How to Make an Author Go Ballistic

Want to know what really pisses-off an author?

The list is long, I admit it. Bad reviews, puny advances, MS Word, Goodreads, cat hair, hipster bookstore clerks, people who boast that they buy only used books…I could go on.* 

But the one thing that REALLY sends an author into the vein-popping bourbon-swigging spouse-beating nether regions of self-destructive fury is this: His (or her) book gets banned by people WHO HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK.

It happens a lot. And not just in the world of children’s literature. Do you think that the bluenoses in the U.K. and U.S. who banned James Joyce’s Ulysses back in the 1920s read the book? Nah. They just read the sexy bits of Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy—just enough to get their puritanical juices flowing through alarmingly intimate and unfamiliar channels—and they screeched “Obscenity!”

Authors like to talk about context. For example, if a YA author uses the word fuck, she wants the reader to understand why she did so. And if a parent at a school board meeting stands up waving a copy of her book and shouts, “This book contains the f-word!” the author feels that some allowance should be made for the fact that 50,000 non-f-words surrounded it, and that no other word was available to effectively replace it.

I say, “That’s f-worded up.” The problem is not that the parent in question did not read the whole book. Context doesn’t mean a rat’s ass to such people. Context won’t change the mind of someone who is mortified by a particular word, or by the sexual orientation of a character, or by a disagreeable religious or political position, or by the mention of a dog’s scrotum. The problem is that some people feel their personal sense of outrage can and should be imposed upon their extended community.

Me, I am easily offended. I go through life in a constant state of sputtering outrage. When my neighbors erect a “wrong” political lawn sign, I feel rage, sorrow, pity, disdain—the whole self-righteous package. But I don’t tear down the sign. Okay, I did, when I was eight years old, on Halloween, knock down a few Nixon signs—but only when they gave me Circus Peanuts.

Ahem. Back to my original topic: the outrage felt by authors whose books have been challenged by people who have not read them. (Here comes the questionable metaphor.) Imagine you are a chef who has prepared, at great expense and effort, a seven course tasting menu. You have worked on it for months, and it’s only $16.99** (wine pairing not included). You present your lovingly designed menu and some guy looks ahead at the third course and says, “Foie gras! I do not eat foie gras! Foie gras is evil, and the chef should be banned from serving such food.” Whereupon he storms out of the restaurant, organizes a picket line, and leaves the other diners picking disconsolately at their first course, which happens to be locally sourced beet root carpaccio, to which no one objects.

Okay, the foie gras hater*** has the right to express his opinion, and the other diners have a right to become uncomfortable in the face of his moral outrage. But the chef?

THE CHEF IS FURIOUS. And he has a cleaver.

 * Actually, I did go on, but I shortened the list for this post.

** Coincidentally, that’s what my latest  novel goes for.

*** And the geese.

I'm going to try to post something every day for Banned Books Week. Celebrate by reading something that makes you unreasonably angry.

Let the Dog Read

Jacques, reading Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

It’s Banned Books Week again, so I’ve been going through my shelves deciding which books to forbid Jacques, my dog, from reading. So far, The Call of the Wild (dog kills people), Old Yeller (dog dies), and Puss in Boots (cat too smart) have been sequestered. And now Jacques, and all the other dogs in the neighborhood, are safe.

“But what about Swimmy?” you ask. Rest assured, I have banned Swimmy the goldfish from reading The Rainbow Fish (socialist propaganda), Jaws (the fish dies), and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (many fish die). The neighborhood fish are safe.

As for the human children, I can think of several dangerous books I would rather they did not read, including How to Build a Bomb Using Common Household Items, and The Kama Sutra for Toddlers. Reading has its perils, certainly. As a child, I once attempted an aerial maneuver based on something I read in a Batman comic. I knocked myself unconscious. But in the larger scheme of things, the dangers a child might encounter in a book are vanishingly slight, and not nearly worth the risks posed by the ignorance and parochialism that comes of not having read widely, boldly, fearlessly.

Before I forbid any child to read any book, I will first ban the following hazardous activities.

• Sports. Every thousands of young people are killed or permanently injured playing football, basketball, hockey, volleyball, etc.

• Riding in cars. Every year, tens of thousands of young people die in automobiles.

• Bathing. The bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house.

• Eating. Choking, allergic reactions, and obesity-related diseases kill more people every year than all of the above combined.

• Walking. Pedestrian fatalities are on the rise!

I’m going to try to post something every day during Banned Books Week. Celebrate by reading a book that scares you.

Jacques is getting old.
Some days he needs reading glasses.

Glacier National Park

Mary Logue and I just returned from a rail trip to Glacier NP, where we spent five days of trail walking ("hiking" might be overstating things) without seeing any grizzlies or glaciers. It was a great trip. 

Normally I do not take photos on trips like this--I prefer to let my memories develop a patina all on their own. But this time I brought a camera, and took about a dozen photos. 

Glacier is an enormous park, with spectacular vistas around every bend. I find that I become quickly jaded to such super-size panoramas. The intimate encounters are more rewarding. 

I could look at tree trunks all day.

If these little guys had been fifty yards away with a gorgeous snowy mountain backdrop, I wouldn't have bothered turning on the camera. But they were only fifteen feet from us, and we could see their tiny horns, just beginning to show. Too cute. Their mother is just off to the left, glaring at the stupid effing tourists (us).

Mary likes looking at things close up too, so we were well matched. We hiked to a stunning waterfall one afternoon, and this is what she did most of the time we were there. Meanwhile, I was looking at a water ouzel, one of the few birds capable of walking underwater. Way cool.

Mary looking at wet rocks.

I like rocks too. And lichen. The photo below is now serving as wallpaper on my computer.

My new desktop image!

The only disappointment of the trip was a dearth of mushrooms, due to a recent spell of dry weather. I guess we'll have to go back next year!

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!

I just got my first look at the cover art for The Cydonian Pyramid, the second book in the Klaatu Diskos trilogy. Must share! Don't they look nice together?

The Cydonian Pyramid will be published in April, 2013.

I'm working on the third book right now, and I'm thinking I should put a nice dark green scene in it somewhere. A scene with something big and round and....greenish-yellow. A giant grapefruit, perhaps.

Finger Painting

I'm working on a new video about my upcoming book, The Cydonian Pyramid, the second book in the Klaatu Diskos trilogy.

Just for fun, here's a small piece of the video, a reverse-painted self portrait without the soundtrack. I made it using a finger-painting app on my iPod, and an older version of iMovie.

The Netflix Algorithm

We are all becoming accustomed to the fact that technology sometimes outpaces our innate reasoning capacity. When was the last time you multiplied, divided, or even added two large numbers using pencil and paper? I can hardly balance my checkbook without a calculator. (How do you know you're lost? Your GPS tells you that you aren't where you think you are.)

As further evidence of this, Netflix tells me what I want to watch. I try to resist. Sometimes I watch things that escape the Netflix algorithm entirely. But mostly I yield. Out of laziness.

The problem, however, is that both Mary (Mary Logue, my S.O., life partner, love of my life, etc.) and I make use of the same Netflix account. Consequentially, we get parallel user recommendations like this:

Oddly enough, there are many things we can watch together. Firefly, Sherlock, and anything with Judy Dench or Helen Mirren come to mind.

That is all. I haven't been blogging much. This is because I have been writing. Furiously, brilliantly, badly, madly, desperately. As my brother, a carpenter, might say, "It's what I do."

CONvergence

This weekend I attended CONvergence, my first BIG con. About 5000 people, at least half of them in costume, took OVER the Doubletree hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota.
I thought I knew how to have a good time, but these people know how to raise GOOD TIME to an art form. By that, I don't mean I personally had the best time of my life (although it was quite fun), I mean the regular attendees looked to be having more fun than a spaceship full of Devonian monkey creatures. Seriously, if I ever enjoy myself as completely and unselfconsciously as those CONvergers did, I would die complete. I mean, where else could you go to walk around irony- and hassle-free in a fringed loincloth and body paint? Okay, maybe a Gay Pride event. But only if you're gay. I should have taken pictures. I should have worn my loincloth. I should be twenty-one again. No. Wait. I take that back. Twenty-one? Never again.

Anyway, it was a fabulous event. I'm looking forward to next year.

4th Street Fantastic

I just spent three fascinating days at 4^th Street Fantasy, a small convention held in the Twin Cities. It was my first time, it was real, and it was spectacular. Mostly writers, mostly of the delightfully quirky/nerdy/exceedingly smart variety, and all very friendly in that endearingly socially awkward way that SFF folk have raised to an art form. (It seems appropriate to overuse adjectives and adverbs in this connection.) The programming was single track and writing oriented. There were no capes, no vendors, and no overt self-promotion by the authors.

It was great. The organizers—Elizabeth Bear, Steven Brust, Janet Grouchy, Brad Roberts, and Tom Whitmore—did a fabulous job of creating a friendly, accessible, and above all informative con. But mostly it was the collective mass of attendees that made 4^th Street rock. Hats off to all. Except for Brust—he gets to leave his hat on.

Stinkhorns

Our early and very wet spring is producing some unseasonal fungus growth this year. "Stinkhorns" usually show up in mid- to late summer, but this year they're early. I always get calls from friends who think they've discovered a morel. Stinkhorns are not morels! But they do resemble them...slightly. But one sniff is enough to put off anyone from trying to eat one. Stinkhorns reek. Flies are attracted to them because they smell like something a fly might want to lay an egg on. When a fly visits a stinkhorn (the part you see is the "fruiting body," or reproductive structure, of the underground fungus), it carries away some stinkhorn spores, which are found on the slimy, business end of the fungus.

The photo was taken in my backyard this morning.

More fun fungus facts:

The latin name of this fungus is Phallus impudicus. #iamnotkidding

The fruiting body forms underground in a gelatinous orb about the size of a golfball. These "eggs" are edible. Some people pickle them. Haven't tried it myself. Probably won't.

I know I'm going to regret this...

My "author photo" is sadly out of date—by which I mean it makes me look younger than I really am—so yesterday my brother Joe took some new photos. Some of them are pretty good, and I'm still undecided as to which I will use, "officially." Here is one I will definitely NOT be using. Except for here. Just this once.

Rest in Peace

Last week, Peter D. Sieruta passed away. Peter was an author, a librarian, a collector of children's books, a critic, a teacher, and no doubt many other things. His death was sudden and unexpected. He was (I think) about sixty years old. Those who knew him, whether personally or through his work, feel his absence deeply.

I did not "know" Peter other than through his writings and a couple of emails, but I have thought of little else for the past several days. Peter was a remarkable man—a man who loved his work profoundly and without reservation. Check out his blog, and you'll see what I mean. I wish that we could all leave this world is such a state of grace.

My most recent interaction with Peter was on the occasion of The Big Crunch winning the L.A. Times Book Prize. Peter was one of the three judges. I was pleased to win, of course, but an even greater honor, last month, was to have my career profiled by such and astute and thoughtful critic.

I wish I'd had the opportunity to meet Peter Sieruta in person. Still, I am glad to have known him through his writings.

When I heard of Peter's death, I spent a couple of hours rereading his blog, and I became curious as to what this amazing man looked like. Was he tall, short, large, small, brown, white, bald, bushy, or...? I know it doesn't matter, but I craved some sort of visual connection. So I googled him, which is how we connect these days, and found hundreds of pictures of book covers and dozens of pictures of authors—but not one photo of Peter himself. Not even on his Facebook page.

That was frustrating, but I quickly saw that the absence of Peter's image on the web, after years of him being extremely active online, was a part of who he was. It had to be intentional. Peter D. Sieruta was all about the books and authors and things and ideas he loved, not about the flesh and blood shell in which he spent his days. A lesson for us all.

The picture above is his Facebook profile image. Naturally, it is a detail from the cover of a book he loved.

Blade, Boys...Crunch

My final bookstore event of the season (and possibly the year) will be this Friday, May 11, 7:00 p.m., at The Red Balloon. I'll be doing a short reading (not sure from what yet), a Q&A, a book-signing, a cookie-eating, and a wine-drinking.

The Red Balloon Bookshop is located on Grand Avenue in St. Paul.* They have a fabulous selection of books for young readers, and a smattering of adult titles as well. Events are always well-attended, by which I mean, All Your Cool Friends Will Be There. Please come if you can! The author will only be reading and talking for a few minutes, then you get to hang out with your friends and wash down your cookies with some first class literary plonk.

The featured books will be my new sci-fi novel, THE OBSIDIAN BLADE, and my almost new romantic comedy, WHAT BOYS REALLY WANT.

We will also have copies of THE BIG CRUNCH, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for YA Literature.

*The Red Balloon is one of many good reasons for book lovers to love St. Paul. While the number of bookstores has been declining nationwide, the doughty booksellers of St. Paul have been busy. Just down the street and around the corner from the Red Balloon, Garrison Keillor's Common Good Books has moved into a new and larger space across from Macalester College, and their old space will soon be hosting a new bookstore under new ownership. Last night, at Common Good Books, I had the pleasure of hearing Julie Schumacher read from her new (and very funny) YA novel, THE UNBEARABLE BOOK CLUB FOR UNSINKABLE GIRLS. I bet they'll have copies of that at Red Balloon too! Also, I heard a rumor that Julie herself might be on hand to crash my party. I hope so!

A Scene from The Big Crunch: the Chinese Translation

In The Big Crunch, June gets a summer job with a bank piecing together thousands of checks that were mistakenly shredded. The scene was inspired by an actual event in (I think) Minneapolis back in the 1970s.

Now, bank workers in China are performing their own version of the task. A woman with a mental disorder tore up 50,000 bank notes. Here, they are being pieced back together.

It seems to me it would be simpler to find all the right hand corners of the notes and count them, but according to the article, they are attempting to reconstruct every bill.

My Fabulous Weekend, and More

If you follow such things, you may have heard that The Big Crunch won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature.

Friday night I was at the awards ceremony on the USC campus, sitting in an auditorium with about 700 book people, waiting for the category winners to be announced. All of the finalists in the Young Adult category were sitting in the same row. To my left was Libba Bray (Beauty Queens) and her husband Barry Goldblatt. To my right sat David Levithan (who edited three of the finalists), Maggie Stiefvater (The Scorpio Races), Mal Peet (LIfe: An Exploded Diagram), and Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls). Libba, Maggie, Mal, and Patrick are four of the best writers I have ever had the pleasure to meet, and David is, needless to say, a remarkable editor.

The program was entertaining and well-organized, but of course I was sunk deep in my own hopes and fears, wondering if the things that were happening in my chest were signs of an incipient cardiac event.

When The Big Crunch was announced as the winner, all the tension drained out of me, to be replaced with a shaky, hallucinogenic calm that was equally weird but much more pleasant. I don't remember exactly what I said in my acceptance speech, but it came off okay. If the L.A. Times Book Prize people put up a video of the ceremony, I'll post a link.

The next two days at the L.A. Times Festival of Books was fabulous! I did a panel with Libba Bray, moderated by Angelina Benedetti. Angie proved to be an expert moderator, and Libba is smart, funny, and altogether good company. The panel was a blast. Afterward, Libba's husband, Barry, came up to me and said, "I'm glad to see there wasn't any chemistry between you and my wife!" Barry is almost as funny as Libba.

I arrived home at 1 am Sunday night. On Monday, Mary and I were having a quiet, relaxing dinner at home when the doorbell rang. It was our good friends Ilene and Zoran, who said they were in the neighborhood and decided to pop in. Great! Ilene and Zoran are welcome anytime. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. Another pop-in! My brother Jim and his wife Dorothy. What a coincidence, I thought. Then the doorbell rang a third time I began to get suspicious (duh!).

It was my first surprise party, organized by the amazing (and sneaky) Mary Logue. Needless to say, it was a very fun evening. Here's a pic of my mom. Ain't she cute?

And look at what my friend Mary Altman gave me!

Stalkers Welcome

I'm leaving Thursday for the Los Angeles Times Book Festival—four days of BOOKS, WRITERS, and BOOK PEOPLE. This should be fun!

For those of you in the LA area, here is my schedule of events:

Thursday, April 19

 7:00 PM — "this is teen" LIVE event with Libba Bray, Pete Hautman, and Siobhan Vivian, moderated by David Levithan

at Mrs. Nelson’s Toy and Book Shop, 1030 Bonita Avenue, LaVerne, CA 91750  (909) 599-4558

Friday, April 20

7:30 PM — Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Ceremony

Bovard Auditorium, USC Campus

The Big Crunch is a finalist in the Young People's Literature category!

Saturday, April 21,

12:00 PM — PANEL: “Young Adult Friction: Writing YA”

Robin Benway, Libba Bray and Pete Hautman

Moderator: Angelina Benedetti (Award winning teen librarian and reviewer) Followed by Book Signing with other panelists

3:00 PM-4:00 PM — “this is teen” signing at Diesel/Scholastic Booth (Booth # 975)

Pete Hautman/The Big Crunch and What Boys Really Want

Libba Bray/Beauty Queens

Maggie Stiefvater/The Shiver Trilogy and The Scorpio Races

Sunday, April 22

11:00 AM — Book signing at Once Upon a Time booth (Booth # TK)

12:30PM — Book signing at Diesel/Scholastic booth (Booth # 975)

Hope to see you there!

Everybody's an Art Critic

Let me be clear about one thing: I am big fan of Peter F. Hamilton. I've read all of his novels and most of his short fiction. Peter Hamilton writes astonishing space opera; his imagination is prodigious, and although his writing is not exactly of "literary quality," his ideas, storytelling, pacing, and fearlessness place him among the very best sci-fi writers out there.

I am also a fan of Tor Books—I think I must be among their best customers.

And I try to avoid ridiculing anyone in the book business because 1) it is bad business to do so, and 2) it's just plain mean.

But...I have to say that the cover of the 1999 mass market edition of The Nano Flower (now out of print) is possibly the worst book cover I have ever seen. It is so awful that I can't stop looking at it. So dreadfully silly that I feel compelled to share it with you.  Here ya go: