Theme Week

Before we get started, I need to make a public service announcement. Those of you reading this blog, be warned: you're reading pornography. How do I know? Because the Lancaster County Library System said so. Apparently they've been tinkering with their content filter again, and the new one declared this blog "Pornography" and wouldn't let me on. Oddly, the four erotica publishers that were blocked under the old version are now accessible. Go figure.

So why is this innocent li'l blog now listed as indecent? You'd think the content filter would have gone after Shapeshifter Seductions, which has been known to feature descriptions of sex scenes and photos of naked men. Here's my theory: the computer is programmed to scan for key words that indicate the presence of racy content. Take a gander at the first three letters in "title." Uh-huh. I'm betting the computer lumped me in with all the naked boob sites. AI, gotta love it.

I've already listed a complaint with the site admins, trying to get the category switched to "Entertainment." (Update: nope, I'm still Porn.) In the meantime, we can all rest easy knowing that Lancaster County's libraries are keeping The Children safe from titles, because half of title is tit. I didn't check, but I'll bet the new filter will still let me onto those sites that show people how to build pipe bombs. I'm glad the system has its priorities in order.

I had no problem getting onto the Titleist Golf Balls website. They must know people.

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Meanwhile, back at my YA-in-progress—which doesn't contain any sex (so far) but does have four-letter words—I made an interesting discovery. The book's nowhere close to finished yet, but it has a theme. That was news to me. I tend to write a surface story. If subtext creeps in, it's by accident. Ask me what my book's about, and I'll respond, "About 300 pages." Or I'll describe the plot. Theme? We don't need no stinkin' themes!

So what's this one, and how did it wind up in my story? In a nutshell: the book deals with an alien (ET division) girl who was found as an infant and raised by humans. Her superpower is shapeshifting. She can physically mimic almost anyone, male or female. She thinks she may be a mutant until she encounters another member of her species. Her people crash-landed on Earth generations ago. Now they're poised to take over the planet by replacing key world leaders. If all goes according to plan, humans will eventually be phased out, which leaves our human-raised alien girl in somewhat of a pickle.

That's the plot. Teenage girl thwarts alien invasion. (Or not. I'm still working my way through the story.) The real story—the theme—came to me as I got deeper into my MC's personality. Mainly: what is it? Her whole existence is based on copying others and turning herself into someone else. Joining the herd. Fitting in. The ultimate pressure to conform to the norm. But what is the norm for her? When she steps away from both humans and her alien species, who is she?

I suspect we're both going to find out over the course of the story. Right now, I have no more idea than she does. But that's why we read, and that's why we write: to find out what happens.

A huge chunk of the reading experience is relatability. If the readers don't like your characters, they'll toss your book against the wall and go read something else. I've been worried a non-human protagonist might be a turn-off, especially since she doesn't have a romance. (So far. She believes she's asexual. Truth is, she's just not sexually attracted to humans, who are a different species. Things could change when she spends time among the aliens. We'll find that out, too.) But there is a touchstone with the human teen experience that I hadn't even thought of when I started: her penchant for shaping herself to fit in with the group, and her self-discovery of who she is and where she fits into the world. If any teens are reading this, you're probably nodding right now.

Damn, I hope I have the chops to pull this off. Well, I wanted to learn how to write better. Here's my teaching tool. I can hone my skills on this. I should probably read more YA while I'm at it. The level of writing in YA books is better these days than what I remember. I blame J. K. Rowling. She and Harry Potter set the bar impossibly high, and now the rest of us have to aim for it. Bitch.

Or I could just write porn, since the library's intent on blocking me anyway. Porn doesn't need themes, just phallic symbols. Easier all around. Happy reading!

Making a Killing in YA

Having learned nothing from my last foray into young adult literature, I've decided to try it again. As part of my prep, I'm raiding the library for the current popular sellers, to see what I'm up against. Ye godz. I am seriously going to have to up my game if I want to compete in this market.

For the moment, it appears the Twilight/paranormal and Hunger Games/distopia fads have run their course. What I'm seeing a lot of now is otherworld fantasy, sort of Game of Thrones lite with a bit of the X-Men thrown in (the kids in some of the books have superpowers). This makes reading them like old home week for me. I grew up haunting the Science Fiction section of the bookstore, which is where these would have been shelved back when I belonged to their target demographic. In those days books for tweens and teens consisted primarily of contemporaries and mysteries. Those of us with a penchant for weird read Lord of the Rings, and Stephen King when he showed up. Then Harry Potter and Twilight came along, and all of a sudden YA was a thing. And here we are.

So I'm in Barnes & Noble skimming through Throne of Glass (somebody else got the library's copy) and I notice something interesting: the protag, a young woman constantly referred to as the best assassin in her world and a total badass, never seems to kill anybody.

Come to think of it, the whole point of Hunger Games was two dozen teenagers turned loose in a huge arena to kill each other. How many did Katniss kill? One, I think. She may have shot some guy. Mostly she ran and hid and let them kill each other. Katniss was not a killer, and no fool.

The publishers of these books, however, I have to wonder about.

In following the Game of Thrones formula of intrigue and nasty doings in a high fantasy setting, coupled with the call for kickass ladies fueled by Hunger Games and Divergent, publishers are putting out stories of teenaged assassins and swordfighters and rebels against the (adult) government and presenting them in a light that makes them look heroic. Maybe not the best of ideas. I have to question the marketing strategy of glamorizing killing to a segment of the population known to take deadly weapons to school and bully classmates into suicide.

Somebody else must have brought this up at a board meeting, because these teenage killers don't enjoy what they do. It wasn't even their choice: they were forced into it by evil adults. Even though they've been trained from childhood to kill, they usually don't. The greatest assassin in her world spends a lot of her time knocking people unconscious. As soon as they can, they leave the profession and become—I dunno, maybe a housewife. All these chicks have boyfriends, killers like themselves.

This dilemma—we wanna read about tough teenage girls, but kids killing others is wrong—can lead to absurd and even frustrating situations, like the assassin mentioned above. If she doesn't off somebody, she's liable to look like she's all talk. But do you really want your 14-year-old daughter "watching" a 17-year-old slicing people up? Getting the idea that's a good thing? We must protect The Children!

That's one way around the problem. When these kids do kill, it's justifiable. Nobody's going to blame Harry Potter for magically blasting Voldemort. On the other hand, Harry was 17-18 years old by Book 7, pretty much an adult. In the Percy Jackson series, Percy's only 16 in the climactic novel. He doesn't kill the bad guy. The secondary bad guy has a change of heart, offs the major bad guy, and then dies a hero. In the Throne of Glass series, Celaena finally does kill somebody, but it's the wrong guy. She was tricked by the head of the Assassins' Guild. There's a man who seriously deserves to get a knife in the gut. Will she do it? She'll be over 18 by the end of the series, so probably.

It helps that these books are set in fantasy or future worlds that have nothing to do with our modern reality. Different worlds, different times, different societies. Same old sexist attitudes, but that's a different blog. It's okay for kids to be trained killers in these books because the stories take place somewhere else and not in middle America. Don't try this at home, kids! Or at school.

As for the hundreds of innocent techs, scientists, military grunts and support crew who perished when twentysomething Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, it's best we don't think about them. They destroyed Alderaan; I suppose they had it coming.

For the book I'm fiddling with, I won't have to worry about any of this. My story is set in modern America, so showing kids who kill is out of the question. My protag doesn't need to kill. She's a shapechanger. She can knock grown men out with the best of them. My biggest problem will be matching the quality of the writing in similar YA books currently on the market. I've definitely got my work cut out for me.

Observations

Once again I have no topic, so I’m just going to freestyle and see where the words take me. We’ll start with a random observation I made last week while I was getting my teeth cleaned: I don’t think I’ve ever met a dental hygienist over the age of 40. They always seem to be young girls (“young” defined as 20s and 30s. I’m staring 60 in its wrinkled face. This is young to me). They’re all happy and smiling as they root around in your mouth and dig all the crap out from between your teeth. It’s like tooth geishas. Is that a thing?

If this job has a low threshold for burnout, I wouldn’t be surprised. There are only so many years of your life you can spend peering into somebody’s mouth. It has to get old real quick. I don’t know if this is a long-term term career for these ladies or if they’re trying to earn money to go to dental school. Hygienists seem like nurses’ aides: they do all the crap stuff, then the “real” professional (usually a man) comes in, talks to you for five minutes and collects a huge paycheck. I don’t know what hygienists get paid, but it better be substantial, considering what they have to put up with, halitosis being only the start.

At least they get to wear gloves and masks now. I can remember back in the Dark Ages, when my dentist did all the dirty work himself, maskless and bare-handed. Then you rinsed out with a Dixie cup. This was all pre-HIV. This same era used to have playground equipment set into concrete for kids to land on when they fell off the monkey bars, and if you wore a helmet while riding a bike even the school wuss would beat you up. My God, how the hell did we ever survive to adulthood?

Getting back to the question of pay, I’m going to assume hygienists don’t get much. What makes me say that? Because in 50-plus years of going to the dentist, I have never seen a male hygienist. Men gravitate toward the higher-paying, more prestigious careers. Judging by the dearth of men, I’d guess dental hygienist doesn’t fall into that category.

Ladies, if you want to make the big bucks, look around for the professions with the most men in them. That’s where the money will be. If you can’t land a job, you can still go to Plan B and marry one of these guys. Then you can afford to become a dental hygienist because you’ll have financial backup.

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Over on the writers’ site, there’s a thread going on under Young Adult called “The Next Big Thing.” We chime in and try to guess what the next huge trend in YA will be so we can ride that train to the bank. So far no real trends have emerged, though I’ve noticed something interesting.

Thanks in part to Game of Thrones, we seem to be seeing an upsurge in Medieval-style fantasy. I just read (or skimmed) three of these in a row, and they all have the same basic plot: Hunger Games meets the X-Men. There’s a dystopian society with an oppressive government, downtrodden/enslaved masses, and a gathering rebellion, with a twist: the hero and his/her friends have superpowers. Besides the three I read, there are others out there. Was this a trend we missed?

If so, you’re already too late to hop aboard. These books were bought two years ago. The market’s saturated. The trend’s already over. If you want to write to a trend, forget it. Real trends come out of nowhere, flare up and die while you’re madly scribbling away. Just write what you want to and make it good and start the trend instead of chasing it. As the one writer said on Twitter, “Nobody was looking for Harry Potter.”

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Finally, here’s how you don’t make friends. I go to the library daily because I’m too cheap to pay for home WiFi. I’m a regular fixture up there. The other day some woman said to me, “You were up here the other day, weren’t you?” I remembered her face, so I said, “Yeah, I come here for the Internet.” “Me too,” she said. She then followed up with, “Did you watch those ISIS beheading videos on YouTube?” Uhhhhh … I don’t think so. This is what you say if you’re trying to pick up Hannibal Lecter in a bar. This is NOT how you start a conversation with a stranger in a public library.

Lady, I don’t care how many times you’ve seen me in the lobby. You don’t know me. And after that little opening salvo, I sure as hell don’t want to know you. I think I made my position plain by my tone and disgusted expression, but I’m not sure. People who kick off conversations this way don’t always grasp the nuances of subtlety.

How do I keep attracting these psychos? I must be hanging out in the wrong venues. Normal people have WiFi at home and don’t have to go to the library. As soon as it gets warm enough, I’m going to start writing in public places, like Barnes and Noble and public parks. See what kind of sickos I can draw to me out in the real world. If nothing else, I’ll have something to write about. Hasta la vista!