What does it mean to be "Well Read"?

So, my good friend Lor tweeted this link from Book Riot: From Zero to Well-Read in One Hundred Books. If you aren't interested in clicking on it (and I actually don't really blame you) I'll tell you what it's about.

The author of this post is giving advice on how to become well-read if you've never read a single piece of literature before. He asserts that if you read these hundred books on his list, you will magically be "well read," despite claiming that there is no quantifiable definition of the term "well read." So, yes. He contradicts himself directly. Which is only the first problem I have with this particular article. Here are all the quibbles I have with it, in no particular order:

- "We have a term for 'well-read' but absolutely no one can come close to defining it." Well. Guess what? He then "defines" well-read as a person who has read the hundred books on his list.

- This list is to help a person who has "never read any literature." The person who is capable of reading and who has never read any literature does not exist. Seriously. You may have read only children's literature, but he acknowledges by virtue of having several children's titles on the list the fact that children's literature is, in fact, literature. So, if you learned to read, you've read literature. This list is void because it applies to no one, ever.

- There are several "first" books without their sequels. Who reads Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone without reading the rest? And, for that matter, if the whole point of "being well-read" is to know what the heck people are talking about when they talk about books, I would think you'd need to read the entirety of the best-selling series of all time. Just a thought.

Game of Thrones, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Anne of Green Gables, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Hunger Games, and 50 Shades of Grey all make the list, without their respective sequels. Interestingly, The Hobbit, the prequel to the Lord of the Rings series makes the list, but Lord of the Rings itself (any of the books) is not on the list. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn similarly appears as a single title from the middle of a series.

(No. I'm not going to discuss 50 Shades being on the list. It's absurd.)

- Conversely, several "collections" are listed as "must-reads." The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as well as collections from Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Flannery O'Connor. I have a hard time taking a man seriously when he lists everything written by Emily Dickinson, but only cites two of Shakespeare's works. Speaking of which...

- Two Shakespeare plays makes you "well-read"? I mean, Hamlet is good and important, but could you imagine a person who had no idea what Macbeth was about? Or The Taming of the Shrew? Or Much Ado About Nothing? Henry V?

Bueller?

I'm not a major, uber Shakespeare fan or anything, and I'm not one that advocates "You must read the complete works of Shakespeare to be taken seriously." But to claim that reading Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet alone will give you a functional understanding of Shakespeare and his influence on literature, pop culture, language, OUR WORLD, is ridiculous.

- This list is really, really white, with a heavy emphasis on Russian, British, and American novelists.  And that's really all I have to say about that.

- The Gospels and The Pentateuch are both listed. As a deeply religious person, I am highly offended by these being listed among ninety-eight titles of fiction. As a deeply religious person, I am highly offended by the idea that you can read the "greatest hits" of two major religious texts and call it a day, claiming you understand what more than two billion people on this planet claim as their lifeline. If you're a non-religious person, I'd think you might be offended by the claim that you must read religious texts in order to be taken seriously.

(I don't know if you're actually offended, it's just a guess.)

And this point really feeds into my last, which is really the gist of this entire rant.

- This list feels like it's less "How to Be Well-Read" and more "How to Fake Being Well-Read."

This list has some huge, gaping holes. Only the most popular works (not the best, just the best-selling) of some of the most popular authors throughout the history of the world are included. A single title from Austen, a single piece of work from any of the Brontes. A handful of fantasy, even less of science fiction, virtually no romance outside the major gothic/tragic/literary classics. A single horror title. Not a single vampire (love them or hate them, they are culturally significant across pretty much all of human history). No Hugo. No Dumas. One Dickens.

This is a list written to help people pretend to care about books.

Which is a damn shame.

It could have been a list written to help people learn to love books, to discover what kind of books they love most. I am not against lists of "Must Read" books. On my bucket list is the BBC's 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, and I'm making good headway on it (35 down!). I understand the purpose, and I understand that these lists cannot be perfect. But this one?

It's just bad.

Since this makes me all ragey-faced, please, tell me what you think it means to be well-read and what books would be on your list. Or blog about it and drop me your link. I'd like to revisit this topic in a much more positive way. 

Pregnancy and Childbirth in Books and Movies

This is something that has been getting under my skin for... well, since I had my first son in 2006. Pregnancy and childbirth are often represented in books and movies, and they are usually MISrepresented. Which, frankly, is really irritating. Pregnancy is a very diverse experience, childbirth is a diverse experience. Even one woman will experience multiple pregnancies and childbirths in radically different ways.

This means there are literally MILLIONS of ways to get this right, and yet authors (almost invariably male) still manage to get it wrong. So very, very wrong.

Today, I'm dispelling some of the most common pop-culture errors about pregnancy and childbirth. Most of these are pervasive - i.e. they are repeated by multiple writers, across genres, with no regard for the truth. Use this post as a general set of guidelines, especially if you have no idea how pregnancy and childbirth works.

Error #1: "THE BABY KICKED!" 
This usually is shown when the woman is verrrrrry far along in her pregnancy, visibly and obviously pregnant. She then doubles over and grabs at her stomach and everyone freaks out and she says, "NO! The baby just kicked for the first time!"

The (more common) truth: Baby is kicking from the second it has gummy-bear sized limbs to kick with. Depending on how and where the placenta and embryonic sac are placed within the womb, mom will feel the baby kick sometime between sixteen and twenty weeks. From that moment - the moment she first feels baby move - it is gymnastics meet/dance party. Some movements will be bigger than others. Some are hardly noticeable. But let's put it this way: I felt when my babies had hiccups, I could tell whether it was a foot or arm or butt that was pushing on me, and I could tell when they were "swimming" around.

Error #2: "MY WATER JUST BROKE!"
It seems like most labors start with a woman's water breaking, it's a big embarrassing mess, and then she is immediately whisked away to the hospital.

The (more common) truth: Less than 10% of women experience their water breaking as a beginning to their labor. When they do, it's usually a trickle of the "Oh my gosh, did I accidentally pee my pants a little???" variety.

Most labors start with a "Was that a contraction?" contraction. And those contractions are far apart and annoying for hours. They slowly get stronger and closer together until you call your doctor and he says, "Yes. You're ready, go to the hospital." That early-at-home-annoying-but-not-really-ready-yet labor lasts for HOURS. Most women spend something like 6-12ish hours in this phase.

"Normal" labor can last anywhere from one hour to a hundred hours (literally), and the early stages are very, very boring.

Error #3: YOU DID THIS TO ME!!!
Every fictional woman in labor is screaming and blaming the world, particularly her husband, for her plight.

The (more common) truth: Women in labor don't have the energy or brainpower to spare for screaming coherently at anybody. Most women - even giving natural birth - are fairly quiet. Grunts, moans, whimpers, and crying are common. You can speak normally, except maybe through the "transitional" phase (if you don't know what that is, don't sweat it, it's not a huge deal). You just probably don't want to. The instinct is to rest between contractions, not to scream at the one person who is supporting you, both physically and emotionally.

Most women who give birth naturally report it being a very peaceful, quiet experience. This is extremely important to remember if you write historical fiction. Speaking of historical fiction...

Error #4: Flat on her back. 
Fictional characters always deliver babies while lying flat on their backs. This experience is almost exclusively limited to modern, westernized medicine, and even then it's only the norm for women who have epidurals and other interventions during labor.

The (more common) truth: 
Natural childbirth - which makes up 99% of childbirths in the history of the world - is usually accomplished in a squatting/sitting position.

Note: Kudos to Michelle Moran who managed to get the births in her historicals much more accurate.

Error #5: The postpartum body.
This one is especially bad because we have such insane expectations of a woman's body to begin with. In fiction, women are back in their pre-pregnancy jeans without so much as an ounce of effort after only a few weeks (or even days!) Scarlett O'Hara achieves a nineteen-inch waist just four weeks postpartum, and every new mommy on TV has nothing but huge breasts to show for her pregnancy.

The (more common) truth: 
It takes many, many weeks or months to get your body back. Some women never achieve it without surgical assistance. I have a diastasis, meaning my abdominal muscles now have a three inch gap between them, forcing those muscles to bow outward, forever changing the shape of my midsection.

Yes. Some women bounce back quickly. Some look better than ever post-baby. But I have a friend who is a dietitian and personal trainer and she is six months postpartum. She still doesn't look exactly like she did before (she looks great, don't get me wrong, but it's just not the same).

What are some of the more common errors you've seen in fictional pregnancies and childbirth?

Insecure Writers' Support Group

This is my first time participating in the Insecure Writers' Support Group, hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh.

I'm in a major funk right now and I don't even know what to do about it.

I started querying before going to Storymakers, and then realized there were changes I wanted to make to my manuscript. Well, guess what? Everybody I queried before the conference (some help you all are, by the way, that was on your advice) has sent me a form rejection.

I got a "revise and resubmit," but everything they wanted to change was everything I loved about the book.

With the changes I'm making - based on Storymakers inspiration - I'm sending everything out to CPs and betas. And everyone has different ideas.

Remove all the dialog tags.
Use better dialog tags.
Don't use dialog tags at all, find a way to work in a beat instead.

I need more info on this character/trait/scene/world.
Don't give me so much info on this character/trait/scene/world.
I don't like this character/trait/scene/world.

You're explaining too much.
You're not explaining enough.

Show, don't tell.
Don't use twenty words when ten will do.
It's all about word economy.
Expand your prose, take your time to really get the description right.

And the worst part is: NOBODY IS WRONG. They are all right, in some way, and according to some set of opinions. And those opinions are based on reading a lot of books, both good and bad, and taking a lot of writing classes, and speaking and working with people in the industry. In short: They are really educated opinions.

But the problem is this: I now hate everything I write. And since I've received only one genuine piece of feedback from an editor or agent, and that was basically, "We hate everything about this, but feel free to try again." I have a hard time believing there's anything I can do to make other people not hate what I'm writing too.

I'm not fishing for compliments. I promise. I don't want a whole bunch of "You can do it!"s based on a whole lot of nothing. Or based on your personal opinion of me as a person.

I just... think I might quit.

What I Learned at Storymakers

This post has been incredibly slow.

That's not fair. It's not the post's fault. I should rephrase that: I have been incredibly slow at writing this blog post. But, it's for a good reason. You see, I learned SO MUCH at this writing conference, that I've been furiously polishing my manuscript. I polished it so much that I submitted it to the #PitMad contest happening on twitter.

And I got some requests.

So. Basically, this intro is to tell you I've been querying and I'm getting some (very early, don't get too excited) results.

All that aside, I do want to blog about some of the amazing things I learned at Storymakers in Provo. First the things I learned from myself:

1. Comfortable shoes are a must. My cowgirl boots (I live in Arizona, duh) were the perfect choice. My feet didn't hurt for one second, despite pulling four consecutive eighteen-hour days.

2. Bring non-sugary snacks. I did not do this, and I was on carb-overload by the end of the weekend.

3. Don't ditch to have a chat session with your friends. You will want to ditch to pick an editor's brain, and you will have wasted your ditch. (I made the right choice on this one, but more on that in a later post)

4. Promote yourself. Don't pimp yourself. Hand out cards or swag. Don't accost people and force them to take your swag.

True story: Every time someone forced me to take swag I didn't ask for, I thought to myself, "Yeah. Sure. I'll throw this away for you." Which is wasteful. Don't be wasteful.

5. Get your friends' cell phone numbers ahead of time. Tweeting and emailing gets slow when there's five hundred people in the same room doing it at the same time. Text is much more efficient. And you can gossip without someone reading it in their tweetstream.

Now, the stuff I learned from other people.

Elana Johnson, on querying: They're judging you.

J.R. Johanssen: When querying, be the non-crazy people. It will help you.
J.R. Johanssen: Sometimes it's about the trends. Sometimes it's about the writing. But the biggest deal-breaker is not having a voice of your own.

Jordan McCollum: A well-executed internal journey (or character development) dovetails with the external journey (or your plot).
Jordan McCollum: Give your characters real choices, not stacked choices. And then let them make the wrong choices.

Marion Jensen & Krista Lynne Jensen: It's not what your character does, but how he does it that makes him endearing.
Marion Jensen & Krista Lynne Jensen: Humor requires surprise. It is the opposite of boring. (This doesn't actually have anything to do with their class - "Crafting Endearing Characters" - but it's both true and useful.)

Paul Genesse: Tom Bombadil is the worst thing to ever happen to Middle Earth. (Again, not really relevant to the class - "The World as a Character" - but it's true and needs to be said more often.)
Paul Genesse: Come up with 100 details about your character's universe. Delete 90 of them.

Julie Wright: Don't focus on the most important character in the universe, but the one who hurts the most.
Julie Wright: Books that are not fully imagined are not worthy of the [fantasy] genre.
Julie Wright: Fairy tales remind us to be better people.

Clint Johnson: There is no such thing as an "omniscient" POV. It's all being filtered through someone's lens. Figure out whose, and define the story through them.
Clint Johnson: Reaction reveals so much more than action. Your story is not what happens, but what your characters do about it.
Clint Johnson: Exposition communicates information. Narrative communicates emotion.

Several of these classes/instructors were so informative and helpful, I'd LOVE to just post my notes (some of these hour long classes resulted in four pages of notes... and not just one of them.) and let you share the vast wealth of knowledge I know possess. But. That would be unethical, not to mention mean. So, if you want more notes from a particular instructor (and I promise, if you *think* you do, then you TOTALLY do), you'll have to get in contact with them.

What I've Learned About Writing Conferences Without Even Having Attended One Yet

I really tried to think of a shorter or less obvious title for this post but came up short. Have I mentioned how much I hate titles? Oh, I have? Well, then. We'll just move on.

I am attending the LDStorymakers Conference in Provo, Utah this week and my preparations have taught me a lot already, despite the fact that the conference doesn't start for two more days. Here's what I've learned so far:

- You need business cards. And if you don't know this until it's too late to have them printed, you'll have to do them yourself. And if that's the case, you'll need to buy twice as many as you think you need because you are a writer and not a professional printer and you will mess them all up.

- Writers are casual people and will refer to the shoes they packed as "really nice clogs." I don't have any idea what that actually means, but it bodes well for my feet over the next few days.

- You're never ready to read your work out loud in front of people, no matter how much you love it and no matter how many times you've edited it.

- "Business Casual" means something very different to artistic-type people than it does to a person who worked in banking for eight years.

- There are too many classes and, yes, you will want to attend them all. But you can't. So you need to pick.

- Checked baggage fees are bullcrap.

I'm quite sure the list of "What I've Learned After Attending A Writing Conference" will be fourteen and a half times as long as this one, so I'll just leave you with this for now.

Oh, and if you're interested in learning some of the tidbits and gems we glean from the conference, you can follow #storymaker13 on Twitter. (Yes, it's a very long hashtag. I'm not in charge of these things.)

Unfriended

So there's this woman I know from Twitter. I will call her Mary. Only because I'm reasonably certain that I don't actually know anybody named Mary, so that makes this an innocuous choice.

Mary and I followed each other for probably two years. Maybe three. Who's counting?

We followed - literally - hundreds of the same people. We talked often. Shared jokes, shared good news and virtual hugs when there was bad news. We were not close friends, but more like good friends. Like, she's the childhood friend of your best friend, type of friends.

One day I saw that she unfollowed me. (I use Manage Flitter to unfollow inactive accounts and such) No big deal. It happens. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it wasn't, but it was definitely not a big deal. I stayed following her and would occasionally comment on something she tweeted.

She never, ever responded.

When I would comment on a tweet of hers that had somebody else involved, she would respond to the other person and delete my handle - effectively deleting me from the conversation.

She then went on and unfriended me on two other social networks. I took that as the sign that she just didn't want me around, so I unfollowed her on Twitter.

Please believe me: This was not an "I'll show you!" kind of move. It just that if she's in my stream, I'll respond /star/RT/whatever. She obviously doesn't want me doing so, so I just remove her from my stream to stop myself from doing those things.

Every day, she shows up in the "People you should follow" setup in the sidebar of Twitter. #AWKWARD

And I know I need to get over it because it's just twitter, and I know it's not worth being upset about. And I honestly wouldn't categorize myself as "upset," it's just that it's... well... it's WEIRD, right?

Pen Names, Women, and Fantasy Fiction

I've decided I need to use a pen name. Well.. sort of. I've sort of decided I need to use a pen name. A big part of me wants to see MY NAME on a book on a shelf someplace, but as I get closer to being ready to query this bad girl, I'm spending more time researching actual sales trends. You know, as opposed to the "I wish this was true and it feels true because of what I have on my nightstand currently" sales trends I've relied on up to this point.

And I've noticed something that I thought was over, but apparently is not.

Sexism and speculative fiction is alive and well, folks. And not just in content (though that is getting better as each year goes by). No. I'm talking about the name on the cover of the book.

"But no! Nobody in their right mind thinks that a woman writes fantasy fiction badly! Not anymore! What is this, 1934?!"

But, alas. It is true. I did some internet searching and noticed some pervasive trends. Based on those trends, I deduced that there are still certain expectations in place out there. I've broken those trends and expectations into easy-to-read graphs.

First: The ratio of Male Fantasy Authors to Female Fantasy Authors. It's not shocking in the slightest. Slightly more men than women, but that gap closes a tiny bit more every year. (The size seems unnecessary now, but later on, you'll be glad the graph is so big. And I need them to all be the same size for my faux-CD.)

However, that picture is not quite fair. A large portion of women still use a pen name, and masculine or gender-neutral pen names (including initials) are the most common. Some women have a given name that is gender-neutral, such as Robin or Jaime, and I counted those in the gender-neutral name category for the purposes of this illustration. A few women, such as Tofa Borregaard use distinctly female pen names. You would know her as Gail Carriger, of course. And, yes, I know "Gail" has been a masculine name in the past, but it is primarily a female name today.

So a very small percentage of published fantasy authors are women using a distinctly feminine name, whether their given name or a pen name. Still, it's a measurable number of women named Katy or Karen publishing fantasy, right?

Well.

Sort of.

That yellow sliver - approximately five to ten percent, so far as I can calculate - represents ALL fantasy-related writing. When you break it down into sub-genre and other categories, it looks a little more like this:

Published women with distinctly female names have written books across all fantasy genres. However, a measurable portion of them write mostly non-fantasy, and are only considered "fantasy authors" for the sake of making the genre look more progressive and feminist-friendly than it truly is. That is, they write mystery or thrillers or romance or literary fiction for a bulk of their writing and once wrote a fantasy-based short story, or incorporated paranormal elements into one of their mysteries once. They aren't really fantasy writers, at least not to their readers.

YA Fantasy (and all its sub-genres) is dominated by female writers, and they make up the bulk of female fantasy writers overall. Female authors seem to be well-accepted as urban fantasy or paranormal writers, and (of course) they are well-accepted as romance and erotica writers. The fantasy-romance-erotica category seems to be overwhelmingly female, but again, the fantasy elements are secondary to the romance elements, and their readers wouldn't say they are reading fantasy most of the time.

The number of women using a distinctly female pen name while writing high fantasy for adults is small. Combine those last two graphs, plugging the genres into the female-pen-name slice, and it looks something like this:

It might be hard to see, but that tiny dark purple sliver is women with female names publishing high or epic fantasy for adults.

So far as I can tell, the ability to succeed is proportionate across all these slices (i.e. - one percent of men publishing fantasy will sell well enough, and one percent of women with a feminine name writing high fantasy will sell enough ... but since there are approximately two hundred times as many men writing fantasy as there are women-with-feminine-names-publishing-high-fantasy... there will be two hundred times as many male household names as female household names.)

Doing that math all the way, I have about one-hundred-and-sixty times the chance of selling well if I use a gender neutral or masculine pen name.

I feel it necessary to say at this point that these numbers cannot possibly be perfectly accurate. It is nigh on impossible to track every book that is released into the wild, so I've done my best to make these graphs realistic without knowing every piece of data. I did pore over lists and charts and actually do a lot of math to get to this point. And, trust me, these numbers are not what I want them to be, so there's no way I would have fudged them to make them look like this.

I also feel it necessary to note that these numbers are only related to traditionally-published authors. I have no idea how to begin tracking the massive labyrinth that is self-publishing. Since my goal - at this point, anyway - is to be traditionally published, these are the numbers that matter to me.

I also want to be PERFECTLY CLEAR: I am not saying high fantasy is somehow "better" than fantasy-tinged romance, or anything of the sort. It's just that I am writing high fantasy, so that's the category that matters to me. I have a lot of respect for people who write genres and sub-genres other than my own, and don't take these comments as another other than the observations they are intended to be. Thank you.