Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)

I think I have to go for Kelly Link’s beautiful stories in the collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, though I have to give a shout out for the recent paperback collection Pretty Monsters, which I bought despite having copies of all the stories inside! No one writes stories like Kelly Link.

I also deeply adore Kim Newman’s Diogenes Club stories, which are collected in two volumes so far.

In my teens the most important anthologies to me were the Sword and Sorceress collections, which showed me that there was a world of fantasy fiction that was all about female characters. I used to lap these up, and discovered many awesome authors thanks to them.

Probably the short story collection which has stayed with me the longest is one called Dragons and Warrior Daughters, which I loved so much I even painted a copy of the dragon from the cover on my bedroom wall. Among other things, it introduced me to Diana Wynne Jones’ fantastic “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” which I read at exactly the right age for discovering Diana Wynne Jones, and yet didn’t actually discover her until my twenties. Later, reading a collection of her short stories, I was stunned to discover that one was by her.

Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan, is a collection that means a lot to me, not only because I read it for the first time in manuscript form, but because it has some of the most powerful and lyrical stories in it which redefine what fantasy is – and of course it has Singing My Sister Down, which I don’t dare re-read now that I have children. I remember discussing how amazing it was in the group, and being mildly surprised that, while I knew it was brilliant, the other women in the group had such a visceral, horrified “I love it but never want to read it again” response to the text. They were all mothers.

I liked Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but didn’t love it. It was so heavily male-centred that it felt empty to be. And then I was drawn to the gorgeous grey cloth-covered hardback of her short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and bought it without even thinking about it. The stories in this collection are amazing – beautiful and lyrical, and all contribute to the worldbuilding of her faery-contaminated version of history. It’s a book I would buy multiple copies of, in order to give away as presents.

The short story collection I’m most excited about this year (and it has lots of healthy competition) is Karen Joy Fowler’s What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, coming out imminently from Small Beer Press.

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I promised myself I would get to this one eventually. I had read most of the individual stories before the release of this, Deborah Biancotti’s first short story collection, and I read all of the new stories last year, as I read most original short stories, in electronic form and in a rush, in order to sift out the best ones for Last Short Story blogging.

But that’s the whole point of a short story collection. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the stories before. They are being presented anew, forming part of something else, and you haven’t actually read it as a collection unless you have sat down and read it, in order, turning all the pages.

I promised myself that one day I would lounge on a couch, with a box of chocolates or a tall jug of iced tea, and spend a whole afternoon taking in this particular book properly, instead of just waving my hands and telling other people to read it. Of course, my life doesn’t work that way. I consumed it in three parts – one part lying on the bed in my library, glaring at the various members of my family attempting to visit me in there and loudly announcing THIS IS MUMMY’S QUIET TIME, one part perched on my couch while the baby ran ever so slightly amok at my feet, and one part in an armchair today, while eyeing the workmen busily digging holes and swapping power poles outside my window.

Each time, despite my surroundings, I dipped into a source of calm while reading these stories. It’s hard to explain, if you haven’t read Deb’s work. She does creepy and weird and murderous and horrific (and someone *really* has to do a study one day on how many excellent Australian writers also do creepy, weird, murderous tales so very well, a Biancotti-Warren-Lanagan triptych anyone?) and very few of her stories make a complete amount of sense if you stare at them too hard (sometimes it’s better to sneak up on them from the side) but the language is so fluid and lovely, the characters regularly grab you by the throat and make you feel their pain/angst/confusion, and the overall reading experience is simply… well. Calming.

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The lovely  editormum linked me to this poll attempting to determine the top 100 YA novels of all time. They are requesting each participant to vote for their own top 10 of YA books, in order of preference.

On the one hand, these things make me kind of cynical – on the other, lists are good. I love lists, especially the deeply subjective ones. They encourage people to read books, and I do love it when people read books.

So here we go. This was a tricky one. The list I started out with was weighted far more heavily with books I’d read in the last year or two, but then I kept remembering classics from my own childhood, that bounced out the more recent books. I am rather pleased I ended up with 50% Australian authors, too

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
This is the queen of floaty old fashioned girls novels for me – I loved Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Jo March and Katy, but there’s something particularly wonderful and soppy about Cassandra Mortmain, her bohemian family, and the twisting dance of her sister’s (and her own) first romances, that just makes me melt inside. The movie was also weirdly perfect, even though it had Riley from Buffy in it. The casting was so good that it has imprinted now on to my memories of the book.

Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
Choosing which DWJ book to include here was tough, as I could of course fill an entire top 10 with novels by this author. But when it comes to favourite – it’s not about which has the best plot (Archer’s Goon) or the best romance (Fire & Hemlock) or the best magic (Charmed Life) or the best worldbuilding (The Merlin Conspiracy) or the deepest melancholy (Time of the Ghost) – it’s about which one you love best. Howl’s Moving Castle has all the hallmarks of a great DWJ novel – tangled plot, quirky characters, great dialogue, weird magic, bad parents, REALLY complicated plot, sweet romance – but on top of that it has Howl, and Sophie, and Howl’s hair. So it wins.

Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
I can never stop talking about this one – it made it to my top 10 standalone fantasy novels too. I can only repeat what I said there: I don’t have an unbiased bone in my body when it comes to this literary retelling of Snow White and Rose Red with added dwarf smut, extra sexy bear men, and deep psychological trauma. I feel it’s one of the most important fantasy novels published in recent years, precisely because of its powerful themes about trauma and recovery from abuse, over-protectiveness, and indeed, the nature of fantasy itself.
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Going Bovine, Libba Bray
A deeply important, epic story of a boy dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, who runs away on a crazy, magical adventure to save his own life, and the world. Quite possibly one of the best road trip novels ever, this deserves to be the bible of disaffected & nihilistic teens for at least a generation, and to serve as a snapshot of weird 00s pop culture for every generation that follows.

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After yesterday, I’ve been thinking about how many fantasy novels are truly standalone. Girlie Jones declared on Twitter that she doesn’t read fantasy because she’s not interested in waiting for volumes to be written. It’s a fair cop – if the concept of a journey through an elaborate magical world doesn’t grab you from the outset, it’s hard to find a half-decent gateway drug to introduce you to the genre.

Fantasy certainly lends itself to extended series, either of the to-be-continued type or the ‘many standalone novels set in the same world/based around the same character’ type. One of the pleasures of fantasy is the exploration of a world and the ongoing consequences of changes to that world – but that isn’t all that fantasy has to offer and sometimes there is a deep pleasure in a short burst of magical fiction. It’s also a great way to lure a new reader into the genre. I suspect that his many and varied standalone novels are a big part of why Neil Gaiman, for example, has such a broad fanbase.

Standalone novels are, if you are not Neil Gaiman, mostly a luxury for fantasy writers. They turn up at the very beginning of their careers, in many cases, or sidle in from time to time. The accepted wisdom is that standalones simply don’t sell as well as trilogies or series books, even when by the same author.

I wanted to assemble a list of fantasy books I love that are not only standalone, but continue to be so – they don’t share their world or characters with other books. There are no sequels, sideways or direct. @crankynick pointed out on Twitter that I had set myself a hard task because “it’s a rare writer that doesn’t go back to the well if a book takes off.” This is a cynical but let’s face it, not untrue view of how the publishing world works.

By only including pure solo standalone novels in my list, that means I am excluding many great fantasy novels which share a world or character with one or some other of their author’s works, even though they stand perfectly well on their own: such novels as The Hobbit, Valiant, The Curse of Chalion, Anansi Boys. Even Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can be excluded on these grounds, I think, as The Ladies of Grace Adieu is very much a sequel and companion volume, while not actually a novel. Thanks to Tehani and Nicole I also learned that Threshold, Sara Douglass’ lovely novel of maths, magic and glassworking is now linked to some of her other novels and no longer counts as a standalone in that pure sense. Damn it! There goes another of my best examples.

So: THE LIST (my top 10 super-solo-unsequelled-standalone fantasy novels) presented below…

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Margo Lanagan has won three World Fantasy Awards, four Aurealis Awards and four Ditmars, and been shortlisted for many other awards, including a Hugo, a Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr (twice), a Bram Stoker, a Theodore Sturgeon, a BSFA and an International Horror Guild Award. She is the author of the novel Tender Morsels, and three speculative fiction short story collections, White Time, Black Juice and Red Spikes.

1. The new Australian edition of Tender Morsels has an awesome Shaun Tan cover – are you excited about the novel being repackaged? Was there a reason (other than woot, Shaun Tan) for the cover change?

Well, it’s being repackaged not once, but three times, so I’m excited three times over, which is not a pretty sight, let me tell you. A Vintage (UK) paperback is coming out, the cover based on the adult UK cover (but different colours and with the words ‘A WORK OF GENIUS’ emblazoned across it), and Knopf put out a gorgeous paperback on 9 February, and now on 1 March the Shaun Tan cover from Allen & Unwin will hit Australian shops.

The reason for the Australian cover change is that this is a Young Adult edition, whereas the first edition was aimed at adults. So, new cover and the words YOUNG ADULT printed on the back. Contents exactly the same, except printed slightly smaller (because YAs have such wonderfully sharp eyes).

2. What have been the best and worst things about the reception and reader responses to Tender Morsels?

The worst thing was how willing people were to jump in and deliver an opinion based on what they were told, either by squeamish friends or by lazy journalists, about the book, without just going to it, reading (more than the first 20 pages of) it and forming their own opinion. People’s willingness to fling unsubstantiated judgments around was pretty disappointing, if also kind of hilarious.

The best thing was that the people who liked the book REALLY liked it, and passed it around, and pressed copies on their friends. Reading reviews by people who understand what you were on about is a great relief after a slew of articles accusing you of having perverse tastes and corrupting minors. You only need a couple of the former to be able to give the latter the finger and move on.

3. You’re currently working on a selkie novel, based on your novella “Sea-hearts” from the X6 anthology – what can you tell us about it? When will we be able to read it?

Oh, I could go on and on, at this stage; I’m more than two-thirds of the way through the first draft, and full to the brim with this story. Or at least, to the tear-ducts; this is one saaaad tale. The novel is called THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND. The X6 novella makes up the last third; for those who’ve read that, the first third is from the POV of Messkeletha, the witch in that story, and the middle third is from Daniel’s father’s POV.

The story is based on various selkie stories from Scotland and Scandinavia – nothing obscure, nothing you can’t find with a bit of light Googling. (Selkies being seals that transform into humans on land, for those wondering what this is all about.) It’s about an entire island that succumbs to the mysterious magical beauty of the selkie women, and traps them on land, for romantic and reproductive purposes, by hiding their seal-skins from them so that they can’t return to the sea. If you like having your heart pulled out through your chest wall, this is the story for you.

Deals are being hammered out as we speak, but I would expect BRIDES to be released in 2011, early or late depending on which country you’re in, and either preceded or closely followed by a collection of reprinted short stories, called YELLOWCAKE. Probably both books will be marketed as YA; but, you know, that doesn’t mean a whole lot these days. Everyone over 15 should like it, and perhaps some under. There are a couple of racy sex scenes associated with this novel, but they are being issued separately as short stories; I’m doing a podcast of one of them with Keith Stevenson at the end of March.

4. Which Australian writers or work would you like to see on the Hugo shortlists this year?

Kaaron Warren for anything she’s written, Deb Biancotti for A Book of Endings, Paul Haines for ‘Wives’, Jonathan Strahan for anything he’s edited. I reckon you and I should get a look-in, too, Tansy. Yes, a Hugo shortlist stacked with mates would please me greatly!

5. Are you planning to go to Aussiecon 4 in September? If so, what are you most looking forward to?

It’s all a bit up in the air – I’ve got a son doing his HSC this year, and I’m not sure whether he’ll need a mum around at that time of year or won’t care one way or another. If the latter, I’ll be there!

Having never been to a Worldcon, I’m not entirely sure what I should be looking forward to, but I imagine the Hugos (after-) party would be a goodie, and seeing which northern hemisphere friends take their lives in their hands and fly all the way around here for this will be interesting. And the panel Kyla’s got me pencilled in for in the horror stream (The Eternal Border: Are there taboos in dark fantasy? At what point does the fantasy stop and the psychosis begin?) sounds like one we’ll have a lot of fun with. My ears prick up and my nostrils quiver in the proximity of a good taboo.

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Also interviewed today: Marianne De Pierres, Richard Harland, Karen Miller, Ben Peek, Narelle Harris, Paul Collins, Damien Broderick, Justine Larbalestier, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Angela Slatter, Dion Hamill

Snapshot interviews will be blogged from Monday 15th until Sunday 22nd Feb.

To read them hot off the press, check these blogs daily:
http://random-alex.livejournal.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/

Will we beat 83 this time? If you know of someone involved in the Scene with something to plug, then send us an email at 2010snapshot@gmail.com.

Paul Haines is offering his acclaimed novella Wives in free electronic copy for anyone who asks. This is an awesome, epic piece of Australian horror/post-apocalyptic science fiction from last year, and if you’d like to see some Australian content on the Hugo ballot, this would be a marvellous one to support.

Wives isn’t just a great piece of fiction, it’s an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that he writes stories I hate, about people I hate (and I don’t mean mild revulsion, I mean actual HATE), and yet I can’t pull my eyes away. “Wives” is his best work to date, an utterly hideous vision of the near future, exploring issues that are already very relevant to many people – the lack of women sticking around in country Australia, the sociological effect of preferring male children to female and, oh yes, the ingrained misogyny that hovers just out of sight in our culture. Haines exposes the ugliest sides of human nature in this epic story of “Bridal Services,” rape and slavery, told through the eyes of a narrator so utterly screwed up by his circumstances that it’s hard to blame him for the despicable, thoughtless way that he speaks, lives and acts. This is post-apocalyptic fiction at its best and worse, because there is no apocalypse. There’s just us.

(in discussion with my fellow LSSers about “Wives,” I said “I don’t know whether I want to nominate it for the Tiptree or BURN IT TO THE GROUND.” Yeah, that. Just that.)

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Well, that was a bizarre evening! After a day of tidying in preparation for Raeli’s birthday party tomorrow (her first ‘proper’ one at home instead of at a kids centre, with games and everything) I settled down with a baby on my lap to follow the Aurealis Awards via Twitter. It turned into a rollicking good time, with many of us playing along at home chatting away merrily. Scott Westerfeld and Donna Hanson vied for the role of star twitterer from the event itself – Donna was quicker off the mark with announcing the winners, but Scott provided fashion descriptions, which added immeasurably to the style of the whole affair.

I was especially pleased to see Jonathan Strahan take Best Anthology for Eclipse 3, which I really think was the top anthology of the year internationally, not just in the Australian scene, and was also pleased to be beaten in the Best YA short story category by Cat with “Seventeen,” which was my favourite of her stories from this year. Also cool to see Leviathan take YA novel, and Peter M Ball win one of his many nominated stories. Sad that Twelfth Planet Press won none of its 7 nominations, though I think it just earned 7 years worth of always-the-bridesmaid karma which should be good news for next year! I was very pleased to see Paul Haines win Best Horror Short Story with “Wives” though he had to share the prize with himself! I hope he doesn’t end up fighting with himself over custody of the trophy. Or will they give him two? They should totally give him two.

Congratulations and commiserations to everyone, in any case. Many worthy winners and many equally worthy not-winners. I was very pleased and touched to hear of the Kris Hembury Encouragment Award for Emerging Artists – what a lovely way to remember Kris! I dropped out a bit towards the end of the Twitter party, as my baby reached the end of her tether right around the time that my elder daughter was insisting on bedtime stories. Oh, and we iced cupcakes in the middle of the whole thing. Sadly I don’t think Twitter was able to convey them properly to Margo and Felicity, but it’s the thought that counts.

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I’ve had a tab open to this post by Jim C Hines on Girly Books and gender stereotyping all week, pretty sure that I wanted to say something about it, but not sure what.

I understand his bafflement at male readers being hesitant to pick up his new books, the ones with girls on the cover. I remember the almost physical blow I felt the first time an acquaintance told me to my face that he wasn’t going to read my books because he didn’t read anything with female protagonists. (ten years later I’m still going, seriously? Seriously?)

Looking at Hines’ covers, which are gorgeous, it occurs to me how unusual they are in the fantasy genre. Having a female character on the cover, even a female and no male character, is not that unusual – but three women, with no man in sight? I can’t think of another fantasy cover ever that has had such a composition.

Fantasy fiction is not short of female characters, even memorable and important female characters, but it’s hard to escape the fact that so many of the sourceworks, the deeply respected historical texts that helped to form people’s idea of fantasy fiction, tend to place female characters in a vacuum.

From fairy tales through the pulp stories and Tolkien to the epic fantasies of the 1980’s – whether women are crunchy protagonists and point-of-view characters or cardboard love-interests and prizes, what they most have in common is feminine isolation. The princess’s most important relationship is with her potential prince, and her value is often calculated on how well she gets along with male characters. Often this is well meaning – an awesome female character stands out very effectively when surrounded by blokes. Also her awesomeness is often created by an unflattering contrast with other women – she is special, they are drips.

(I do this too, I’m horrified to realise, most of my female relationships in novels are based on conflict, and the best friendships represented are male-female)

These traditions bleed through to modern storytelling, and I can think of so few examples of fantasy fiction which has an emphasis on family or friendship relationships or even teamwork between women. I have to admit, when I first heard about Hines’ Stepsister Scheme my first thoughts were very cynical, that the idea of fairy tale princesses ganging up together and kicking arse/fighting crime was a bit of an old cliche. But thinking about it again – no, it isn’t. It’s horribly original. There just aren’t that many fantasy stories out there that are predominantly about women – and women plural, not just one really great woman.
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I was reading Locus Magazine this morning over my porridge and nag-the-child-into-getting-through-morning-chores ritual. There were many pleasant aspects of it, not least the fact that I have caught up enough with my  lastshortstory reading that I was able to have a dialogue with the short story columns (yes this does mean reading bits I agree/disagree with aloud).

But it was Cory Doctorow’s column (also available online) that caught my eye. Cory’s column is usually about platforms rather than content – copyright issues, freeware, publishing, new media, that whole Doctorow grab-bag of goodies. This month, though, it’s very much about content: it’s about the complaints he has received about his YA novel Little Brother, and specifically the complaints about the 17-year-old protagonist having sex. Not, he takes pains to point out, that the book is remotely sexually explicit:

I admit that I remain baffled by adults who object to the sex in this book. Not because it’s prudish to object, but because the off-camera sex occurs in the middle of a story that features rioting, graphic torture, and detailed instructions for successful truancy.

Young Adult fiction fascinates me, largely because it has formed a good three quarters of my novel-reading material for the last several years. There are a whole lot of interesting meta-stories that go along with YA fiction and publishing – the hip, popular authors who blog and tweet and tour and all seem to be friends with each other like a colossal literary sitcom, the enthusiastic teens and their responses to the books, and then… there are the parents.

I feel rather as if there should have been ominous chords at that point.

It seems like you can’t turn around in the blogosphere these days without some kind of drama or protest or scandal about what teenagers are reading, and what certain people would like to prevent them from reading.

I’m pretty sure it’s a win when teenagers are reading at all, right?

Sure, there are dangerous books in the world. By all accounts (I haven’t read it yet), Little Brother comes down on the side of dangerous books for teens, dealing with lots of controversial ideas and themes. But is it still really that controversial to depict two seventeen-year-olds in a loving, long-term (by teenage standards) relationship having sex? Especially if that sex takes place off stage, with no graphic description.

It seems, though, that no matter what pains YA writers take to be responsible in the writing of scenes depicting sex or other disapprove-worthy behaviour, there are always complainers who would prefer that those scenes not be written at all – indeed, that the topics be completely left out of any books intended to be read by teens.

The recent Lauren Myracle-Scholastic started with the mega-company asking that Lauren edit the fact that one of her 10 yr old protagonists had two moms, and the protest only died down when they decided to distribute her book anyway – but only to middle school audiences, not to the age group the book was meant for. Before that there was the British newspaper reaction to Margo’s admittedly difficult novel Tender Morsels, declaring that even older teenagers should be sheltered from such concepts as rape and incest, regardless of how tastefully said themes were depicted in a work of literature. There have been many more examples, for as long as this YA boom has been around. People – and not just parents – seem determined to try and control what teens read, as if books somehow are going to be their main source of troubling themes and information in the current age of new media.

Possibly I’ve said all this before. But the thing that gets me is that – if it’s the fact of sex, or drugs, or underage drinking, or whatever, that gets the anti-book brigade into such a flap, then it doesn’t actually matter whether the authors deal with said issues responsibly. In Cory Doctorow’s column he said that all the complaints about Little Brother boiled down to one question “Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don’t you punish them for doing this?”

Hmm. Is that why all those horror movies tended to kill off the teenage girls right after they had sex? Suddenly it all seems so clear. The important thing is to punish them fictional characters for making parentally-disapproved choices. Yep, that’s going to drag the teens away from their mobile phones and back into the libraries, now isn’t it?

That’s right, I am rocking the minimum. Go, minimum!

New music added to writing playlist: the Glee soundtrack. Awesome writing music, I have to say. It’s so peppy. But then I’m the girl who likes to write to Lily Allen turned up Way Loud, so possibly my suggestions won’t work for others.

Writing was harder today because the baby was just a bit squeakier, and being somewhere other than home ceased to be a novelty for her. I have to suck it up and start TAKING THE BOUNCY CHAIR anywhere I intend to write. She does love the bouncy chair. Still, minimum achieved. And the day isn’t over yet…

In other news, I just found out that Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels was the co-winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It’s always awesome when Australian writers get recognised at an international level, but I’m particularly excited because I think this is one of the most interesting and important fantasy novels of the last decade. Tender Morsels has so much depth to it, and so much to say about the nature of fantasy, reality and fairy tales. It’s not an easy book by any means, but it is a true classic of the genre. I’ve never formally reviewed TM because I felt too close to it to appear unbiased (I am in a critiquing group with Margo and critiqued an early version of the manuscript), but I would love to write an academic paper on it some day. There’s plenty of crunch there to work with.