Howdy. Thanks for all the well-wishes. After another disastrous encounter with the medication this morning, I’ve decided that I must be allergic. Like, really, really, allergic. If I had been just a little more allergic, I would have had to go to the hospital.
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I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about my story in Wild Thing. The answer is yes, it will be continued, and is the first in a new urban fantasy series coming out from Ace in July 2008. A whole year away! This series will be totally unlike the Dirk & Steele novels in that it will follow just the heroine, Maxine, and it will be very low on romance, and high on sexy danger and action. What a combo. Never fear, though! The Dirk & Steele series is continuing, as well. I’ll be writing both at the same time.
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Recent posts on literary snobbishness.
1. Gregory Frost’s response to a recent NY Times article on Phillip K. Dick (called, ironically enough, A Prince of Pulp, Legit at Last): “Essentially, this is the same bullshit argument we hear all the time: That book is too good/too literary/too well written to be that skiffy gradoo. It�s literature, so it must be extracted from your grubby skiffy-tainted hands and placed in the light of legitimacy. P.D. James? Not sf. That Atwood woman? Not sf. Marge Piercy? Oh, most definitely not sf.”
2. Lou Ander’s post, in which he quotes Kim Stanley Robinson: “You pay a price for being in the world of science fiction in terms of essentially ghetto culture. In the larger culture you are marginalized in the way that everybody in a ghetto would be marginalized. But … it’s not the same as ghettos traditionally were in the origins of that word because you’ve actually chosen to enter it; you could leave it if you wanted to. So you go in there with the full knowledge that you may be marginalized in some contexts, but in other contexts you have actually been empowered…”
3. Related, Erica Jong’s article called Ghetto (Not) Fabulous, in which she states: When writers like Eugenides write about families and relationships, critics marvel at their capacity for empathy. When a female writer does the same thing, they sigh and roll their eyes. Men aren’t penalized for focusing on family and relationship. Rather, we wonder at their empathy because of their gender.
Which is nice, but then she also goes on to say: I see deeply diminished expectations in young women writers. They may grumble about the chick lit ghetto, but they dare not make a fuss for fear they won’t be published at all. Their brashness is real enough, but they accept their packaging as the price of being published.
I disagree with this. I’m not in a thoughtful enough mood to fully explain why, but I will say that I am troubled by the fact that she associates “deeply diminished expectations” with “chick-lit,” which somehow implies that despite her argument against the “ghettoizing” (is that a word?) of certain works, she herself subscribes to the same prejudice.
But then, this I like: Let’s celebrate our femaleness rather than fear it. And let’s mock the old-fashioned critics who dismiss us for thinking love matters. It does.
4. An essay on genre-bending at Bookseller Chick: “Because I grew up feral in the wilds of the public library, I never learned the rules about books. No human explained that literary fiction was superior and distinct from genre fiction; no one cautioned me against the acute boredom of a thick literary tome. I consumed science fiction, mysteries, literary novels, stories about animals, gothics, biographies, contemporary fiction, and how-to books. Just as I learned to follow the trail of a new hardback through the stacks, I also learned that there were good books and terrible books in every section.
5. And hey, Nora Roberts is one of the top 100 most influential entertainers of the year. Oh, yeah. She rocks.