Jonathan Langford's Blog, page 4

2012 Whitneys

Just to let all my friends and faithful followers know — over the past month or so, in my copious free time I’ve been trying to read finalists for the 2012 Whitney Awards for best novel by an LDS writer (in various categories). So far, I’ve read and blogged about the finalists for the Middle Grades and Speculative YA categories. (And that’s probably all I’ll get to, given that votes are due this coming Monday, April 29). Check it out!

Report on LTUE 31

So I’ve  been back now from Life, the Universe, and Everything 31 for about 3 weeks, and I know that all my many fans out there are literally dying to know how everything went. Or, well, figuratively dying. Because I really do know the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” Honest!

Short answer: It was great! Longer answer: It was great, though also a bit disconcerting. More on that below.

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My presentations went well enough. On the panel about food and feasting in fiction (which I had pouted my way onto after seeing the panel title in the program), I think I was the only person with a primarily sf&f connection. There were an awful lot of directions the panel could have gone. Between the contributions of the different panelists, we wound up going a short distance down all of them. Which perhaps was less interesting than a bona fide presentation about food from a food expert would have been, but not a bad event.

I had lost my notes (but not, fortunately, my handouts) for my presentation on classic sf&f you should be reading. Which probably was for the best. Sadly, there wasn’t anyone in the audience who had read more sf&f than I had. One posted blog comment about my panel liked my handouts but disliked the fact that I went down through the list rather than focusing more narrowly. I agree that it could have been more interesting. Actually, in my view this is the ideal topic for doing as a panel, with each panelist presenting a list of 10-20 neglected classics and maybe 10-20 books that everyone MUST have read in order to be knowledgeable in the field, compiled beforehand and available as handouts. Hm. Maybe that’s an idea for a future year.

Steve Walker’s presentation on Tolkien was excellent. I hadn’t had prior communication the week before the symposium and so was quite nervous, but he showed up in good time about 20 minutes prior to the starting time for the presentation.

The panel on Mormon perspectives in Tolkien was, in my opinion, fantastic: one of the best things I attended all during the symposium. Given that one of my reasons for going out this year was to make sure this panel happened (and that I was on it), I was quite pleased about that. It was also one of the more explicitly Mormon events on the schedule, though there’s still a clearly Mormon element to the symposium.

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It was surprising how many people showed up: almost 1300 total, I think the statistics went. Several hundred of them were students, but most were not — making a change from when I was more deeply involved in the symposium, but one that I think had already occurred, even before the last few years off-campus. Indeed, the strong presence of non-students is, perhaps, one good reason for not having LTUE on the main BYU campus. It was also great to see my son helping to run such an event, though the symposium as a whole has gotten to the point where no one person can really oversee everything, or anything near. It’s a very *healthy* event.

The event looked more like a standard convention than I expected. Partly, that was due to the venue: for the first time this year, LTUE was not on a college campus, but rather at the Provo Marriott. Partly it was the assortment of attenders. And partly, I think, it was the prevalence of authors on panels where I would have liked to see more academics.

I also would have liked to see more create your own world presentations by established academics. But that’s a longstanding soapbox of mine. I’ve volunteered to create a set of guidelines on how to recruit academics for create your own presentations.

I have other thoughts too about the symposium, which I’m hoping to write up in greater length, possibly on the AML blog. Like how it seems to me that there’s a disconnect now between the community that’s being served by the symposium and the group that actually puts it on. I’d like to see the Mormon sf&f community take on a somewhat more corporate existence, rather than relying on the eroding structures of the past.

But that’s for another day. Meanwhile, I got to go. It was fun. I had a good time with family, met friends I haven’t seen for a dozen years or more, and had a bunch of good conversations. I’m glad I went.

Turner, The Thief (Review)

More than once in my youth in the west which is now forgotten (kudos to whoever catches that reference), I attended a science fiction convention where the guest of honor was someone I’d never read. Like, for example, in 1984, when I couldn’t understand why everyone at the Worldcon was so excited about this whole “final encyclopedia” thing everyone kept talking about. I mean, an encyclopedia? Come on!

And so I didn’t bother to attend any events with guest of honor Gordon R. Dickson, author of the Dorsai series. A few years later, I could only kick myself for my prior ignorance.

It’s happened on other occasions as well. I’ll go to a convention, listen, be impressed by an author—and then read something by that author later, and wish I had done so beforehand, so that I could appreciate the presentation properly.

And so I’ve made it a policy to try to read something by the guest of honor before the convention. Which, in this case, meant digging out my copy of The Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner, guest of honor at the upcoming Life, the Universe, and Everything, which I had purchased about a year ago because it was bright and shiny and had a Newbery Honor Book sticker on it. I’m pleased to report that it was well worth my time.

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The book starts with point of view character Gen — a boy apparently in his late teens (more on this below) — languishing in the prison of the king of Sounis, a victim of his own competence (in stealing the king’s seal) and foolishness (in bragging about it). There he’s visited by the king’s magus (not a magician but a scholar), who recruits him to help steal an (initially unnamed) magical artifact which, as we discover over the course of the novel, will help the king to achieve supremacy over neighboring lands: somethat neither we nor Gen are inclined to be happy about, given what we’ve come to know about this particular king. Still, Gen seems to have little choice in the matter. And so he agrees.

The first part of the story focuses on Gen’s journey with the magus and several other characters to where the artifact can be found. Little by little, we find out more about the object of the quest, its historical/mythical background, and the military and political situation that makes it so important. At the same time, we get to know Gen’s personality — an engaging mix of pride, cleverness, sincerity, immature defiance, and teenage sulkiness — and observe the interactions of the other characters in his party, including two other teenagers whose dynamic of admiration and envy prove to be more important that we initially realize.

And then the characters reach the object of their quest, and the story takes a sharp turn toward the overtly magical and supernatural. Events gain a more external focus, as the party members find themselves struggling to escape pursuit — and we start to discover things about Gen that we hadn’t known before. In the end, plot threads are resolved in a surprisingly satisfying way, with mythic tied to political tied to personal. A good read — despite several theoretically dubious artistic choices.

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It’s an adage I mostly adhere to that authors shouldn’t hide things from the readers that the point of view character knows. A rookie trick. A cheap shot. Smoke and mirrors, substituting for good, honest plotting.

And yet it sometimes has its place, as witness (for example) Agatha Christie’s tour de force, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The Thief represents another such case — justified, in my opinion, by Turner’s skill in dropping clues and by the important role that Gen’s self-concealment plays in the larger story. (No, I won’t tell you just what it is that we find out about him, but trust me, it’s important.) Gen is a trickster, and we come to know him better by being tricked than we could from full initial self-revelation.

It’s also a bit jarring to have gods take the stage two-thirds of the way through the book, after a beginning where both magic and the gods are referenced but not really seen. Again, though, it works, or at least mostly: in part I think because it’s as unexpected and disturbing to the characters as it is to us as readers (or more).

And then there’s the fact that in a YA novel, much can be forgiven for the sake of a main character with a clear and interesting personal voice. Turner certainly delivers that — and all the more interesting for the fact that we’re forced to reexamine our assumptions about him as the book progresses. What seems at first to be motivation simply to survive makes way for a deeper purpose and surprising strength of mind and will.

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Which raises again the question of just how old Gen is supposed to be, and a broader question about just the typicality (or otherwise) of characters in YA novel. Gen’s age is never specified in the story, though a quick web search found some fan calculations putting him at about 15. I think I can safely say that while many of Gen’s attitudes seem appropriate for a 15-year-old, his internal voice seems to keep slipping to something a lot older than that: say, early twenties at least.

In a way, that’s hardly surprising. How many sf&f readers — even (or perhaps especially) those who are teens themselves — really want to read a book about a typical teenager? Paraphrasing a comment I once made in a different but comparable situation: those are the types of people I go out of my way to avoid in real life; why should I want to encounter them in fiction?

People say that readers (including YA readers) want realistic characters, but I’m not convinced that’s really true. Gen is more focused and determined, braver, more skilled, and more clever than pretty much any teenager I’d expect to meet in real life (or myself, for that matter). And that’s okay. I doubt I’d want to read about him if that weren’t the case. But it does lead me to wonder just what it is that we really mean when we say that a teen character is realistic. I suspect it’s a combination of things: reminders of teenage priorities and perspectives on the world, combined with a vivid delivery, distinctive voice, and compelling level of self-revelation, so that we feel we’ve not merely read a description but actually spent time in the company of someone we know and (at least to some extent) like.

On that level, The Thief delivers very well indeed, while at the same time delivering on an intriguing plot, complex development of even the minor characters, and a world that leaves us wanting to explore further. Fortunately, there are other books to follow, which I now have added to my increasingly tall mental to-read stack. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Thief to those who enjoy YA fantasy.

Classic SF&F You Should Have Read

The idea started, as so many do, with good intentions. Life, the Universe and Everything, Utah’s annual symposium on science fiction and fantasy (previously held at BYU, though not for the last couple of years because BYU’s administration includes poopheads), is being chaired this year by my son. And it’s been a lot of years since I’ve gone. And my daughter wants to go too. And so I thought, why not? I can attend, catch up with friends, trade a Utah February for a Wisconsin February (not any real bargain there), heckle my son, get revved up on my sf&f writing — all that good stuff.

Well. That was before I looked at our bank balance and checked the price on airline tickets. Also before my creative writing juices ran out of steam last year, leaving me unsure that I can justify the expenditure on writerly grounds. And yet the idea, once entertained, was hard to dismiss. And so I am going next month (Feb. 14-16), with my daughter, and will be appearing on a panel on Tolkien with my old thesis advisor. And I’ll be doing a presentation on classic sf&f you should be reading, though honestly, I’m not exactly certain how I got into that one, except that I’m sure it involved incautious volunteering around people who were paying far too much attention.

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So why is it important to read classic sf&f? That’s the question I’ll be starting with. I’m under the impression that my presentation is under the writing track, so I’ll try to justify this on grounds that make sense to those who are planning to write sf&f: knowing the field, engaging in a dialogue with those who’ve gone before, that sort of thing. Not to mention that the classic stuff quite simply includes a lot of very good stories.

I did some Internet searching today (in between polishing up an overdue marketing report) on classic sf&f, best science fiction lists, etc. As you’d expect, there are quite a few such lists out there. I plan to reference the Locus list(s), Hugo and Nebula award winners (and nominees), and probably a list I found based on a poll conducted by NPR. And such other items as I may find between now and then, peppered (naturally) with my own opinions.

I plan to talk separately about science fiction and fantasy. Short fiction versus novels, too, if I can manage it. The lists are different, and the relationship between the “classic” tradition and stuff that’s currently being published is different for fantasy than for science fiction. In discussing fantasy, I plan to draw on my graduate school reading to talk not just about “classic” modern/contemporary works, but also the great older works of literature that connect to this tradition: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and All Those Guys. In the process, I’ll get a lick in for William Morris (the 19th century socialist/artist/writer, not my friend the Mormon arts blogger), Lord Dunsany, L. Frank Baum, and others not, perhaps, frequently enough read.

And I plan to have at least one “rate yourself” kind of interactive activity, where we award ourselves a point each for various names/titles we’ve read. Mutual embarrassment is, after all, a big part of the reason for the game. (And there will be plenty of embarrassment on my side of the podium as well, considering how many of the “classics” I have yet to read…)

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It’s amazing — in light of my many “more serious” projects (novel writing, paid work, etc.) — how much of my time gets spent on things that can’t possible contribute to the household budget and that no one has actually sat down and assigned to me as something I should be doing. You might think it would be better for me to focus my efforts on the more important things, and let those other things slide.

And yet. Consistently over the years, I seem not to find it possible to do that. The trade-off seems to be not between spending my time on core responsibilities versus side projects, but rather between spending my time on a mix of core and side projects versus not spending my time productively at all.

And so perhaps it’s better to embrace that side of my personality: face the reality that I will always need to be constantly pruning to rescue (inadequate) time for the things I have to do, while juggling a lot of other things that I merely want to do — or even (like my upcoming LTUE presentation) find myself somehow slated to do without really knowing how it happened. Provo, here we come!

Gay Mormon Lit Anthology

Hi all! Progress on my current writing is slow (partly because I have a lot of paid work at the moment, which is definitely a good thing). However, I do have a news item to report.

A month or two ago, I was contacted by some people I know who are putting together an anthology of stories about the gay Mormon experience. They asked if I’d be interested in having a selection from No Going Back included in the anthology. I said yes. Since then, I’ve been spending odd moments poking around and looking at possible candidates for inclusion.

It’s been an interesting experience. My initial reaction on being asked to contribute something was to wonder whether it would be possible to pull out an excerpt that will (a) make sense on its own to readers who don’t know what’s gone before, and (b) provide a sufficiently satisfying sense of closure to work as a standalone piece (even if readers know that it’s taken out of a larger story).

And indeed, that proved to be a challenge. It quickly became evident to me that in order to use some of the most promising selections, I would need to trim individual scenes from the excerpt — simply because they involved characters and plot threads that were extraneous to the main focus.

Based on an initial skim through the book, I came up with 11 candidate selections, 8 of which I put on the table to the people who are putting together the anthology. (The others I eliminated without further consideration, because on review it was clear that they just didn’t work.) Meanwhile, two of the anthology people had looked over my book themselves and come up with their own candidate selections.

From the various lists, we came up with three finalists that shared broad support. I then added back onto the list one of my own candidates that no one else had selected, but that I thought needed consideration as one of the dramatic high points of the books (mostly consisting of pieces from Chapter 10, including Paul’s “confession” scene with his bishop). I then created Word files of the four finalists and sent them around for consideration.

Interestingly, the fourth candidate (the one I had put back on the table) was the one that Jerry Argetsinger (senior editor on the anthology) liked the best and felt did the best job of reflecting what I was trying to do with the novel. According to him, this is also now everyone else’s favorite as well. FYI, Jerry — an experienced dramatist and professor of performing arts — was one of those who originally recommended No Going Back for publication, and also provided me with some revision suggestions that I think made No Going Back much better than it would otherwise have been.

And so that’s where we are right now. I’m also planning to get opinions from my YA critique group, none of whom have read No Going Back and all of whom are non-LDS — which will provide an interesting test case, though I suspect that most readers of the anthology will have strong background knowledge about Mormons. (I don’t know if a publisher is lined up yet, but I know they had one in mind that operates primarily in the Mormon market.) Barring major surprises, though, the current plan is to go with the selection from Chapters 9 and 10.

So what does it all mean?

Pleased as I am to have my work included, I doubt this will lead to any new book sales. Still, it’s good to know that my book will be out there as part of the conversation. On a personal note, I’m pleased to discover that I still like my own book. Which is a good thing. It would be sad indeed to have sunk so much effort into my writing (for no monetary compensation once expenses are calculated) only to discover afterward that I couldn’t stand the story I’d written…

End-of-June Progress Report

Hey! It’s been a while since I posted. And I don’t really feel sorry about that, because my resolve this year was to focus on my actual writing, and to write about my writing only intermittently, as I feel the need. And I’ve mostly managed to do that. So yay, me! Or something like that.

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First things first, I guess. A few weeks ago, I reached a point that I’d identified as about the 2/3 point on my high school empath novel, which is what I’ve mostly been working on this year on the creative front. Details of the plot kept shifting along the way, but that’s only to be expected.

And then it was time for me to prepare my first 30 pages to show to my new writing group (a YA-focused group that meets in Minneapolis, mostly not sf&f focused). The feedback I got confirmed a basic problem with the story as it exists so far: that is, the absence of an external conflict. And that’s a very real problem.

My original intended focus for this novel was one how a pretty ordinary teenager deals with the discovery that he’s an empath, just as he’s starting high school — with all the downsides I imagined from that. And I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that. But that’s not enough to hold the interest of readers.

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Way back when, I recall reading something by my good friend Dave Wolverton/Farland about the importance of making sure that your story is as good as it can be on every level: story and character and style and worldbuilding and theme and everything else. I remember thinking at the time something like this: “Wow, that’s hard. I bet you don’t have to really do all those things.” Looking now at my own writing, though, I think it’s important at least to try — not leaving any gaps where you know you haven’t put in a 100% effort.

For me right now, that means on the level of plot. Except that I think the problem is more basic than that. My story currently has one Big Idea: the teenage empath dealing with his unwelcome gift in the middle of an ordinary life. I think I need another Big Idea — especially if I want to attract readers of sf&f (young or otherwise), who tend to like ideas and brain food. Hopefully, that second Big Idea will give me a zone of intersection that can help generate some external conflict, as well as cool baubles that make readers say, “Ooh! Shiny!”

I’m beginning to think that in order to write a good story, what you really need to do is take the material for three stories and pour it into one story space, then boil it down until it all fits into that compressed volume. Which is a bit of a problem for me, since I’m not one of those people who generates ideas like berries on an overladen summer vine. I’m more of an elaborator: someone who can take an idea and stretch it out. But that’s not the skill I need right now, not if I’m going to make a story that can stand on its own as an idea story.

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Last weekend, I spent a day and a half at Fourth Street Fantasy, a single-track, limited-size sf&f con where the focus is on talking about ideas and the membership seems to be about half published authors — and the other half seriously creative and bright people in other arenas. It was, in short, a great brainfest: a bit like those good discussions we used to have in the science fiction and fantasy club in college, but with a group informed by experience and extensive knowledge.

I didn’t come out of it with any ideas specifically related to my empath story. If anything, I walked away with a bigger sense of just how much there is to think about in crafting a really good story. But I’m hoping that the effect of all this — plus discussions with other people, and reading about medieval technology, and some intensive thinking sessions (in between paid work, which is gratifyingly plentiful this summer) — will be to crank up the old thought engine and give me something new to work with. And then it will be time for me to start over again, from the beginning. I almost look forward to it.

2011 Whitney Finalist Reviews

Each year, a set of awards known as the Whitneys are given out for the best novel written by an LDS author in each of various different categories (7 genre categories this year, plus best novel by a first-time published novelist and best overall). I have fond feelings about the Whitneys, both because I think they’re a good thing for their own sake and because No Going Back was a Whitney finalist in the general fiction category back in 2009, which was probably the single most positive thing that happened for the book marketing-wise.

There’s a 3-part process to the Whitney Awards. First, a book has to be nominated by a minimum of 5 readers, the only qualification for which is that each must affirm that he/she has no financial interest in the success of the book (e.g., family member of the author or publisher). Then a panel of judges, selected from the LDS writing community, reads all the books in a specific category that received at least 5 nominations, and selects 5 finalists. Finally, a large group of potential voters — the “Whitney Academy” — votes on the finalists, category by category, after first affirming that they have read all the finalists in that category.

I’m a member of the Whitney Academy. Every LDS author who’s had a novel published in the last 5 years is eligible, upon request. I also believe that the Whitney Academy includes owners of the various LDS bookstores, plus well-known critics and/or representatives of specific organizations with an important presence in the Mormon arts community. So even back when No Going Back was a finalist in the general fiction category, I could have voted, if I had managed to read all the other finalists.

I didn’t manage to read the other finalists, and so I didn’t vote that year. This year, though, I decided that I should give my best shot to reading and reviewing the finalists for as many categories as I could. And I’ve done that. And I published collective reviews for each set of finalists in the four categories I managed to complete, the last being posted earlier today at A Motley Vision Mormon arts and culture blog.

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I first tackled the general fiction category. I felt like I owed it to this category, since it was the one for which No Going Back had been a finalist. Besides, I’d heard some controversy about a couple of more literary-oriented books that some people thought should have been finalists but weren’t. I wanted to see what the competition was like.

Overall, I found it disappointing. I also found myself wondering just what the “general fiction” category is. It largely seemed like a grab-bag of things that almost but didn’t quite fit in other categories, or that didn’t really fit anywhere. I got a lot of responses to that review, though mostly it took off into a general discussion of the Whitneys themselves and the state of Mormon literature, with few specific comments about the books themselves.

My next priority was general youth fiction. I found the finalists in that category generally stronger than in the general fiction category, though I was disappointed at the lack of Mormon experiences in the mix — something that had also disappointed me in the general fiction category.

Finally, I tackled the youth speculative and adult speculative categories. Both of them, I thought, were pretty strong overall. Maybe that’s because those are the categories that are closest to my own personal tastes. If you like those categories too, I recommend that you take a look at my reviews. You might find something for your reading list.

It was an interesting experience. This is probably the most focused spell of fiction reading I’ve done in years, partly because reading itself has become more laborious for me as I’ve grown older, for reasons I won’t get into here but hope to write about sometime. So this was partly an exercise to see if I could do this kind of focused reading. (Answer: yes, but it was an exhausting experience I probably won’t repeat anytime soon.) Second, it was a form of market research, since these are the genres I’ve written in and/or want to write in. And third, it was (as I commented above) a way of paying back a little to the community of Mormon letters.

So that’s part of what I’ve been doing over the last couple of months, together with paid work and plugging away at my teenage empath novel, which I’m feeling pretty good about. More progress reports to come!

The Writing Rookie Season 2, #5: Writing in the Plane Style

Cross-posted at A Motley Vision. For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.

Recently in a discussion about writing and revising over at the AML blog, William Morris (someone I greatly respect and often agree with) talked about being frustrated by his first drafts because "the language seems so mundane." Which resulted in one of those sinking feelings on my part — you know, like the one you get when the speaker in sacrament meeting talks about how bad things were when they missed their daily family scripture study, just when you were feeling good about reading scriptures together once last week. Or maybe like how you feel — at least, the way I feel — when I turn on the radio to one of those money management programs that keeps talking about how money I should already have saved for my retirement. But that's another (though not entirely unrelated) topic.

The point is that I don't really feel like much of a stylist. Sure, I revise — but it's not to achieve any kind of lyrical prose effects. Really, I have only 2 main goals: to make my writing quick, clear, and easy to read, and achieve some kind of consistency in my characters' voices. Those are hard enough.

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The last several weeks, I've been stuck at a plot point in my writing: one I need to research, and also a point where I need to sit down and do some detailed thinking about what happens next. Unfortunately, I've also been very busy with work commitments. So in order not to completely abandon my creative work — and steep myself in what I've already written, so as to (hopefully) inspire myself for my plotting — I've been reading and editing my existing draft.

For me, reading and editing is a lot like using a plane in working with wood. (Bear with me here.) I read through the text at something like normal speaking speed, which is hard for me not to do since I'm one of those people who hears words spoken inside my head as I read them. (The same thing happens while I'm writing, which leads to some interesting effects when I pause to try to figure out what the next word should be.) As I read, I'll hit rough spots: places where my mental voice stumbles, where I wonder what was going on, where I think "Gee, that's awkward" or say to myself, "My character wouldn't say that." The effect for me is a lot like running my fingers up and down a board to find the spots that seem rough or give me a splinter. And then I try to smooth them out, applying a least-needed-change philosophy: a word or two here, cutting something there, substituting a new paragraph for an old one. And then I reread to see if the problem seems to be fixed.

I've never been very good at woodworking, which probably has something to do with the reasons why using a plane doesn't work too well for me. I always worry that I'll gouge the wood — cause new places where it's rough —or keep on shaving away until there's a dip in the wood and it starts to lose its intended shape.

The same things can happen in editing. Trying to fix one problem can lead to another. Focusing too long and too hard on one part of the text can result in prose that looks fine up close but doesn't read that well as part of a longer passage. And sometimes I worry that the iterative process of reading, editing, reading, editing, results not necessarily in an improved text but rather one that is constantly in flux.

I try to guard against these dangers by imposing limits: not spending too long at one time looking at one particular place in my writing, rereading after each substantial edit from a point before where the revision started, rereading multiple times later on. One thing I find is that sections I draft later generally appear rougher to me than those I've already read and revised multiple times, which provides some evidence that my writing does in fact improve (for me as a reader, at least) as a result of my edits. And then when I reach the point where I can't tell if I'm improving things anymore, I stop revising: for that session, for that point in my process, sometimes for the story as a whole. There are doubtless still improvements that could be made, but I'm no longer capable of knowing with any certainty what they are.

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I remember reading once that Isaac Asimov wrote only two drafts: the initial draft that he banged out on a typewriter, and then the revised draft that included whatever changes he wound up making in the process of typing it all out again.

I won't go so far as Orson Scott Card and call Asimov "the finest writer of American prose in our time, bar none" (Maps in a Mirror, p. 270). But at the top of his form — say, with "The Bicentennial Man" (the novella; I've not read the novel) — Asimov's style is remarkably effective: clean, clear, distinctive, and capable not only of telling a story but also of communicating and prompting feeling. It's not lyric, but it does the job.

My point isn't that Asimov's style is "right" (not something I believe he ever argued), but rather that it is what was right for him. I have my own process. Whether it works or not — that's something I'm still trying to figure out.

Rules of Sanity

A few days ago, I started the following list, purely for my own amusement. I share it now for yours.

Rules of sanity (in no particular order):

Treat all schedules as works in progress. (This is for your sanity, not other people's.)
Don't plan how you're going to use time you don't have yet.
Do stuff when you have a chance.
Everywhere you go, take with you a book (or two), a notebook (or two), and a writing utensil (or two). After all, you never know when you might get stuck for a half-hour waiting for a train to pass. Even if there haven't been any trains there for 20 years.
Do first that which is most urgent. (But see next item.)
Do first whatever it is you have energy to do.
When the brain cells fail, it's never a mistake to do dishes. (Not quite as valuable now that we have a dishwashing machine. Maybe substitute "do a load of laundry/pick up the living room"?)
When you're too tired to work, sleep.
Go for walks. It's better than strangling people.
Don't put off taking a shower.
When your body informs you that you aren't getting (back) to sleep anytime soon, get up and do something useful.
Always have some nebulous writing project to work on in your spare time. It's the best way to avoid having any. (Spare time, that is.)
Don't break your diet for something you don't really like.
Warm Pero and a bathrobe are the best cure for a headache. Along with Excedrin.
Dark chocolate. Need I say more?

So what are your own personal rules of sanity? Feel free to share!

High School Dances: Not about Pairing Up Anymore

As part of my ongoing campaign to research what I'm writing about, I went to a dance at our local high school last night. (I've been thinking that it would be entertaining to write about how a budding teenage empath deals with all the emotions he might pick up at a dance.) It was illuminating. And requires me now to rewrite several scenes I had already written, but I suppose that just demonstrates the necessity of the research…

I should start by explaining that even though I have two children who have attended high school (one now a college student, the other currently a high school junior), neither has shown the slightest interest in attending school dances. Keep in mind as well that I'm pretty much a popular culture illiterate. I did attend some dances back when I was a teenager (kind of hard to avoid when you're the student body president), but that was (gulp) 35 years ago in an extremely small, extremely rural school district in eastern Oregon. In short, about as different as could be from the way things are in a suburban midwestern high school of today — more different, it turns out, than even I had expected.

I had previously found a cultural informant: the daughter of some friends of ours, now in her mid-twenties, who went to dances when she attended the local high school. Her description was helpful, but I thought it be good to see things firsthand. So I wound up talking to the school volunteer coordinator about helping out with the winter carnival dance. She had me fill out some forms — including one for running a background check that I found comforting in a protect-our-children sort of way — and told me when and where to show up.

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I went early, on the theory that I might be able to help with setup. It turned out not to be necessary, as the teachers on duty clearly had everything well under control. On the other hand, I got to observe the last half-hour or so of what even I thought was a very exciting basketball game, which our local team won in double overtime. Go Wildcats!

Things started as people were streaming out the gym through the Commons area where the dance was going to be held. One end had been cleared of tables, and equipment (lights and speakers) had been set up there. As best I could tell, the music was all done by students on a volunteer basis. I think the set list had been pretty much decided in advance.

Lines were set up to process students. The fee was $3 each, which I was informed went to the student council and helped pay for scholarships. It was basically run by students, overseen by faculty members (with a friendly police liaison officer very much in evidence). I hovered at first in the area where students were being admitted, basically to be another adult presence, though I doubt I would have known if someone was doing something he or she shouldn't — a statement that pretty much summarizes my role throughout the evening. As the dance was getting ready to start, students were also still selling soft drinks in a vending area. Later, they sold pizza-by-the-slice further toward the back: again, basically run by students under teacher supervision.

And then the dancing started. I'm not any good with numbers, but I figure there were maybe 50-100 kids there, which I think is pretty good for our school. (I just went online to try to get enrollment figures, but failed.)

From the beginning, things were different from what I was expecting. Students crowded up toward the front in large groups: boys with girls, boys with boys, girls with girls, in ways that seemed to have very little to do with romantic pairings. There was a lot of hopping, jumping, and waving of arms. It kind of looked like what I've heard about mosh pits, except not nearly as squished together as real mosh pits must be. The music was loud and heavily techno/rap-influenced, as best I could tell (what do I know about popular music?). The whole thing was a lot more athletic than erotic.

And that's the way it continued. With the exception of the slow dances — of which there were maybe three, in the two hours I was there — kids weren't dancing as couples. The slow dances were much the way I remember, with boys and girls wrapping their arms around each other and swaying side to side, kind-of in time to the music. That part of the evening seemed strangely like an afterthought, though. Most of the time, there was more couple action at the tables than in the dance area: kids cuddling or talking, but nothing more than what you'd see during lunchtime at a typical school, I expect.

Eventually it occurred to me that unlike high school dances of my time, what I was seeing wasn't about pairing up romantically. Guys weren't asking girls out onto the dance floor (or vice versa). Teen hormones were clearly in evidence, but they had to do more with working out energy with other teens in creative ways than with checking each other out. Frankly, I've been to science fiction club meetings with more romantic tension than I saw out on the dance floor last night. In short, the evening really wasn't about courting (or pre-courting) behavior — at least not any more than all teen interactions are about that. That's a major change from the dances of my youth: both those I remember and everything I've heard reported by contemporaries.

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The other thing I noticed is harder to characterize. I want to give it a try, though, because in some ways it represents just as fundamental a shift as the first, or perhaps the same fundamental shift as the first.

The teen years, from what I've observed, are often characterized by a kind of awkward earnestness, doing its best to camouflage itself behind a mask of attempted irony and misdirection. Social acceptance is often literally a matter of survival. Teens do their best to hide that vulnerability by pretending that what they're doing and the reactions they get from both peers and adults don't really matter to them.

What I saw at last night's dance was a bit like that, except less serious. The kids at the dance mostly really didn't care about what they were doing, except as a way to have fun. It was all a kind a tongue-in-cheek performance to them, whether what they were imitating was dirty dancing, disco, or swing (all of which you might see at any given time). They were essentially all goofing off, in a way that was social while at the same time highly individualistic.

(I should also comment here about the variety in dress, which ranged from jeans and t-shirts to cocktail dresses and mini-skirts, to button-up shirts and even a few ties. All evidently part of whatever performance the person wanted to enact. One kid I saw was wearing a pair of truly horrendous early-60s-geek-style glasses with huge plastic frames. I wondered at first if fashion had taken another truly unfortunate swing of the pendulum, but later decided that it was probably a bit of deliberate parody. Or maybe not. Who am I to know?)

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So what do I make of all this?

It's easy to overgeneralize. Teen behavior, for all that we talk about the universal impact of the Internet, tends to manifest within often highly idiosyncratic microcultures — a fancy way of saying that my local high school may simply be weird. And I'm sure there's a lot I missed, or misinterpreted, or misapplied based on an inadequate sampling (or too much attachment to an elegant hypothesis). And yet… Results of direct observation certainly shouldn't be dismissed. There's something immensely powerful about firsthand perceptions, especially when it comes to informing fiction, which is always inevitably about the particular as opposed to the general.

From a broad cultural perspective, I can't help but think about how this calls into question the common wisdom about dances as a venue for dating and pre-dating experience. I'm sure dances can still serve that purpose, especially in settings like the Mormon church where expectations are colored by what the Old Folks say. But if what I saw is representative, we're swimming against the tide on this one. Asserting that this isn't the way dances ought to be risks making our advice irrelevant and/or confusing. Do we really have any right to insist that our children adhere not just to our values, but also to the culture of our youth? That's a losing battle. Teens, by definition, own teen culture. I suspect attempts to change that are ultimately doomed to failure.

Which is more than enough pontificating based on a scant two hours of time done at a high school dance. I'm off now to attend a rocket launching sponsored by the Minnesota Amateur Spacemodeler Association…