I Can Believe It’s Not Butter

One thing that depresses me about the future, as depicted by SF and dystopian writers, is the state of the food. A lot of the time in these worlds, people are stuck eating these super practical protein-pellet sorts of things. It’s like, now we’ve perfected nutrition, and it comes in this little blue square, so bon appetite. Like all of a sudden human beings are going to say, oh, you mean cheeseburgers are bad for me? How silly of me! Hand me that blue pellet at once!

In Matched, for example, I personally thought it was less depressing that the government chose your mate for you than the fact that they also selected (and measured) your food for you. Every day. The Matched world is sort of like what would happen if eHarmony took over the government, which, as dictators go, doesn’t seem like the worst possible choice. I mean, they match you up based on all your preferences and personality quirks! It’s almost thoughtful. Of course, if two people were matched based on their love of French cuisine, say, they’d both still end up with the blue pellets at the end of the day (so I guess they’d both be equally disappointed and they could bond over that).

I think the idea of taking away the day-to-day little choice of what to pull out of the fridge or order from a waiter could really wear on a person.  I also think we all realize, on some level, that these authors are probably right. If the government ever does turn into one big, micro-managing parent—they’re coming for our bacon first. And of course the real butter.

I’ve had a roommate who’s stocked that butter substitute in my fridge for years, but I’ve eaten it about twice. If butter were outlawed, I’d actually rather just eat the muffin dry and remember butter how it used to be, in better days. I am not fooled by the name—or the taste. It doesn’t really matter to me if the real thing's not good for me. I like it; I’ll eat it. Because it’s my choice, and because I can.

We want the ability to make our own bad choices. As Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, one of my favorite books (another world of protein-pellet dining): "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." My favorite pop-culture version of this manifesto comes from the movie Demolition Man. Denis Leary’s Edgar Friendly rebels against the perfect future world he lives in, because he wants the freedom to do the wrong thing:

I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of

speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a

greasy spoon and wonder, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the

jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I

WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS

of cheese, okay?

I love this movie (mostly) because of how much I love this speech. In the Demolition future, all restaurants have become Taco Bell, which also seems like the kind of dystopian corporate world we are probably heading toward. Even though the movie is silly at times (see: Sylvester Stallone’s beret, and all his dialogue), the story essentially depicts a perfect world and shows how human beings are just not going to live in it for long. The urge to reclaim free will is just too strong.

I realized as an English major in college that every story was, in some way, about the Garden and man’s choice to fall. I got a lot of mileage out of this observation in all my lit classes. I know the tree was labeled KNOWLEDGE and all, but what the snake was really selling was the ability to decide, hey, I think I’ll eat that thing I’m not supposed to. Because I choose it. And because I can.

Trilogy Launch

I’d really love to launch an amazing trilogy. The ground is kinda littered, though. When I try to think of ideas, that stupid Barenaked Ladies song goes through my head “It’s all been done…--wooh-hoo-hoo!” And then I’m idea-less AND I have a Barenaked Ladies song stuck in my head.

First I know I need a really unusual name for my heroine. The last time I was book shopping I saw some great ones—I especially remember there were two Americas. So I think I’m going to go for the name Canada. Either that or Voltage.

So now I need a seriously dire situation for Canada/Voltage to be in. I know for a fact that Barnes and Noble has a whole section of Teen Paranormal Romance. I want Barnes and Noble to sell my Trilogy (maybe I should do the Stephenie Meyer thing and do a Quadology. A tetralogy?) Anyway, so Canada could be in love with a supernatural creature.

Werewolves-overdone

Vampires—beyond overdone

Witch—I keep thinking of Hermione. Or Charmed

Mutant with powers that are, well…mutant—Maybe…

Succubus—Just, ew.

Demon—Also an ick factor.

Okay, so Canada falls in love with a mutant. What can he do?

Fire breather

Tekenetic

Mind reader

Can melt and reform

Dragon slayer

I guess that last one’s not really a mutant power, but if that nine-year old kid can write a dragon story (trilogy!) how hard can it be? Okay, so Canada falls in love with Seven (I’ve read a lot of books recently with boys named after numbers, and Seven is a very significant number).
Canada and Seven will face many obstacles. Now I need to make a list of obstacles.

Making a list of obstacles is hard. Since this idea is already super craptastic, I think I will go ahead and combine my story (working title: Canadian Fire!) with a couple of really terrible television shows.

The worst show I’ve ever seen is Toddlers and Tiaras, but I’m not sure how to combine that with dragons and stuff (and I’m pretty sure reproduction and/or child explotation is a no-no in YA). How about The Bachelor? That’s a pretty terrible show.

Except there’s already a parody of The Bachelor called Burning Love online, so now I need to change my title. Maybe I should go back to my second choice girl’s name ‘cause it’d make a cool title.  So here’s the pitch:

Seventeen year-old Voltage Cassidy has always been on the outside looking in. When her parents died in a freak sunbathing accident, Vo was orphaned, and sent to live with her tyrannical Aunt Maru. Vo’s been counting the days until she can graduate and go off to work in the magical hinterlands. What Vo never counted on was being picked to go to the Palace of Argon. Each year, ten young girls compete for the hand of the hottest young dragon hunter in the land. This year, it’s sexy yet dangerous Seven Monroe. Vo has no interest in the haughty young slayer. But when the two meet, unexpected sparks fly. Can Vo resist Seven? Together, can Vo and Sev protect Canada from a mutant dragon army? Cram-packed with familiar story elements and a surprising lack of grammatical mistakes: Voltage!

Reforming Rakes and The Thirst Olympics

         At this moment, there is a meeting somewhere in book world (probably more than one) and they’re talking about the e-book revolution and how the top four slots on the NYT Bestseller list are all taken right now by a book that was once free online, written by an author who crashed past the gatekeepers with, of all things, fan fiction. Fan fiction with an added, shall we say, element…after all, it’s all about the hook.

            I read the first one out of curiosity, to see what all the fuss was about. I then accidentally read the next two. They’re not really my cup of tea, on the surface. I realized after I bought the second one (on my e-reader, of course) that this story was just a new, more modern shade (see how I did that ;) of a theme I’ve read over and over in romance novels. Actually, this theme is most common in my other most shameful reading addiction: the Regency Romance. If you’re unfamiliar with these books, the deal is, the setting is England 1800 to about 1820. The books are usually very chaste, heavy on the Austen-era details, and every single one of them retells a version of one of about four stories. The most common is the reforming of a rake.

            A rake, for those who are less nerdy than me (so, for pretty much everyone) is a man who doesn’t have any feelings. He flaunts his disregard for society’s rules, he sleeps with licentious widows and fallen women, he gambles, he (gasp) duels. He’s rich, handsome, and pretty much a bastard. Until The Right Girl comes along. Only for her does his tiny little Grinch heart start beating. Only for her does he show his true, gentlemanly nature. Once T.R.G. comes along, it’s not long until we’ll be hearing wedding bells and buying baby gifts.

            This story is pretty much the ultimate female fantasy. This guy’s manly and untamed and he’d punch out a guy for looking at you on the dance floor. But with you he’s sweet and gentle. The thing is, it’s just that: a fantasy. In real life, sadly, when a guy is a jerk, he’s a pretty much…a jerk. No girl, no matter how much she loves him, is going to change him. You can’t fix people. You can be there while they fix themselves and be supportive, but that’s not really what these stories are about. I’m sure love can sometimes be the catalyst for personal growth and change, but again, that’s not really the fantasy.

            These rakes/troubled CEOS/vampires are also control freaks, crazy jealous, and sometimes stalkers. It’s usually a troubled past that led to their Grinch-heartedness in the first place, so the tortured soul thing comes out in their relationships. These T.R.G.s wind up talking their men down from a ledge when another man asks them to dance or gives them a hug. Or they get sleep-stalked and wake up to find the guy’s been sitting there watching them for who knows how long. I guess none of them snore or drool in their sleep.

            So the theme is recycled and so are the characters…hmm. The author is still earning an obscene amount of money each week. I’m wondering if the next big thing is going to be a dystopian world in which twenty-something adults have to enter their names into a lottery with terrible consequences…the heroine, Nat, will have it bad for an inaccessible guy who has no heart. Until the love of Nat, his plucky T.R.G, who can really kick ass with a set of throwing stars.

            I think I’ll call it The Thirst Olympics.

            

Armchair BEA 2012 Introduction

            To anyone visiting from Armchair BEA, welcome! I've answered some of the intro questions below. I look forward to visiting many of you this week. 

1.              Please tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? How long have you been blogging? Why did you get into blogging?

I originally started my blog as I was wading in to social media with my debut YA, which is coming out in April of next year. I ended up loving blogging, though mine has ended up being more about ideas and issues in books and culture, rather than book reviews. I’ve been a teacher for the past fifteen years; I teach English, Humanities, and Media Studies. So I do a lot of thinking about the youth of America ;)

2.              What are you currently reading, or what is your favorite book you have read so far in 2012? I am currently reading The Masque of the Red Death, and I LOVE the opening scene. It’s inspiring me as a writer to write a (much) better opening scene for my WIP.

3.              Tell us one non-book-related thing that everyone reading your blog may not know about you.

My favorite holiday is Halloween. Every year, my best friend and I throw a huge Halloween party, with a theme that carries through the invitations, decorations, and costumes. Every year I spend a lot of time making a playlist for the party—all year long I keep an ear out for great new music that’s on the dark side.
I also make a new playlist for every new writing project—it’s the first thing I do.

4.              If you could eat dinner with any author or character, who would it be and why?

Jane Austen, all the way. Depending on where this magical meal would take place, either I would get a kick out of visiting Regency England, or it would be fun to watch her head explode (metaphorically, of course) at the world of 2012.

5.              What literary location would you most like to visit?   I’ll stick to the theme and say London, 1801.

Tools

It came up somehow the other day in our faculty cross-curricular post-planning meeting (sounds fancy, huh?) that a good number of our school’s second graders have cell phones. Mostly smart phones. Seven-year olds are now equipped not only to browse and download all the web has to offer, they could also, theoretically, type a paper, start a blog, or, like that little girl in the phone commercial, start a lemonade empire.

This is Progress* for you. No one under twenty five or so would likely be all that shocked to hear about the second graders’ phones, but for those of us who grew up back in the day, this is still kind of a shocking reality. Think about it: when I was a kid, I did have a television in my room—which was actually somewhat unusual in my group of friends—but that was it. Our family, like most, didn’t have a computer until the mid nineties. So of course life was different back then, as those of us who experienced (or have been forced to hear about it) know. But here’s the thing. If you accept the basic tenet that tools are what separate us from the animals, isn’t it significant that kids today are equipped with so many powerful tools at such a young age? I really think we’re talking about more than a change in how kids spend their free time.

Here’s my theory: having access to the same tools adults to makes them grow up faster. I don’t just mean that kids can access adult content online—I think it might go further than that.  Today, for maybe the first time in history, the second grader and the businessman have access to exactly the same tools. Once upon a time, a person had to enter adulthood first, and then they went to work, where they were equipped with a computer, phone (and later work-sponsored mobile phones). Today, some kids are getting all that practically at birth, no job required. I made it through college on a Smith-Corona word processor with a tiny little LCD screen. You could move blocks of texts around, but it almost made you blind. Now, just a couple of generations later, my students have laptops more powerful than any in existence during my college years. (I love it when my students complain about computer problems, I’m like, you just have no idea.)

            I know technology changes the way we interact with the world—it has to. But I also think that having the same tools as the adults is one of the factors that’s erasing childhood. In some ways, empowering kids is a positive. But for every good technology brings, it takes something else away. These kids with the cell phones may never know how great it feels to be playing outside and out of earshot—free. For one thing, these poor mites are carrying Mom in their pockets all the time. Nine times out of ten when one of my students gets a text in class, they tell me, “But it’s my mom!” Technology has definitely allowed the helicopter parent a whole new level of attachment and involvement. When I see Facebook posts from parents to their kids saying, “Call Me,” it kind of makes me glad that my parents are still on dial-up internet and have no interest in that world.

            So there are some clear negatives, but there are certainly benefits. These kids will enter the workplace computer savvy, as opposed to playing catch-up on the side while also learning how to do their actual job, like we did.

            They can do anything, really. With the right tools, the world is your oyster. I’ve recently been re-watching one of my favorite shows, Veronica Mars. If you’ve never seen it, because you missed it, or you came of age in the era of The Vampire/Witch/Werewolf: when the show began, Veronica was a seventeen-year old who helped her dad, a private investigator, with his cases. Except she seemed to solve more cases than he did—and why? She had the tools. She had a laptop, cell phone, and access to databases and information courtesy of her father’s work. Essentially, Veronica was a private detective. Even though this was fiction, it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Why not? The character was a very bright, resourceful person. Add in the right tools, and there’s nothing to separate her from any other adult starting out in that field. You can get experience simply by doing. She could not have done the job at age ten—developmentally, humans aren’t ready for adult cognition at ten (yet?). But at seventeen, properly equipped, why not?

            This new breed of kids, growing up with the same tools as adults for the entirety of their lives hasn’t grown up…yet. I think it will be interesting to see whether the tools give them such a boost that they leap over and past childhood, or whether the inherent distractions, the dark side of these devices and tools, will simply infantalize them. Rather than wanting to learn and master an adult skill at seventeen, maybe they won’t ever want to. It’s a brave new world out there. Grown-ups, just keep in mind the playing field’s been leveled a bit in recent years. If you do have a lemonade business, be careful that some little girl with a smart phone doesn’t put you out of business.

*I am rather Saddened that the eighteenth century custom of Capitalizing words that were Important is not longer an Option. I had a Student this year who used this System, and I must say it was rather Entertaining.

           

Cover Art!

Usually, I write a whole bunch and THEN find a picture, but today is special…I’m psyched to be able to share the amazing cover art for my debut, THAT TIME I JOINED THE CIRCUS!

Getting the cover makes the whole thing seem much more real! J

Cracked

According to Wikipedia, which my students all claim is a super-credible source, a dystopia is: the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian.

I have read no less than twenty of these books in the last little bit, and in each one there’s usually one major crack in the foundation of the world, including: a bloodthirsty Capitol (need I say more?); love’s been excised from people’s brains, everyone dies in their early twenties; no one dies and young people are illegal; teens have to go live in the woods and learn to defend Canada or something. What’s with all these broken worlds? Why do they speak to teens? Heck, forget about the teens for a second, why do I keep reading these things? Because I just bought another one about some sort of crying disease that’s killing everyone.

The drama queen in me says I already live in a repressive and controlled state. My life is governed by bells, which ring at set times, and must not be disobeyed. I eat my lunch, while working, out of a brown bag, and then when I go home I have more work to do.  Since a lot of my students work at lunchtime too, this description applies to them as well, though I do get to sit at a bigger desk. So maybe dystopias simply take a semi-familiar setting and amp up the stakes.

I think we respond to these increased stakes most of all, because we as a culture often lack a true sense of purpose, in our education and in our lives. Just this past year, I think I accidentally broke some of my best students. We read Neil Postman’s The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. (If you are a teacher you should read this book—seriously.) Postman’s main thesis is that there is no longer any true sense of purpose for education. When America was younger, there were what he calls gods which inspired us, chief among them was one he called The God of Economic Utility. This god’s tacit promise was that if we work hard in school, we will be rewarded with a well-paying and secure job, perhaps even one we enjoy. Beginning with my generation in the eighties, this god fell on hard times, along with the rest of us, and I think we all now realize that this promise is not one that’s always kept. One of my students who has always stayed up half the night to complete her work flawlessly, for years, sat in our discussion after reading this book and asked, “Why did I do all that? What was it all for?” But much as I hate to be the one to pull back the curtain, I do think it’s better than living in the dark.

Postman discusses other past inspirations for learning, including a true sense of civic responsibility and a feeling that we have a voice in the direction of our government. Obvi, these ideas are toast too. Part of the problem is doubtless growth—as our nation gets bigger, each of us has a smaller share of voice in how things run. But I think kids are savvy—even those who don’t get stuck in my AP Language class realize, if only on a subconscious level, that they are working hard, but don’t really even know what they’re working for. (I speak here of the kids who still work hard in school, who are also probably sharing the part of the Venn diagram that includes the YA readers.  I’m glad these kids are reading anything, but I love the idea of dystopias because they are A)more accessible and widely read by teens than Neil Postman and B) I think they accomplish some of the same effect: waking us up, helping us to not lead unexamined lives, stuck on our treadmill of work and preparation for an uncertain future. The best, and scariest of these books, I think, is M.T. Anderson’s Feed. Anyone who thinks that teenagers are not capable of receiving a cautionary message aimed right at them should give a teenager a copy. Most of them get it, and they look down at their cell phones and tablets with horror—wide awake, at least for a moment, to the path we are all on.

            When I feel a little trapped by the bells and the doubt, wondering what I’m actually accomplishing and what kind of world I’m getting my students ready for, books like Feed actually give me hope. I don’t know what the future will look like. I hope it’s not completely broken and doesn’t feature reapings, feeds, or zombies*. But I know that the readers will be a bit more prepared for whatever the future brings, because they are thinking—not just about what they have to do to put a roof over their heads, but about why we are all here. I think it’s important that at least some of us stay awake to ask those kinds of questions.  

*I’ve taken several quizzes online. I know the odds aren’t in my favor in the event of a zombie apocalypse L