Dia Reeves

First, I just want to say congrats to Cindy Pon whose book FURY OF THE PHOENIX is out today! Y’all should definitely read it–Cindy is probably one of the most twisted writers I know (don’t be fooled by the sweet facade!) She’s having a kickass contest, so enter to win!

But I also want to continue to offer my support to Jessica Verday who pulled her story from an anthology after the editor asked her to turn her gay couple into a hetero couple on her assumption that the publisher didn’t want to include gay characters.

There’s been a lot of talk about this, and on the blue boards it was suggested numerous times that the editor shouldn’t be cast as the villain simply for making a business decision. I agree that the editor isn’t the villain (she’s actually a nice lady; I know because I’ve worked with her), but this is bigger than her. This is about the deeply entrenched discrimination in the publishing industry. So deeply entrenched, that some editors apparently take for granted that publishers don’t want gay characters.

People keep coming up with all kinds of reasons to rationalize why the editor initially wanted Jessica to make her couple heterosexual, mostly saying that it’s a business decision. I say as long as there’s institutional discrimination, there will always be some halfassed rationale to back it up. It’s a business, people say; you can’t get all emotional when making business decisions.

Can you imagine Rosa Parks boarding the bus thinking, “Well, it’s wrong of them to discriminate against me, but they’re just thinking of the bottom line–making me sit in the back of the bus helps to maintain their profit margins and really, why should my rights as a human being interfere with that?” Gandhi himself said business without morality is complete bullshit. Or something along those lines.

I think when people rationalize like that, they do it out of fear. Institutional discrimination is scary; business on the other hand, well that’s just status quo.

There’ve been some other remarks too. Stupid things like that Jessica has a vendetta against the editor (as though she’s not allowed to not want to work with someone who assumes gay characters are bad business) and she’s being petty by not offering her story now that the publisher has asked her for it nicely. I don’t worry that Jessica’s story won’t ever see the light of day; I’m positive it will. So I don’t think that her decision not to include the story, even after the editor and publisher apologized, is a loss for readers who will certainly have a chance to read it in the near future. We gained something much greater than one story, though. People talk about discrimination in the publishing industry, and now we’ve seen that those people aren’t just making it up. Thanks to Jessica, many MANY people have seen the truth for themselves.

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This is the funniest/lamest conspiracy theory ever–the idea some bloggers (who are also aspiring authors) have that if they write negative reviews of YA books, successful YA authors (the YA Mafia) will blacklist them and ruin their future careers.

I’d never heard of such a thing until Holly Black posted about it: http://blackholly.livejournal.com/148264.html

I brought this up on the Blueboards, so I’m copying my response there here.

It seems like some people who write negative reviews already feel nervous about doing so, and so when they are called on it, even subtlely, they get defensive and maybe even slightly delusional, ie, YA Mafia.

In Holly’s post, in the comments, the bloggers who are worried about this seem to want to have the freedom to write whatever reviews they want, negative or otherwise, but still be welcomed with open arms by the author/authors’ friends/agents/whoever whose feelings they’ve hurt. That’s what I think is naive.

One, even if you write the most evenhanded negative review in the universe, that doesn’t mean that the author will take it that way. You can’t control how people internalize what you’ve written. I think that as authors, we’re better equipped to handle negativity in the form of reviews because that’s part of the job (not all of us of course; Candace Samms anyone?), but bloggers don’t have to ingest the kind of medicine they dish out and so I think being critiqued or disagreed with is harder for them to handle.

That said, I think bloggers should do exactly as they please with regard to writing reviews. Just as long as they understand that everything they do has consequences. Will it ruin their future careers? Of course not. Will it ruin their future relationships with authors who feel (rightly or wrongly) hurt by their past dealings? Of course.

You can’t have it both ways. No one can.

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When you write books marketed for anyone under eighteen you have to deal with a whole set of bullshit that adult authors don’t have to face, namely, WRITING RESPONSIBLY.

Certain people say things like “you can’t write about sex and drugs because, if you do, you’re PROMOTING that behavior.” Those people expect YA authors to write about what teens go through, just not in a graphic or offensive or, you know, honest way. We have to make the good guys good and the bad guys bad, and anytime anyone does anything morally or socially objectionable, they have to be punished. Preferably by lightning so that we all understand that God is punishing them for being bad.

All I can say is screw that. The only thing I’m responsible for is telling a kickass story. All that moralizing and crap, that’s not my job. I’m neither a preacher nor a parent and have no interest in teaching the youth of the world how to be or not be stupid.

I’m not saying that books can’t open kids’ eyes and put all sorts of new ideas into their heads. I read A Clockwork Orange when I was in high school and it blew my hair back. Did I go out and starting raping and killing people? No. Did I reevaluate my ideas about the importance of free will to every individual, even murdering rapists? You bet.

Not saying that I’ve written anything as powerful as A Clockwork Orange, but I’d say any book has the potential to make you think. But once thought becomes action, well, my responsibility as a kickass author ends and your responsiblity as a reader with free will begins.

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Picture it, kiddos: You’re a customer in a bookstore looking for a dark fantasy novel. You look around and see signs for ADULTS, TEENS, and CHILDREN. You’re looking for a young adult novel, so you head for TEENS. Once you’re there, you see more signs for SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, and ROMANCE so you head for the FANTASY shelves. Then you ignore the EPIC FANTASY, and the *NEO-FAIRYTALES, and you finally find the DARK FANTASY book of your dreams. Huzzah, right?

Categories, genres, and subgenres. That’s what it’s all about. YA is a category. All it does is tell you what part of the store you’re in. It doesn’t tell you what type of book you’re getting. Genre tells you that. Genre lets you know that you’re reading a romance and not a mystery, and the subgenre tells you whether the romance is contemporary, historical, or paranormal. See? YA is not a genre. Say it with me so that you will believe it: YA is NOT a genre. Thank you.

*I just made that subgenre up. But what *do* you call all those books about modern fairies or those modern retellings of Cinderella and whatnot?

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Do you know who Grant Hill is? He was this basketball star who was kind of a big deal about ten years ago. I don’t know who he played for or whatever happened to him. All I know is that he was in this awesome Sprite commercial back in the nineties. So if you ever see me point to my face and scream, “I can only be Jake!”, watch this commercial, and you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

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I was just on Twitter, which led me to this post. It’s full of passion and worry and outrage and the comments are full of people shouting, “Amen!” But I don’t get it. I read stuff like this, and it makes me feel like a complete sociopath because I just don’t get it. My first reaction was to laugh because it reminded me of how people were so freaked out in the fifties about rock ‘n roll corrupting their sweet lily-white kiddos. They stood around tearing out their hair and screaming, “Oh won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?” Sixty years later, the kids are all right. Or dead. Whichever.

The points about YA writers being cliquish and how difficult it is to know what teenagers really want to read and ohmygod what’s happening to YA can be summed up quite handily: Who gives a shit?

I’m not saying that in a mean way, but rather in a wide-eyed and totally bewildered way. If a bunch of writers want to stroke each other’s ego by giving each other totally undeserved five stars on Goodreads or join a group like the Tenners (Tenners RULE!) or the Debs or Contemps in order to commiserate about the ups and downs of writing life with the handful of people in the world who could possibly understand what it’s like (the YA world is frigging small and there aren’t that many of us) then how does that hurt anyone?

It doesn’t hurt teens, the majority of whom don’t know or care about our cliques and various other inbred dramas–the only one of us they could even name off the tops of their heads is Stephenie Meyer. And maybe Maggie Stiefvater if they’re feeling brave enough to attempt pronouncing her last name. It doesn’t hurt other writers–the YA community is friendly as crap. Even a misanthrope like me is made to feel welcome. (And if other writers never bothered or don’t care to join a group then that’s their choice. That’s the beauty of living in a free society–nobody has to do anything they don’t want to. Except pay taxes.) It doesn’t hurt bloggers–the blogger/writer relationship is symbiotic; they like to blog about stuff, and we like to be blogged about.

As far as what teens want to read, if there was a simple answer to that we would all be zillionaires. Because then we would write books they would love every time and everyone would be happy and unicorns would slide across the sky on rainbows. Look, when I write something, I do NOT think about what anybody wants but ME. I write what I want to read, and I’m lucky that so far it’s been what other people want to read as well, but I’m not about bending over backward to make anybody happy. (My Goodreads rating will totally testify to that.) I’m the only one I can make happy, and that’s enough of a challenge, believe me.

So, I don’t know. If you wanna be upset because you can’t figure out why people act the way the way they do or what it is they want, then okay, but settle in for a long haul because you’re never gonna figure it out. For my money it’s always better to look inward than outward.

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Feeling nostalgic today. So here’s some stuff I remember watching on Saturday mornings:

Kung Fu Theater is something my mom was into. After the cartoons were over, they’d show a martial arts film, usually a Shaw Brothers epic or something with either Bruce Lee or Bruce Li. The best thing I remember seeing during Kung Fu Theater was 36 Chambers of Shaolin. Best kung fu film EVER.

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Pump Up the Volume is one of my favorite movies. Maybe even in the top ten. It’s clever and subversive and provocative. I was thinking about what I’d blog about today when I remembered Hard Harry from the movie and how sometimes he’s on air for five hours, but sometimes he’s only on for five minutes. I’m not feeling very bloggy at the moment so consider this my five minutes. But I thought I’d present you with a taste of the awesomeness that is PUtV (this clip also summarizes how I feel about my own writing; take that however you want to :p).

Tags: I hate blogging, unheard of awesomeness
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