Microfic time - lost

I had to do 100 words on the theme of 'Lost' last week. It get's tricky when the word count goes that low. I was amazed how much people could pack into it. I opted for monologue as a strategy.

Under the Bed

Hello!

Look under the bed.

Under. The. Bed.

No, not in your sock drawer. When have I ever been anywhere near your sock drawer? I'm down here, behind the crisp packet.

It's really nasty under here. You know that, right?

Look, this is getting us nowhere. Get your mum to help.

No, I'm not behind the radiator. How would I even fit... oh. So that's where my boots went. Right.

That's it! Just reach a bit further in. Mind the old apple... yeah. That.

Finally! Action Man reporting for duty. Let's get this battle started. But first, find me some bloody clothes.

Waterstones and dark fantasy

I was browsing the genre shelves of my local Waterstones today to pick up a book for my flight on Monday. While I was there I thought I would do that writerly thing they all tell you to do and check out what's on the shelves in general. You know the sort of thing: what's selling, what's getting promotional coverage, etc etc.

I have tweeted before that Waterstones has a dark fantasy shelf. Yay, said I. Clearly this stuff is selling. Maybe they'd like an English one to go with all the American ones on the shelf. Maybe my book will not be the subject of agentish sniggers and coffee expelled in the direction of monitors.

Got to be honest though, after a closer look today, I have my reservations. They seem to have lumped all the paranormal romance and urban fantasy featuring female MC's onto this dark fantasy shelf. Okay, fine. Except the Jim Butcher books, which are urban fantasy, are across the way in Science Fiction. So is American Gods by Neil Gaiman (bought that one for the plane, can't wait). High fantasy and comic fantasy were also in Science Fiction.

So why is urban fantasy split across the two shelves?

There are two reasons that I can think of, and I don't like one of them very much. Have we got into the situation where the bookshops think we need a separate shelf of urban fantasy for girls? Heaven forbid that they should corrupt the proper books. Better keep them nice and clear in case it's contagious.

The second one is that the whole shelf was paranormal romance, which I was mistaking for urban fantasy. That makes me wonder where the line is. Does an urban fantasy become a paranormal romance as soon as there is a relationship in there somewhere? Would any urban fantasy with romantic elements be viewed as a paranormal romance for the purpose of shelving?

What I really need to do, I suppose, is make a note of all the authors and see where they fall on the spectrum. As for where my book would fall? I haven't a flaming clue any more.

What did you read in your teens?

This morning I woke up to the big twitter kerfuffle #YAsaves about a Wall Street Journal article. I read a lot of young adult fiction and follow a few YA authors on twitter, so it pretty much jumped out at me.

In the article the author slated modern young adult books as being overwhelmingly dark and violent, and unsuitable for teens. This led to an avalanche of twitter posts and blog posts about how many young people are trapped in dark and violent lives and value something which makes them feel less alone. This came from YA authors who have received letters from teens saying this, and direct posts by teens. Sadly the spammers latched onto a trending topic and drowned the feed in garbage, but a wonderful person preserved some of these tweets on storify so you can see what I mean.

I tried to think about the books I read as a teen to see how this alleged flood of darkness compared with the late 80's (yes, I know I'm old, shut up), and to be honest, I realise that I didn't read young adult. I had a library card and the freedom to read whatever I chose (no censorship in our house. Love you, Mum!) so I ploughed through the children's section and read everything in it, then pretty much without looking up moved onto the next available shelf, which was adult genre fiction. For some unknown reason, they put what young adult books there were on the other side of the library. I didn't even see them until I had exhausted the adult genre fiction and was eyeing the non-fiction shelves.

So, the books I read as a so-called impressionable teen were adult horror (every one I could find), fantasy and thriller, with the occasional old-skool rapetastic romance thrown in, the kind that the Smart Bitches have a field day with occasionally. If this article author thinks YA darkness is bad, she should have seen what I was reading.

Those horror books didn't do anything to change me. What shaped me were my real life experiences, not things I read on a page. I don't propose to censor The Boy's reading, even if I did chicken out of reading the Tales of 1001 Nights to him.

I am really curious about the rest of the world, though. What books did you read as a teen? Do you feel that you were scarred by inappropriate books or saved by loving censorship?

Careful who's listening

Cartoon courtesy of Mark du Toit

I'm in the opening stages of another book at the moment, and researching my little socks off. This has caused a certain amount of domestic alarm. Beloved mother, you see, was a nurse before she retired, so when she rang her eldest daughter to ask how she was and how The Boy did in his school cross country race, she got a barrage of questions I had been saving up to ask her. They went a bit like this:

• How often do you turn someone who is completely paralysed to prevent bedsores?
• Would you feed them through a tube?
• How soon would muscle wastage set in?
• What kind of physical therapy would they receive?
• If someone was just pretending to be paralysed, would the therapist be able to feel it?

We wittered on for about twenty minutes about the care and treatment of paralysis, until suddenly I hear: "No, stop it. Give me the phone back, go away. Everyone's fine. Stop worrying."

Then in a tone of complete exasperation: "She's writing another book."

Turns out that esteemed stepfather was having kittens listening to her end of the conversation, thinking that someone in the family was paralysed and in hospital. I suppose it's slightly better than being caught trying to find out how to be an effective terrorist.

And so my personal contribution to the craft of writing today is: when you do your research, be careful who's listening.

My writing challenge is going to be how to cover do-it-yourself catheter removal when breaking out of hospital. Sexy, huh?

Microfic competition result

Big cheer up moment for me tonight. I came second in my first writing competition, 250 words on a prompt of 'dirt' for Watford Writers. Amazing what a little bit of positive reinforcement feels like after weeks of revisions.

I've been trying to avoid flash fiction lately and force myself to write longer, because for a while, everything I wrote seemed to come in at 1500 words or less. I think I naturally write short, which causes me no end of pain as I try to expand my MS to something approaching novel length. Microfic is great fun though. It's a challenge to see how much story you can pack into 250 words. This was what I came up with.

A blessing on your fields

I have never seen an uglier thing as I turn the little statue over in my hands, all lumpen breasts and belly and huge buttocks. It doesn’t even have a face.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Laura says. “I saw it in the souk and knew you’d love it.  It’s supposed to bring fertility to your fields.”

“It’s wonderful,” I lie.

When she’s gone I throw my fat, pregnant statue out onto the lawn. Stupid statue and stupid, insensitive Laura who has no idea how her gift makes me feel. The dog retrieves it and takes it to her favourite spot under the honeysuckle.

The postman brings my letter the next day. The dog bites her tongue in her frenzy guarding the house, but the spectre of bad news always finds its way in. Tooth marks and bloody smears on the envelope won’t change anything.

I shut her out in the garden to drip blood and calm down as I open it. I already know what it will say.

In the morning a swathe of wheat has grown out of the dirt under the honeysuckle. The dog looks confused. In the afternoon she comes into season and breaks out of the garden, returning late and smug. There might be puppies.

She’s spayed.

That night as my husband sleeps, I lay under the honeysuckle on a bed of immature wheat. I pull a knife across my palm and let blood drip on to the dirt in front of the statue.

I can’t wait.

A not very dauntless book reviewer abandons ship

I've decided to abandon ship on book reviews because I suck at them beyond all measure and the last thing I want to do is damn books with faint praise where they deserve more. For example, The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston, which I just reviewed, is beautiful and compelling and I'm not sure I really got that across. Think I'll leave structured reviews to the experts.

What I really want to do, I think, is explore what interests me in the world building of books. For me, The Freak Observer raised all sorts of questions about poverty and universal health care. I love reading YA, but my thoughts often drift to the protagonist's parents.What must it be like to raise a child when you can't afford for them to get sick or injured, when it's that or food and utilities?

In Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan, Olivia was driven mad by something, which I won't mention because it is a huge spoiler if you haven't read it yet. She still had to hold herself together and get a job. What must that have been like, to have to go to work and be nice to your boss and your colleagues when your world has collapsed and you are living a nightmare which has you screaming inside your head? Olivia deserves a prequel book of her own one day.

A YA book with world building that just blew me away was Divergent by Veronica Roth. In my new approach of not doing a structured review, I will just say that Divergent was amazing; it completely de-railed my day yesterday because I couldn't put it down. She painted a powerful picture with very simple and straightforward prose.

It is when world building is this strong that I get the urge to explore it and think about other POVs than the protagonist's. In this case, what would it be like to be a Dauntless mother? We saw young Dauntless, including very young instructors, and we saw corrupt Dauntless leaders. We encountered one older woman, going by the streak of grey in her hair. Then again, I had some of those by the age of thirty. I don't think we saw any old Dauntless anywhere. It made me wonder, do they fade away, hand over the flag to their children and take no active part in society?

I am no stranger to the quest for adrenaline, but motherhood sucked it right out of me. How would you reconcile the motto of your faction with the bone-deep need to keep your child safe? The internal conflict would be acute. Would you fear for them so much that you would quietly encourage them to choose another faction? Would faction allegiance survive your concern for their life?

The picture painted was one of Dauntless youth, and it was an alluring one, even if few of us would survive it in real life. Given the little nugget in the book that the city gates are locked from the outside, there appears to be the foundation for more books in the Divergent universe. I would love the opportunity to find out more about the world Roth has built, including the eventual future of that youth, when I read them.

TBR challenge April - The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston

Hardcover, Carolrhoda Books, 2010

Disclosure: I didn't buy this book, I won it in the draw for contributors to Maureen Johnson's Next Little Shelterbox campaign on twitter.

High school student Loa suffers a series of losses, one after the other. One of her few friends is killed in a road traffic accident, another leaves the country, her father loses his job, and most profoundly, her disabled sister dies. Caring for Loa's sister is the glue that binds the family together, and when she dies, grief affects them all.

The main thing that stood out for me in this book was Loa's voice. The author has nailed the sense of isolation and suppressed pain that carries Loa through her life not quite caring about anything that happens to her in the face of all the things that already have. Death is the Bony Guy, and he is never far away from her thoughts, which she expresses with a certain wryness. Despite this she never disconnects completely. She works to deal with her losses and keeps going using her own unique outlook on life.

Her family's new poverty makes even the simplest things difficult, and I found the lack of a safety net for the family quite shocking. This makes the book sound depressing, but it wasn't. Things get better for everyone, and I finished the book glad I had read it, even if I did wipe away a few tears in the middle. Loa felt very real.

Not my normal genre by any stretch, but a welcome change, and a book I would recommend for anyone wanting to read something a little different.