What do you dislike about this form?

I say "form" because I don't think of YA as a genre -- it plays with a wide variety of genres, all while attempting to garner the same age demographic (and often skewing much older or much younger, I think). YA is a target market, or at best a certain kind of story that often gets labelled "coming-of-age," but whose subject matter is different from, say, your average Nick Hornby novel that also happens to be about a person coming-of-age. I ask because I have noticed that the stories I most enjoy writing have to do with adolescents, and yet I would not necessarily think of them as "stories for young adults." This is mostly because there is a lot of sex and swearing in them, and I have this theory that YA editors rather frown upon that sort of thing. (If not, please tell me, it will give me hope.) So, questions:

1. Does YA have rules?
2. If so, what are they?
3. How have they been most creatively broken?

I ask not only because I find myself wanting to write this kind of story, but also because I had a very illuminating discussion with one of my cousins this Christmas after we purchased her Wicked Lovely. I stayed up late and read a good chunk of the book before it was wrapped in Christmas paper, but found myself intrigued enough to remember how much I used to love this kind of story -- and to realize how much I really still do love this kind of story, albeit in animated form. (Going to join the Faeries is really not so different, to my mind, from becoming a Priestess of Suzaku or a Shinigami or a State Alchemist.) After we gave her the book, she and I discussed the books she likes (Cassandra Clare, Stephanie Meyer, etc) and ways to improve others like them. (She suggested more male POV characters, and less female dithering.) It made me think of a list of things I  dislike within stories (anime, manga, novels, etc) featuring young adults:

• Prophecy (it gets perilously close to eliminating free will, and thus conflict, and thus tension)
  
• Wealth (it makes things too easy)
  
• A lack of sex and swearing (genuine young adult life is rife with both)
• No moral grey area (any battle between good and evil has already been decided when each character knows the difference between right and wrong and lives it all the time)
• Consumerism (while waiting in line for a Chuck Palahniuk signing last year, I read all the dustjackets on the YA recommended reading tables, then promptly decided that 75% of the authors were paid by Apple or Louis Vuitton and not a publisher)

Growing up, my favourite "YA" stories were what you might call "the witch next door" stories. The fate of the world wasn't on anyone's shoulders. The enemy to be overcome was within, as well as without. There might be epic battles (The Last Unicorn) but the character's merits and flaws were on a human scale. Ethical decisions were required. Who is writing these stories, now? What have I missed?

My friend and fellow workshop member Karl Schroeder is a finalist in the Best SF Novel category at the Locus Magazine Best of 2008 Poll, for his novel Queen of Candesce. (A lovely read -- I thoroughly enjoyed it while on a trip home to visit my parents.) You can vote for him by clicking here, if you are so inclined. Don't worry about all the fields, tick-boxes, or personal information -- you don't even need to be a Locus subscriber (I'm not, and I still got to vote), and you don't have to vote in categories you don't care about. I was happy to give "Magic With Thirteen-Year-Old Boys" my vote, though. I figured that if I could remember any short story by title alone, it was definitely a good choice. (Plus I really enjoyed the story.) 

• Got two of the three necessary signatures on my TD1 (thesis proposal) form today.
• Learnt that my fieldwork will likely be approved for the Graduate Diploma in Asian Studies. (Yay for further clarifying my otherwise-amorphous degree!)
• First Japanese lesson tonight.
• Meeting with j_brayton  tomorrow.
• Peter Watts has officially joined the workshop.
• Husband received his birthday copy of Macross Plus in the mail yesterday and DAMN it still holds up 14 years later.

I wish I had more to report, like publications or more interviews or something like that, but I just don't have that kind of news right now. I am, however, excited about learning another language. I get this little thrill when I recognize numbers and furigana, when I see a symbol and hear a sound in my head. It's a very simple thing but it's basically like learning to read all over again, and that's a kind of triumph unto itself.

Now if I could just write better stories. I do about three things well, and writing stories is the one that I can share with the widest amount of people without either destroying my kitchen or breaking my vows. So I'd like to be better at it, please.

Speaking of which:

• Ad Astra was good! I actually talked to cristalia  a little bit, and got to meet some of Dave's friends. (Psst: he has a short story collection coming out next year from ChiZine.) Plus both of my panels went well and the service at the hotel bar was actually pretty decent this time around.

And on totally unrelated note:

• My university friend saw Trent Reznor yesterday and emailed me just to tell me/make me jealous. Which is very sweet when you think about it, given that we almost never email each other and haven't seen each other in at least two years, yet he still thought of me.

Frothy, sexy, cool YA story about death

or

Moody, lyrical, magic realist story about death?

Discuss.

I won my department's language award. I now have up to $1,500 CDN with which to study Japanese.

I have a couple of interviews lined up for my thesis. One of them is in Japan; the trip is looking more and more like a reality. I also have leads on other interviews, but I don't want to count my chickens before they've hatched.

My paper proposal got an A. And I thought that writing about Gwen Stefani and the Harajuku Girls would cause an eyeroll. Phew.

Reading up on Anti-Fanfic Bingo , as well as the weekly "Fanfic in the news" column at fanthropology, has made me wonder if anyone is collecting links on negative mentions of fanfic, and if so where. The bingo card brings up a lot of points, but I'm curious about who specifically made (or tried to make) those points. Can they be attributed to specific authors/bloggers/license holders? Or is it just an amorphous "they"?

I ask because the bingo card focuses on personal protests to the medium ("You're raping my characters!") rather than global, theoretical, or ideological ones ("This is a post-modern crisis of authenticity! You all are part of the Cult of the Amateur!"). It seems to be about personal ethics and opinions regarding ownership and sex. Which is relevant and indicative of where a culture stands, yes (in that the protests on the bingo card seem to support middle-class cultural conservatism, by and large), but I was curious to find something with, you know, footnotes. Or a permalink.

*looks outside*

*begins thinking up a recipe for Filipino-style congee with plenty of ginger and cilantro*

*squees over Ghosts I-IV yet again*

OMFG GHOSTS I-IV.

*starts to get flustered*

*devolves into a puddle of capslocky joy*

I HAVE WAITED FOR THIS RECORD FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS.

AND YES, IT WAS WORTH IT.

...This is like watching your friend, who you always knew was a genius, stand up prove it to everybody else.

I'm in the process of drafting letters of introduction to anime studios, asking for interviews. I plan on sending them soon, but I'd like a Japanese version as well. Any takers? 

A while ago, I submitted a novella to an anthology. Actually, I submitted two. Both were rejected. I was not alone in this, and another member of my workshop also submitted a novella that was later rejected. (To my workshop's credit, two of our other in-house productions were accepted, one of which was penned by two writers, so it counts as three victories as far as I'm concerned.)

Today I read the other rejected novella that my fellow workshop member had written, and although thematically and genre-wise it's quite different from the first novella I submitted, they do have one startling similarity: they're both fanfic of a type. Both depend highly on one's knowledge of a pre-existing "canonical" work. In fact, they read even better if one has knowledge of this work as well as the genre conventions of certain types of literature. In his case, it was the Bible and fantasy literature. In my case, it was King Lear and cyberpunk (specifically, another member noted, Ghost in the Shell). The stories are so thoroughly studded with references to both extant works that the texts become a sort of scavenger hunt for additional clues that might shed light on the story's ultimate meaning -- if the reader were interested in discovering one.

For example, my Lear (given another name, of course) "howled" over his third and favoured AI's cyborg body. I made absolutely certain that he repeated the word "nothing" five times in his love-test conversation with her. The Gloucester character does in fact get his eyes hacked by one of the other two sisters (rather than gouged out). The jester/Edgar character is named "Thom," in reference to "Poor Tom's a-cold," the line Edgar studiously repeats while on the heath. I even gave Akira Kurosawa's Lear film Ran an appearance within the story. In fact, the company that my Lear works for is called Lionheart, a reference to Cordelia herself, as the name "Cordelia" derives from the French coeur de leon, or "lionhearted."

All of this was so intentional on my part that when I received my rejection notice, I wrote back and said: "That's quite all right. Sometimes you're just not in the mood for the cyborg Lear."

But calling my story "the cyborg Lear" isn't quite right. The cyborg Lear would be easy -- you screw on a few alloy limbs, tell the same story, and let it go. I tried strenuously to avoid this very thing -- my Lear takes place from Cordelia's perspective (I narrowly dodged accusations of feminist revisionism), it ends differently (although still with plenty of violence), and focuses instead on the lack of love between Cordelia and Lear (she may forgive him for ejecting her from the household, but not for being the man and leader that he is). I did this in full knowledge of Lear's chequered inter-textual past -- Nahum Tate's re-version, in which Cordelia and Edgar live and marry, was the definitive performance edition from the late 17th century until suppression in the late eighteenth century.

If anything, I was doing what I read about in Fanfiction & Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: "re-staging" the play (Coppa's metaphor), then exposing a lack and "supplementing" it through the use of "archontic" tactics (Derecho). My workshop members' reactions to this were mixed: some wanted the same old Lear, some thought that cyborgs were incapable of tragic experience and that the story was faithful to potential synthetic subjectivity. (It developed, for a brief and shining moment, into a rather heated discussion about both textual adaptation and post-humanism.) And we've already covered how the anthology's editor felt about it. Personally I still enjoy the story, but I enjoy it for the moments where it diverges from Lear. My Cordelia rips her sister's jaw out and crumples it between her fingers. Lionhearted she is; merciful, she ain't.

But does that make it fanfic? If not, then what is it? (A symptom of postmodernity, no doubt.) And, assuming that my fellow workshop member's story follows the same rules for radically different texts, is it safe to say: "Congratulations, your Bible fanfic is more evocative and challenging and interesting than Orson Scott Card's!"