Kate Elliott's Blog, page 7
August 27, 2015
Remembering Japan 1945 – 1946: Chapter Eleven: Madame Butterfly
From October 1945 to June 1946 my father, a Navy signalman, was stationed in Japan at Toriga-saki by the town of Kamoi, at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. He was then nineteen years old, a young Danish-American man from rural Oregon. The experience made a profound impression on him and he spoke of it often.
In Chapter Eleven, he recounts the story of a young Japanese woman that left a deep impression on him.
Chapter Eleven: Madame Butterfly
Chapter Eight:The Cold War Begins?
Chapter Seven: The Toriga Saki Fleet
Chapter Six: General Douglas MacArthur
Chapter Five: Japanese Signalmen
Chapter Two: Harbor Entrance Control Post Toriga Saki, Tokyo Bay
Chapter One: The Sea Devil to Japan.
Introduction can be read here.
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
The Month Ahead (March 2015)
That it is March already does not thrill me, given the volume of work I have to do. At this point I am not trying to get ahead or even get caught up; I’m just trying not to fall any farther behind.
On Fridays I will continue to post chapters of my father’s post-World War II memoir, Remembering Japan: 1945 -1946.
Each Thursday I hope to post a short “enthusiasm” for a novel, short fiction collection, or other media, but that will depend on how each week shakes out.
In February I did some publicity (posts and interviews) for the publication of my short fiction collection, THE VERY BEST OF KATE ELLIOTT (Tachyon Publications). The collection also got a number of gratifyingly positive reviews. It’s not too late to buy and read it!
I also completed and turned in the copy-edited ms of Black Wolves (Orbit Books). The novel now goes to typesetting and I will next see it in page proofs. Publication date remains 3 November 2015.
I continue to work on a draft of the sequel to my YA debut Court of Fives (Little,Brown Young Readers). Having sorted out a plot tangle (with the patient aid of one of my editors) I have what looks to me like a clear shot to the end.
An essay on Writing Women Characters will go up some time this month on Tor.com. It’s long and meant not as an “opinion piece” but as more of a workshop style essay.
I am still working on The Beatriceid, which is now my most overdue item.
The three projects mentioned above are my focus for March. I have other posts, essays, interviews, short stories, and novels awaiting my attention but for the moment they have to stand in line. I’m not complaining; far from it.
I am at that stage of my workload where I am having to say No to things I would like to say Yes to because I have too many outstanding projects and commitments (often small ones, but the small ones pile up into monstrously intimidating mountains). I like saying Yes to things but when I have too much unfinished work, especially of multiple diverse types, I often end up becoming exhausted by the mere thought of the overload and don’t get anything done at all.
So: March is for finding the space to breathe.
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
Writing Women Characters (an essay)
I have written a long essay on Writing Women Characters, published on Tor.com
“To suggest that “inequality” or “violence” is the only or the most important thing in portraying women’s lives in a reconstructed past is a profoundly incomplete representation of a much richer territory.”
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
Remembering Japan: 1945 – 1946: Chapter Six: General Douglas MacArthur
From October 1945 to June 1946 my father, a Navy signalman, was stationed in Japan at Toriga-saki by the town of Kamoi, at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. He was then nineteen years old, a young Danish-American man from rural Oregon. The experience made a profound impression on him and he spoke of it often.
In Chapter Six, he relates his brief encounter with General Douglas MacArthur, and also discusses the state of Tokyo after the war. “We were so stunned by what we saw – the total destruction of two great modern cities.”
Chapter Six: General Douglas MacArthur
Chapter Five: Japanese Signalmen
Chapter Two: Harbor Entrance Control Post Toriga Saki, Tokyo Bay
Chapter One: The Sea Devil to Japan.
Introduction can be read here.
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
Remembering Japan: 1945 – 1946: Chapter Seven: The Toriga Saki Fleet
From October 1945 to June 1946 my father, a Navy signalman, was stationed in Japan at Toriga-saki by the town of Kamoi, at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. He was then nineteen years old, a young Danish-American man from rural Oregon. The experience made a profound impression on him and he spoke of it often.
In Chapter Seven, The Toriga Saki Fleet, Gerry mentions how they came into possession of a barge, as well as several adventures with the picket boat.
Chapter Seven: The Toriga Saki Fleet
Chapter Six: General Douglas MacArthur
Chapter Five: Japanese Signalmen
Chapter Two: Harbor Entrance Control Post Toriga Saki, Tokyo Bay
Chapter One: The Sea Devil to Japan.
Introduction can be read here.
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
The Secret Genesis of COURT OF FIVES In Title IX at YA Bibliophile
Kate Elliott reveals Novel Secrets on COURT OF FIVES at YA Bibliophile, (where you can also enter a giveaway to win a free copy of COURT OF FIVES!).
When I was a girl the books written “for girls” almost never included the girls themselves being involved in thrilling sword fights, arduous overland treks, riots, and revolutions even though that was exactly the story I most wanted to read. Boys got those stories, not girls.
[…]When I was a young teen the girls often did not even have official leagues. Girls played “club” sports while boys played official high school sports, with leagues, playoffs, and state titles. All that changed with Title IX. Girls had to get the same opportunities as boys.
Read more about this Novel Secret at YA Bibliophile!
The Novel Secrets Blog Tour lets readers discover fascinating behind-the-scenes information connected to brand-new YA novels! Thank you to Heidi at YA Bibliophile for participating!
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
Diversity Panels: Where Next?
I’m writing this post not because I have answers but because I have questions.
I just returned from WorldCon 73/Sasquan, held in Spokane, Washington, from 18 – 23 August 2015. From my perspective both Sasquan programming and everyone who organized and volunteered for Sasquan as a whole did a fine job in a particularly difficult and fraught year. I say that to make it clear this post is not about Sasquan but rather about the general situation within the SFF field and the larger world of publishing and popular culture in general.
In the past SFF conventions have sometimes featured panels on “using foreign lands and histories to give new color and detail to your SFF,” a format I personally find appropriative (even though I can be accused of doing just that in my writing). Those aren’t panels analyzing and opening up for discussion the need for and presence of often-marginalized writers/artists and stories and characters, and how (usually USA) publishing (and Hollywood) culture supports or hinders these efforts.
In the wake of 2009’s #Racefail discussion, LJ blogger delux-vivens (much lamented since her passing) asked for a wild unicorn herd check in to show that people frequently told they don’t read SFF and aren’t present in SFF circles do in fact exist. In some ways I personally think of this as the first unofficial “diversity panel.”
Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo launched the Diversity in YA tour and website in 2011. At that time, featuring a diverse group of authors talking about the existence and importance of Diversity in YA seemed fresh. In 2011, when the World Fantasy Convention took place in San Diego, Lo wrote to the programming committee to offer to moderate a Diversity in YA panel for convention programming. Instead, WFC programming scheduled a panel titled “I Believe That Children Are the Future” whose description began, “How do we convert YA fantasy readers into adult fantasy readers?”
These days, more conventions & comiccons feature panels on diversity: what it is, why it matters, how we can support it. I’ve seen examples of these being absolutely packed, especially when they first became features of the con and library landscape, because they addressed a pressing need to discuss how the publishing industries too too often marginalize many as they highlight the same few and provide more publicity and visibility to certain kinds of stories while neglecting others in a systemic way.
Now, however, without in any way suggesting that the need for discussion is over or that we have solved the problems, I am wondering to what degree the “diversity panel” may be beginning to become less effective and perhaps even to exacerbate the problem.
I’m not the first person to bring this up or ask these questions, not by a long shot. [Please feel free to link to related discussions in the comments.] I emphasize I don’t have answers; I only have questions, and I’m writing this post not to suggest solutions but because I am wondering what people think and what their own experiences are.
For example, at Sasquan I was on a Diversity in YA panel with Fonda Lee, Cynthia Ward, Cassandra Clarke, and Wesley Chu. First of all, Fonda Lee did a fantastic job moderating: She prepared for the panel by emailing us a list of questions she planned to ask and a course of action she planned to take as moderator to cover as much ground as possible in the 45-minute time frame we were allowed. The panelists all had smart things to say. But let’s look at the line up.
Ward was placed on the panel because she and Nisi Shawl wrote a well-known and much cited work on “Writing the Other”. Lee and Clarke have both published YA (Young Adult) novels, Zeroboxer and The Assassin’s Curse, respectively. My YA debut fantasy Court of Fives was released the week of Worldcon. Chu, however, has not written YA or MG although his debut novel, The Lives of Tao, did receive a special citation from YALSA as a novel that could also work for teens. As Chu himself pointed out, there really was no reason for him to be on the panel except that he is of Asian ancestry and thus fits in an obvious diversity box.
Chu’s fourth novel Time Salvagers was published in July, a straight-ahead SF time travel story, yet at Worldcon he was not placed on any of what I’ll call “mainstream” science fiction programming items in which he could discuss, as a writer with other writers, writing science fiction, science fictional ideas, and the use of science fiction to comment on trends and futures. This strikes me as the very opposite of what we might hope to accomplish with an emphasis on more “diverse” programming.
In this same fashion, besides a reading, autographing, and Kaffeeklatsch (small group meeting), I participated in five other programming items: two I proposed (a dialogue with Ken Liu () on world building and a powerpoint lecture on Narrative Structure and Expectation), one last minute (and really fun) Ditch Diggers live podcast (hosted by Matt Wallace and Mur Lafferty), and two “assigned by the convention,” which were both YA panels, one on world building and the other on diversity. I was also offered a panel on Teen/YA Romance, which I asked to be taken off of.
That’s three YA panels. Now in one sense I believe the programming committee was kindly acknowledging that my YA debut was out that week, and yet I couldn’t help but notice that although I have a new epic fantasy series whose first volume comes out in November (not so far away) and although I have under my belt multiple multi-volume series, I was not asked to be on a panel titled “Writing the Multi-Volume Series” (populated by four male authors all of whom, I hasten to add, are bestsellers). This isn’t the first time in recent years I’ve been given programming in diversity or gender and not in multi-volume series and/or epic fantasy, which has been my main sub genre for — oh — all of my career.
I understand the desire of a convention committee to present bestselling authors on their panels (or much beloved older authors at Worldcon given the importance of fannish history). People naturally want to see them! I do too! Yet at the same time if they are the only ones consistently tagged for such panels, the practice ends up highlighting the visibility of a limited number of (often already very visible) people.
I wonder if the “diversity panel” is in some circumstances becoming a way to “fulfill” the pressure to have the diversity conversation while meanwhile funneling it off to one side in a way that prevents actual diversity from fully integrating into the “regular” “mainstream” discussion.
I’m not saying this happens deliberately on the part of organizers but rather that people may need to pause and reflect on how decisions like this get made. The need for discussion remains acute, and a diversity panel may be an effective way to introduce people to concepts they haven’t thought much about, yet discussion only takes us so far. Dismantling the systemic biases embedded in our culture is the ultimate goal but obviously is a vast, complex, and long term endeavor.
Meanwhile: Visibility matters. Action matters.
Here’s a final observation from Sasquan. My world-building dialogue with Ken Liu happened to be scheduled back-to-back with the Diversity in YA panel, in the same room. Ken and I had a full room, while the Diversity in YA panel (which took place in the next time slot) had perhaps a third of the audience. While I understand that most who came to the world building panel were writers hoping for insight, I can’t help but think that people are increasingly looking for diverse panels rather than diversity panels.
What have your experiences been with diversity panels? Where next?
END NOTE:
The diversity conversation includes many voices. I list a very few here:
We Need Diverse Books
Deb Reese’s blog American Indians in Children’s Literature
medievalpoc: People of Color in European History
Leonicka Valcius’s work on #DiverseCanLit
In this The Book Smugglers Roundtable, Charles A. Tan asks a panel of writers “What do you think of the term ‘diversity’ when it’s used in publishing?”
An interview of Charles A Tan by Sarah McGarry on diversity and publishing
Diversity discussed as an American term
Daniel José Older on how positional the word ‘diversity’ really is
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
August 26, 2015
COURT OF FIVES Behind-the-Scenes at Read, Breathe, Relax
Can’t get enough COURT OF FIVES? Head over to Read, Breathe, Relax for Kate Elliott’s guest post, “From Idea to Publication: The Journey of COURT OF FIVES,” to learn more about the writing process and inspiration for Efea.
Meanwhile, my spouse became co-director of an archaeological dig in the Delta region of Egypt, a site called Tell Timai that flourished during the Greco-Roman era (about 300 B.C.E to 600 C.E.). Naturally I got interested in the history because of his work, and over the next few years I began reading research books and articles on the period and jotting down ideas. Other inspirations also came together at this time, merging into a larger plot.[…]
Eventually I sat down to write…
Read more at Read, Breathe, Relax.
Thank you to Lisa of Read, Breathe, Relax for hosting this stop of the blog tour!
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
August 25, 2015
An Interview with Supernatural Snark
Check out more insight into COURT OF FIVES at Supernatural Snark, including more about Kal, Jes, and, of course, Kate Elliott. (There’s even a five-word sneak peek at the second book in the trilogy!):
If Jes was helping you train to compete in The Fives, what would the first words out of her mouth be on day one when she evaluated your fitness and strategy?
“I have so much respect that you have come to train, Honored Lady, but at your age I have to suggest that you might think twice about setting your sights on the highest levels of competition.”
Read more at Supernatural Snark!
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
August 24, 2015
More Interviews w/ Flying Through Fiction & Book Rambles
Kate Elliott’s COURT OF FIVES blog tour continues with a two-part interview with Brittany of Brittany’s Book Rambles and Mariam of Flying Through Fiction, in which she discusses setting boundaries as a writer, obscure research facts, and her dream cast for COURT OF FIVES :
Do you have a dream cast or soundtrack for your book?
I haven’t had time to figure out a dream cast, and I honestly prefer to see who readers come up with because readers’ takes on how they think people look is much more interesting to me than my own. However I do think model Hideo Muraoka (although he’s too old) looks something like I imagine Kal looking. You can see how Kal looks HERE
Stuntwoman Jessie Graff doesn’t look at all like Jes (and she’s about 13 years too old for the part anyway) but she’s built the way I imagine Jes is built: tall, lean, strong, and an acrobat (in fact, Graff is former competitive gymnast AND pole vaulter: what a combination!). Watch Graff’s fantastic performance at the Venice Finals of the 2015 season of American Ninja Warrior to see how I imagine Jes might look on a Fives court, and especially watch how intently Graff plots each obstacle in her head before she tackles it.
Read the first part of the interviews at Book Rambles, and the second part at Flying Through Fiction. Thank you to Mariam and Brittany for hosting these interviews!
Want to learn more about the behind-the-scenes of COURT OF FIVES? Keep up with the COURT OF FIVES blog tour with Kate Elliott:
8/11 The Book Wars
8/16 Artsy Reader Girl
8/18 Two Chicks on Books
8/19 Once Upon a Twilight
8/21 Eater of Books
8/22 Adventures in YA Publishing
8/24 Brittany’s Book Rambles & Flying Through Fiction
8/25 Supernatural Snark
8/26 Read. Breathe. Relax.
8/28 A Reader of Fictions
Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.
