K.V. Johansen's Blog, page 12

Dogs and Language

This morning I had further evidence of Mister Wicked's grasp of language, not mere vocabulary but what happens when words go together. Mister Wicked is very fond of snatching slippers, mittens, pillows, etc. and fleeing with them. He wants to be chased, and if he isn't chased, he comes back and peeks around the corner, saying, "Grr? Grr!" until he is chased. If you don't chase, he drops the stolen object pointedly on the floor, lies down with a world-weary sigh, and sulks.

Today I decided a pair of my leather slippers had finally come to the end of their useful life, having holes in the toes and soles and generally having reached a state of final decrepitude. Rejecting the Spouse's suggestion that I bury them in a bog to become archaeology in a few hundred years, I decided that since Mister Wicked enjoyed slippers so much, he might as well have a pair of his own. (He already has his own felt boot-liner, and knows that his is for playing tug while those belonging to the humans are for stealing and running away with.) He was outside at the time, so I put the slippers in the corner where his toys tend to get heaped. When he came in, he saw or smelt them at once, of course, and went straight to him. I watched him standing, contemplating them. Is this a test?

"Those are Mister Wicked's slippers," I said. He looked at me, and I swear his eyes went all shiny and round like a kid opening up their best Christmas present. Really? Mine? He grabbed a slipper and went prancing and capering out to his box in the kitchen, not fleeing as he does with a stolen slipper, but in full gleeful pride of ownership. Having safely cached it in his den, he came back for the other. The novelty, of course, will wear off. Stolen slippers are more fun, being more interactive — running around with your own slippers does not guarantee a good game of chase the way stolen slippers do. For the time being, though, he is a very happy dog, secure in the knowledge that these particular slippers now belong inalienably to Mister Wicked, because the human told him so.

Guest post elsewhere

Over on Madison Woods' writing blog, I was invited to be the guest poster this week. Check it out here! It's mostly about how Blackdog came to be published by Pyr, how I got my start in writing, and includes, for you Torrie fans, the secret history of Anna, how she escaped being captured by the pirate-queen, and why telling your sister her favourite character is out of commission due to a broken leg will not, in the long run, stop you having to make more stories about said character.

Dispatches from the Desk # 12: Little girls — brandish your wooden swords and burn your plastic tiaras!

International Women's Day has come and gone for this year, and I've been thinking about princesses. Here we are, all post-feminist doin' it for ourselves, and all the little girls want to be princesses. In my day it was cowboys. Or pirates. (Yes, cowboys. Sorry, to all those real female cowhands out there.) Cowboys got to ride around on pretend horses and chase bad guys, and I regret to admit that it never crossed my five-year-old mind that a cowgirl could do the same. Mind you, it never crossed my five-year-old mind that I shouldn't play a boy if I wanted to.) So, cowboys had horses and pirates got to wave swords about and make people walk the plank. All very empowering; you were the hero (or presumably the Byronically cool anti-hero in the case of pirates), and you had to make up stories to go with what you were pretending. We never played we were princesses.

Why on earth not? Myself, I always liked the fairy tale about the princess who went off to rescue her seven brothers and had to cut off her little finger, to shape the bone into a key, to get into the enchanted castle. Now that was a princess.* And yet despite that, somehow, a princess didn't seem like someone who did anything. It's even worse now. The little girls seem to want to be princesses, but princessing, as witnessed in my nieces when they were a few years younger, isn't pretending anything. It's Barbie-ing with more sparkles. It's just dressing up in pre-fab Hallowe'en costumes based on movie character designs and saying, "I'm a princess." There's no play involved, and certainly no getting to be a hero (or even a villain) and master of your own fate, saver of the day. Mind you, I think we're teaching boys to be passive too, or worse, to feel they have no value, but that's a whole other essay. (What about all the fairy tales where the youth, prince or humble artisan's son, sets out to seek his fortune and achieves it, and usually a clever rather than passive-and-sparkly princess as well, through his wit, daring, honesty, and kindness to animals and old ladies? Why is no one retelling those for kids today?)

There is a plethora, or at least a sufficiency, of princesses in the Blackdog world. Possibly this is some previously unrecognized attempt by my subconscious to make up for always feeling the active and interesting roles in a game of pretending were male. "Darn it, not only am I going to have female heroes, but they're going to be princesses . . ." Probably not, though you never know what your subconscious will get up to when you're not looking. Properly, very few of the Blackdog world's royal females should be called princesses, since it's a Romance-language word, a feminine of the Latin-derived "prince". In a Germanic culture, a king's daughter was a lady, a kneader of bread. I used "princess" as a sort of private joke between Mikki and Moth and myself, and it stuck, linguistically at odds with the Northron culture though it is. Mikki calls his back-from-the-grave warrior-wizard lover "princess" when he's feeling sarcastic about her avoidance of manual labour. I suppose I could say he calls her "princess" in a meta-fictional defiance of the current cult of sparkly princessiness that consumer culture has created in little girls, which seems to debase the word. She's not the only one. Ulfleif, queen's sister and Queen's Sword in "The Storyteller", is another princess, and An-Chaq, who dies trying to sabotage a devil's wizardry, is a third. (That's not a spoiler — she only enters the action after her execution.)

A generation has grown up dismissing "princess" as something not merely passive and un-adventurous, but as twinkly and childish. It also seems to have connotations of a creepily sexualized prepubescence. The word's been so candied that it doesn't seem it can possibly apply to Aethelflaed of Mercia, Alfred's daughter and a worthy Anglo-Saxon commander (who of course is not a princess, but the king's daughter of Wessex and Lady of the Mercians, wife of the Mercian king), or to Henry I's daughter Matilda, who outfought King Stephen in the first English civil war and, if only she'd been a diplomat as well, might have succeeded in claiming the crown some felt was rightfully hers. It's been taken away from all the real princesses to whom the word did apply, all those young women shipped to foreign kingdoms to seal alliances through the Middle Ages and long after, who might have been passive victims of their birth, but many of whom survived, reared their sons, and quietly (or otherwise, in the case of women like Isabella of France, mother of Edward III) made history. Contemporary culture has made "princess" an expectation of helpless passivity and sparkliness, and worringly, it's convinced a lot of little girls that that's what a girl is supposed to be, until she turns into a sexy glam queen at puberty.

None of this is really a good reason for Moth to be, culturally-inaccurately, called a princess. But hey, it amuses Mikki, and am I going to argue with the man with the axe?**

*And of course it's also a shapeshifter story, and we all know my fondness for shapeshifters; the princess's brothers, in the version I remember, were ravens.

**Arguing with the giant demon bear is right out.

The Black Box on Year’s Best List

The Black Box is on the 2011 Year’s Best list published by Resource Links, a Canadian periodical for teacher-librarians. The Black Box is the third of the Cassandra Virus books, science fiction for 9-13 year-olds set in the near future, but the story stands on its own even if you haven’t read The Cassandra Virus and The Drone War. The cover is by my manga-partner Connie Choi. (Do you think Uncle William looks a bit like Mick Aston from Time Team?)

Here’s the back cover copy:

Something is cutting off Spohrville’s communication with the outside world. The phones don’t work. There’s no radio, no TV — no internet. Are eco-terrorists trying to shut down the Mars Relay satellite? That’s what the government says, but Jordan and Helen and the sentient virtual supercomputer Cassandra don’t believe a word of it. The town is overrun with “birdwatchers” who can’t tell a hawk from a heron. Jordan’s old enemy, Harvey Number Two of the spy agency Bureau 6, is sneaking around pretending to be a cop on holiday. And archaeologist Uncle William has dug up a very strange black rock while excavating an Acadian settlement. With no land-lines to the site of the dig and wireless communication impossible, Jordan and Helen have no back-up from Cassandra. They’ve taken on corrupt government agents and industrial spies before, but they’ve always had Cassandra behind them. It’s the twenty-first century. The bad guys have night-vision goggles and interference triangulators. How did Jordan and Helen get stuck with a bunch of musket-toting War of 1812 historical re-enactors as their only allies?

The Black Box on Year's Best List

The Black Box is on the 2011 Year's Best list published by Resource Links, a Canadian periodical for teacher-librarians. The Black Box is the third of the Cassandra Virus books, science fiction for 9-13 year-olds set in the near future, but the story stands on its own even if you haven't read The Cassandra Virus and The Drone War. The cover is by my manga-partner Connie Choi. (Do you think Uncle William looks a bit like Mick Aston from Time Team?)

Here's the back cover copy:

Something is cutting off Spohrville's communication with the outside world. The phones don't work. There's no radio, no TV — no internet. Are eco-terrorists trying to shut down the Mars Relay satellite? That's what the government says, but Jordan and Helen and the sentient virtual supercomputer Cassandra don't believe a word of it. The town is overrun with "birdwatchers" who can't tell a hawk from a heron. Jordan's old enemy, Harvey Number Two of the spy agency Bureau 6, is sneaking around pretending to be a cop on holiday. And archaeologist Uncle William has dug up a very strange black rock while excavating an Acadian settlement. With no land-lines to the site of the dig and wireless communication impossible, Jordan and Helen have no back-up from Cassandra. They've taken on corrupt government agents and industrial spies before, but they've always had Cassandra behind them. It's the twenty-first century. The bad guys have night-vision goggles and interference triangulators. How did Jordan and Helen get stuck with a bunch of musket-toting War of 1812 historical re-enactors as their only allies?

Dispatches from the desk # 11: writing old characters

I've hit the point in the current project where some characters from Blackdog get into the story. It's interesting to be returning to them, to see how, a year later, they've been changed by what went before. Some tempers have cooled, but others' grudges have been brooded on. I've always liked Ivah; I'm enjoying her return. I found it awkward, at first, though, because I kept thinking of her as a girl, a teenager. Aside from her first appearance at the fall of Lissavakail, she wasn't that even in Blackdog; by the time she went out hunting the goddess for her father, she was in her early twenties, and yet emotionally, she was still very much a child, utterly quashed and shaped by her father, and her own bodyguard played on that and contributed to it. Ivah was one of those people who have fossilized at a certain age. In her head she seemed about thirteen, and I've been having a hard time making myself treat her as more than about sixteen. Every now and then you meet someone in real life who has been emotionally crippled by a parent that way, kept a child on some psychological level. Trying to remember myself, and to show, that she's broken with that and is desperately and consciously trying to be her own girl — woman — was a challenge at first, but I've gotten well into it now and the fact that Ivah is consciously trying to shape her own life, thinking, "No, I won't do that, I can't be that person, I won't," is helping.

I also thought that I had everything in my head but I find I keep having to go back to the file of the previous book to do searches on words that I hope will bring up the details I've forgotten. It makes me appreciate very much that I've always written on a computer, when I imagine leafing back and forth through a five-hundred page books trying to find just where it was I described Westgrasslander tattoos, or what colour some secondary character's hair was. It's easy to see why authors lose track of these things and end up with inconsistencies and contradictions.

Dispatches from the desk #10: YA as an adult genre

A journalism student contacted me a few weeks ago to get my thoughts on adult reading of YA books for a paper she was doing. Although in Quests and Kingdoms I discussed books for children and teens that went on being read by adults and had always been read by adults as well as their intended audience, I didn't talk about the trend for YA books to be almost an adult genre, read by adults in the same way they'd read mysteries or romances or sf, because it hadn't really happened yet. People who read fantasy also read fantasy for children and teens, and so on; people who enjoyed particular authors went on enjoying them in adulthood; people who enjoyed children's books sought them out. This wasn't, I think, from my own observations and those of friends in both the academic and the library world (the latter particularly well-placed to observe changing trends in reading), the same readership which has suddenly now discovered YA books, usually either real-life humorous or dramatic teen-girl books, or fantasy or dystopian-future books, and who regard them as a separate genre. Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging goes along with Bridget Jones' Diary and Shopaholic very naturally and the readership does overlap. However, quite a number of the adult readers of YA fantasy or dystopian apocalyptic fiction aren't and never were readers of adult fantasy and science fiction; they're not reading YA in addition to adult books of speculative fiction, but instead of. Why is that?

I suspect that it may have to do with why the new readers of YA sf are turning to teen books. There are of course many different ways in which children's and YA books appeal to adults. Some authors have lasting appeal and people go on reading them as adults, because the books have depth and complexity that endures: Rosemary Sutcliff and Diana Wynne Jones are examples of this. Some people reread favourite childhood authors to recapture whatever it was that that experience brought them as a child.

The journalism student with whom I was corresponding wondered if I thought the current trend, of adults who weren't lifelong children's book readers beginning to read recent YA books, was a form of escapism. I considered that, but initially it didn't seem to me to be a form of escape except in the same way that reading any other kind of fiction is an escape; that is, escape is part of the appeal but doesn't explain it, because reading an adult book in the same genre would also offer that escape. The recent YA books that are acquiring new adult readers are mostly fantasy, dystopian-future fiction (in which science fiction "what-ifs" play only a small role), or paranormal romance — especially paranormal romance. I suspect that part of the appeal is the length. People who are rushed don't feel they have the time to invest in reading an adult 500 page fantasy novel, for example. A YA book is usually (not always, but usually) shorter — at least at the start of a series! The YA to adult crossover series by recent writers who are not also writers of adult sf are also often — not always or universally by any means! — not deeply complex in their fantasy or futuristic or supernatural elements; they don't demand great imaginative commitment the way a much longer adult novel, with far more room for complex world-building will do. Therefore the reader doesn't have to spend nearly so much time in learning the world in order to become immersed in the story, and again, if you're pressed for time, that's appealing.

I do wonder if, for a lot of people, there's a desire to return to that young-and-full-of-potential point of their teen years, which would make a teen hero, rather than an adult beset by adult complexity, appealing. (Look at what those movies did with The Lord of the Rings, making Frodo into a helpless dewy-eyed, passive hardly-more-than-teen. He's a very intelligent, thoughtful, competent gentleman in his maturity, for goodness' sake. Anyway …)

The student also wondered if I thought this trend would continue. I said that those adults who have always read children's and teen books are going to go on doing so, but that I thought that probably the tendency to regard certain types of YA as another genre choice would fade as something else took its place in fashion. It was Harry Potter, once the hype really got going, and Twilight that touched off this current trend, making reading juvenile or teen books something adults didn't feel they had to apologize for or justify. I suspect that a significant number of the people who read what everyone is talking about will, unfortunately, in time drift away to the latest genre attracting media attention, whatever it may turn out to be. Literary taste goes through fads and cycles just as tastes in music, movies, and television do.

She also asked what I though the main difference between children's and adult books was. There's a simple answer there: complexity. I don't mean that a children's book should be shallow or simple or easy. It's partially a matter of length. In 180,000 words you have room to build so much more than in 50,000. Plots can be far more complicated, characters more numerous, worlds vaster and with greater history and geography, because there's room for it to happen. (I'm talking about my own genre of fantasy, or speculative fiction as a whole, here. You don't need to do that world-building in a book set here-and-now, so that doesn't really apply — although a novel set here-and-now isn't usually so long as your average fantasy or science fiction work these days.) Vocabulary naturally changes somewhat; in a good book it does so without any deliberate dumbing down. The intensity and degree of violence and sexual explicitness does and should change depending on the audience too, of course. However, one of the major differences I see is in the psychological complexity, what's going on inside the characters. Children aren't psychologically simple but they don't have the experience or the self-analytical abilities to understand or analyse a lot of what goes on in an adult emotional world, and that's really where an adult book will lose child readers — when what's going on in the characters' motivations and so on is baffling. That's what will put children off reading an adult book that they may have the vocabulary for, regardless of whether the sex and violence is more than what they're prepared for or should be exposed to. It can simply bore them out of the book. That now brings me back to escapism, and the thought that maybe there is an element of escapism in the current trend for adults to regard YA books as a genre of adult fiction; maybe, when people are stressed and harried and feeling beset by the world and things they can't control, they want that return to the point of burgeoning self-discovery, that borderline between childhood and adulthood when we are only beginning to become aware of own mental and emotional processes in a complex and analytical way, and when optimism that horrors can be overcome and the world saved or changed is easier to come by. Teen books, whether dealing with friends and family and romance, or a future of ruin and tyranny that must be survived and reformed, can give the reader that.

Book giveaway!

I've suddenly realized it's Valentine's Day, or will be tomorrow. I know that if I go out Mr Wicked will present me with a slipper (my own) when I get home, or possibly a sock or best yet, the Extremely Deflated Soccer Ball, his most prized possession. What other token of love does one need, really? However, to get more into the spirit of things, I've decided to have a spur-of-the-moment book giveaway.

Long, long ago, in a — no wait, just long, long ago, in the previous century, I wrote a collection of short stories based on ballads from medieval Denmark. These literary fairy tales are out of print now, though vague plans are in the works for a reissue sometime in the next several years or so. I do have some copies of the original edition, including, of course, the famous typo in the table of contents. (People keep pointing that out, so I'll get it out of the way now. Yes, I know "plumage" does not have two m's. These things often appear spontaneously after the proofs are corrected. Thank you.) In one of my favourite books, Farjeon's Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, the wandering minstrel hero sets out to cure a farmer's daughter of lovesickness by telling "ten new love stories". The Serpent Bride is, in best wandering minstrel tradition, the retelling of "ten old love stories". (Half of which involve shapeshifters. Don't blame me; they were there in the sources, honest.)

So, if you enjoy literary fairy tales (very different in tone from Blackdog, and yet … Scandinavian shapeshifters!) and would like a chance to win a signed copy of The Serpent Bride, a collection of literary fairy tales from way back in 1998, and if you live in Canada or the US, here is what you should do:

Go to The Serpent Bride page of my Pippin website, here.

Listen to the MP3 excerpt there or watch the video.

Go to the contact form on one of my websites, the Pippin site or the Blackdog one …

… and send me your name and the name of the male hero from either one of the stories in the samples (or, given the fuzzy recording, your best guess at it). Make sure your email address in the form is correct!

The names of all who send a correct answer by midnight, Atlantic Standard Time, on Valentine's Day 2012 will be written on small pieces of paper and offered to Mr Wicked. The winner will be whichever he first attempts to eat. I'll then get in touch to find the winner's mailing address.

Dispatches from the Desk # 9: Eulogy for the School Library

Is the school library dead? Yesterday I was reading in quite a large elementary school in quite a large city, and the school had no library. Most of the time when I go into a school to read, there is at least a room designated as a library. There isn't usually any sort of librarian to go with it, and often it is crowded with other things, but at least it's there with a sign on the door. Often a secretary (administrative assistant?) or teacher's assistant or someone of that sort is vaguely responsible for the library, in spare moments from their real job. The library is often a shared space, used for the music room, storage, the lunch room, the place to send the kids to run around during indoor recess, the place to send kids who are acting up in the classroom, and so on. What is this demonstrating to the children about the value of reading? It's a luxury we tack on if we can afford it? It's a sort of clutter that we can't quite throw out, so we want to at least shove it out of the way, like that china rabbit with an umbrella that was Granny's delight?

In my elementary school, which had fewer than 200 students, we had a library; we had a librarian, and she was a full-time librarian. She had more office and work-space in the back corner of the library than many public libraries I've seen. It had bright red carpets (even one wall was covered with bright red carpet), and a nail-yarn sculpture of owls. It was quiet. It was soothing. (Okay, I find bright red soothing. Maybe it's due to that library.) Although I loved the public library in Collin's Bay to which my family went every three weeks or so and at which I discovered many of my enduringly favourite authors, that little school library was where I first found Enid Blyton and Marguerite Henry and Walter Farley, fondly remembered but now outgrown, as well as authors whom I still reread, Arthur Ransome, Anthony Buckeridge, Lloyd Alexander, and John Buchan. It's where one sister devoured Beverly Cleary and another Judy Blume. It was where we all trundled down from our classrooms, year after year, to find little books in which to research our projects on Laura Secord and Frederic Banting and Billy Bishop and E. Cora Hind, on pileated woodpeckers and acid rain and the solar system.

We were always taken to the public library as well, and had a house full of books, but lots of children aren't, and lots of children don't. If they have a school library, though, a good school library with lots of well-chosen books, not just recent oddments selected from the book-order catalogue by someone, however well meaning, who isn't a wide and thoughtful reader themselves, and if they have regular times to go and explore that library, they're going to read more. They'll have a much greater likelihood of discovering something that they want to read and will like to read; wanting to read and reading regularly is half the battle, in the early years. As a society, we're drifting more and more to a state of aliteracy; where people, educated people, are functionally literate. And that's all. They lack any complexity in vocabulary — just listen to the misuse of language on the CBC, of all things — and have no ear for syntax — ditto. Grammar eludes even many with a bachelor's degree, at least, going by various communications I've had to read and again, what one hears on-air. If we can't speak and write clearly, we can't communicate. We're also cut off from the knowledge of the past. History, culture, science — all knowledge is communicated through words, and primarily through the written word. As language becomes more a hit and miss affair with comprehension a matter of skimming and stabbing in the dark, we're losing our ability to understand what we read, to think complexly and to comprehend complexity in ideas.

That's a lot of weight to put on the foundation of the humble school library, but without that simple foundation — words, words, words — there's nothing to build on.

P.s. And no, looking things up online is not "why we don't need school libraries". I've seen a project on myself — a teacher proudly showed it to me. It was the bio off my website, printed out and glued to a piece of cardboard. The student got an "A".

Dispatches # 8: Is this an outline I see before me?

I don't write with outlines. (In fact, I find starting with an outline kills the story.) This frustrates teachers who bring me in to talk to their classes and want me tell children the pedagogical rules for writing, which seem to start with an outline, although lately I've noticed that they're being told to make something called a web before they make an outline. "Uhhh," says the author, when a little boy asks, "Do you use a web?" "Um, I look things up online sometimes …?" I suggest. "No, a web," he says. "A web, when you're writing." "Uhhh," says the author. I'm still not clear on that. The closest I get to webs is thinking sometimes of Robert the Bruce and his persistent spider, and the message therein. But anyhow, outlines. Nope, don't use 'em. Sorry. Some authors do, I assure the teachers. Many authors do. The Spouse does. But I don't. There are lots of ways of writing books, you see and some work for some people, and others work for others. It's art, not formula.

I do, however, hit a point where an outline comes into the story. This is usually halfway or two-thirds through or thereabouts. Until that point, it's a lot of exploring of mysterious paths. I liken it to a forest, with a distant mountain visible. (Visible how? Is it necessary to climb a very tall tree, like Bilbo in Mirkwood? That didn't work for him; not knowing he was in a low spot, he saw nothing but trees stretching on forever, which, come to think of it, is a very good metaphor for many stages of the writing process anyway.) Grant me that the mountain is visible, or at least, known to be there. That's the end of the story. To get there, though, is a matter of finding one's way through forest and bog; it entails a lot of wandering and a lot of dead ends, or going miles along a winding path and realizing that it's the wrong one and it's necessary to retrace one's steps and take that other fork, the road not taken that was actually the one that should have been followed from the start. Until the next fork. Or the unfordable river. Or the deep and miring slough. And then one backtracks again. The current project has been particularly bad for that. I shudder to think how many really long fat fantasy novels-worth of writing I have done, getting it and myself onto the right trail. But here we are. I just need to go back and unpick a character who started off as the hero, turned out not to be, was downgraded to secondary character, taken out, put back in, and whom I have finally admitted to myself to have no place in the story whatsoever. I'll miss her. I liked her a lot. I think she can get herself into the final volume of the story, though, so she's not lost forever. But … but … but …

… suddenly the ground underfoot is rising. The Kindly Hermit has given me a map; that is, the outline has happened. Having written it all down frantically last night, and slept on it, I still feel quite happy and settled with it. Yep, that's how it all happened. Just need to get the words down. There are quite a lot of details still to unfold as I get to them, of course, but the bones are there, the interconnections, the logic, the shape of things.

Onwards!