only as the backend, syncing and managing the various RSS feeds.

I’ll need to find another solution by July 1, because Google is shuttering Reader—a service that clearly has millions of regular nonpaying users. It strikes me that the lesson here is that this is the moment Reader ceases to be cheap, even though I remain a nonpaying user. True, I’m going to end my 8 year ride on Reader without giving Google a dime directly, but now I have to spend time finding a replacement—time I didn’t plan on spending.

What will I look for in a new feed syncing/RSS reading service? A fee. If Google couldn’t monetize this service by selling the users (because to Google, the users are the product to be sold, not the software) no one can. So I’m going to find a service on a different model, one where I am the customer, not the product.

It sounds weird, but I want to have fewer free things in my life. It’s cheaper that way.

Manuscript formatting and prep screencasts

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:37:00 +0000

I don’t know if this is by popular demand or if many will find this useful, but here are two screencasts of what I do to clean up and format manuscripts of almost all types (pictures books are the only exception).

Click “Watch on YouTube” for best scaling options. (I suggest 720p).

Basic invisible-character elimination.

For the bold-ish and the quasi-brave.

I think everyone should do the first video. The second is as needed and as you find it useful. Questions in the comments or on Twitter @andrewkarre.

It hardly gets any better

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:00:00 +0000

It hardly gets any better than publishing debut novels. If I may be utterly self-indulgent for a bit, there is a pleasure special to editors in looking back at an author’s first book in light of all their subsequent work. And I've been very blessed in this regard over the past seven years or so. And it’s frankly heartwarming to witness the support established authors give to newcomers here in the kidlitosphere. The generosity never ceases to amaze me.

So allow me to introduce the two debutante Lab Rats for fall 2013, including their jackets and some advance accolades from fellow authors. Click the caption below the jacket to see everything.

A Wounded Name by Dot Hutchison

Sex & Violence by Carrie Mesrobian

So many people help get a debut book to an audience, but Tess Gratton, Victoria Schwab, Andrew Smith, Geoff Herbach, Patrick Jones, and Trish Doller all deserve special thanks for helping launch Carrie and Dot. My eternal gratitude to you all.

But wait, there's more!

Would you like to win an ARC of these two debuts? Would you like to win an ARC packed in a box with a copy of every debut novel Lab has ever published? There are two ways to accomplish this:

1. Send me a video of you reciting a few lines from Hamlet. No costumes or staging necessary. No, I'm not kidding.

Here's mine:

And here's how a pro does it:

2. Send me a video of you reciting the Official Carolrhoda Lab poem, which is equally applicable to either of these novels.

Stick a link in the comments or email carolrhodasubmissions@lernerbooks.com.

On March 1, I'll pick three winners.

A tiny request

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:17:00 +0000

I hold these truths to be self-evident. Self-publishing is a good thing for authors, readers, and traditional publishers. Its proliferation and diversification are objectively good. The media should cover self-publishing, including interviews with its success stories—people like Smashwords CEO, Mark Coker.

I also hold this truth to be self-evident. The media should not be incredibly lazy in allowing the owners of those success stories to, if you will, self-publish their narratives unchallenged and unquestioned.

Exhibit A.

Please, for the love of of Gutenberg, the next time a self-publishing advocate says “self-published authors keep [some very high number] percent of the profits, whereas a traditional publisher only lets you keep [some conspicuously lower number] percent” can just one host say, “I’m going to stop you for a second. I hear this comparison all the time, but isn’t it more complicated than that? Let’s talk about actual dollars. A traditionally published author gets an advance. How does even a very modest advance of say $10,000 compare to the average earnings of a Smashwords title?” Etc.

(I don’t see this as a devastating “gotcha” question. I don’t know the answer, but I’m pretty confident it’s not a knockout argument either way, and I do know it’s much more interesting follow-up than “What about Random House’s 50-Shades bonuses?”)

The choice of a publishing path—self- or traditional or whatever else—inevitably involves compromise. One defers payment and leverages uncompensated DIY labor with an eye on a greater long-term payoff. Another shares risk and labor with a partner in exchange for upfront investment and a lower share of the long-term profits. The story is not that one option must crowd the other out any more than the story of Home Depot is a tale of the end of contracted remodeling.

I don’t expect the CEO of a for-profit self-publishing platform to say this without some questioning. I do expect a journalist to do some questioning.

I think it’s time for Carolrhoda Lab to have an official poem

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:32:00 +0000

Maybe I’m still giddy from last week’s news. Maybe I’m just pleased that even when I don’t bring up this poem with an author, it still manages to make an appearance. Either way, Lab Rats, from now on, This Be the Verse:

“This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin (Bonus points that Larkin was personally not remotely likeable.)

So some fantastic things happened yesterday at ALA.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:26:00 +0000

The professor is getting some hardware.

In this corner…

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:16:00 +0000

We’re honored to lace up the gloves for SLJ’s 2013 Battle of the Books. Our fighter is ready, and so are his corner men.

No Crystal Stair likes its chances very much.

Stars against darkness

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:33:00 +0000

I confess to a little bit of trepidation about the two Carolrhoda Lab standalones in spring 2013. They are not . . . cheerful. Fortunately:

“Jacobs’ storytelling has the effortless velocity of early Dean Koontz, and his prose is textured with hard-boiled grit: each kid’s supernatural flexing causes nosebleeds and vomiting, not to mention the realistic mangling of innocent people. An expertly spiced stew of attitude, humor, horror, and grief—and with a movie-ready plot to boot. Sequels? Probably. Let’s make that hopefully.”*
–Booklist, STARRED.

“Bick’s compelling tale manages to be a blistering confessional and a page-turning whodunit (or maybe what-really-happened) all in one. Ben’s thoughts on sexuality, the dangers of rumor, individual freedom and personal responsibility, among other topics, will resonate with teens, who won’t mind the lack of a tidy end.

“Readers won’t be able to look away even if they find they don’t much like—or trust—Ben.”

–Kirkus, STARRED.

Trepidation, assuaged.

*Such hopes are not misplaced.

Of whooshes and whams (and allusive language and children)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:59:00 +0000

If you listen to or read any kidlit coverage from mainstream reviewers, author interviewers, and general professional booktalkers for long enough, you will invariably come upon a specimen of the following statement:

“You put all these allusions in your book that will certainly fly over the head of your child reader, but I, the adult, noticed them and will now catalog them….”

I have written on this phenomenon and why I find it to be a kind of reviewer malpractice in the past. (Kudos to Terri Gross for noticing what she had just done after she got through the characteristic “but” clause in her recent interview with Lemony Snicket. [Anti-kudos for her “Oh my god! Laudanum!” moment a minute or two later.])

For this post, I’d like to look at why authors should make allusions in their writing and what are the effects of same. I’d also like to look at the times when it all goes wrong. It is helpful to these ends to think about guns and their bullets. I have seen a great many movies where people are under fire, and I have noticed that, almost invariably, people who are being fired upon duck when a bullet sails over their heads. Upon successfully ducking, I notice a wave of relief and the flush of adrenalin in their faces—the more proximous the bullet, the more substantial the ducking, the waves, and the flush. I have also seen movies where people have not sensed the headbound bullets and failed to duck. In these nonduckers, I find no evidence of waves or flushes—just scattered, useless brain matter (which is also dramatic). So much for the effects.

(Incidentally, I find no correlation between age and ducker/nonducker status. The peculiarities of projectile flight seem not to discriminate between adults and children.)

All this is to say there is a significant difference between the whoosh of a thing over one’s head and the wham of a thing between one’s eyes. Do I need to say also that good authors know when to whoosh and when to wham and what the various effects will be on their readers? So much, then, for the why.

I have not mentioned in the above list—because I have never seen in any film or TV show—the species of person who, when sensing bullets overhead, rises onto tip toe or, if possible, climbs a ladder, wide-eyed, to confirm the caliber of the ammunition bearing down on him, all in hopes of reporting the information to any who will listen. Though I find no convenient cinematic equivalent, into this category I confidently place the reviewers, interviewers, and booktalkers I mentioned at the outset. This is, of course, where it all goes wrong.

Look, I believe it’s in a reader’s interest to be intensely sensitive to allusions flying about in books. You’ll live longer and be happier as a reader that way. But “intensely sensitive” doesn’t always have to equal “acutely and instantly aware.” And I’ll argue to the ends of the earth that a young reader’s high sensitivity to an obscure allusion is just as valuable as the hoary adult reader’s grizzled awareness of that same allusion’s every minute implication. And the beautiful thing is that in a lifetime of reading, you get to be both, often with the same book.

(Incidentally, I can sympathize with the bullet eaters. I have been in their number. Sometimes it is necessary to be one for certain books. But it is always less than ideal. Specifically, I have an annotated copy of one of my favorite novels, Lolita. The annotations are tempting ladders that will allow you to turn Nabokov’s carefully crafted whooshes--some of which are designed to displace hair near your scalp while others of which you only detect as disturbances in the breeze--into brain-splattering, Tarantinoesque whams. This is not the best way to read that novel or any other novel. At any age.)

(Lemon photo by rob_moody, used under CC license. I trust FirearmsId.com will not mind my appropriation of their photo for purely literary illustrative purposes. )

While we’re being honest…

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:59:00 +0000

The headlines and tweets about the new Harper Collins YA imprint perplexed me this morning:

Wait, aren’t there a half dozen HC imprints that do YA? What are they aiming at? (I thought I was the only one with my sights set on the debauched an impoverished corner of the YA market).
But then I read the New York Times piece and the specifics of the imprint’s plan cleared up my confusion. But the article went beyond that even.

“Readers of Y.A. have embraced digital reading in a big way,” [President and publisher Susan] Katz said. [Emphasis mine.]

Up until very recently, you could rely on that statement to begin“Teens have embraced….” This is, I think, a meaningful part of a shift toward open acknowledgment that the main character of a book need not mirror the reader of that book for the match to be a happy one. So, that tweet is wrong on one important level. They’re not aiming at a market of young adults. They’re aiming books about young adults at a market of readers who are interested in these stories--stories with a certain genre commonality (makes for an inelegant tweet, I agree). Wonderful, couldn’t agree more. “About not for.” Blah, blah.
So why then is anyone still talking about “New Adult”? Doesn’t everything you’ve come to understand about the popularity of young adult tell you that making books for a demographic is madness?

I actually never liked the Misfits . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:24:00 +0000

..but remember you have until they take the stage to submit.

Then you can shift to a band I did like:

I do love the word “twaddle.”

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:54:00 +0000

Comment of the year.

Could I get John Cleese to read this in the architect sketch character?

Call for submissions update

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:35:00 +0000

If your ability to send your ms by the original deadline will be affected by Sandy, please feel free to give yourself until midnight on Monday, Nov 5. Honor system.

Be safe, everyone.

About Not For

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 13:43:00 +0000

Movies for teenagers are abundant enough (“teen sex comedy” is even a genre, as far as I can tell), and the case for greatness can be made for quite a few of them, but as I was watching a movie last night, it occurred to me that my precious about-not-for distinction in books applied to movies in interesting ways. Thus, my decidedly personal list of favorite movies about teenagers (none of which were conceived of as movies for teens):

4. The Prime of Miss Jane Brodie: A more perfect portrayal of the gradual dissolution of the myth of adulthood I can hardly imagine. Fascinating things going on with POV, too. (Full disclosure: I’ve never read the book.)

3. Brick: OK, maybe this was marketed to teens. I don’t know; I heard about it first on Fresh Air, so probably not. Best portrayal of a high school ever. Also: most meaningful use of negative space where adults are concerned.

2. A Clockwork Orange: Language. Adult fear of the teenage monster they’ve created. Language. Language. Language.

1. Margaret: The new sheriff in town. I just saw this movie last night and was blown away. Lisa is the most fully imagined and unflinchingly portrayed teenage character I’ve ever seen in a movie. The adult-teen relationships in this movie are brutal and painstakingly observed. Every thwarted attempt at meaningful connection is heartbreaking. Sublime.

So, suggestions? What have I missed?

The only thing I have to say about J.K. Rowling’s new book

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:34:00 +0000

Shocked, shocked!

Some people seem shocked that an author who wrote books for children featuring:

murder,
methodical torture of various kinds,
genocidal maniacs,
ethnic cleansing,
slavery,
one hero haunted by the specter of his murdered parents,
another forced to purge herself from the memories of her own parents,
and another who loses his brother in a war,
and so on

is the same author who has now written a book “in which a teenager is raped by her mother’s heroin dealer, a man who may well be the father of the girl’s own three-year-old step-brother, although it’s hard to know for sure when the mum concerned is a prostitute.”

Some people are idiots.

Send me your YA manuscripts beginning Oct. 1.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:51:00 +0000

Updated Below
I do NOT want books that:

“have series potential.” No. I’m serious. If you really want to write lots of books about the world or the characters, give this one a miss. This includes trilogies, tetralogies, cycles, sages, etc.
are dystopian, post-apocalyptic, or otherwise posit one of those catastrophic futures that are curiously good at breeding teenage heroes. (I kid because I love.)
have dragons. (I already have the only dragon book I’ll ever love.)
have anything to do with Hamlet.
exceed 100k words.
feature protagonists in college.
are strikingly similar to things I've already published.

Things I like:

Grit that shows breathtaking sparkly bits when the light hits it just so. I really like this.
Very unusual people.
Very unpleasant people who are nonetheless irresistible.
Sex.
Awkwardness.
Awkward sex.
Adversarial relationships with objective reality.
Encountering unfamiliar mythologies.
Foreigners.
Doomed romance.

Things I require:

That you follow my submission guidelines.
That your cover letter be very brief and you not agonize over it for more than twenty minutes.
Your extreme patience. I’m slow. I often return to manuscripts several times before I make a decision.

Things you should continue to do after you submit:

Look for an agent.
Write more books.

I will not read anything sent before October 1 or after midnight on Halloween.

Thank you!

Update:
Opportunities for deeper explorations into my tastes (by no means necessary, but what the hell?):

On the subject of “…material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity.”

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:43:00 +0000

May I humbly submit that if you’re writing about teenagers and not thinking about porn, you’re missing something critical? I’m not saying porn must be present in your novel, but I am saying the influence of porn is manifold and manifest wherever teenagers, their sexual relationships, and their caretakers are present, and if you believe, as I do, that YA is at its best when it’s transforming and processing teenage experience into art, then porn is somewhere in your ingredient list (maybe in undetectable amounts; maybe handfuls).

I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time, but honestly I don’t think I have anything to say on the subject that exceeds what you’ll hear in the first half hour or so of this conversation between the inimitable Dan Savage and the new-to-me-but-very-interesting Cindy Gallop, creator of MakeLoveNotPorn.com. It’s all interesting and contentious in the best sense, but particularly so around 5:00 in (porn as sex education and why this is a problem). The whole thing is interesting.

(And, in case you’re unfamiliar with Dan, he’s a sex advice columnist—and not a dainty one. He talks very frankly about sex. There is a lot of swearing. Pornographic tropes are discussed in detail—but, hey, they use the word “tropes” so it’s like college, right? You’ve been warned.)

I haven’t listened to Gallop’s TED talk, but I certainly will.

Let me help you

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 20:29:00 +0000

Oh the demographic humanities. It’s authorial cognitive dissonance of biblical proportions!

The mind boggles.

Who will come to your aid? What is an author to do?

Nothing. If the demographics strike you down, you shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

“I can compel you.”

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:24:00 +0000

“I am not yet whole. Had I been, I could make this entire
yard of boys kill each other. Gleefully.”

Soon enough winter will be here, and then will come spring and with it, John Hornor Jacob's new novel The Twelve-Fingered Boy, wherein you will meet, among others, Mr. Quincrux. You may look forward to the arrival of spring, but I think you will feel differently about the arrival of Mr. Quincrux. Both are inevitable.

(Meanwhile, here’s the cover and some reassuring words about what you’re about to face.)

“A fast-paced, ferocious nightmare of a story—gritty, magical, and surprisingly tender.”

-Brenna Yovanoff, New York Times Bestselling author
of The Replacement and The Space Between

“John Hornor Jacobs’ The Twelve Fingered Boy is a thrill ride. With candy. And polydactyl, reluctantly heroic kids who go up against all odds in a world of uncontrollable superpowers and unrelenting bad guys. Exciting, suspenseful, creepy, and fun—The Twelve Fingered Boy is a terrific, fast-paced read!”

– Andrew Smith, author of the MArbury Lens, Winger,
Ghost Medicine, and In the Path of Falling Objects

"John Hornor Jacobs conjures dark magic with The Twelve-Fingered Boy. A powerful new voice whispering out of the dark. A brilliant first YA novel!"

-Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
The King of Plagues, Patient Zero, and Rot and Ruin

Of codes and canons

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:35:00 +0000

So I just finished Elizabeth Wein’s masterpiece Code Name Verity. I have nothing to add to the richly deserved praise already heaped on this book.

I enjoyed it so much that I cannot muster my normal critical faculties to answer the question I almost always ask: “how is this a YA novel?” I trust it’s well known by now that in this question I ponder not appropriateness, but representation. The question is whether the book is in some critical way about adolescence (as opposed to the deeply, insultingly boring question, is the book for adolescents.) I simply don’t care right now. (The last time I had this reaction was The Scorpio Races, so Verity is in excellent company.)

I will, however, take up my hammer and tongs for a moment to address the final paragraph of the otherwise glowing review for the book in the paper of record (May 11, 2012):

This is a very suspicious piece of criticism. Leave aside the critique of the cover (I don’t love it either, but I fail to see how it looks like a “lesbian version of Fifty Shades of Gray” but maybe that’s code for something I’m missing). The silliness gets truly thick with “I doubt most teenagers will get the references to ‘A Thousand and One Nights,’ Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim’ and the death of Admiral Nelson, all of which make the book challenging in a lovely, bookish way.”¹
First, you could substitute the word “readers” for “teenagers” in that sentence and the statement would be no more or less true—or more or less relevant to full enjoyment of the book. The measure of a reader is not whether she catches every “bookish” nuance, but whether she is sensitive enough to detect that something subtle is going on between the lines in a book and whether she has the wherewithal to tease out those associative subtleties. Reading is not doing a crossword puzzle without Google. What a teenage reader might lack in canonical references at his fingertips (though I’d hardly call the Nelson quote canonic, of which more shortly), he might easily make up for in determination to understand what is obscure but intriguing (and intriguing obscurities are thick on the ground in this book). “Kiss me, Hardy” was unknown to me, and I’m rather glad of it. I had to work harder (and do some Googling) to fully imagine that aspect of the book than I did for the things I already knew. And thus my enjoyment increased.

When you suggest that because a book is allusive and “smart” that it is more for adults than it is for teenagers, you are in me-thinks-she-doth-protest-too-much territory (yes, I know what I just did there). This time, I can break Ingall’s code: “It’s OK that I read this YA novel, because I read it on a higher plane than a teenage reader will.” Tiresome.

Or maybe I should delete all my foregoing explanation and just post this:

^1. If I have one lasting niggle about the book, it’s that some of the allusions are too much sourced in the text, the codes too broken. Having Julie translate remembered bits of Wagner as she writes under duress seems an unnecessary concession to I don’t know whom and it breaks the very delicate suspension of disbelief you absolutely need for this book to work.

Great artists cultivate a sense of unending possibility

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:38:00 +0000

I routinely have interactions like this with authors:

AK: This thing you did on page 201 is such a great echo of this other thing you did on page 107. It pulls things together nicely. Great connection.

Author: I wish I could take credit for doing that on purpose.

AK: It doesn’t matter. You did it. You made me susceptible to the connection.

The magic of telling stories on a big scale—books, movies, TV shows—is the connection-making momentum you create in readers’/viewers’ minds. In other words, the creator alters the consumer's mind to such an extent that the consumer is infinitely susceptible to making connections. To a large extent, I believe the accomplishment of a great artist is not so much the connections themselves in a work, but the momentum the work generates in the reader to make them. (Do I have to say I consider this a blissful state of being?)

Nabokov would, of course, be my favorite example of this phenomenon, but I suspect the Internet’s favorite example (and I’m a fan too) is Stanley Kubrick. Read this and the comments now. DO NOT skip the comments. I’ll wait.

(And keep in mind this is but one of many, many examples of this sort of Shining scholarship.)

The author of the piece is not an idiot, but the commenters aren’t really wrong either (they’re just boring). And that’s Kubrick’s genius; it’s the genius of many great artists: cultivating the sense of unending possibility. Consumers do not dive this deeply into insignificant art—into art where they don’t believe anything is possible. The commenters who accuse the author of the piece of wasting his time are missing the point of art. The pearls John Fell Ryan surfaces with after his dive into The Shining may be mere “continuity errors” but that simply doesn’t matter. Once you’re open to the slightest possibility that they aren’t coincidence, the work of art has reached another plateau. The pleasure was, after all, in the dive, not in the surfacing (and pleasure is what matters in art, not being right).