I’ll say it up front: I despise the term “chick lit.”
Let me also admit that I steadfastly avoid the kinds of books I think of as belonging to this category: the designer-name-dropping, upscale-housing-trendy, single-female-on-a-shopping-and/or-sex-spree-but-longing-for-mister-right books.
But I’ve seen plenty of well-written, nuanced books tagged with the term, and it seemed to me that these books were [...]
Orson Scott Card’s craft book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy begins, interestingly enough, with a discussion of genre. He specifically discusses the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy, but what he says could as easily apply to a discussion of “literary” versus “women’s” fiction or (horrors!) “chick lit”:
…common wisdom has it that more males [...]
I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and it raises questions about genre that have been on my mind for months. So I’m going to focus for a few posts on genre, and the slippery business of labeling fiction. What categories/distinctions make sense? Which seem more of a product of bias against subject matter [...]
Some stories hit too close to home.
A library in West Bend, Wisconsin, less than an hour’s drive from my home, is being harassed by the Milwaukee branch of the Christian Civil Liberties Union for displaying Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block, a book in her “Weetzie Bat” YA series. Baby Be-Bop is the coming-of-age story [...]
Salon.com has a nice collection of summer reading recommendations from authors who appeared at Book Expo America earlier this month. Above is Neil Gaiman, but if you follow the link, you’ll find video from authors ranging from Sarah Dunant to Dave Barry. Salon also has an article on recommended memoirs to read at the beach, [...]
This week is crowded with rites of passage. One of my kids is graduating from 8th grade; the other turns thirteen. My husband’s uncle passed away over the weekend, so we’ll be attending a funeral Thursday morning, and the graduation ceremony Thursday evening. Uncle Frank’s passing is sad, but also expected. The seasons of life [...]
Truby and McKee both point to moral dilemmas as the key to successful fiction. McKee points out that our more relativist society makes developing believable moral dilemmas more difficult. When more people believed in absolutes, crafting moral dilemmas in fiction was more straightforward.
Now, it seems, there is the gray morality of everyday life, in which [...]
Remember carbeurated cars? I do. And since my husband likes older cars, we still have a couple of them. A problem that doesn’t happen often in modern cars, thanks to high-pressure fuel pumps and fuel injectors, is vapor lock. But I remember when it happened fairly often, at least in one of the cars I [...]