In Which It Is Banned Books Week

 This is Banned Books Week, and, wow, it's amazing to reflect on the number of books that have been banned for a wide variety of reasons. Here's a partial list of books that have been banned in the U.S.

For the record, I've read 18 of the 25 on this list. A decent number of them hadn't yet been written during my childhood. The others I haven't read in some cases because they're not interesting to me and in other cases because I've heard good things about them but simply haven't gotten around to reading them. I read mostly middle grade fiction after all, and there's a lot on this list that's not in that category.

There are, of course, a lot more books that have been banned, either on a wide scale or just by a particular school library or city library system. 

I kind of sort of understand some of the rationale behind banning books. There are some books that really would be unhealthy for some kids to read at particular times in their lives. There are some books that kids don't have the maturity to understand. For instance, I wouldn't let my 9 year old read The Hate U Give or Lord of the Flies. Those are great books for an adolescent to read, but I don't think she's emotionally or intellectually ready for them.  Right at this moment she wants to read The Hunger Games, but I've told her she has to wait until at least middle school. I just don't think a 4th grader is ready to read a series centered around teenagers in a dystopian society being forced to kill each other on live television.

There are book on this list, such as The Handmaid's Tale, that I wouldn't even let my 15 year old read. I'll certainly recommend it to him when he's an adult, but I don't personally think it's something he needs to read before he's 18. Another parent might feel differently, and that's okay. 

That leads me to my point. I believe the only people who should normally have authority over a child's reading habits are loving parents. In the best case scenario, parents know their children, their maturity level, their life circumstances, and why or why not a book would be good for them to read.

Before you come at me for this, yes, I'm aware that this isn't always an ideal situation. Not all kids live in loving homes with parents who care about what effect the books they read have on their emotional health. Not all loving parents are equipped to determine which books would be good for their kids to read. Perhaps the parents are immigrants and don't read well in the language of the country they live in. Perhaps the parents were badly served by the educational system and don't read well themselves. Maybe the kid knows it, maybe they've done a stellar job of hiding it. But either way they may not feel qualified to decide what their child should read.

In these cases, I do think it's sometimes appropriate for a teacher or a school or community librarian to point kids toward books that would be good for them and recommend against books that wouldn't be good for them. I think this needs to be approached as gently as possible, saying something like, "You know, I think you'll appreciate The Hunger Games much more when you're in middle school. Maybe you'd like to try [insert adventurous middle grade book this kid might like here].

What I don't think is appropriate for parents, and especially not for librarians, is to say no to a book because someone somewhere finds it offensive, because they personally don't agree with the message, because they think it's gross or immature, and so on.

There are a lot of good books out there. No person is going to like all of them. You will undoubtedly find some of them really offensive. However, I don't think that gives you the right to play gatekeeper and stop everyone else from reading them. 

In Which I Receive Bad Writing News, but Pizza, a Giant Chocolate Chip Cookie, and the Twitter #WritingCommunity Make Me Feel Better

Remember how I posted recently about how an agent I really liked had my full manuscript and I was hoping to hear good news soon? Well, I heard news. Sadly, it was not good news. Friday evening I obsessively checked my email for, like, the 12th time that day and I had an email from the agent. Since it was a generic "submission reply from____" through Query Manager I didn't have much hope. Many agents call to make an offer. However, I don't have any hard evidence of how this particular agent operates, so it was always possible she would send a message through Query Manager to set up a call.

You've probably figured out by now that that was not what she was doing. She basically said she likes my premise a lot but didn't love the actual book enough to want to represent it. She gave one criticism, that she felt the pace was a bit slow, but basically the problem was that she had quite a few great manuscripts to choose between and, though she liked mine, she didn't like it enough to choose it over something else. 

I'd actually been afraid I was going to get a message to that effect since Wednesday, when this agent tweeted that one of the hardest things about being an agent is not being able to represent everything she requests in full. My first thought was, "So, what category does my manuscript fit in for you? The chosen or the regretfully rejected?"

So, weirdly, because of that tweet I felt sort of mentally prepared. That doesn't mean it didn't feel like a punch in the gut, it just didn't feel like quite as hard a punch. My husband and teenage son had just left for a weekend backpacking trip, so I couldn't even go home and cry to him. I texted the news, and to his credit, he did send a nice text back. I told my 9 year old, and she was appropriately disappointed for me, especially since she really likes the book and wants it to be published, but she didn't really understand what I was going through.

The people who did understand were other writers.I tweeted about my disappointment, and the Twitter #WrtingCommunity really stepped up. So far, two days later, I've gotten 419 likes, 10 retweets, and 4 quote tweets. That blows statistics for all my other tweets out of the water. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I added up all the likes for my other tweets for the past 6 1/2 months since I joined Twitter they would not equal 419. I also got about 100 comments commiserating and/or telling me to hang in there and that I'll find the right agent someday. 

I'd still much rather have gotten an offer than a rejection, but, since I had to get a rejection, it's nice that it resulted in so much support. Particularly in the divisive political climate we live in, having 419 people, all but about three of whom don't know you, is a pretty amazing demonstration that people can, in fact, be nice to each other when they want to be.

The other thing that made me feel better was having pizza and a movie night with my 9yo. If I had not just gotten a rejection I would probably have clicked "no" when Mad Mushroom asked if I wanted a dessert before I paid for the pizza, but it's awfully hard to muster up the self control to turn down a giant chocolate chip cookie when one version of your dream has just been crushed, so I didn't turn it down. It turns out Mad Mushroom doesn't just make the only pizza my super pick 9yo will eat. They also makes an amazing giant chocolate chip cookie.

So now it's back to the querying trenches, or really just reacknowledging that that's where I still am and may be for awhile. It's also back to work more seriously on my work in progress, so that I can query that one and let the current one in through the back door if that's not the one that gets me an agent.

Most people who aren't writers have the ideas that actually writing the books is the hard part of being a writer. Don't get me wrong. It's not easy and takes a lot of work. However, it can actually be accomplished relatively quickly if an idea gets ahold of you and you have the time to let it take you where it wants to lead you. Actually getting that brilliant book you produced published and in the hands of readers, whether you're searching for an agent, submitting directly to small presses, or publishing independently, is a million times harder in my humble opinion.

To end, because I really like including pictures and I didn't take one of the pizza or the cookie and sharing a screenshot of Twitter seems hokey, here are pics of my cats. The tabby boy is Daniel Tiger and the black girl is Shadow. And before you asked, no, Daniel Tiger is not named after the cartoon character or the puppet who inspired him. He's named after Daniel Boone because he's an intrepid explorer.

In Which Writing and Supervising Remote Learning Don't Mix Very Well

 My kids are now on day 12 of remote learning. In Kentucky remote learning is known as nontraditional instruction, NTI for short. Some districts have been using a version of NTI for years on days that would otherwise have been cancelled for weather. Our district never chose to do that, but they did do "pandemic NTI" this spring after it became clear that we weren't returning to in person school. Educationally, it was kind of a disaster. My 3rd grader learned nothing and was not a fan. My 9th grader learned a little bit and didn't hate it as much, but neither kid had a good end to the school year.

The one good thing about the pretty light amount of responsibility for them was that it meant a light amount of responsibility for me as the parent supervising their learning. I started writing a new book about a week after they came home in mid March, and I had finished it by mid May.  By mid June I had gotten it beta read and revised and was ready to query. I did this by taking every single spare moment to write. I wrote while my daughter was doing her schoolwork. I sent her to watch Netflix and wrote. I brought a camp chair and my laptop and wrote while my daughter played in the creek at a local park and my son rode on the mountain bike trails. 

It was super helpful that I was passionate about my main character and felt like she was living inside my brain and demanding that I tell her story. I was able to get her story out on the page pretty quickly because it was constantly being built inside my head.

The good news about this fall is that remote learning, which our superintendent is calling NTI 2DL (the 2DL stands for differentiated distance learning) is infinitely better than the spring version of NTI. The teachers have actually received a little bit of training in remote teaching and the district has invested in technology that makes it easier to achieve. My kids are actually learning stuff. Another improvement is that we've expanded our Covid bubble to bring in a classmate for our 4th grader. The girls are both much happier this fall than they were in the spring, and, though they also sometimes distract each other, they most often spur each other on to do their best work. They can also help each other if one girl gets kicked out of zoom, which happens less than it did the first few days but still happens.

My 10th grader is also getting good content, though I don't feel like he's getting quite enough since for some unfathomable reason they've decided to do each class only twice a week. Overall, though, the kids have actually been learning new content and feeling engaged in school this fall, which is a good thing for them and for their educational futures.

It is, however, not a great thing for my writing. It turns out the average 4th grader has pretty pathetic typing skills. And, guess what, the classwork for remote learning often involves typing. This means that I basically serve as secretary for my daughter and her classmate whenever they have an assignment that involves a lot of typing. For short assignments I make them do it themselves, but, if they have to type a few sentences or more, it's so much less frustrating for all of us if I just step in and do the typing. Otherwise they're hunting and pecking for 20 minutes just to write three sentences. Oh, and this whole time they're asking me how to spell every third word, even more often if the words are in Spanish (they attend a Spanish immersion school and I used to be a Spanish teacher).

Add to this the fact that my 10th grader emerges from his "schoolroom" in the office downstairs several times a day to ask me to look over something or help him with something (because, surprise surprise, remote learning is pretty much the worst possible way to start learning a foreign language, just for instance) and I don't have very  few solid blocks of time during which I'm not interrupted. I also never know precisely when and how long those blocks will be. 

This makes writing just about impossible. I have a new work in progress started. It all began with a question that my daughter asked me last December when she was dancing as a mouse in The Nutcracker (between them, my kids have danced in 11 Nutcrackers, though, sadly, neither is currently taking dance so there would be no Nutcracker parenting this year even if not for the pandemic). She asked, "What if the mouse king won the battle?" I didn't have a great answer at the time, but the question stuck in my brain and, almost a year later, has emerged as a story that centers around a reimagining of the Nutcracker in which the roles of hero and villain are reversed.

I like the story I've come up with. I believe in it, but, since school started, I've made absolutely no progress on it. I started really well late this summer. I checked out every single book about mice (the story features a talking mouse) or The Nutcracker that our library had and I brought them with me on a visit to my parents' house in Michigan. I spent a lot of time reading on the 8 hour drive up. I also spent some time reading in the "mobile office" I set up in the back of our minivan while our son rode at one of the many mountain bike parks within a half hour of my parents's house (it turns out there's much better mountain biking in West Michigan than there is in Central Kentucky). I got an outline for the story down and even started the first two chapters.

I was so excited about how well it was going. I was hoping that, if I didn't get an agent through this round of querying my current book, I might have the new one ready to pitch during Pitch Madness in December. I figured December would be the perfect month to pitch a Nutcracker themed book. Given that we're 1/3 of the way through September and I'm on chapter 5, I think that it extremely unlikely that's going to happen. I'm crossing my fingers that the full manuscript I have out to an agent results in an offer of representation. If I have an agent there's no pressure to finish something else in time to get it ready to pitch to agents on a particular timetable. I'd still want to work on it, of course, and, if I do get an offer, I'm hoping my hypothetical agent will love my WIP as much as they love my current project. Maybe knowing there will be someone to rep it to publishers after it's done will motivate me. Only time will tell if this hypothetical situation comes to pass.

In the meantime, the one thing supervising remote schooling has allowed me to do is pursue activities that work better for me even with frequent interruptions. Starting this blog is an example of that. At least I'm writing, even if I'm not writing a story. Another activity I've been making more time for is reading. I've read some great recent middle grade books which, though they don't  related to directly to anything I plan to write, can help me become a better writer and also give me a picture of the current market. Because, like it or not, understanding what will actually sell is part and parcel of being a writer. I've also done some reading my own education (I'm slowly making my way through Stamped from the Beginning) and my own enjoyment (I just received a copy of my friend Allison's newest romance novel, Since September. 

I'm hoping this role of remote learning supervisor will just be a short blip in my life and I'll soon be back to having more time to write. Either that or I'm going to have to make my ADHD brain hyperfocus on my WIP so I actually get it done. It's definitely an interesting time in history to be a writer and a parent.

In Which I am a Majority Culture Author in a World in Which #WeNeedDiverseBooks

 As I mentioned in my first post, I was privileged as a child and still am as an adult to read books featuring main characters that are mostly like me. This is because I'm white, abled, cisgender, heterosexual, and upper middle class. I do not truly belong to any marginalized community. I know plenty of women who have experienced gender discrimination, but I have never personally felt it (though it may have happened to me without me knowing about it, of course). I identify with the neurodiverse community because I have ADHD, but I didn't even know this until I was in my 40's (I just though I was spacey and disorganized) and, because I've set up a lot of scaffolding for myself, I can "pass" as neurotypical in most situations. It's only behind the scenes that my ADHD tends to show itself.

Despite this, as I shared in my first post, I have a passion to create stories and characters to which a greater diversity of kids can relate. I love books that that portray diverse characters. I fell in love with Rick Riordan's mythology inspired books when my son was in elementary school, and I love how the Rick Riordan Presents imprint has allowed authors from diverse backgrounds to showcase stories inspired by myths and legends from their own underrepresented cultures. I also love the diverse cast of characters that Rick Riordan himself created. I've recently discovered some great series books featuring nonWhite girls as the stars. My 9 yo also loves these.

The question I face as a nonmarginalized author is, at what point does creating a carefully researched character from a culture that is not my own cross the line into cultural appropriation? Should I just err on the side of caution and only create characters who are like me as a child? I don't think so, but I do think I and other authors like me need to proceed with caution.

An example of this is Anna Ono, the 9yo protagonist from the book I'm currently querying, which I hope will be the first in a series. Anna is half Japanese and half Swedish. Her mother is an immigrant from Sweden and her father is Japanese American. Her multiethnicity first began as an accident. I wanted to create a character who was obsessed with palindromes due to both her first and last names being palindromes. Anna was easy to hit upon, but the only palindrome surname I could come up with that sounded at all reasonable with Anna was Ono, which would mean she had Japanese heritage.

I first reached out to a multiethnic friend to ask her opinion on whether it would be okay for me, as a white author, to create a multiethnic character. My friend's response was, "Maybe, if you approach it sensitively and do a lot of research." I decided to forge ahead and really own Anna Ono's multiethnic identity as a big part of the story. 

I think I succeeded. I hope I did. The friend I approached with the idea was one of my beta readers and approved of the way I approached the topic. Another friend who is a person of color and the child of immigrants said it was well done. If the book gets published I hope the readers, especially multiethnic readers, understand that I approached this character carefully and thoughtfully. I intended to create a unique character who will be loved by many and allow multiethnic kids who discover her to feel "seen" in a book, perhaps for the first time, and did not intend to imply that I know all there is to know about the multiethnic experience.

I am, of course, not the first white author to have created a nonwhite character. For a long time, nonwhite characters (the few there were) were only created by white authors. This is because white authors were the only ones being published. There's still a huge problem in the publishing industry with nonwhite authors not being represented or published at the rate they should be. There's a movement by some in the industry to begin to change that.

This is being partly addressed by the creation of a Twitter pitch party called #DVPit.  In case you don't know, Twitter pitch parties are events in which authors are invited to pitch their book in the form of a tweet during a certain timespan in a certain day using a certain set of hashtags. Agents (and some acquisitions editors) will peruse the feed. If a pitch intrigues them, they will like it, which is an invitation for the writer to submit more.

The original pitch party, as far as I know, is Pitch Madness, or #pitmad for short. This one is open to anyone. It's been followed by pitch events specific to picture books, faith based fiction, romance, and quite a few others. #DVPit is one of the newer pitch events and it's specifically for writers from marginalized communities. There's no policing. Any author who identifies with a marginalized community is invited to pitch.

There's been a controversy on Twitter recently involving a not at all marginalized author who pitched in DVPit despite not belonging to a marginalized community (and even justified it by stating on their blog that we're all marginalized in some way), got an agent through the event, and now has a book deal for a book representing a culture to which the writer doesn't belong and which presents a misrepresentation of that culture. 

I don't think I've done that with Anna Ono. I definitely did not and will not participate in a Twitter event that's not intended for me. I do feel I'm treading a fine line, however. And, no I don't share this to say "Woe is me." I enjoy a ton of advantages that are completely unrelated to anything I've done. I want to create books with characters that aren't all the suburban white kids I mostly read about during my childhood.  I hope I can do this thoughtfully and sensitively.