Red Blood to the Knee
Oct. 22nd, 2012 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustOn Friday we wasted money on Paranormal Activity 4, which sadly mainly proves that the franchise has officially run itself into the ground, and on Sunday I went to a CZP double book-launch, which moon_custafer has a pretty accurate run-down of at her LJ. OTOH, I'm almost definitely now a hard push—maybe two sections—away from being done on "Trap-Weed", although I've also officially come to the end of my existent notes, which means it's slightly difficult to reckon exactly how long things will take from here on in. One way or the other, it's almost 5,600 words long at this point; pretty good, for something that began as a bit of a joke. (Still, as Lois Tilton's Locus review of “Nanny Grey” proves, sometimes keeping yourself amused probably just isn't really enough to build a whole story around, no matter how much you enjoy doing it.)
Haven't done a Hallowe'en entry since last Wednesday, though, so that needs to be rectified. But not today. Instead, I've been thinking a bit about YA, since it ensues that I'm going to write some, though not immediately. Previously, although many of my formative models were obviously YA (Mollie Hunter's The Thirteenth Member, which re-frames the story of James the First and Sixth vs. the North Berwick Coven from the POV of a young stableboy who knows one of the witches involved, informs much of the Five-Family Coven's historical underpinnings, as does the type of witchcraft practiced in L.M. Boston's An Enemy at Green Knowe and Josephine Poole's Moon Eyes), I've always hitherto sort of fallen into the category of being one of those annoying people who doesn't quite get not so much why adults would read YA per se, but why so many adults I “know” increasingly seem to only want to read stuff categorized as YA.
(A lot of the ones I've eavesdropped on say it's because with YA, you don't have to deal quite so much with the hyper-heteronormative male/female sexual dynamics imposed on almost every mainstream narrative aimed at their own age-groups, but from my POV, that doesn't really hold up, because the bulk of current YA is built around polarized romantic triangles; I'll also point out that a lot of these people are younger than me, and thus came of age while feverishly writing porn for things like the Harry Potter series, so if they want to avoid sexuality in their narrative choices, one might think they'd range a bit further afield.
Then again, as I well know, the plain fact is that sex is probably going to make its way into the mix no matter what your genre of choice. Even while reading something like Jo Walton's brilliant Among Friends, a book so interesting I almost wished I belonged to a book club just so I could discuss it later on after I'd finished, the fact that I found myself constantly going: “Oh how interesting, she has her main character talking about the saturation of acceptable adolescent sexuality she finds herself surrounded with and questioning it the same way I used to, making that familiar distinction between theory and practice, having her wonder if she's essentially asexual even though she also mentions regular masturbation, then having her drift back towards a quote-quote 'normal' attraction to a slightly older guy in such a way that it doesn't feel like a betrayal of her earlier ideals...” simply meant that sex is undeniably there, a force of nature to be reckoned with like any other, which only makes sense, given the holistic/animistic magical system she's set up for Mori Phelps to exist inside.)
So what other attractions are we talking about? Well, YA books are usually faster to read, and definitely cheaper to buy—up here you can get a YA hardback for less than twenty bucks, which is pretty nice, when you think about the fact that an “adult” hardback regularly runs thirty to thirty-five. Of course, they're also usually part of a series, so cost can mount up that way, but that's just as likely to be true of “adult” genre fiction, my usual meat of choice. YA books are also usually more...cheerful than “adult” books, overall, though that's not always true either, frankly. (And speaking of which, why would people who constantly subvert other people's narratives want a restorative model, anyhow? It seems antithetical to their interests.)
All these rumninations first came up around the time I finished Diana Wynne Jones's Fire & Hemlock, which I'd never done before, even though she's well-represented on my shelf of YA favourites. As I've said on at least two panels, one of the first books I ever remember feeling that wonderful shift of perspective in which you suddenly realized you were seeing the same things in at least two distinctly different ways was with her book Power of Three; by that time, I'd also experienced first-hand—via Dogsbody's emotional stomach-punch of an ending—her power to twist the heart, without even seeming to want to, simply by following whatever plot-threads had already been set in motion through to their most inescapably logical conclusions.
So when I found myself reading Fire & Hemlock, I was already prepared for the way the chapter-heading quotes told me what I needed to know about what was "really" going on, in a way that initially felt a tiny bit forced; from Eight Days of Luke, after all, I knew that she absolutely understood how to overlay mythology on top of “realism” and make them both palpable in almost exactly the same way. Here, Thomas Lynn/Thomas the Rhymer, the tithe to Hell and some weird sort of familial compact with the Fae involving changelings are definitely hinted at throughout, but shot through with observations about the 1960s and our main character's evolution as a reader/writer, a person whose fantasies and “lies” become tales and stories, whose ability to pattern-match and spot narrative tropes is what allows her to keep remembering what everybody else forgets, and defeat a system of magic which can only be fought contra-intuitively. God bless her for it, too; I'm not sure my own logic-instincts would ever allow for that, but it's very fun to watch and extremely moving, especially in the climax.
Anyhoo. I've had that brewing for a while, so I just wanted to get it down. It'll do for a post, if nothing else.
Haven't done a Hallowe'en entry since last Wednesday, though, so that needs to be rectified. But not today. Instead, I've been thinking a bit about YA, since it ensues that I'm going to write some, though not immediately. Previously, although many of my formative models were obviously YA (Mollie Hunter's The Thirteenth Member, which re-frames the story of James the First and Sixth vs. the North Berwick Coven from the POV of a young stableboy who knows one of the witches involved, informs much of the Five-Family Coven's historical underpinnings, as does the type of witchcraft practiced in L.M. Boston's An Enemy at Green Knowe and Josephine Poole's Moon Eyes), I've always hitherto sort of fallen into the category of being one of those annoying people who doesn't quite get not so much why adults would read YA per se, but why so many adults I “know” increasingly seem to only want to read stuff categorized as YA.
(A lot of the ones I've eavesdropped on say it's because with YA, you don't have to deal quite so much with the hyper-heteronormative male/female sexual dynamics imposed on almost every mainstream narrative aimed at their own age-groups, but from my POV, that doesn't really hold up, because the bulk of current YA is built around polarized romantic triangles; I'll also point out that a lot of these people are younger than me, and thus came of age while feverishly writing porn for things like the Harry Potter series, so if they want to avoid sexuality in their narrative choices, one might think they'd range a bit further afield.
Then again, as I well know, the plain fact is that sex is probably going to make its way into the mix no matter what your genre of choice. Even while reading something like Jo Walton's brilliant Among Friends, a book so interesting I almost wished I belonged to a book club just so I could discuss it later on after I'd finished, the fact that I found myself constantly going: “Oh how interesting, she has her main character talking about the saturation of acceptable adolescent sexuality she finds herself surrounded with and questioning it the same way I used to, making that familiar distinction between theory and practice, having her wonder if she's essentially asexual even though she also mentions regular masturbation, then having her drift back towards a quote-quote 'normal' attraction to a slightly older guy in such a way that it doesn't feel like a betrayal of her earlier ideals...” simply meant that sex is undeniably there, a force of nature to be reckoned with like any other, which only makes sense, given the holistic/animistic magical system she's set up for Mori Phelps to exist inside.)
So what other attractions are we talking about? Well, YA books are usually faster to read, and definitely cheaper to buy—up here you can get a YA hardback for less than twenty bucks, which is pretty nice, when you think about the fact that an “adult” hardback regularly runs thirty to thirty-five. Of course, they're also usually part of a series, so cost can mount up that way, but that's just as likely to be true of “adult” genre fiction, my usual meat of choice. YA books are also usually more...cheerful than “adult” books, overall, though that's not always true either, frankly. (And speaking of which, why would people who constantly subvert other people's narratives want a restorative model, anyhow? It seems antithetical to their interests.)
All these rumninations first came up around the time I finished Diana Wynne Jones's Fire & Hemlock, which I'd never done before, even though she's well-represented on my shelf of YA favourites. As I've said on at least two panels, one of the first books I ever remember feeling that wonderful shift of perspective in which you suddenly realized you were seeing the same things in at least two distinctly different ways was with her book Power of Three; by that time, I'd also experienced first-hand—via Dogsbody's emotional stomach-punch of an ending—her power to twist the heart, without even seeming to want to, simply by following whatever plot-threads had already been set in motion through to their most inescapably logical conclusions.
So when I found myself reading Fire & Hemlock, I was already prepared for the way the chapter-heading quotes told me what I needed to know about what was "really" going on, in a way that initially felt a tiny bit forced; from Eight Days of Luke, after all, I knew that she absolutely understood how to overlay mythology on top of “realism” and make them both palpable in almost exactly the same way. Here, Thomas Lynn/Thomas the Rhymer, the tithe to Hell and some weird sort of familial compact with the Fae involving changelings are definitely hinted at throughout, but shot through with observations about the 1960s and our main character's evolution as a reader/writer, a person whose fantasies and “lies” become tales and stories, whose ability to pattern-match and spot narrative tropes is what allows her to keep remembering what everybody else forgets, and defeat a system of magic which can only be fought contra-intuitively. God bless her for it, too; I'm not sure my own logic-instincts would ever allow for that, but it's very fun to watch and extremely moving, especially in the climax.
Anyhoo. I've had that brewing for a while, so I just wanted to get it down. It'll do for a post, if nothing else.
