Forced to spend time with the wife, when I want to be with the mistress

Metaphorically speaking, that is. A.k.a., I have to write a paper today on Wordsworth instead of gleefully working on my fiction. The paper's not due till Thursday, but I'm pretending it's due tomorrow instead to force myself to finish it TODAY so I can get it out of my head-space and move on to happier places. And yes, I dream of the day when the mistress becomes the wife and I can give her all my attention ;)

When I finish the paper, I'm going to reward myself by blogging my first In My Mailbox edition - I've got some exciting titles coming this week to review!!

Malinda Lo's ASH

I've been trying to track down a copy this book since it came out last year--the gorgeous cover first caught my eye, and when I heard it was a retelling of Cinderella (I'm a sucker for retellings of any kind--fairytales, myths, Jane Austen novels, etc!) with LGBT themes, my interest was piqued. They finally got it at my local library, and I picked it up this week. It was a lovely read. Today has been frantic with an unconscious stress that had been making my jaw tense and tired all day, but settling into Ash tonight helped everything slowly unwind. It was the perfect kind of retelling--keeping with the spirit of the tale, but taking it to new and unexpected places. Too many modern Cinderella stories are heavy-handed about reversing the problematic gender stereotypes it reproduces, but this one was beautifully written and paced. It was nuanced in all the right places with a story that unfolded naturally. And, you know, with some tricky fairies thrown in for good measure :) The setting was a little removed, set in a story-world that felt akin to a high-fantasy with villages and princes and forgotten magic and such, and it didn't quite pull me in as entirely as other books, but it was still a high quality book. I look forward to Lo's forthcoming Huntress.

A passage from the climax of the book (but I don't think it's spoiler-y, just lovely):

As the people swayed and stamped and sung their way around the bonfire, Ash knew that this was what the fairies were always hunting for: a circle of joy, hot and brilliant, the scent of love in the deepest winter. But all they could do was create a pale, crystalline imitation, perfect and cold. How it must disappoint them: that they would never be human.

SEX?! In Young Adult Novels?! Oh my!

I was reading a YA author's blog recently, and when asked why she wrote in the YA genre, she answered frankly that one reason was that she didn't want to write sex scenes! This cracked me up because it is so spot on! My graduate studies in children's literature has made clear the long tradition of viewing children as innocents who are not to be corrupted, not to mention the notorious history of book-banning. Consequently, there's traditionally hasn't been too much sex in YA books. But this is changing, most notably among some excellent male authors willing to transgress normative YA sex-talk boundaries like Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and John Green's Looking for Alaska (mainly in their *shocking* frank discussions of masturbation, which really, is even more transgressive than talking directly about sex!). For all the girls, on the other hand, there are several writers who are talking details of the deed (albeit couched in someone ambiguous terms, at least as far as naming body parts goes) in their books:

Simone Elkeles: Both Perfect Chemistry and Leaving Paradise are so, so good, surprisingly good. And yeah, sexy too. No problem talking about melodramatic sexy situations here! Unfortunately, the sequels to both of these books bummed me out, but the initial books are great reads.

Jennifer Echols, who's recent two books, Going Too Far and Forget You.
I've been seeing a lot of attention toward, and for good reason, they are quality chick-lit reads. These books are fluffy, but oh the most delicious and well-written kind of fluff. And unabashed with the sexy.

One of my favorites is Elizbeth Scott, who continues to take on such a variety of interesting projects, mixing up really difficult stories like Living Dead Girl and her newest one, Grace (which I really want to read), with other plain-talking very real feeling stories of teenage girl life. She's like Sarah Dessen, but with more honesty and real-to-lifeness, and she doesn't seem to feel the need to wrap up every little ending with a happy, unrealistic bow. I first read Bloom by her, which talks about a girl dealing with burgeoning sexy feelings and just last week read The Unwritten Rule, the rule being, don't want your best friend's boyfriend. But the stories are so much more complex and honest than their cover blurbs. I love every one of her books, but they are always too short!

And one by a debut author this year that was absolutely amazing, top ten reads of the year: Jandy Nelson's The Sky Is Everywhere. I mean, this is amazing writing, hands down, poetic and gorgeous and with a super compelling story, and again, not afraid to talk about female sexuality.

Kindle Giveaway!

Check out Sparkling Review's blog for details about the giveaway!

http://www.sparklingreviews.com/

I love YA review sites!!!

I Am An Agented Author!!!

That’s right folks. The illusive dream has been made real, and I have my name signed on the contract to prove it. With Charlie Olsen of Inkwell Management!! And really, while this feels like the end of one journey, I know it’s really the beginning of another—the real stuff of being an author.

So allow me a bit of memory lane--I started writing prolifically in 2006, the first time I’d ever done so in my life.I hadn’t written so much as a short story since I was in high school, so needless to say, the learning curve was high. And slow. Much slower than I’d anticipated, and if I’d have known then that it would take me four novels to work out all my crappy first attempts and that I wouldn’t really get anywhere until the fifth, I don’t know if I would have had the mojo to keep going. But alas, as ignorance is bliss—I thought that first novel was going to be amazing, that I was already fabulous, that I’d be one of those amazing people who writes a kick-ass novel their first try. Yeah. Or not. J

But perseverance, willingness to take critiques to heart, continuing on try after try after try, through hundreds and hundreds of wasted pages, querying two failed novels, and figuring out what the hell they mean by voice, I’ve just signed with an agent for my novel GLITCH. Which is where we get to the part about this being a beginning.

This does not feel real yet, and maybe that’s just because I was really confident in this book, and I’d had so much interest from agents—so I can’t tell if it’s just because underneath I was confident it might happen this time, or if good things just take a really long time to click with me as real (I felt the same way about being a mom, to be honest—they handed me this squirming squishy mass with big eyes and tiny fists and I was like, oh, wow, well, this is, you know, cool, I guess). Talking with my rockin’ agent doesn’t make me feel very nervous either, it just seems all like—yeah, I was ready for this, I put in the work and it was time.

And digging into the new edits feels like a delightful vacation from the detestable grad school papers I’ve been trying to force myself to write—because this is where I want to spend my energy and brain power and creativity. I’ve been itching to get back to storytelling, and now I get to.

Fabulous Life

I just got back last night from an academic conference in Fort Worth where I presented a paper on Ursula LeGuin and Terry Pratchett. The conference went well for both me and my buddy Phillip who went with me, but more even than the conference itself, what was sweetest about the entire trip--was coming home. I've never traveled without the hubster and it was strange not to have him there with me. Coming home and spending some sweet time with him made me realize just how precious he is, how beyond ordinary he is, and how much I genuinely adore him.

And of course the kiddo is super stoked about Halloween, and wasn't as interested in me hugging the stuffing out of him when I got home, but I just wanted to hold and hold and hold him! He kept squirming away until I finally told him he owed me three hugs, one for each night I was away, and he complied--and then twisted away to show me all the candy and toys he'd gotten at a halloween festival he went to last night. He's going to be a skeleton when he goes out tonight. He's very excited about looking as scary as possible

So life is good, very, very good. There are some exciting things brewing in my professional life--more news to come on that later in the week. In the meantime, I'm trying to batten down and focus on finishing the first six cantos of The Faerie Queene for my Renaissance class tomorrow night. Not exactly my favored reading, but I'm stoked to have some great YA books coming in the mail next week--including an ARC of Ally Condie's Matched!

X-Men, Feminism, and the Idealized Body

Watching the first season X-men with my son—the 90’s cartoon, not X-men Evolution--brings up a lot of feminist considerations, probably in part due to my recent Feminist Composition class, and doing research on Twilight.X-men as a concept, is pretty damn great. I’d love to read some cultural studies scholarship on the comics and the cartoon versions. It’s such a charged metaphor of for the persecution of Others in society. Senator Kelly, with his ‘Let’s round up all the mutants!’ seems an implicit echo of Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism witch hunts.

But on a feminist level, it’s pretty great—all these girls and women are equally kicking ass alongside the dudes. Mutant powers have leveled the playing ground of physical difference and strength, so tiny Rogue is able to flip over giants three times her size. Everybody in third-wave feminism talks about Buffy, but surely these super-hero chicks were her forerunner.

At the same time, the way they are visually depicted is evidently male-gaze driven. All the women are busty, with long gams, and very developed hour-glass figures. This is only true of the super-heroes though. Other women in the series are more flat-chested and, while they have long hair and wear conventional feminine garb of the 90’s, they are not hyper-feminine. This is true for the men as well—all the X-men are super-ripped with idealized bodies, and normal dudes are well, normal. So I think that’s more what the busty women are about—all the good guys have great idealized bodies (even Beast, while blue, is strong-chested and slim-wasted).All the guys have super strong jaw lines, wide chests, ripped arm muscles.This all seems very Tarzan to me—or maybe it’s just most pop culture phenomenon and literature, started in the penny-dreadfuls and pulp fiction and continuing on through comic books and romance novels.

I don’t have any real conclusions to draw from all this. Just interesting observations. At least in our heroic asthetic, even the Others can be the beautiful people, the ones we identify with and want to emulate. Also I can see why this is so appropriate for adolescents who are attracted to texts like this. And you know, for grown ups who never seem to have gotten past adolescence ;)