Whitewashing

I've long been of the school of thought that if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem. As I read more about racism in science fiction, anti-racism, and whitewashing, I've come to a dilemma:

All of the central characters in my YA novel are white. Yeah, sure, one of them isn't human, one of them is bisexual, one of the secondary characters is trans, I address mental health issues to some extent. I tried to actively include things that could be othering to young people and have those people affected by them kick ass. I was careful to have female characters retain their agency regardless of romantic attachment. I avoided the icky cultural narratives of romanticizing quasi-abusive relationships as best I could. I thought I was doing pretty well on showing a variety of people doing awesome things.

And then I realized that all of these characters were white. They're from different socio-economic backgrounds and some are immigrants and there's an age gap between people who would sociologically be considered the same generation, so I got to address a bunch of things I find interesting. I don't think about race a lot, because I don't have to: I am white. I also try to deal with people as individuals, and when they mention something race-related (delicious collard greens their grandmother makes, or parents having a hilarious Mumbai/Halifax accent), that gets tagged in my head as something related to their culture of origin, much in the same category as my parents being hippie journalists.

That's one of the reasons one of my characters is Polish: I think the idea of 'white culture' is crap, because there are so very many different cultures. But I've been reading a lot about social justice in the past year (thank you, Tumblr, I think), and have been reminded that having heroes that look like you is really, really important. Belle was my favourite Disney Princess because she looked the most like me (and also because I have an absurd weakness for that fairy tale).

So it kind of sucks that all of these characters are white. I didn't set out to write a perfectly politically correct novel. But I kind of want to rewrite it so that one of my characters (the all-American football star) is African-American. So I am dithering.

Another part of the argument is that I don't want him to be token, I don't want him to be 'just' inclusion of people of colour. Additionally, I'd kind of envisioned him as an American mish-mash: part Ojibwe, part French, lots of German, some Lakota, some English, a fair portion of we're-not-really-sure. Tanned and tall, but not particularly easily pinpointed in terms of subculture of origin. But he'd still read as white, so that would make him not particularly perfect as the All-American Hero.

There's also the really tempting part that, if I'm not changing him, the book is ready to go. I started on this four years ago, so being done is a really, really tempting thought.

Editing published works

This was going to be a completely different post. One of the pitfalls of being friends with a number of writers and reading all of their stuff behind the scenes (primarily in Google Docs) is that I lose track of what they've actually published. A friend was talking about how she's heavily editing one of her novels, and I was annoyed  with her because I thought it was the one she'd already put out. Whoops, no, it's the one slated for later this year.

But back to my annoyance.

Editing works that are already out is something that happens. We see it most commonly with comics, where collected volumes will have extras: these are mostly to get you to buy the same material again, plus bonus sketch or story or worldbuilding. This is established practice, which is evident particularly in popular series such as The Sandman, which has the individual issues, the collected editions, the absolute editions, and the annotated editions. One gets something new and slightly different out of each edition. One needs to buy the whole series four times to get that full experience.

It is also fairly established practice in textbooks, where new information requires rewrites.

But in novels, there have traditionally been few differences between editions: some will have particular illustrations, some will not, and the page count may vary between the hardcover and the pocketbook, but it is essentially the same content. In the case of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, there are two cover variants, but the contents remain the same. The cover variants are entertaining when next to each other (all of my copies have been of the black cover: my best friend has one with the white cover), but the contents are the same.

Take, for example, American Gods (yes, it is apparently Neil Gaiman day on Author's Refuge). It recently had a tenth anniversary edition! The tenth anniversary edition has an additional twenty thousand words on the original. Twenty thousand. It is also the author's preferred text.

I find this maddening, as it's a larger echo of something I see a lot in indie publishing. I need to buy it again to get the whole experience - to get the experience the author wants me to have, even. This is okay for me with American Gods, as my paperback has gone missing somewhere in the last two countries, and I adore the story.

In indie publishing, I've seen a few authors scrambling to fix typos or plot holes pointed out by first readers - meaning that people who buy the book on the first, second, and third days are generally all buying slightly different books. This is amateurish, and frankly quite terrible: your book should be the best it can be before you publish it. Often, the best it can be requires an editor.

I am firmly of the opinion that, when you learn something new about writing, something that changes the way you write, it is the better part of valor to take that and apply it to something new instead of re-writing something old. Produce new and better things and send them forth into the world, and then produce more that are even better.

But I'm caught - it's been ten years, and it's twenty thousand words. It's a celebration, not a cover-up. I may end up buying the hardcover.

Island Writer Launch

Last Wednesday was the launch of my last issue as Editor In Chief of Island Writer magazine. It was a good run: I started as Editorial Assistant on Issue 8.1, was Managing Editor for 8.2, and Editor In Chief for 9.1, 9.2 and 10.1. I learned a lot over that period, and contributed to the magazine, I think. Island Writer is now available online: you can download it here. It wasn't, before. Island Writer has six staff now, instead of three as when I initially started on it. I am not the person who instigated that change, but I campaigned for it and helped find some of the wonderful staff we have now, including Simeon Goa, our Art Director, who also did the cover you can see at right, and Kim Nayyer, the very steady Creative Non-Fiction and Writer's Life editor, whose support has been invaluable. Lana Betts, our efficient Editorial Assistant, does not have a personal website. Nor does Lynnette Kissoon, our fearless fiction editor whose daughters I accidentally traumatized by inviting to a launch at which there were readings not suitable for young ears (sorry). Sheila Martindale is the poetry editor, and a venerable poet in her own right.

I started everyone using Google Docs for those things edited by multiple people online, and worked with Simeon to try to streamline a lot of that process as much as possible. We started having editing parties, which got us through copy-editing and proofreading in record time, without anyone feeling too much of a stress-crunch.

In addition to any contributions I may have made, I learned a lot while working on Island Writer: I learned the mad giddy rush of making changes to ones house style-sheet, I learned about formulaic rejection letters, I learned about being very polite under all circumstances (which, if you read last week's post, you'll note is not a skill I choose to exercise at all times). I learned about organizing book launches, and the fact that there is such a thing as too much cheese, but not such a thing as too many post-it notes.

It's been a great run.

Romance Woes

I can't tell if the book I'm reading is self-published or not.

This could be considered a great stride in self-publishing: a book put together by someone who respects their work enough to hire a good editor and a good designer, someone who has been paying attention and decided to do it on their own and doesn't see any reason there should be any qualitative difference from something put out with the totality of A. A. Knopf's editorial team behind it.

In some cases, it would be.

But this is a romance novel.

So the cover's pretty okay, and the layout's pretty darned good, but the editing . . .

To be fair, if the editor did what I would have been tempted to do and took a shot for every sentence fragment, they'd have been dead of alcohol poisoning by Chapter 3 and none of this would be their fault.

The plot revolves around two lovers separated before they had closure, and their reunion and presumed eventual resumption of relations (I haven't read that far). She is in a non-threatening caring profession (she's not a cardiac surgeon or a Special Education teacher, but somewhere in between where the audience can nod along that yes, she has obvious nurturing qualities and no, we don't need to think about anything too difficult). He is in a highly-paid and highly-respected field that leaves him feeling somewhat isolated (sports star, business tycoon, whatever: that's not important either except for props). Her son is in the requisite 6-10 age range, smart and quiet (quiet because we can't have one of the obstacles to their relationship taking up too much dialogue).

This plot, with these characters, are practically a genre unto themselves. If I kept track, I could probably name a dozen with the same setup. Most of them are probably put out by some imprint of Harlequin. To give credit where it's due, Harlequin romances are often well-written. Rather, actually, comprehensibly written, because I am quite aware of the literary merit of cotton candy nailed to a page.

But with other romance publishers, I have encountered nightmarishly bad editing. The rub of it is, I wasn't particularly scandalized. If a sci-fi novel had been published with a similar startlingly vast array of problems, I'd have politely tweeted to the author that they had gone insane. But these are romance novels. So I take the warm-fuzzies of the inevitable happy ending, go to the next one, and forget I ever read it.

This time, I'll try to include a note to self that just because it's free from the Kobo bookstore does not mean I  am obliged to download it and read it.

It's a Complicated New World

Having just read the Globe and Mail article bashing freelance editors, I felt the need to respond.

The publishing industry is changing, and I live in the Mecca of indie publishing. The idea of Editor as arbiter or taste is a limited one, a little old-fashioned. Editors exist to make written work better.

That can take a variety of forms, from structural editing to proofreading. And not just for what we typically think of - a novel going through traditional press, to be issued in dead tree format. Academic papers require people to look them over to make sure a coherent point is being made, proposals for books require proofing, limited runs of guidebooks for use by museum staff at a tiny museum need to be edited for clarity and flow. Then we get into the indies: people eschewing traditional publishing in favor of epublishing and print on demand and retaining control over the entire process of their book. They need editors, too, ones who will work with them to make sure they walk away, happily, with the best their book can be.

I like to think I help with that, as well as aiding in epublishing. Like most freelancers, I'm willing to provide samples: I will go over the first five pages of your manuscript for no charge, to see if we can work together.