November 26, 2010

Protesting against increased university fees

Our new insect overlords

I come from a time in the distant past before university fees. I was fortunate enough to attend one of the UK’s top universities without paying any fees myself. Now, in the harsh light of the year 2010, this seems like privilege beyond imagining. I certainly didn’t feel rich, I had £3,000 a year to live on (a gift form my parents since I didn’t qualify for grants) which paid for my accommodation (Class C rooms at class AA rates), my food (Tesco value range) and my books. But I left university with a degree and with no significant debt.

Right now, the average student graduating in July 2011 will find themselves with £21,198 of debt. Students graduating in 2014 may find that figure increases to £40,000 or more. And that’s based on an undergraduate degree only – not postgraduate or research work.

The rationale is that graduates will earn more and therefore will easily be able to pay of this monstrous burden of debt. Cue hollow laughter. Have you looked at the job market recently? Courses with a vocational aspect, professional accreditation or a clear path into a profession will stand students a better chance of graduating into a good job. But for most the future is bleak, especially in the arts. Unemployment is currently standing at 7.7%. For women the statistics are even worse. The number of unemployed women is at 1.02 million, the highest figure since 1988. And please note that this comes at a time when the government is introducing drastic spending cuts in the public sector, reducing Town and District Council spending by 40%. No public sector jobs for you hopefully graduates, and no civil services ones either with cuts affecting them almost as radically.

Our insect overlords seem almost surprised at the scale and scope of the student protests, as if they thought students wouldn’t notice or care about the increased fees. This morning David Willetts (the universities minister) said cheerfully patronised students: “”My real worry is that maybe young people are put off going to university because they think that somehow we are going to be charging them fees upfront. That’s not the plan… No young people or their parents are going to have to reach into their back pocket to pay to go to university. They will only pay after they have graduated. I don’t want any young person, therefore, to be worried about going to university, and some of these protests – they mustn’t put people off.”

Thanks for that, Mr Willetts, I thought it was the crippling burden of debt putting people off going to university. But now I understand those student are just confused and it’s the protests that are worrying people unnecessarily… Come off it!

And so much for widening participation. I actually found myself saying to a colleague “But doens’t the government want people form poor backgrounds without a family history of higher education to go to university… oh wait, it’s the Tories in right now.” Aimhigher, the national programme to get more working-class teenagers into English universities, will close in July 2011. David WIllets think’s it’s no longer needed and that “the universities [should] have the freedom and flexibility to decide how to spend their resources on promoting access.” Yeah, because with dwindling resources and no central support the widening participation programme will continue as vibrant as ever.

But let’s not blame the current cabinet of millionaires though. Born with a silver spoon protruding from every orifice, Cameron and co have no idea what it’s like for ‘ordinary people’ despite throwing that phrase around like a wrecking ball during the election. This is what the Conservative party is like.

I remember growing up as one of Margaret “there’s no such thing as society” Thatcher’s children. I remember the meanness, the hypocrisy and the sheer bloody-mindedness of Tory rule. And now they’re back, like the Evil Empire in act V of Star Wars, and it’s at least partly #NickClegg’sfault. (That’s the last time I ever vote Liberal.)

We should praise and support the students for marching and for protesting an unfairness that will have the worst effect on people not old enough to have voted in the last election. And, to the students, while you’re protesting don’t forget that there will be another election (however hard the Tories try to push it back into the distant mists of the future) and when there is you can march again down to your local poll station and vote them right back out where they belong.

August 30, 2010

Negative reviews

I was prompted to write about negative reviews by this post on Publishers Weekly on The Value of Negative Reviews. The PW post was in turn inspired by a blog post by Sarah Rees Brennan and comments on that blog post about the value of positive vs negative reviews.

Someone said that they didn’t read all positive review sites which is interesting to me because I have done my most reviwing for Armadillo which had a policy of not publishing reviews that panned a book. By and large that rule has held true for me in reviewing. On my blog and in trade magazines you won’t find me reviewing a book negatively. I have in the past reviewed books negatively: in my brief stint as a Guardian teenage reviewer and in online reviews for a BBS I ran for recommended reading. Nowadays I feel uncomfortable about putting bad reviews in the public eye.

I may privately wax lyrical with my friends about hated books. Sometimes I need to vent about a book and my friends get the outpouring of bile about a title I haven’t enjoyed. Like Sarah “I can act out, scene by hateful scene, some of these books.” Our book group has a good balance of liked to hated books and we’ve had several books which we’ve spent a pleasant evening tearing apart. When I review publically, I review books I like.

Even when I complain about an element of a book this is within the context of me contining to read the books. Sometimes I forget to take this into account when criticising long standing series writers. As a collector of writers I can get disappointed with someone’s current strand of writing, like their work generally but not specifically. It can be hard in the fervour of hate for a book to remember that you were gripped while reading it and enjoyed a great deal of it.

I’m suddenly inspired to give negative reviews and to explain the ‘why’ of the negative for books I own and intend to keep. For example:

  • I buy all Steven Brust’s Dragaera books but not in hardback anymore. I love the world and the character and I want Brust to finish the 23? book sequence but I feel they’ve bogged down now and lack the playful stylish inventiveness of the earlier books in the series
  • Did Lois McMaster Bujold hit the ultimate Vorkosigan novel in Memory? Can any book in that series top that masterful work? I end up being disappointed in the novels since that one just because I enjoy them so much and I want so much of them. Is this fair criticism? (The fear of every artist has got to be that you have already completed your best work eg Michael Jackson and Thriller)
  • Diana Wynne Jones will always be on my top ten, Margaret Mahy likewise. But it’s been a while since either of them wrote fiction that influenced me as much as their earlier work. Is that because I’m no longer a teenager?
  • Spider Robinson seems to have turned into Robert Heinlein. The evolution of Callaghans Bar has moved the conceit so far away from the things I liked about it – and yet I continue to buy the series. I like the character development but I hate who the characters have developed into.
  • John Scalzi is experimenting with different POVs in pre-existing story/universe, I want him to get on and write new work. Tie-in novels are not as good as original ones they’re merchandising, not fiction. Yes, I know this is harsh.
  • I adore Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutian series and Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish series. I resent it when they write other books. Yes, I know this isn’t fair.
  • David Weber, Peter F Hamilton and George R R Martin and other authors create these huge worlds and universes with so many interlinked plotlines and character proliferation and I wonder if those series will ever be completed, like Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time. I wish they’d write shorter 3, 5 or even 10 book series which stand a chance of being completed. Oh, and PS: if you’re going to have over-titles and individual titles please keep them consistent: Book 1, Book 2 and Book3a and Book3b is aan unhelpful way to title books of the same length.

Yes, I feel negatively about books. These are my kinder criticisms. But we criticise because we care – I think that’s something to remember.

August 23, 2010

57 varieties of writers

Filed under: Advice for writers,bloggery — Tags: , , , — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 1:24 pm

About once a month someone in my extended friendship group asks me for advice on writing and/or getting published. While I’m happy to share my few nuggets of wisdom (which have almost invariably been ignored by the questioner!) often there’s no advice I can give because the questioner is asking about a completely different part of the field.

I’ve been asked twice now to give advice to aspiring travel writers. Madness! I barely leave my writer’s garret, I know nothing about travel, nothing about engaging travel writing, have no contacts of any kind in the business. My total sum of my knowledge in this area is that I own most of Bill Bryson’s books.

Last week a very lovely person asked if she could drop by for advice about how to write a graphic novel. I had to tell her that as far as I’m aware it’s a completely different industry from mine. Even the publishing companies are different (at least with the travel writing thing the big firms overlap). If I had any idea how to write a graphic novel I would have written one.

I’ve been asked about short stories more than any other kind of writing. Hah! I’ve only ever written four short stories, two of which were on commission for anthologies. In theory I know you need to pitch to magazines but Google would give you better advice than I can.

Likewise picturebooks, another popular topic. Weirdly enough I get asked a lot about how to break into illustration, another topic I don’t know anything about except that it’s a tough field. I’ve never written a picturebook and from watching Mary Hoffman at work I know that it’s a challenging discipline, a rigorous closely-written artform in which not one word can be wasted. I’ve written thousands and thousands of words, but limit me to 28 double-page spreads and a total word count of a single side of A4 and I’ll run screaming from the pressure!

Adult fiction I know something about but children’s authors don’t always find it straightforward to move into the adult market. I could maybe give some advice to the genre authors but it’s not going to be as useful as advice given by an actual author of adult fiction. Come back and ask me again in 20 years time, eh?

So my advice to you would-be-authors out there is to find the right type of author to ask advice of before you even ask your first question. Oh and remember that the answer to “can you help me get published?” is invariably a resounding “NO!” Writers are too busy trying to get published themselves. Agents are the people to help you get published and even they can’t help everyone.

August 20, 2010

What makes a book YA fiction?

After I posted about boys and girls as readers and characters I got some very interesting responses. One comment in particular stuck with me though; this one from Dom who wrote: “Good YA books are, from my perspective, misshelved adult books.”. I replied: “Are good YA books misshelved adult books? I don’t think so. Good YA can be read and enjoyed by adults but I don’t think that makes it adult fiction. Not unless adult is a synonym for quality.”

I had my Writer’s Polygon on Wednesday and we started talking about this. The other people present are very original and creative writers, to the extent that although they are writing YA their works don’t fall into any conventional sub genre. Frances Hardinge has described her work as ‘whimsical’. Ralph Lovegrove is a not-yet-published writer whose work is rich and full of resonance. In comparison I think my work is much more typical of YA and my backgrounds are much less fantastical. I tend to start in the ‘real world’ and then move sideways.

So, inspired by this evolving discussion I began a web hunt on “what makes a book YA fiction” and was instantly presented with this article from suite101.com, containing the following list of what makes a book YA:

Books for teens are almost always written in the first person and usually have:
* a teenage protagonist
* adults characters as marginal and barely visible characters
* a brief time span (the story spans a few weeks, yes, a summer, maybe, a year, no)
* a limited number of characters
* a universal and familiar setting
* current teenage language, expressions, and slang
* detailed descriptions of other teenagers’ appearances, mannerisms, and dress
* a positive resolution to the crisis at hand (though it may be subtle and never in-your-face moralistic)
* few, if any, subplots
* about 125-250 pages in length (although many of the newer YA books are much longer)
* a focus on the experiences and growth of just one main character
* a main character whose choices and actions and concerns drive the story (as opposed to outside forces)
* problems specific to adolescents and their crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood

Some of that is fairly reasonable, although reducing anything to a list makes it seem flat and uninspired. I think the list would have worked better for me if it were introduced as qualities YA books may possess. ‘Teenage protagonist’ is fair, almost all good YA in my opinion does have a teenager character. But there are successful and popular YA books with older characters e.g. Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart series. ‘Marginal and barely visible adult characters’ is often true of the YA fantasy quest novel but less so in contemporary fiction, the YA fiction of Margaret Mahy never brushes off the adults as unimportant although the teenagers are driving the narrative. ‘A brief time span’, is true of most fiction. Epic speculative may deal with the sweep of decades but in the main books include only a couple of weeks of elapsed time. ‘Limited number of characters’ is certainly not my experience or true of my fiction – and somewhere Frances Hardinge just burst out laughing and doesn’t know why. ‘Universal and familiar setting’ isn’t always the case, especially when no setting is universally familiar to every child. If a book deals with gangs in New York does that count as familiar because we have heard of New York and of gangs? Or are books set in schools automatically familiar because many children attend schools – regardless of the type of school or it’s location? Tricky.

Continuing boldly on, the ‘teenage slang’ isn’t all that common. Partly because writers often only remember their own now-outdated slang and don’t feel comfortable using a more modern but less familiar idiom. Also publishers will cut swearing and that accounts for a lot of slang. ‘Detailed descriptions of other teenagers’ appearances, mannerisms, and dress’ does occur in mainstream YA fiction but once outside that mainstream is less common. Even in the mainstream it’s more true of the younger end of the YA pool. ‘A positive resolution to the crisis at hand’ is most fiction again. Adult fiction certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on dark, Patrick Ness anyone?

‘Few, if any, subplots’ – oh dear, I’m definitely doing it wrong if that’s true! ’125-250 pages in length’, I never think in numbers of pages so I’ll have to do a sum. Wikianswers tell me there’s 300 words to a page so that’s 37,000-75,000 words. That’s a wide range. I’d say most current YA is between 70,000 and 100,000 words and the popular Harry Potter books have been significantly longer.

‘A focus on the experiences and growth of just one main character’, in my experience YA fiction more often involves a close knit group of characters. ‘A main character whose choices and actions and concerns drive the story’, eh, again that’s most fiction not specifically YA. But ‘problems specific to adolescents and their crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood’ is one I do agree with and a central element of my fiction.

I’ve spent a long time on this one list but that’s because most of the other links my search produced were booklists and recommendations: a ‘I can’t describe it but I know it when I read it’ approach to the question. John Scalzi has a blog post form a couple of years ago about the placing of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother on the YA shelves in which he says YA Sf sells better than adult SF but adult SF readers seem blind to YA titles. This reminds me of Philip Pullman who’s been saying for years that he finds YA more exciting and imaginative than adult fiction. I also found a blogger writing about engaging with teens through their choice of fiction who says: “[YA books] can talk about really controversial stuff, actually, in a way which is interesting and true and informative and not just included for shock value.”

So, now I’m throwing the question open to the blogosphere. What do you think makes YA fiction? How does it differ from adult fiction? Are you an adult reader of YA or a YA reader of adult fiction – what informs those choices?

June 2, 2010

My favourite authors: Diana Wynne Jones

Filed under: bloggery,growing up,my favourite authors,recommended reading — Tags: , — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 4:08 pm

Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. – Diana Wynne Jones

I’ve been reading about Diana Wynne Jones on her official website, prompted by the sad news in Ansible that her oncologist fears she “has ‘months rather than years’”. I have loved Diana’s work for years. I still vividly remember reading Howl’s Moving Castle at age ten and laughing myself silly but even that wasn’t the first DWJ book I’d read. I’d found Witch Week a couple of years earlier but hadn’t made the connection. From age eleven I was following her work compulsively. My mother and I both loved Fire and Hemlock but I was particular found of her more sf titles: A Tale of Time City and The Homeward Bounders. I’ve recently been re-reading my collection of her books for the umpteenth time and noticed that the more I read it the better I like The Time of the Ghost and how clear it is to me as an adult and a writer myself how much of her own childhood experience she puts into her work.

There are so many of her books I love. For sheer hilarity and imagination I don’t think books come much better than Archer’s Goon. I think overall I prefer the novels where she uses her own vast store of creativity to imagine beings who are mysteriously magical to the ones in which she draws on mythic themes and resonances. (Eight Days of Luke employed the norse gods, Hexwood an assortment of mythic figures and Fire and Hemlock and  Enchanted Glass the seelie court.) I do appreciate a good mythic reimagining but Diana can create powerful characters and strong ideas of her own without relying on borrowed power.  In her Chrestomanci series she created a central character, a surrounding world and an expansive multiverse which is iconic in the fantasy genre and has doubtless influenced a number of other YA writers.

My own writing has definitely been influenced by Diana’s work. The relationships and dysfunctions of families is a strong theme in her work and has become so in mine. I’ve also endeavoured to emulate her smooth transitions between the magical and the mundane: in settings, plotting and the way my characters think.

Having read Diana’s words quoted above about her attempts to write the ideal book – the one she wanted as a child – I feel a strong empathy with that impulse. I also have not yet written my ideal book although I feel that I am getting closer to it. But my conception of what the ideal book is comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s work. She and Margaret Mahy have set the standard I aspire to and drawn the map of of the fictional landscape I inhabit.

I have never met Diana but I feel as though I know her through how much of herself she has given to her readers. My thoughts are with her and her family in this difficult time and I hope very much that she will surprise the medical profession. With all that she has given us, she still has more to give. Meanwhile I’m returning to reread the rest of my collection and to fill in the astounding gap. I think there are two whole novels of hers I inaccountably don’t possess.

January 25, 2010

Birthday bookswap woes

I was asked what I thought of this story by US columnist Emily Bazelon about how she celebrates her sons’ birthday parties. The two boys, Eli and Simon, are 10 and 7 – and ever since the older boy’s third birthday they have celebrated a “bookswap” birthday party.

Twenty five children are invited to the party and each is asked to bring a (wrapped) book. At the end of the party each child takes away a different (still wrapped) book. The rationale for this is that the birthday bookswap celebrates the anti-consumerist values of the parents since the boys want for nothing and don’t need twenty five presents.

The problem is that the children hate it. After the first three years of the bookswap at nearly 6 Eli protested and the parents modified their austerity rules. Now twenty children bring wrapped books but five selected guests are expected to bring sizable consumer toys. Emily says: In the e-mail to the parents of the five present-givers, we told them to go nuts. They were happy to play along. “We’ll make it sure it’s BIG and made of PLASTIC,” one mom wrote.

That was four years ago. Eli has just had his tenth birthday and both children still hate the book swap. Emily describes their raction in her 22nd January column: Over the years, the kids have not exactly embraced the book swap. Nor do they tolerate it as a mildly irritating but harmless parental quirk. They hate it. Every year their protests grow louder. Meanwhile the parents don’t seem at all clear on what the bookswap is intended to achieve. They lavish their children with presents throughout the year, giving one a night throughout Hanukkah. They also allow family members (themselves, the uncles and aunts and the grandparents) and the five chosen children to give birthday presents. It’s not mentioned if the parents themselves celebrate their birthdays with bookswaps. So it appears that the only time this anti-consumerist sentiments are expressed are on the boys birthdays.

No argument against it works. The message from the children is clear.
“But I want 25 presents! I don’t care. I hate book swaps. I’m NOT having one. Nobody else has to. IT’S NOT FAIR! Why can’t I be like everyone else?
But the parents are immovable. The children don’t need 25 presents. They don’t think the idea of giving half the presents away to a charity is polite to the guests. They wants their kids to have some spine and not want to be like everyone else. They could donate the money from their own present for the boys to a soup kitchen – but they don’t want them to miss out on large parental presents like this year’s gift of a camera.

In the article Emily explains that in the end Eli gave up. Drama subsided into anticlimax. At the party, we did the book swap. Eli said not one more word about it, either of protest or acceptance.

It’s difficult to explain quite how depressing I find this whole sorry tale. The bookswap is pointless. 25 middle class children get presents, charity gets nothing and two children are cheated of the one day they can get to feel special. I think it’s particularly sad that the parents expect their children to debate them, to explain their reasons for not wanting the book swap, when the parents can’t explain their own reasons for having it in the first place. On top of that there’s the problem that books (and by extension literacy and language) are made a ‘teaching moment’ but the children themselves are not given any books and not expected to value books as gifts. Five guests are allowed to bring ‘real’ presents which are not books.

And I wonder if the five selected guests are being selected on the basis of their financial ability to produce really good real presents. Is this teaching anti-consumerism or tactical trading for the best return for the smallest investment?

There are so many better ways of doing this. Let the child receive the 25 presents of their guests but ask them to donate half the presents to charity. (I have no idea why Emily thinks this is not nice to the guests – it could be done after the guests have gone.) Or have the child donate some gently used toys of their choice to charity. Or ask that all 25 presents be books – I’d have loved this idea, although not all children would. Or ask that children don’t bring gifts, or only small gifts, or a small gift and a charity donation. Or forget the whole sorry exercise and on another date volunteer as a family to do charity work.

So, my opinion is that the birthday bookswap is misplaced idealism. What do readers think? Does your opinion change if you don’t belong to a culture that celebrates birthdays? How would you feel as either the child, or as the parents, in this situation?

January 20, 2010

Middle child syndrome in trilogies

In yesterday’s Guardian books blog Imogen Russell Williams explains that while she has warmed to trilogies (as long as each book stands alone) she feels the middle book of a trilogy is often the weakest.

After praising Inkheart, His Dark Materials, Peter Dickinson’s Changes, and Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus she says:

Hex: Shadows

Hex: Shadows

I was also a tad disappointed by the second book in Rhiannon Lassiter’s Hex trilogy. The eponymous first volume, written at the precocious age of 17, has a fascinatingly dislikeable anti-heroine, Raven, and a gripping future world in which people are literally stratified by wealth – the rich in the Heights, the gangs in the shadowy ground-level slums – and citizens with the Hex mutation are proscribed and executed. While the third book, Ghosts, feeds the reader’s yen for revolutionary action as the genocidal elite get overthrown by Hexes, the middle volume feels as though it’s marking time – Raven is captured by the security forces, but not a lot happens and not much is learnt.

Since Imogen mentioned the Hex trilogy I’m going to respond to those comments. Firstly, I should say how pleased I am that the Hex books have stayed in her mind, over ten years since they were published. There are thousands of trilogies she could have used as an example so simply being remembered ten years after the fact is a triumph of sorts.

I also am inclined to agree that middle books of trilogies can be the weakest since theirs is the toughest job. The first book begins with a bang and takes the reader into a new world. The last book ends with another bang, concluding a story that has taken three books to tell. The work that falls to the middle book is to broaden and deepen the story, to add another dimension to the characters and the world. This is difficult to pull off in an action adventure where the plot must wind its way through a valley in the shadow of two obvious peaks. No wonder that middle books, as is sometimes said of middle children, are the least loved.

If Hex: Shadows didn’t work for Imogen, that’s a fair comment. There’s no rule that everyone has to like all my books – although what a boost to sales such a rule would be! But looking back on it I recall a fair few things happening in that book. (Spoilers ahead: so if you haven’t read the Hex trilogy you might want to skip the next part of this post.) In the first book of the trilogy Raven and her brother Wraith comb the streets of a high-rise London for their missing younger sister Rachel, adopted away from their family and at risk from a totalitarian government. Making contacts in the underworld they eventually track Rachel down to a secret government laboratory where she is the victim of sadistic experiments at the hands of the evil Dr Kalden. Hundreds of other similarly brutalised children perish and Rachel and two others are the only ones to be rescued by our heroes. Here endeth the first book.

In book two, I could have marked time until the inevitable conflict with Kalden in book three. But instead I chose to take the novel into what felt like darker territory. In Hex: Shadows the security forces strike back… perhaps an unconscious homage to the incredibly bleak middle episode of the original Star Wars trilogy. Hex: Shadows begins with a betrayal. A new recruit to the team reports Raven’s whereabouts to the government. After all that effort to rescue Rachel in book one, in book two Rachel is trapped with the heroine Raven and her sidekick Kez while the security forces close in from all sides. Rachel dies and Kez and Raven are captured. Raven’s Hex abilities are now put to the test as she becomes the experimental subject in the latest round of Kalden’s quasi-scientific sadism. Without access to any of her resources from book one, Raven must break through the devices being used to torture her to get a message to her confederates on the outside. As the book moves towards the conclusion the characters must put their faith in the person who betrayed them – while Raven transcends the torture and kills the sinister Dr Kalden herself. There surely can’t be many middle books of trilogies in which the hero kills the villain! My editors at the time must have wondered what would be left for book three.

The action of Hex: Shadows allowed me to take the story forward so that I could explore bigger and more radical ideas in book three. In Hex: Ghosts Kalden returns as a ghost-in-the-machine, far more deadly as a computer virus than he was as a man. And Raven is no longer a casual adjunct to the core group, the skilled consultant who doesn’t care about the main mission. By book three the cause of the Hexes has become personal and her closest friend is the person who betrayed her to the government in book two. What’s more, Kalden’s experiments have had an unexpected result: since not only has Kalden escaped into the computer network, Raven has set foot on the path that leads to true transcendance of the physical world. Everything that happens in Shadows is necessary for Ghosts.

The middle book might have as much action as books one and three – although there’s a pretty kickass firefight where I fly a flitter into a building and down a corridor with inches to spare. But action’s not the only thing that takes a plot forward. The changes in Raven are internal and emotional, the changes in the rest of a group a response to that shift. I do regret an editorial change which de-emphasised Raven’s cold decision to rid the world of Kalen. Macmillan felt that cold-blooded murder, even of a torturer, was too strong for a YA novel in the 1990s. Other than that, I’ve content with what I achieved in Shadows and I’d encourage Imogen to re-read the trilogy: not only as an action-adventure but as a coming-of-age story in a bleak and shadowy world.

But then I’ve always had a special love of middle books. At 10 years old I dressed myself in black and told my family to call me Arha: The Eaten One, after falling in love with the middle book of the Earthsea trilogy: the magnificent Tombs of Atuan. And then there’s Ann Halam’s (Gwyneth Jones) Daymaker trilogy. The middle book, Transformations, is the darkest and the most disturbing of the three. Among my friends and professional colleagues Pullman’s middle book The Subtle Knife is often cited as the favourite. Critics have also admired Rowling’s Prisoner of Azkaban: the third of seven and to me the darkest of the Harry Potter books. (The novel won the 1999 Whitbread Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the 2000 Locus Award, and was short-listed for other awards, including the Hugo.)

In the Guardian blog Imogen comments: “I’m all for dark and uncompromising children’s literature, but upping the ante… after [a] first volume’s gentle, PG-rated antics is baffling to me… A good rule of thumb, in fact, is probably to avoid dedicating book two to the protagonist’s capture and imprisonment.” But I suspect the darkness at the heart of a series is best found in the middle book. George Lucas knew what he was doing in The Empire Strikes Back. A series in which the heroes win, win and win again lacks the drama of one in which they win, lose, and have to win decisively and permanently against not just the representatives but the whole political system. The middle book is a story of failure, of hopes blighted and trust betrayed. It’s a book in which the characters first feel a sense of the magnitude of their mission, the promises they have to keep and miles to go before they sleep.

Middle books may be the hardest to write and perhaps the hardest to read. But they’re the pivotal ones. So when you praise the oldest sibing and pet the youngest of three: spare a thought for those middle children of trilogies, working as hard or harder to prove themselves and stand out on their own.

December 7, 2009

Living in Dreams

Filed under: About Rhiannon Lassiter,bloggery,dreams,growing up — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 2:00 am

I once wrote a novel called Waking Dream. For a long time (until Bad Blood) it was the novel I was proudest of. I think that’s because I live in dreams.

When I was little I didn’t have a lot of friends who “made things up”. Maybe that was just my group of friends but it was always a surprise to me when someone admitted to “telling themselves stories” or were willing to play a “make believe”  or “let’s pretend” game. It was surprise because most of the time my schoolmates and classmates and other contemporaries were alarmingly literal. After about age 10 it was virtually impossible to get any of my friends to play with dollshouses, action figures or the most basic of imaginative games. Approaching secondary school I found myself doomed to a life of gossip and chatting and no more make-believe.

Even my reading friends were too old to play out games. Instead we turned to writing shared world stories or sharing book recommendations. Everything in text because our school didn’t prmote drama. Then later at a school that did promote drama, putting on a play. But forever the world of make believe, true make believe, was lost to us by then.

The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of a king
But when does the wild rumpus begin?

Make believe exists in dreams and as much as I live in a world of fantasy, I exist in dreams. I have, at times, kept a dream diary. But it’s virtually impossibile for me to capture every aspect that incorporates the reality of dreams. In Waking Dream, the novel, I tried. But in using a pastoral arcadian quest story mythic resonance canvas I missed out so much of what dreams are about. The missed train, the unpacked bag, the doors in walls; there’s just so much I could have said in that novel and didn’t have the space for.

So, just to begin with, some dreams I’ve mentioned in places elsewhere:

The Tooth dream
In this dream there is a problem with my teeth, they are crumbling out of my mouth and although I try to put them back in they won’t go.
The Packing dream
In this dream I am staying somewhere on holiday and need to pack to leave. But the room is full of things belonging to me, I have no sensible packing materials, not enough cases, and then I realise that there are bookshelves full of books and tonnes of fragile ornaments and bits and pieces of stuff that I can’t possibly get packed in time. For bonus points I have my cat with me (and no cat carrier). For extra bonus points I have multiple cats.
The School dream
In this dream I am back in school or college. I am behind on lessons, I need to study, I am late for class but I don’t know what my time table is and I can’t find my way around the buildings. (This dream can be linked to the Moving House dream or the Bus that never seems to get anywhere dream.)
The Moving House dream
In this dream I have moved out of my lovely house and into much less suitable accommodation. I am living with a bunch of poorly-chosen people in a house where there are not enough rooms and some of us will have to share rooms or beds. Only then do I notice an entire wall of the house is missing and replaced with clingfilm or some equally unsuitable and structurally-lacking substance. (This dream is sometimes combined with the Gate Crasher dream)
The Gate Crasher dream
In this dream I am having a party and it has been gate-crashed by some people I either know but do not like or don’t know at all. They won’t go and when I try to get them to leave they laugh at me, they take over my bedroom and start using/breaking my stuff. I ask my friends to help but they think it’s funny.
Rooms opening into other rooms dream
I am in a house, possbly a new house that I’ve just moved into, and discover new rooms that I did not wot of through unexpected doors. This can be a positive thing unless those rooms are occupied by confused or aggressive strangers who did not realise their house connects to mine
Flying powers are failing and can only slightly float dream
Everyone loves to fly but sometimes my flying dreams don’t work and then I bob about ineffectually.
On a bus that never seems to get anywhere dream
For bonus point combined with Failing At University dream
People I know have been replaced by doppelgangers dream
Creepy dream in which the people I love behave inconsistantly with how I;d wish to believe they’d behave in real life.
Witch can see into my mind and is going to come and get me dream
See Ghost of a Chance, coming in 2011 from OUP
Not Enough Pies dream
In this dream I am making a quantity of food for myself and others. When the time comes to serve there isn’t enough to go around.
Eating Weird Objects dream
In this I am for some reason able to consume things one would not normally think of food. Last night it was a light-bulb. I don’t like this dream because it makes my throat feel sore and I can taste the lightbulb and feel the glass crunching when I bite it. It burns.
« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress