Language, Time and the Reader

I'd planned for today's post to be yet another review of a serialized novel at JukePop Serials. But then I saw a particularly interesting article over at Mad Genius Club, Sarah Hoyt's writing blog. So I've decided to delay my review of C. Rye's Sibling Moons to a later date, and we'll have a little change of pace.

Cedar Sanderson takes us through a Fantastic Journey Through Time, examining the language used in some of her favorite fantasy works, from the Red Fairy Book, which was published at the close of the nineteenth century, through one of Jim Butcher's most recent novels. A span of a little over a century, not nearly enough for language to change to the point of being incomprehensible, but certainly enough that, even with  mass literacy, stylistic changes become noticeable.

The most obvious change is the move from a more formal and scholarly level of diction toward a more conversational style. The earliest examples have a bookish feel to them, a sense of an elevated phraseology even with the occasional contraction or other construction generally stigmatized in formal writing. It's not just what is often called a timeless style -- instead, the prose seems almost deliberately constructed to create a sense of antiquity, of the story having been transmitted from the distant past.

By the time we come to JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, we see a shift in tone away from that effort to imitate the (sometimes ponderous) diction of the classics of Greece and Rome, and toward a more contemporary tone. Not yet casual or breezy, but almost the sense of a father sitting by the fire and telling the story to a circle of wide-eyed children. Maybe a Victorian or Edwardian father, but still a recognizably modern one telling a story in a contemporary voice rather than one intended to hearken back to older forms of storytelling.

With Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road the transformation is complete. Our hero's speech is casual, down-home and unpretentious, even when addressing the princess. And he's genre-savvy, referring to Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional Mars -- not to mention his suggestion that the princess might be wearing a cave-woman outfit of fake fur made by a chemical company.

The last two novels Cedar mentions are notable for being crossovers with other genres. In the Discworld series Terry Pratchett isn't just writing fantasy, but humorous fantasy. Instead of the larger-than-life characters of epic fantasy, we have absurd characters who elicit a chuckle by their antics. In this bit of dialog we have several standard fairy tale tropes, but all back-to-front and turned on their heads, to the point it becomes ridiculous.

Similarly, in the Henry Dresden novels Jim Butcher is writing urban fantasy, a subgenre in which magic intrudes into a contemporary setting to create a world in which wonder takes on a modern industrial sensibility rather than that of the pre-scientific world we see in epic and heroic fantasy. Furthermore, we have the elements of detective fiction, and specifically the hardboiled detective. The presentation of Maeve could be any femme fatale from any of a dozen hardboiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or the like.

And thus we have, at the conclusion of this look backward, the question of whether it is obligatory for a contemporary writer to use contemporary language, especially when retelling classic stories. And then I think of Vera Nazarian, a contemporary fantasist whose immigrant background resulted in her having relatively little exposure to contemporary literature, instead growing up immersed in classical fairy tales and mythology of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, a very different literary tradition from that familiar to most readers. As a result, her English prose has a richness and intricacy that often strikes readers accustomed to minimalist transparent prose as  heavy, even overworked. Because so many of the gatekeepers of traditional publishing have been educated in the minimalist mainstream, Ms. Nazarian has struggled for the better part of three decades just to get published, and only with the emergence of indie e-publishing has she finally been able to come into her own as a writer.

One Good Man

About a year ago an editor at a major publishing house spoke at some length against portal fantasy (the subgenre of fantasy in which a character from a fictional version of the Primary World travels to a magical world, has adventures there, and at the end of the story returns to their own world), claiming that it generally didn't have strong enough stakes to carry the story. This pronouncement led to considerable debate on several online fora, with various people offering titles of successful portal fantasies both classic and recent, from Narnia and Thomas Covenant to Harry Potter and Spirited Away.

Although I was busy at the time with other projects and didn't have time to contribute to the discussion, it made me think of how many portal fantasies I'd read when I was younger, and that yes, a big part of the appeal of them was the element of "you too might get to travel to a wonderful magical world and have Adventures." And remembering some of the ones I'd read in those days made me realize how long it had been since I'd read any.

Even more, I noticed how the real thrust of the discussion was the way in which the current fiction markets did not welcome portal fantasy, or several other genres that involved characters going "too far" from the fields we know. The unspoken subtext was pretty clearly, "write it if you must, to get it out of your system, but be ready to put it in the dresser drawer and move on to something more publishable."

And of course the assumption was that traditional publishing and its gatekeepers were the Only Game In Town -- an assumption that is rapidly being smashed to pieces by the rapid growth of indie publishing. Even just a few years ago, self-publishing a novel was still pretty much an admission that it was unpublishable, and you were a loser as a writer. But within the last few years it has really taken off, to the point that several newcomers have rocketed into success that most traditionally-published writers would envy.

Indie publishing has meant the traditional gatekeepers no longer have the power to say that an entire subgenre is declasse or beyond the pale. If you the writer believe in your story, you can find a platform to publish it on and if readers find it and are interested in it, you will get read. And you'll have real metrics of your writerly success, rather than the often-questionable sales figures of the major publishers with their reserves for returns and the like.

Right  now one of the top serials on JukePop Serials is Kevin Boyer's Dread Lord Bob. With over 2000 +votes, it appears on the first page of stories sorted by most +votes.

Dread Lord Bob is the story of Robert Goodman, an ordinary teenager in Kansas who goes to the library one day, intending to study but ending up messing around, when a mysterious stranger appears to him, giving him a strange glowing orb and claiming to be his steward in some mysterious realm. Bob is skeptical, and Harrak's talk of power, wealth and beautiful women only makes him more dubious. But then Harrak tells him "your people need you" in a tone of such urgency that Bob can no longer refuse. Off he goes to a world where the moon is a huge many-colored disk hanging fixed in the sky and the sun creeps so slowly that a single day is a week of Earth time. (Readers familiar with astronomy will soon realize that the "moon" is in fact a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter and the world to which Harrak has brought Bob is in fact a habitable moon).

Almost from the beginning Bob is struggling to sort out the world on which he's landed and the people he's supposed to lead. It doesn't help that he feels like his so-called adviser is holding out on him, not telling him things he needs to know. Harrak claims he's never lied -- but again and again his answers to Bob's questions are so full of presuppositions that they confuse as much as inform.

Just as he's beginning to get his bearings, the promised day is up and back Bob goes to his familiar life on Earth, with all its conflicts between the football team and his own baseball buddies, and the roses and thorns of the dating scene. And of course the tension at home between his parents and his efforts to shield his younger sister from them.

And then the call comes again, and back he goes to that world of goblins, hobgoblins and elves, of war with the Empire and the peril of the Bound. Since this is a serial still in progress, it appears that he's going to have at least a few more trips back and forth between worlds before the story is resolved.

One of the things I've really enjoyed in this novel is the element of moral struggle, and particularly the ethics of power. Unlike JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and rather like Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son, it has a strong element of learning to use extraordinary powers in godly ways, for godly purposes. Bob Goodman is older than young Alvin Miller, his character stronger and more fully formed, but he still notes with considerable discomfort the rush that comes with exercising the power of the Dread Lord. Yet he is also aware that he is operating in a world where evil has a real and powerful presence, where whole communities of the people he's sworn to protect are being destroyed in a war he barely understands.

I also find it fascinating to see the underpinnings of science in the worldbuidling. Not only does it take place on an exomoon (a moon of a planet in another star system), but there are also repeated hints that the magic has a technological base that may well involve sophisticated computers and energy weapons, all of which are viewed entirely in magical terms by the locals. For readers who find regular fantasy magic uncomfortably close to occultism, the technological element may make the story more palatable.

And there is the wonderful characterization, right down to the interaction between various minor characters. Some readers may find it challenging to keep track of so many characters, but in a story of this scope (apparently we're not quite to the halfway point of the projected complete novel) the cast is going to be big.

Full disclosure: Kevin is my brother, and the person who introduced me to publishing on JukePop Serials. If you feel this affects my judgment of his work, you are free to discount it accordingly.

The Return of the Serial

As electronic publishing is moving toward maturity, it has gone through many changes. The earliest attempts at electronic publishing were digital files on floppy disks or CD's, with the work remaining firmly wedded to the artifact. Needless to say, problems with distribution meant that they didn't succeed overly well.

As the Internet began to become well-nigh universal, the first experiments with completely non-physical books began, awkwardly at first. There were all sorts of concerns about copying, leading to cumbersome digital rights management schemes that in effect punished legitimate purchasers for the misdeeds of a small minority of dishonest people. And many people still found it unpleasant to read for pleasure on a computer screen.

Then came the Kindle, with its paper-like screen that didn't have the problems people associated with reading on a computer. It connected wirelessly to the Internet, so that readers could acquire books wherever and whenever they wished. Purchasing a book became as easy as tapping a few buttons.

But the Kindle was still in many ways an enclosed garden, where users could only go to the places Amazon.com decreed they might. The tech savvy might be able to jump the walls and wander at will about the Internet, but the average user would not be so eager to risk voiding the device's warranty by unauthorized alteration.

That changed with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet computer. Suddenly people had a computer in the palm of the hand, a device that could be taken anywhere and which could do almost anything a regular laptop or desktop machine could do. As a result, a number of new e-publishing platforms have began experimenting with forms beyond the typical model of the novel, the anthology, and the magazine, translated from print into digital format.

Among those formats is the serialized novel. During the Nineteenth Century serialization was a very popular option for both writers and publishers, since it enabled the release of small portions of a longer work on a regular basis over a period of time. Writers liked it because they didn't have to have an entire novel written before they could start publishing it and get some reader responses. Publishers liked it because they didn't have to commit to publishing the entire novel before they had a reasonable assurance of success. A serial that turned out to be a dog could be dumped, or at least wrapped up with a hasty ending.

And readers liked them. The growing literacy of the working classes meant a large population of people who were beginning to read for pleasure, but couldn't come up with the money to buy an entire hardbound novel. However, they could afford the weekly or monthly periodicals in which these novels were serialized, and were soon learning to eagerly await each installment as it came out. Charles Dickens often published his most famous novels in serial format, and one of them was so popular on both sides of the Atlantic that people were literally waiting at the docks in New York, Boston and Philadelphia for the ships bringing the latest installment.

During the twentieth century serialization began to fall out of favor. Part of  it may have been the association with cheesy contrived cliffhangers, many of which involved playing stupid tricks on the audience (this was especially true in the cinematic serials). But at least part of it was an economic shift, such that people became more able to afford to buy the entire novel as a single volume.

Recently the serialized novel is coming back on the Internet. Several well-known novelists have serialized upcoming novels on their blogs, keeping interest high by dribbling out one chapter after another. However, the average beginning writer is apt to see little success from that method, for the simple reason that when you're an unknown, your blog isn't likely to get much traffic, and you end up posting to an empty room.

But if you could provide a central location where people could come to find serialized novels, similar to the old "penny dreadful" broadsheets of Victorian England and Gilded Age America, might serialization be a way for unknown writers to get their start? Instead of needing a complete novel in hand (with all the attendant problems of maintaining focus and momentum through to the finish), you would only need to have that first chapter in acceptable shape to begin presenting your novel to an audience.

This is the philosophy behind JukePop Serials. Authors write their serials at their own pace, and after their original chapter is accepted, they can put subsequent chapters up without needing further editorial permission. For the most part the stories are free to read, but many authors set up a "support the author" button, similar to the street musician's open guitar case. Support the arts on a personal basis, giving as much as you feel moved to give.

But the real metric of success at JukePop Serials is the +vote. This is an audience response metric -- as the readers complete each chapter, they have the option of rendering a vote in favor of that chapter. As serials accumulate +votes, they move upward in the rankings. Some of the most popular serials have thousands of +votes, since people who enjoy a serial will spread the word and soon the buzz becomes self-sustaining.

JukePop is only a few years old, and at this point it's impossible to say whether it will produce a lasting paradigm for serialized novel publication, or if it will end up like so many companies of the earliest days of e-publishing, whose names are now forgotten by everybody except those few early adopters who fondly remember novels they can no longer access on unsupported equipment.

Women, Men and Reviews

Kate Elliot has a very interesting post on her LiveJournal about disparaties in visibility and reception of books by men and women authors. She's brought up some very interesting issues related to the role of reviewing, of positive and negative publicity about the authors' personal lives (women authors are far more prone to getting treated as though their personal shortcomings reflect the value of their work, while men often get far more severe missteps forgiven), and of male vs. female gazes (what men observe is viewed as universally important, while what women look at is of importance only to women).

Bad News for Horror Readers and Writers

Due to the bad economy, The Twisted Library is putting all anthologies on hold for at least six months and some, the exact number to be determined, will be canceled altogether. Like Norilana Books, which has also had to postpone anthology publications and has had some editors take their anthologies elsewhere, The Twisted Library is a small press that is almost entirely the work of one person. Things had hung on for a little longer there because the publisher of The Twisted Library is a dentist and had been using money from his dental practice to float the anthologies, but as the economic crisis worsens, people are deferring routine dental care, which means less income for him, and a lot of it has to be put back into maintaining the overhead of his dental practice.

This is unfortunate because short stories in anthologies are one of the important ways for readers to be introduced to new writers. If you know that there will be at least two or three authors in it whose stories you are likely to enjoy, you can buy feeling confident that you'll get your money's worth, and thus take the risk of trying out stories by new writers that are also in there. After all, you've already paid your money, so everything else you gain is a bonus.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Traditionally the used book store has been a dusty little place of shelves crammed tight with books, generally off the beaten path and quite unlike the new book store with its bright lights and carefully arranged shelves of pristine copies. But with the advent of the online bookstore, the distinction between sellers of new and used books has blurred. Amazon.com's Marketplace program enables used-book sellers to sell right on the same page as the new books Amazon itself is selling, thus allowing used books to compete directly with new ones.

As a result, there has been increasing concern that the sales of used books are depriving authors of their rightful royalties. After all, if a person can surf onto Amazon's webpage and find the same title that is sold brand new by Amazon itself sold instead for half or a quarter that price by a used-book seller, it would seem obvious that people would be likely to buy the cheaper one. Thus an organization called Novelists, Inc. has begun pressuring lawmakers to require used book sellers to remit royalties on each book sold, or at least books published in the last two years.

Paul Biba of TeleRead has suggested that requiring used-book dealers to pay royalties could have surprising consequences, including making books even less available to the poorest decile of the population, for whom used books and other inexpensive reading options, including libraries, are often the only way to obtain books at all.

In fact, I would suggest that he has not gone far enough in his discussion of the unintended consequences. In fact, it's very likely that the necessary overhead in recordkeeping could actually kill the secondary market for books altogether. Most used-book dealers operate on very narrow margins, often on a mom-and-pop basis. The sellers aren't getting rich, and often are barely scraping by. And that's just sellers who specialize in books. The generalist secondhand store will decide to no longer carry books at all, even those that are well beyond the two-year limit, for the simple reason that ensuring that nothing recent slips in by mistake is too much of a hassle. Thrift stores such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army will also find it impossible to justify such overhead, and will decline to accept book donations, thus hitting the poor twice -- by eliminating a source of very low-cost books and by the loss of the revenue those sales generate that are then applied to various good works.

In a world where royalties must be collected on (recent) used books, only the largest used-book dealerships and a few specialist collectible bookstores would be able to stay in business. Otherwise, the only venues at which used books would be found would be garage sales, which generally fly under the regulatory radar altogether. Most books that are no longer wanted by their owners would most likely go straight to the trash, needlessly burdening landfills and resulting in further resource destruction as trees have to be pulped to produce new copies. Worse, many old and out-of-print books would become even more difficult to find, making it even more likely that their authors become forgotten altogether.

Which means that what is intended to help authors get more money will instead result in many authors losing out altogether.

Correction The actual article is by Chris Meadows -- Paul Biba is the overall site owner, who has various guest writers posting as well.