It is always a bit awkward when you finally get around to reading this much-ballyhooed book and discover that as far as you are concerned, it is at best OK. It’s much worse when you read it and decide it’s awful.

I’ve had that happen a number of times over the years, and my first reaction is always “Ohmigosh, what am I going to say to all those friends who love it so much?” After a small delay, my second reaction is usually “What the heck do they see in this, anyway?” and my third is “I’m really tired of hearing about how great this is when I disagree.”

That’s the point at which I generally pull up my big girl pants and admit to everybody that no, I didn’t think the couple were absolutely adorable, I thought they were idiots and spent most of the book wanting to smack them upside the head, or that the style was so wooden that the characters never came alive for me, or that no, I didn’t think that plot was particularly clever and original, I thought it had long gray whiskers back when Homer was looking for subplots for the Odyssey.

Fortunately, most of my friends react to this with long, productive discussions about what each of us likes in a book and why, rather than with tar and feathers. One of the first things that becomes obvious when you do this is that every reader seems to have a particular itch or two. If a story doesn’t scratch that itch, it doesn’t matter what else it does right; the reader won’t like it.

For instance, a while back one of my friends highly recommended a story that she’s read many times; I thought it was fairly decent, but I’ll never go back to it. The difference is that for her, plot is paramount, and this story had it in spades; it was a convoluted spy thriller that never dropped a thread or faltered in pace or atmosphere. I could appreciate that, but I didn’t actually like any of the characters, which dropped it from good to decent for me. More characterization might have helped, but the author seemed to be relying on characterization tropes that anyone who regularly reads that sort of spy thriller would be able to fill in, and since I read them by fits and starts, I couldn’t.

The first and most obvious conclusion to reach from all this is that the writer can’t please everybody. Some things are incompatible: you can’t do a book that’s both sweet, light, and fluffy and bitter, dark, and edgy. You also can’t write a story that has both a simple, spare, transparent style and a convoluted, lush, dense style at the same time, nor can you write simultaneously in first person and third person.

You could, theoretically, write a book that is neither one thing nor the other; that has light bits and dark bits, that’s fluffy in some spots and edgy in others, that has passages that are simple and spare and passages that are convoluted and lush, that alternates between scenes in first person and scenes in third. What usually happens when somebody tries that, though, is that they don’t get a story that appeals to everybody; they get a mish-mosh that doesn’t appeal to anybody.

Trying to give equal time to every possible thing that some reader might like ends up not giving enough time to anything to scratch any reader’s particular itch. It also tends to pull the writer’s attention away from the story and on to matters of technique, which is fine if the writer is trying for a technical tour de force or if he/she is trying to learn as much as possible as fast as possible by juggling as many things as possible. Focusing on technique to the exclusion of story is, however, not usually the best way to end up with a story that other people actually want to read. This is why writing exercises are called “exercises” and not “recipes for stories you can send out and sell.”

On the other hand, a story that is particularly strong in one area – one that does a really, really good job at scratching one particular, and particularly common, itch – will often find a large audience even if it does a lousy job with a lot of other things. It’s not always obvious just what itch the story is scratching, especially if one happens to be one of the folks who doesn’t care about it. This is the kind of book where people start off “Well, the characters are kind of cardboard, and the basic premise is pretty stupid, but…” and then they tell you why they love it anyway.

Ideally, of course, one wants to write something that is strong in as many compatible areas as possible. One may not be able to write a story that’s simultaneously slow-paced and fast-paced, or that has both a straightforward, linear plot and a convoluted one, or that uses a simple style and a dense, lush one at the same time, but one can certainly write a fast-paced, convoluted plot using a simple style, or a straightforward plot using a dense, lush style.

This is obvious once somebody says it, but too often it gets taken for granted, especially when writers of a particular genre – say, action-adventure – have realized that a particular combination of elements – say, fast-pacing, simple style, linear plot – works particularly well for whatever they’re writing. If enough writers adopt it (and they will, if it’s effective), that combination of elements becomes a standard for the particular genre, so much so that writers and readers don’t even notice what’s going on any more, until somebody does something different. It’s good to at least think about, though, because mixing things up can be a lot of fun – and can attract new readers.

Alexandria and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good Very Bad Slush Pile

(With apologies to Judith Viorst)

I wake up with a hangover and miss the train and get to the office late even though I don’t take time to stop at Starbucks for coffee, and when I arrive the coffeemaker is already empty and the last little bit has dried out on the bottom of the pot and the editor-in-chief shows up while I am clearing it up and says she put the slush pile on my desk because it’s my turn to read it even though I have eighteen messages on my voice mail and a sales conference tomorrow.

The stack of manuscripts is two feet tall and even from here I can see that there’s a pile of pink pages in the middle and a smear down the side where somebody spilled coffee down it and I just know it is going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

George, the other assistant editor, says he doesn’t know why I’m making faces, it’s just slush. I hate George

The top manuscript has a three-page cover letter. The first page is a diatribe about the Evil Publishing Conspiracy that won’t look at the author’s brilliant work, which we are all too stupid to appreciate anyway. I just love being insulted before I’ve had my coffee. The second page is a list of the author’s requirements for the book’s layout and cover, along with all the subrights that he is explicitly not offering us. The third page has his lawyer’s address and says that he’ll call on Thursday to negotiate the terms of the contract. Today is Thursday.

Maybe I can get a job selling life insurance.

The second manuscript is addressed very clearly to the editor-in-chief of the hard science fiction line, which is where I work. It is not hard science fiction; it is not soft science fiction; it is not any kind of science fiction at all. It is a Western. Why does the author think a hard science fiction line will buy a Western?

It is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

I get some coffee from the office coffee pot because at the rate I’m going, I won’t finish the slush pile until midnight and I can’t take the time to run down to Starbuck’s. The coffee tastes like soap. Burned soap. George has a Starbuck’s Grande Mocha sitting on his desk. I hate George.

I bet people in insurance offices get to have Starbucks coffee whenever they want.

The next manuscript is three inches thick, and printed on pink paper. I hate pink. I glance at it anyway. It’s in a script font, too. And it looks like the author has replaced all the o’s with a graphic of a little heart. And here I thought the assistant editor over in Romance was exaggerating. I’m not even going to try to read it. I value my eyes.

What’s next? Looks like someone has typed up the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, with the names changed. I even recognize most of the dialog. Did he think we wouldn’t notice?

The slush pile doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. I’m going to have to have lunch at my desk.  I bet life insurance salespeople don’t have to eat at their desks. George is having lunch with a Big Name Author at the trendy café down the block. On the expense account. I hate George.

At least the next author actually read our submission guidelines and sent three chapters and an outline, instead of the whole book. Unfortunately, the outline is incomprehensible. What are kneebles? Why is the hero looking for them on Jupiter when the villain appears to be mining them on Rigel VI? Or is it the villain who’s looking and the hero who’s mining? The cover letter assures me that everything is much clearer in the novel, but I don’t think I believe it.

Here’s a submission…no, two submissions…no, four submissions from the same author. At least he’s prolific. Wait, they’re all versions of the same book. Apparently he’s rewritten his novel three times in the two months since he first sent it in; the cover letter says the current version is much better than any of the earlier ones. On a hunch, I check the incoming mail. Yup, here’s version number five.  I wonder if I can start a betting pool on when version six will arrive?

I’m putting my resume together tonight, I swear I am.

The next manuscript looks like science fiction, all right, but that may be just because the author didn’t bother to run the spelling checker. Or possibly he really is still in third grade and hasn’t learned about grammar or spelling yet; it’s hard to say. Also, the villain is Thrad Redav, and the hero is Kuel Cloudrunner, and the plot is…more than familiar. No.

This is really a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

This one looks like the author typed it with his fingers off by one key. There’s a legible note at the top – oh, it’s in a language that the author invented. Have to give him points for obsessiveness, writing a whole novel in an imaginary language. I wonder who he expects to read it? At least the cover letter is in English… I see, we’re supposed to write him for a translation if we’re interested. I don’t think so.

Ah, a pizza box. Somebody’s read all the stupid suggestions for how to get your manuscript read faster. I don’t suppose it occurred to her that opening a pizza box expecting nice, hot pizza and finding only another slush pile manuscript is likely to get the manuscript off to a really bad start – assuming, of course, that the editor (me) has never run across the pizza box trick before. I had three of them my first week on the job.

Nobody sends fake pizza boxes to insurance salespeople.

Here’s the last one. It is a history of the Roman Empire, with zombies. What is it with zombies? And why does the author think a hard science fiction line is the place for historical zombies? Or should that be hysterical zombies? I check the cover letter. The author appears to think her book is nonfiction. Hysterical zombies it is. I write her a note pointing out that we do not publish nonfiction.

That was definitely a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

At least now I can go home and work on my resume.

And tomorrow, it’s George’s turn to read the slush.

Then one day I was stuck on a scene involving several characters talking to one another. I had no clue how to handle the speech tags (I didn’t call them that, because I didn’t know what speech tags were; I just knew that everything I tried looked wrong).

So I went to my bookshelf and pulled down one of my favorite books, more or less at random, and turned to a section of dialog. I remember paging around a bit, looking for a spot where three or four characters were all talking together. And when I got to it, I didn’t just read the scene; instead, I looked at the lines of dialog…specifically, at how I knew who was saying what in each one.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the lines did not end with “he said” or any equivalent. Some had the “he said” in the middle, or at the beginning, instead of at the end; some didn’t have a “he said” at all. Sometimes the characters did something or thought about something in the middle of a dialog paragraph, and quite often when they did, there were no “he saids” anywhere around. And so on.

I came away from that page with a much clearer idea of how to do what I wanted to do with my dialog. Much later, I realized that that was what people had been talking about when they said “read like a writer.”

What “reading like a writer” means is asking “what is this writer doing here?” or “how did the writer get that effect?” and then going and looking for the answer. It means you look at the words and phrases, at the way sentences and paragraphs are put together, at where the paragraph breaks and scene breaks are and what sort of sentences come before and after them, at the structure of scenes and chapters, instead of relaxing into them and just reading them for whatever effect they have.

It means paying attention to more than the story. You notice when the writer strings together chains of parallel structure, or how often (and exactly where) they use sentence fragments, dip into a character’s thoughts, provide graphic details (or don’t). You pay attention to rhythm and word choices, to italics and tenses, to what’s in dialog and what isn’t, to what’s implied and what’s explicit.

Most specifically, you look at what is on the page, not what you think is on the page. More than once, I’ve had someone tell me quite positively that something was or wasn’t in a particular book, and had to show them the text in order to convince them that they were wrong. More than once, I’ve been wrong myself, and not realized it until I looked at the text and saw that X wasn’t in the story at all (or was there all the time). And you can’t build yourself a solid toolbox of useful writing techniques if you’re remembering the effects of the words on the page, and not the actual words that are there.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. I’ve had people inform me flat out that James White does not use any infodumps in his “Sector General” books…and had those same people come back suitably embarrassed after looking at the actual text and realizing that White nearly always uses a long narrative summary in the middle of one of the early briefing scenes, so as to get very lightly over the description of the case history of whatever medical problem the main characters will face. They hadn’t registered it as an infodump because White transitions into and out of the narrative summary so smoothly (and makes the information so interesting).

Yet moving seamlessly into and out of a long, interesting narrative summary is exactly the sort of thing I, as a writer, want to learn how to do…and that means that I have to learn to see what he did at the words-and-sentences level, so that I notice that hey, there’s a big infodump in the middle of this scene! And then I can ask, how did he do that without me noticing when I was just reading? And then I can maybe figure out exactly what he did, so that I have a chance of duplicating the effect some time when I need it.

I don’t read like a writer all the time. Mostly, I read to enjoy what I’m reading. But every so often I come across something in another writer’s work that makes me stop and ask myself, “How did he/she do that?” And then I go back to see if I can figure it out. Most of them don’t stick in my memory; it’s become a habit.

The thing that 4^th Street always does for me, and this year especially, is to remind me how much fun it is to talk to people who are real, deep experts in their particular field. Writers tend to have an extremely broad range of knowledge, because we have to, to make stories work, but it’s not that deep expertise that you get from digging into, say, the development of Han dynasty bronzework for twenty or thirty years. It is a Good Thing for me to be occasionally reminded of just how much I don’t know.

Friday night, a bunch of us went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner – Elise Matthesen (art jeweler extraordinaire), Ellen Klages (auctioneer an author of The Green Glass Sea), two Swedish visitors who’d read one of my Swedish translations (it was really nice to find out that the traslation was good), and me. We had a yummy meal and lots of good wide-ranging talk, and of course at the end, they brought us fortune cookies. I was busy talking and waving my arms around as usual, so I ended up with the last of the fortune cookies. It read:

“You will become an accomplished writer.”

I laughed so hard I couldn’t even read it out to the rest of the table. Still, it’s good to know I’ll get there eventually… 

I don’t think I’m going to try to talk about the panels, but the list of books that got recommended, by panel topic, is here: https://sites.google.com/site/4thstreet2012/ along with a couple of good quotes from various people. I forsee another bookshelf (for the new to-be-read acquisitions) in my future…

Most of what I remember clearly is conversations – there was a really good one about ways of looking at viewpoint, several what-are-you-working-on-now things that got off into various eras of history and how much most people don’t know about them, one on families and accounting, one that I overheard part of that seemed to be about color perception and anthropology. LizV and I missed two panels and the lunch break talking about query letters and synopsis (which I will be addressing more in future posts, by request).

It’s interesting to me that the more stripped-down 4th Street gets (no GOH, no dealer’s room, no art show, no media room, etc.), the more intense and interesting the discussions seem to get. It isn’t for everyone, but for me…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. And there were scores of people I wanted to talk to and didn’t get the chance – even in three days, you just can’t get around to an in-depth conversation with 100+ different people.

Ah, well – there’s always next year.

In the meantime… Back when I was doing literacy tutoring, one of the training classes they sent us to was about learning styles. They divided them up into three: visual, aural, and kinesthetic (that is, people who learn most easily by seeing an example or reading, people who learn most readily when they are told how to do something, and people who learn best when they actually do it themselves). This has lots of implications for education (our current system is heavily biased toward the first two learning styles), but what I want to talk about is the implications for writers and readers.

Reading is fundamentally a visual experience. Yes, there are audiobooks, but most readers are readers, not listeners…and most books meant for persons over the age of five or six are not written to be read aloud. Nevertheless, there seem to be at least two common types of readers: those who “see” the story as a movie in their heads, and those who “hear” the story in their heads as if someone were reading it. There are also the rare types who “feel” the story as they read it – who lean forward and tense up when the protagonist is running or jumping, and sometimes even fall off the chair if they’ve become too involved in the action.

Ideally, one would like to write stories that appeal to all three types of readers (and however many other categories are out there). The difficulty begins with realizing that this is something one needs to pay attention to. After all, every writer has his or her own learning and reading style, and it is only natural that one begins by writing in whatever way “feels right” to oneself. Reading is also generally a solitary experience, and the way we talk about the things we’ve read seldom gives much of a clue about the differences in how we experience it. “I loved the chase scene in Chapter 9!” may mean “I could visualize the horses galloping through the forest and the branches whipping past” or it may mean “I loved the way the words had the rhythm of hoofbeats and the sentences flowed into one another” or even “I could fell the wind in my hair and I was so into the ride that I kicked the footstool over when they jumped the river.”

If one doesn’t realize (or doesn’t believe) that other people don’t experience “reading a story” the same way one does oneself, one has no reason to suspect that some readers will trip over the clunky sentence fragments in that visually evocative section, or bog down and lose track of the story in a long flow of beautiful but slow-moving prose. I recall one writer friend who was mildly horrified to discover that there were readers who actually cared about “pretty sentences,” rather than about the mental images they produced, and another who was even more horrified to learn that not everyone stops to figure out exactly how to pronounce each and every alien name in an SF novel (because if you don’t know how to pronounce them, how can you tell what the rhythm of the sentence it’s in is supposed to be?)

I think that when any one person reads a story, they translate it from words-on-the-page into whatever their preferred mode of understanding is. In order to write a story, the process goes in reverse, translating the “mental pictures” or the “inner storyteller” into words-on-the-page. (This is one of the reasons why it’s never quite the story in your head.) If one wants to appeal to more than one type of reader, one’s translation into words-on-the-page has to end up with something that each type of reader will be able to “translate” from words-on-the-page into their particular most-valued way of experiencing the book.

Most of the writers I know do this kind of thing more or less by instinct. They lean towards “mental pictures” or “inner storytelling” or “reproducing the physical sensations,” but they’ve found ways of writing that also appeal to other sorts of readers. The writer who is all about mental movies learns to write sentences that are, if not rhythmic and flowing, at least not clunky. The writer who is all about poetic rhythm learns to include some visually evocative phrases. I’ve only known one or two writers who were so far into one mode or other that they had to consciously and deliberately work on acquiring the others in order to get any other styles into their work. Most of the rest of us pick up enough to get by without thinking about it.

“Getting by,” however, is not the ideal. I think an awful lot of writers could benefit from thinking about the reading/writing styles that don’t come naturally to them. Yes, it’s a lot of work to stop and think about the rhythm of the sentences, the word choices, and the flow of the syntax, when what really matters to you is the vivid mental images you’re trying to evoke. Yes, it’s hard to pull back and look at the “big picture” effect that all those lovely sentences add up to. Yes, it feels a bit strange to make yourself physically feel the tensions and the motion in the story. But even if one doesn’t make a regular habit of it, pausing every so often to think about the effects your words-on-the-page will have when they’re filtered through a different style of reading.

I couldn’t do it, not even when they let me cheat blatantly by listing authors instead of single titles. And here is why:

>It seems to me that a “must read” list for would-be fantasy writers should have as much breadth and depth as possible, both in terms of the length of time covered and in terms of the type of writing that’s covered. Because the point is, in my opinion, to give an overview of the field, both at present and historically. And ten slots just isn’t enough to do that in, as you will see in a moment.

J.R.R. Tolkein belongs on any must-read list for fantasy writers, whether you like his kind of thing or not; the success of “The Lord of the Rings” led directly to the founding of the modern fantasy genre as a separate category, and anything that seminal belongs on this sort of list. He also allows me to check off “epic fantasy” and “high fantasy” in the same slot. One down.

J.K. Rowling comes next, but not because of the wild popularity of the Harry Potter books – no, I put her on the list because her work is a synthesis of a whole lot of fantasy and YA fantasy tropes, from the coming-of-age story, to the boarding-school stories, to the orphaned protagonist and wise wizard mentor, to castles, secret passages, saving-the-world, magic swords, prophecy…. (I have remarked on more than one occasion that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had everything a kid could want in a story, except pirates.) It was a tough decision, because I’d really like to have Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, L. Frank Baum, Patricia Wrightson, Edward Eager, Diane Duane, C. S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, or Phillip Pullman in the childrens-and-young-adult fantasy slot. There is a LOT of really excellent children’s fantasy out there.

I’d want one slot for humorous fantasy, and that belongs hands down to Terry Pratchett and his Discworld books. I’d like at least one slot for modern urban fantasy, but the choice is a lot less obvious when you have Charlaine Harris, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, and Jim Butcher all in competition for the slot. I think I’ll pick Neil for this one, on the grounds that his work covers a lot more territory than any of the others (though de Lint is a close runner-up in that regard). Two more slots full.

I’d like to have at least one slot for somebody who’s doing literary fantasy and/or magical realism, like Angela Carter or Robertson Davies or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll throw a dart at the bookshelf and pick Marquez, though again, it’s a tough choice.

That fills five slots with more-or-less modern writers; time to start looking a bit farther back. Dark fantasy should really have more than one slot, because I want one for H. P Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, and one for Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, or John William Polidori. That only leaves me with three slots left, though, so I might have to drop to one choice for dark fantasy.  I’ll put Lovecraft in one and Stoker in the other, for now.

Three slots left. One pretty much has to go to something Arthurian – The Matter of Britain has over a thousand years of roots in English fantasy fiction, and its traces show up in all sorts of unexpected places once you start looking (Star Wars?), and there are a zillion retellings and spin-offs, starting all the way back at Geoffrey of Monmouth. (The Arthurian legends are, I maintain, the fan fiction of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.) I’ll pick Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, though T.H. White would also do very nicely; John Steinbeck’s version would be perfect if he’d only ever gotten it finished; Mary Stewart’s retellings are excellent and so are Rosemary Sutcliff’s two versions.

So now I have two slots left. I’m torn. There are all the Victorian fantasists (Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald); there are the classic literary fairy-tale writers like Charles Perrault and Madam d’Aulnoy; there are sword-and-sorcery greats like Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard (whose Conan the Barbarian arguably founded the whole sword-and-sorcery subgenre); there are the heroic fantasists like Howard Lamb and C. L. Moore; there are writers like Evangeline Walton, who’ve done magnificent retellings of older works like the Mabinogian. There’s historical fantasy, which includes much of Tim Powers and several of Poul Anderson’s as well as folks like Susanna Clarke, and the Orientalists, like Earnest Bramah, Barry Hughart, E. Hoffman Price, Lucy Chin, and William Wu. There are writers who don’t fit into any subclass, like Mervin Peake and E.R. Eddison and James Branch Cabal, and writers who fit in multiple possible subcategories, like John M. Ford and Ursula le Guin and Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And that doesn’t even get to things like Homer or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the explosion of fantasy in comics and manga…

I will throw out Shakespeare on the grounds that everyone has probably already seen or read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” already, and I will throw out Sir Richard Francis Burton on the grounds that he merely translated The Arabian Nights Entertainment rather than actually writing it.

And then I will cheat mercilessly. Twice. First by putting the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies on the list, all sixteen of them, even though Ellen and Terri are editors and not writers. Those volumes are as close to a comprehensive overview of the best of the best fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror available in English for the sixteen years they cover, in-genre and out-of-genre, and they include recommendations for novels (which of course couldn’t be included in an anthology of short fiction).

And last I’m going to cheat by filling my last slot with that prolific writer, Anonymous, because it lets in an enormous number of folk tales, fairy tales, myths, and legends all at once, from the Poetic Edda and the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ramayana, to Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the Arabian Nights.

And that’s where I give up. Ten slots, multiple candidates for all of them, and I still had to leave out dozens of possibilities and cheat twice. Fantasy is just too broad a field. Maybe if I did a “top 100″ list…

Let me unpack that a little.

It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster without detriment to their quality; the speedy crowd seems to work at a rate of around three to six books per year. And then there are the real outliers (whom the rest of us don’t like to talk about so much). The fastest one I know could do a novel in two weeks without a decline in quality (two weeks really was her limit, though: the one that got written in eleven days shows some stress fractures).

But even the really fast folks do not end up with a book on the stands every two weeks. The publishing process doesn’t allow it. What with getting the copyediting done, arranging for the cover art, doing the book design, printing and proofreading the galleys, advance publicity, and getting the book out to reviewers and bookstore buyers…well, the whole business takes six months to a year unless they throw massive amounts of money and people at it, which they only ever do when they have a hope of making some of those costs back.

What all this comes down to is that in most genres other than Romance (which has its own rules), a given publisher will do a book a year by a particular writer. There are occasional exceptions, but they’re exceptions. Some of the extra-productive writers deal with this by working under pseudonyms; others rotate through multiple series for different publishers or even genres. But even if the writer has a book out in a different series under a different name every month of the year, each individual series usually has to wait a year for the next volume in sequence.

The wait is due to a combination of things: the production process, the fact that most writers can work to a book-a-year production rate, the desire of publishers to give the hardcover maximum time to sell before putting out the paperback (while also timing the paperback’s release so that the hardcover of Book 2 or 3 will  be just out and available for eager new readers who can’t wait). But one of the consequences is that it gives all of the eager readers who grabbed Book 1 the minute it came out lots and lots of time to speculate about what will be in Book 2.

Speculation is fun; I engage in it myself quite frequently. The trouble is that it is exceedingly easy to become overly fond of one’s speculations, especially if one happens to have a lively crowd of Internet companions who like the same sorts of characterization and plot twists. It’s frighteningly easy to convince oneself that one has a pipeline into the author’s mind, and that the sequel will be a better, shinier, spiffier version of whatever plot-and-character developments one’s particular group of readers thinks is most likely.

Inevitably, when this happens, the result is that the actual Book 2 (or 3, or whatever) arrives, it’s a disappointment to any and everyone who had constructed an alternate vision of who’d live and who’d die, who’d end up in a romance and who wouldn’t, what the important plot-points were and which things were totally extraneous. Either the readers have guessed right and worked themselves up so far that no writer, living or dead, could possibly find words shiny and spiffy enough to live up to their mental construct, or (more often) the writer is going in a completely different direction and the readers are outraged that their lovingly-rationalized vision isn’t going to play out the way they thought.

It’s a compliment, in a way, when readers get so obsessed with ones characters, plot, and world – or with their vision of it – that they spend the between-books year talking and speculating and constructing their own extensions. And speaking for myself, there’s nothing quite like the thrill when I realize that somebody got exactly what I was going for. Most of the time, though, folks are doing what my ex-husband used to call “jacking up the radiator cap and driving a new car underneath it.” Where they think I’m going, or where they want me to go, isn’t where I’m headed at all.

Even that isn’t a particular problem for me, right up to the point where the readers start berating me for not writing the book they would have written. (I think I’m the most taken aback by the ones who come up and inform me that my main character couldn’t have used magic to do X, because their magic can’t do that. Um, what? My world, my rules. It’d be one thing – an embarrassing one – if they actually ever found an internal inconsistency, but as far as I can tell, they’re just pulling it out of air.)

It is very hard to explain to these folks that they are not my patron and I am not ghostwriting their ideas for them. Usually, I don’t even try. Occasionally, I get cornered by someone who has bought into the whole “ideas are the hard part” thing, and who thinks that the reason Book 2 isn’t out fifteen minutes after Book 1 is that I must have writer’s block. These folks are always eager to give me their outline for my next book, and they’re generally quite crestfallen when I explain as gently as I can that Book 2 is all finished and working its way through the editing-and-publication process, so their pile of ideas is far too late to be useful, even if I were inclined to use them.

On the whole, I do have to admit that I much prefer having intelligent, involved, enthusiastic readers. Even if they do outnumber me by many thousands of brains to one, and therefore can and will catch every plot hole, inconsistency, implausibility, or factual inaccuracy anywhere in my books.

The son went away happily and read the books, then dutifully presented himself for the talk. And the first thing his mother said was, “So, did the sex in those books bother you at all?”

The boy’s eyes went wide. “There was sex in those books?” he said in astonishment. “I better read them again!”

I mention this because once again it is Banned Books Week, and I’ve been poking around in the statistics on book challenges that the American Library Association has been collecting for the past twenty years. A few quick calculations show that sexual explicitness was a factor in roughly thirty percent of the challenges, and that 72% of the recorded challenges were to books in schools or school libraries…and the vast majority were brought by a concerned parent.

This is unsurprising, really. People will go to amazing lengths to protect children – their own or other people’s. And I don’t know anyone who, reading levels aside, thinks third-graders should be reading graphic horror, slasher books, or something like The Silence of the Lambs. The problem is with where to draw the lines, and with who draws them.

It’s also a problem of trust and fear. Challenges to books always are. We don’t trust other people to see the same things we do, to have the same objections, to be intelligent or compassionate or concerned enough to come to the same conclusions we do about a particular subject or a particular portrayal. We don’t trust them to agree with us – and why should we? There’s plenty of evidence around that other people don’t hold the same opinions, whatever those opinions may be.

When it comes to children, however, the issues of fear and trust come out even more strongly. As I’ve pointed out before, fiction is dangerous. Parents fear – sometimes rightly – that their children will be hurt, that they won’t be able to handle scenes or concepts that are too advanced, that they will be exposed to ideas and values that are contrary to the ones the parents believe in. That fear knows no politics; in talking with librarians and teachers, I’ve heard over and over that as many challenges come from the political left as from the political right. The objections are different; the reasoning is always the same: children should not be exposed to X because it will hurt them in some way.

And the more I see and hear of this, the more I wonder: Does anyone ever ask the kids what they think? Not often, I suspect. Yet the vast majority of children I’ve talked to seem to me to be much more sensible and aware than most adults give them credit for. They’re quite capable of spotting and avoiding books that bother them. They know a lot more, at pretty much every age, than most adults think they do, and they don’t automatically absorb and agree with things just because someone wrote about it.

Nevertheless, protecting children is an adult’s business. Unfortunately, protection is not a one-size-fits-all thing. The book that gives one child nightmares may be exactly what another child needs to read to help him/her cope with a difficult situation. The real decision is not “Should we protect all children from nightmares by removing this book from places they can easily find it?” but “Do we take the chance that one child will be hurt directly by leaving on the shelves a book that will give her nightmares, or do we remove the book and take the chance that another child will be hurt indirectly because he has been denied access to something that would have helped him?”

People who want books pulled off school library shelves are trying to protect all children, without recognizing that different kids have different needs and without trusting young people to stop reading books that are too much for them. They come down hard on the side of preventing direct harm (as they see it), rather than preventing indirect harm. Yet it’s a lot easier to teach children not to put a hand on the stove because it will burn them (immediate, direct harm) than to convince them that eating greasy hamburgers from the take-away place is bad for them (long-term, indirect harm) – at least, my siblings and I begged for the take-out hamburgers for years and years, despite our parents’ explanations, while I don’t recall any of us ever defying them over the stove.

Adults, as a group, don’t really trust anyone under twenty-one to make good decisions or good choices. But while it is obviously true that the younger the child, the less life experience they have from which to draw conclusions, I don’t think that young people do any worse, as a group, than adults when it comes to a lot of the decisions they have to make. I also think the old saw about the way you avoid making mistakes is through experience, and the way you gain experience is by making mistakes. And frankly, making a mistake about what kind of book to read is a lot safer than some of the, um, experience I remember gaining along the way.

Lines do have to be drawn sometimes, but I think that decisions about what is appropriate for all children (as opposed to a particular parent’s individual child) need to be made with great care and consideration, and probably with the default being to let a particular book stay on the shelves. Because I think that children can be trusted considerably farther than many adults think when it comes to avoiding – or, like my friend’s son, just not seeing – material in books and stories that are harmful to them.

I am a little reluctant to do this, which is why I had that other post all set to go. And the reason I’m reluctant is that I don’t actually have a ton of experience with ebooks. Then I looked into some statistics and realized that nobody has a ton of experience with ebooks – at least, not with the current ebook market. Because the current market is less than two years old. If my rough calculations are correct, two years ago, ebooks were less than 1% of the total US book market; last year, estimates were running 15-20% of the total market. And nobody seems to know whether this means people are buying ebooks instead of hardcopy books, or whether they’re buying ebooks in addition to hardcopy books.

Personally, I suspect it’s a bit of both. I adore my iPad, which I’ve had all of six months, but I only have two kinds of books on it: 1) books I already own in hardcopy, but that I want the convenience of being able to read on the road (that would be things like Pride and Prejudice for fun, and The Journals of Lewis and Clark for research), and 2) books that were only ever published electronically, so I couldn’t get them in hardcopy.

This may change at some point. I can foresee a day when I’ll only want my most favorite books in hardcopy, and I’ll get everything else in electronic format. (If I start seriously running out of bookshelf room, that day may come sooner rather than later…a four gigabyte flash drive would hold most of my collection, could I get them all in e-format, and it takes up a lot less space and is only about $10 if I catch the sale at Target with a coupon.) I have no idea whether this is the usual way to use ebook readers, or whether most ebook users went fully electronic as soon as they could and never looked back.

As a professional writer, I’m deeply interested in this cool new method of publishing stuff. For one thing, it represents a possible end run around the traditional publishing system for all sorts of things. Novellas and short story collections have both been hard to sell to traditional publishers; a lot of writers seem to be putting together their own ebook-only versions and taking them direct to Amazon. Similarly, gigantic 300,000-word novels are too fat for traditional publishing; they have to be split into two volumes in order for the binding machinery to be able to handle them, and then they seldom do as well as all-in-one-volume books. For ebooks, length doesn’t matter so much – at least, it doesn’t affect the cost of publication.

I also know a couple of professional U.S. writers who’ve been unable to get British publishers interested in their work; Amazon.uk is perfectly happy to take their ebooks and make them available direct, for a much larger royalty cut than they’d get from a traditional publisher.

I am much less sure how well all this would work for an unknown new writer. There seems to be at least some indication that the book-buying public is skeptical of novels that haven’t been through some sort of publication process involving gatekeeping, editing, and proofreading. A writer who has a following may be able to get people to buy his/her original ebook publications; I suspect it’s a lot harder for unknown newcomers to bypass the usual publication process and make a go of it.

My opinion in this regard was unfortunately confirmed by a quick run through some of the direct-to-Amazon ebooks that are available. A lot of them read like the bottom half of the slush pile – incorrect punctuation, sloppy syntax, incoherent prose, mixed-up word choices. Some of them obviously didn’t even run the spelling checker before they made their deathless prose available to all comers.

There are gems in the pile, but it’s not worth my time to hunt them down – not when I can spend that time browsing more e-editions of traditionally published books than I’ll ever have time to read, all of which have passed some minimum editorial standard, as well as having been professionally edited and proofed. I suspect I am not the only reader to feel this way.

On the other hand, I find myself a lot more willing to take a chance on an electronic freebie or 99-cent publication by an author I don’t know than I am on a $7 paperback that’s going to take up shelf space and be a lot more nuisance to get rid of if I don’t like it. I still want someone to pre-screen things for quality, though, and for now, that means traditional publishers.

What does this mean for writers trying to break into publication? More choices, and not enough information. Nobody really knows how all this is going to affect traditional book publishing, and it’s all changing so fast that today’s predictions may be totally out of date by next Wednesday. So once again, we’re back to figuring out what it is you want, how much and what kind of work you’re willing to do, etc.

If you really want to get in on the ground floor of exciting new technology (and are willing to take the risks that go with that sort of thing), then I’d say now is the time. Ground-floor time doesn’t tend to last very long. Do bear in mind, though, that e-publishing is so new that even the e-publishers don’t necessarily know the best way to publicize and sell original e-books, so you’ll likely be spending a fair amount of time and effort doing publicity even if you get accepted by one of them. If you decide to self-e-publish, the work load will be even greater – you have design and layout, editing and proofing considerations as well as marketing…and your marketing efforts will have that extra resistance to overcome in readers like me who still want the kind of gatekeeping that publishers do.

If, however, you’re interested in doing your own e-book simply because you’re so frustrated with the traditional publishing system…well, it’s not going to be any less work, or any less frustrating, really. The work and the frustration will be coming in different places, that’s all – and if you are the sort of person who can tolerate those frustrations and do that work, but who can’t tolerate the stuff that goes along with traditional publishing, it’s a possible alternative. I wouldn’t, but I’m not a risk-taker and I would purely hate doing all the promotion and marketing stuff. But that’s me. Different strokes, mileage varies, etc.

I think the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read was the paperback of Charmed Life, some time in the early ’80s and I immediately went looking for more of the same. I was delighted to find the run of Greenwillow hardcovers under YA, and rapidly became a devoted fan.

In 1987, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Brighton, England that year. Practically the first thing I saw was that I’d been put on a panel that Diana was to moderate. I had that sinking sensation that you get when you know you’re going to make a fool of yourself in front of one of your idols, but it wasn’t like I was going to tell them I couldn’t do it. And then I walked into the Green Room a bit ahead of the panel, checking out name tags, and there she was.

She looked like the best kind of witch in the world, with bushy black hair down to her shoulders and an infectious grin, a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I took my courage in both hands and stepped up, and she blinked over at me and said cheerfully, “You’re on my panel. I have to introduce you. Who are you? What have you done?”

I was still suffering from the worst kind of stage fright, so I just pulled out the copies of my books that I’d brought along and handed them to her. She shuffled through them and then looked up at me with a frown. “But these look marvelous!” she said accusingly. “Why haven’t I heard of you?”

“Um, American writer?” I stammered, and she grumbled something about publishing and which books got published in different countries, and that was the start of a twenty-four-and-a-half-year friendship.

Most of the time, it was a letters-and-emails sort of friendship, and an erratic one at that. Neither of us had a lot of time to spend writing letters. Periodically, one of us would put together a big box of books that weren’t yet available in the other one’s home country and ship them off to the other; it was a toss-up whether it was more fun to pick out things I thought she’d like, or to see what she’d chosen for me. That was how I got hold of Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm, and Sally Odgers’ Translations in Celadon.

We saw each other mostly at conventions. There was one where Diana was going around asking everyone to suggest types of magic swords for a project she was working on. The suggestions got increasingly more hilarious as the hour got later, but she wouldn’t talk about the project because it wasn’t completely settled yet. The project turned out to be The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which later generated The Dark Lord of Derkholm.

Diana always said that her books were true after the fact – whatever she wrote about eventually started happening to her in some way – and she had a string of hilarious anecdotes to prove it. She was friendly to nearly everyone, and she and her husband were beyond hospitable – when I told her I’d be back in England in 1996 and asked if we could arrange a meet-up, the next thing I knew, she’d arranged a ride down from London for me and my travel buddy so that we could stay overnight at her home.

She was funny and dear and energetic, and even when she complained about things, she was entertaining. I will miss her for the rest of my life, even more than I’ll miss her unwritten books, and I will always remember her as the best kind of witch there ought to be.