Daily Vocabulary

eventual: occurring at the end of a series of events, as in, the eventual publication of a book. This comes after many intermediate stages, each with their own joys and frustrations. But it's not just to books that the word can be applied, and those happy and sad steps on the way. Marriage, child rearing, a job hunt, life as a whole, can all be fit into that pattern. Eventually, we will have a book out. Eventually, they will get married. Eventually, the child will grow up. Eventually, we will all die. Which is kind of conclusive, in that case, but true nonetheless. For the moment, though, the eventuality is tied into books, and so I can say: eventually, there will be a book. Eventually, there will be a contract.

One of my many writing deficiencies, discussed

I don't really write series. I'm not built for it as a writer, I don't think. I have difficulty constructing and working with very long narratives. In truth, I like things short and lean and sleek, and a series aims for the opposite. As a reader, however, I like them well enough. I've torn through massive multivolume epics time and again, from my first great literary love The Lord of the Rings on to more modern fare like Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen. But in the main I agree strongly with this article, in that it's all too easy to go astray. A Game of Thrones is doing it; the Wheel of Time did it but might somehow still be salvaged (though I doubt it), and the Malazan series, clocking in at 10 books, should have stopped at 8. But I keep trying them, keep reading them and seeing if a writer can make it work. There are successes, yes, but I think they only work if they clock in at about three books; almost anything more manages to muddle things up. Perhaps some day I'll be bold or foolish enough to give it a try myself; I've had a notion here and there, but the execution always so far has failed me. If I do, though, I'll stick with tradition, and just do three books. Three is plenty.

Daily Vocabulary

Labor, or labour if one favors the Anglo spelling: productive work, especially physical toil done for wages; or those who perform such work. Also, the process of childbirth; and related, at least metaphorically, something done for pleasure rather than gain (as in a labor of love).

Few words run such a gamut of meanings and are yet so intimately tied to our everyday lives. Most of us labor for a living, yet few do so manually in this day and age because such activities are more often done more cheaply, and efficiently, by machines. Labor itself has changed. Our labor is often not of muscle but of intellect: 'knowledge workers' is a modern contrivance communicating this shift. Whether it is in the ephemeral transactions of customer service, the abstractions of finance and law, or the crafting of the written word, we labor as hard as previous generations ever did - if only in mind, rather than in body.

For writers this is especially true - many of us labor to bring ideas themselves into existence, partaking of both the 'childbirth' and 'labor of love' aspects of the word. We write to give birth to the fruits of our imaginations, and we love what we do despite the effort and dedication and patience it requires. No few of us would be far happier to dig a ditch or split logs for a few hours rather than go through another editing session! But of such timber are our word-temples built, and with such sweat do our words coalesce from the aether of imagination to appear, solid and substantial, from the amorphous mists of the creative process. And if anyone tells you this is not a labor - of love or otherwise - they may safely be called a stinkin' liar.

Daily Vocabulary

gender:  the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. There are other meanings. One can discuss the ending applies to words in various languages, all of which are based on gender associations within the particular language. Only there's not much basis for those gendered endings; some things make sense, but in Latin farmer is feminine, even though almost all Roman farmers would have been men. So let us discount that meaning, and stick with the listed one. Note that it mentions cultural. What is "manly" in one place is not going to be "manly" everywhere, and the same can be said for "womanly" behaviors. In Victorian England, a woman was meant to be pretty and pristine and tender (unless she was lower class and had to work). In some Native American tribes, they ruled the family. In Judaism, though women have low actual status, the line of descent is matrilineal. If you mother wasn't Jewish, neither are you, no matter how very Jewish your father might be, so your mother had better be pretty Jewish. So is Jewishness a gendered trait, then? Is fashion womanly? It didn't used to be. Once upon a time men's clothes were the only things anyone cared about, and their ornamentation was full of meaning and significance. But now, at least in the West, men's fashion is a small subset of the overall fashion world, which is bent entirely on women. Definitely a gender based construction, but purely cultural, a historical accident. So what is gender, except what we decide it is at any time and in any place?

It's nothing at all. It's an opinion we assert. Sometimes on ourselves. Sometimes on others. But it's just that: an opinion. Everyone has one. And there's no right or wrong ones.

The troubling topic of "girls' books"

It is a long established belief in the book industry that girls will read books with boys as main characters, but not the reverse. While not entirely true, in my experience both as a reader and as a bookseller of more than a decade, it's pretty much accurate. Girls, for reasons which can only be guessed at, do not mind boys as the heroes; boys on the other hand often actively avoid books with female protagonists, even if they're the sort that do "boy" things, like fighting and adventuring. All of which leads to the idea that while there is only a small set of "boys' books", there is a very large set of "girls books". 

"Boys' books" are such things as sports based fiction, which don't have much crossover appeal. Other than that rather small ghetto of literature, there isn't much that girls don't get to. On the other hand, there is a vast sea of "girls' books", including a great number of quite famous and perennially popular books that few boys ever read. I speak of such titles as Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret; the entire Ramona Quimby series; the Little House books in all their numbers and varieties; the extraordinarily plentiful American Girl series; and perhaps the largest and most famous of the them all, The Diary of Anne Frank.

Anne Frank's book is a peculiar case. It is not a novel, as the rest are. It is a work that examines an interesting and critical period in history from a crucial perspective. It is (as are many of the books listed above) a classic work, assigned in schools across the country. And yet, other than those school assignments, you will seldom if ever find a boy reading the book.

Recently, the employees at the Kids' Desk in my store made up lists of the their top ten books for kids. Everyone at the desk made one up, as did a good number of other employees. Almost all the people at the kids' desk are women, one of those things that just happens, and every one of them, I believe, put The Diary of Anne Frank on their list. Most often in the top five, even. Of the men who participated, not a one of us did. Not anywhere on the list at all. And most of us had never even read the book. Yet I can't deny that it would be a worthy book to read (I was among those who hadn't read it). It would inform us of things. It would reveal a part of the world. But I haven't, and the other men hadn't. And why?

Boys don't read that, was my answer. I could give no more reason than that. I didn't need to give more of a reason; it was like saying rain fell down from the clouds, or gravity pulls things toward each other. It is something that can be observed, and is generally speaking true, and thus does not need to be investigated. All the women were shocked at my statement, but it wasn't incorrect. Boys don't read that. We just don't. We don't read Little House, we don't read the Click, we don't read (much) even so big a thing as Twilight. We just don't. They are stories, we recognize, for girls, for women, but not for us boys. We know this without thought.

It's a shame that we know this. It limits us as readers. Not that I think we should read Pretty Little Liars (I don't really think anyone should read that), but that we should, more of us at least, read Laura Ingalls Wilder. We should more of us read the Brontes. We should, perhaps, even try to find out what makes Twilight tick for so many women of all ages. And we should certainly read The Diary of Anne Frank.

 But we don't. And we won't. And there is something problematic and troubling about that. I don't have a solution. I only know there is a problem.

Questioning Authors

If you could ask your favorite author any question just by highlighting a section of their ebook and sending them a Tweet straight from your Kindle...what would you ask?

That is what Amazon wants to know. Their newest program, @Author, features sixteen current authors who will, in fact, answer questions posed to them by readers through their Kindles.

There are some caveats, naturally: questions must be 100 characters or less, and yes, you have to have both a Kindle and a Twitter account for this to work. But those seem like fairly modest hurdles in this day and age; if you read ebooks, chances are good you have a Kindle, and likely have a Twitter (or aren't afraid to set one up). And if anything typifies this age of short attention spans, thinking in 100 characters would be it. (That last sentence was 99 characters including spaces, incidentally).

But what is really new and interesting about this program is not the ability to ask your favorite author a short question electronically. That is far from new. No, the innovative aspect of this is the immediacy of its accessibility. By making it easier than ever for readers and authors to engage one another, epublishing as a whole becomes a different and far more compelling experience than reading the same book in dead-plant-matter ("treebook") form. Remember when seeing a movie in the theater was a much more immersive experience than on a grainy VHS tape at home? As home entertainment technology advanced, the movie theater experience seemed less and less impressive - until the advent of 3D, which gave the movie-going public a reason to flock to theaters again. Notice how rapidly we've seen the signs of in-home 3D televisions coming our way!

Amazon is testing the epub waters with just that kind of strategy. The content is there, the technology is there, but the biggest question yet remains: if you could ask your favorite author a short question...would that affect your decision to buy their ebooks over those of other authors, and a Kindle over other e-readers? Amazon is betting it will.

Success! Level Up!

Is this the venue for this announcement? Well, why not? I just got an offer for my book Engines of the Broken World, which means very soon it will be bought by a publisher, which means that it will no longer be available. So if you should want to get a chance to read this worthy volume, head on over here and buy yourself a copy pronto.

Also, I get to now spell Author with a capital A. This was a big wad of XP to get all at once, and it totally leveled me.