Wednesday Words: Fan Fic for Sale

Today Amazon announced a fan fiction platform in which people who write stories inspired by certain (currently three) fandoms can publish their work - and get paid for it.

If you just did a double take, you're not the only one. I haven't gotten to read too much about it yet, but the general reaction from people seems to be confusion. How is it legal? Is it legal? What are the parameters? Why are the specifics and 'rules' Amazon has set up for this so vague and, frankly, weird?

I have all these questions too, but another one that comes to mind is what does this mean for the nature of fan fiction? Right now, fan fic is a great outlet for people to express their love for characters, settings, situations. Like playing with dolls when I was a little girl, fan fiction is my 'grown up' outlet for extending the stories I love or choosing to take them in a totally different direction. It's also a way that I hear of many writers getting their feet wet. Rather than having to start it all from scratch, they can take pieces from things that others have already developed and practice with those parts. Because they want to and for the love of it, not because they get paid for it. Once money starts changing hands (outside the realm of authorized spinoffs and that sort of thing), can we really call this fan fiction in it's purest sense?

This is a more random post, but again, I haven't had much time to read up on this or form a more decided opinion. But what do you all think? Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading!

Heart and Home: A Brief History of Montmaray

A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper (The Montmaray Journals #1)
Knopf, 2009

I'll admit to not being the most wide-read individual when it comes to historical fiction, but I do generally enjoy it. In A Brief History of Montmaray, Australian author Michelle Cooper takes on a time period many of us are familiar with - World War II - but from a perspective with a twist.

Sophie FitzOsborne has spent her whole life living in a dilapidated castle on the small island country of Montmary. Located in the Atlantic, about equidistant from England and Spain, she is a member of the royal family which has suffered greatly since the Great War. In fact, the FitzOsbornes are the only inhabitants left of their small but once proud nation. Sophie's diary chronicles six months of life on the island, showing readers the day-to-day poverty Sophie and her remaining family endures, life living under the threat of war in 1936, and her general growing pains about relationships and if she should honor her aunt's request to come to England and properly join society as a princess ought to do.

To me, this story was an interesting combination of Dodie Smith's classic I Capture the Castle and Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries (but without the fairy tale). It took me a while to get into the story, with honestly not a whole lot of action happening until the final quarter of the novel. On the one hand, it left me needing to push to get through. On the other, I can applaud Cooper for wanting to keep the story grounded in realism - as someone who keeps a journal myself, I can attest that not every entry chronicles a day that is particularly exciting. Sophie as a narrator was something of a challenge for me. Yes she's 16 and she's more interested in boys and spinning up a little drama in her imagination, and I eventually liked her, but I never felt a strong connection with her.

While it doesn't have a cliffhanger ending in the truest sense, this is definitely a book that sets up for a sequel. I may not have been completely in love with this installment of the story, but my interest has been piqued enough where once my to-read pile gets a little smaller, I might consider borrowing books two and three from a library just to see how it all works out.

Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading!

Michelle Cooper's Website

Where's Your Bookmark? (26)

In which I discuss Thanks for the Memories by Cecelia Ahern. It's also worth mentioning that I recorded this before Maureen Johnson's Coverflip project, so the comments I make on the pink cover and why I don't think it suits a book told 50% from a grown man's point of view were completely serendipitous!

Wednesday Words: Right Books, Right Time

A few weeks ago, I posted a video here on the blog in which I made a book jar. Simply put, I have a lot of unread books in my room, and I think half of that is because I make deciding what to read next a HUGE decision. The jar is a simple concept that removes ambiguity: put the titles of all the books I have that I need to still read in the jar, pull out a slip, read that book.

So far, I like the concept even if I haven't stuck with it so well. I pulled one book and started reading it, and while I liked it, I wasn't in quite the right mood for it. (It's hard for me to read historical fiction involving zombies when the weather is so completely gorgeous, full of sunshine and hope and colors.) So I shelved it and then had a choice to make: chance it and pull another title, or do a once-over of my shelf again first? I went with option #2 and am currently reading Me Before You by Jojo Moyes.

What we have now come across is a case of a the right book at the right time. It's that truly serendipitous thing when the things the character is feeling on the page mirror what is bouncing around inside my soul. But I'm not going to lie - this book's content is heavy, the story of a woman who loses her job and becomes a caretaker for a quadriplegic man.

Did I mention that Disney animals are practically singing outside my open window right now?

And so I also started a second book, My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick, from the library. This is a contemporary YA about Sam, a girl who has always been told by her conservative and strict mother to steer clear of the "wild" family that lives next door, a family with lots of kids and who she's always been fascinated by with their color and vivacity. Things only get more complicated when Sam falls in love with one of those many offspring. A perfect almost-summer story.

They are both the perfect book for me at the moment, and I love it when that happens. Am I crazy in thinking this, or do you guys agree? Do you think the timing of when you read a book plays a role in what you end up thinking about it in the end?

Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading!

Rereading With New Eyes: To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

J.B. Lippencott & Co, 1960

It’s often said that English and literature teachers are out to torture students with old books, which is why young people are forced to read “classics” against their will. It’s not actually true, but you probably couldn’t convince my high school students of that. It’s also been said by Cliff Fadiman that when you rearead a classic, you don’t see more in the book than there was before, you see more than you than there was before. Put these ideas together and you have me digging up my old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. For the first time in 10 years, I decided to take another turn through one of the greatest American novels of all time.

What I found was a book I thought I’d remembered but so clearly didn’t. I liked it well enough when I was a freshman in high school, but at 14 years old there were so many other things going on. Now what I read was about so much more than the trial of Tom Robinson and how young Scout and her brother Jem watched their father Atticus defend a black man for a crime he didn’t commit in a time and place where everything was defined by one’s race. That’s a huge part to be sure, but Scout actually tells a story that spans four years - the trial only happens over the course of a few days one summer.

This book is full of growing pains and of not understanding. It’s a realization that our world is unfortunate shades of gray, and I don’t think anyone illustrates this better than Jem who is at a time in his life when he starts to see that the world is far more imperfect than he ever could have imagined. Scout is pure emotion, luckily raised in a house of love. And then there is Atticus, a literary hero unlike any other. Is he perfect? No. He’s from an age where there are things that can and can’t be done, and there are some aspects of society he accepts rather than fights to tear down. But overall, he is a good man. He is a fiercely loving father who wants to do right by his children and does the best he can. He is willing to take on incredible burdens because he knows it is the right thing to do and because though he won’t take on everything, it’s clear that he knows the blatant racism of Maycomb’s court is something that he must stand up against and should not be tolerated. He feels that if he doesn't do right by Tom, then he'll never be able to look Scout and Jem in the eye ever again.

It’s a story with humors and heartaches, with justice and injustice, with love and hatred, with kindness and cruelty. And while I’m sure I looked at it when I was 14, I didn’t really see it until I read this book again, with eyes 10 years older and a mind a decade wiser, much more aware of the world. I know how things have changed since Harper Lee penned this tale, and how some things have unfortunately stayed the same.

There’s not more in this book than there was before, but there’s certainly more in me. And if you haven’t read this book before, or you haven’t read it since your own high school days, I can’t urge you enough to pick it up. It’s one of those books that changes lives.

Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading.

Wednesday Words: Coverflips and Cover Ups

Gender politics: they're hardly new. Many of us are raised with the idea that there are "girl things" and "boy things." Of course as we grow up, many of us come to realize that the world - especially the world of gender - is hardly so simple.

But identifying that there is a problem and doing something about it are two very different things. Now I've written about the nature of book covers, especially in YA, before, and you can see that post here. Long story short, I'm getting bored because to me, they're all starting to look the same.

We say don't judge a book by it's cover, but we do. Earlier this week, Maureen Johnson posed the question a little differently than I did last year because she threw in the gender card. Let's face it: books written by men often get different cover art than books written by women, further emphasizing this idea of a Girl Thing and a Boy Thing. I mean, there's a reason so many women authors go by their initials instead of their first names when they publish to hide their gender - J.K. Rowling is a modern example of a woman who was told boys wouldn't read stories written by Joanne.

So Maureen's challenge was this: coverflip. Take a book and pretend that the author was the opposite gender of what the actually are. The content of the story is exactly the same, but how might the cover change? This grew into such a big project that Huffington Post actually got in on the action, articles were posted (along with some of what they felt were the best examples), and this spread like wildfire. I'll admit that I did a cover, just to try it. What I didn't expect was to see it in the Huffington Post slideshow.

Original Hardcover 1999

I took on Neil Gaiman's Stardust, a fairy and action tale for adults. The original cover is more literal: it showcases the wall and the falling star that get the story started. The cover for the following year's mass market paperback looks more like a diary. This is actually pretty plain except for the small shooting star on the cover. It's more understated, but there's still a sense of something in store if you're daring enough to enter. This, I feel, is a more common trend with books written by men - they trust that readers will dig a little, trust a little, dare a little.

And then there's the cover I submitted, imagining that this tale was not written by Neil, but instead by "Nellie Gaiman." So often with books written by women, I find that if there is any sort of romantic element to the story, that's often what is played up so girls will read it. Because we girls all love love all the time and couldn't possibly care about flying pirate ships and epic sword fights, right? No, bring on the romance angle, so I did. I came up with this:

Now I'll admit it - I probably wouldn't pick up this book right away. Maybe if someone told me about it before, I'd pick it up and base my judgment on the blurb (which is what I usually do - since I think about covers so much, I've grown to ignore them and make my reading selections blurb-based). This only shows a very, very small part of the story in the grand scheme of things, but so often with cover art for women's books,it's the part that is played up the most.

Is this always the case? No. I actually had a hard time picking a book to try this project on because looking through my own bookshelves, I feel that many of novels I own do a good job being neutral (or really, just honestly true to the story within). Is there anything we can do about it? As a teacher, librarian, and reviewer, I feel like all I can do is continue to urge people to look past the title and cover, reminding them to consider content above all. Thankfully, many of the students at my high school are already pretty good at this, with plenty of boys reading Cinder by Marissa Meyer openly, even with a giant red high heel on the cover. But not everyone is so open minded, and projects like this make people look up, though, and open their eyes to the gender stereotypes at play on our book covers.

Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading.

Huffington Post Article
Maureen Johnson's HP Blog on the Gender Coverup

Know Thyself: The Host

The Host by Stephenie Meyer
Little, Brown, 2008

Plenty of people have plenty of thoughts on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and the saga that followed, and while that story wasn't for me, I'm so happy to say that I gave this author another chance and found out The Host, Meyer's first venture outside of her vampire universe, was.

In a science fiction novel aimed for adults (more like New Adult if that genre buzzword had been around when this was published), readers learn the tale of Wanderer, an alien Soul who has lived many lives in many planets in host bodies. Her latest life has brought her to earth, and nearly the entire human population has been occupied. Trouble soon becomes evident when the consciousness of Melanie, the woman whose body Wanderer now inhabits, refuses to fade away. As these two beings share one body, Wanderer sees Melanie's memories, forms her own feelings for the people in Melanie's life such as her boyfriend Jared and her brother Jamie, all the while being pursued by a Seeker who wants to use Melanie's mind to find other remaining 'wild' humans left. Suddenly rather than helping her own race take over, Wanderer forms bonds with humans and fights to keep them free.

I'm absolutely shocked at how much I liked this book. I will admit I set the bar low as I was not a Twilight fan, but Meyer is completely inventive in this different kind of body-snatcher story. I loved how she told this story not from the human's perspective, but from the alien's - it was so interesting to examine human nature from this outsider point of view. I also loved the societal rules of the Souls and how thoroughly Meyer clearly thought about how they functioned. Wanderer, or as she comes to be called, Wanda displays an incredible amount of care and actually shows the best of humanity.

Secondary characters also grabbed me. Jamie as well as Mel's Uncle Jeb were so introspective and always displayed an understanding of the fact that Mel and Wanda were not the same. Ian, a human Wanda develops feelings for, had a fantastic arc and showed growth that I loved. But not everyone likes Wanda, which I felt was very realistic.

The Host is currently a book that stands on its own, and while there are rumors of possibly two sequels, I hope that doesn't happen. I liked this story just the way it was, ending with imperfections that were still complicated, but I also found hopeful. So if you like science fiction or are looking to give it a try, pick up The Host and don't let any prejudices against Stephenie Meyer stop you. I was pleasantly surprised and think I may actually purchase a copy of this book to enjoy for rereads in the years to come.

Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading!

Stephenie Meyer's Website