Malinda Lo

This morning I woke up to the news that Amazon was about to launch “Kindle Worlds,” a New Publishing Model for Authors Inspired to Write Fan Fiction.

My initial reaction: WTF?!

I read the press release, and then I read the Kindle Worlds for Authors guidelines and this is what I’ve concluded: This isn’t Amazon figuring out how to make money off fan fiction; this is Amazon entering into a partnership with media properties to crowdsource officially licensed novelizations.

Officially licensed novelizations are already old hat. Here are some examples:

There are a lot of things that are unclear from the initial guidelines. These things jumped out at me:

“When the Kindle Worlds Self-Service Submission Platform opens, you will be able to upload your story easily” — except “World Licensors have provided Content Guidelines for each World, and your work must follow these Content Guidelines.”

My question: Who’s going to make sure that writers follow those guidelines?

“All works accepted for Kindle Worlds will be published by Amazon Publishing.”

My question: What does “accepted” mean? Really. Again, is someone going to vet those stories to make sure they don’t violate the guidelines?

“You will own the copyright to the original, copyrightable elements (such as characters, scenes, and events) that you create and include in your work, and the World Licensor will retain the copyright to all the original elements of the World. When you submit your story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle Worlds authors to build on each other’s ideas and elements. We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.”

So, who gets to decide which elements of your work are “original”? And dude, the World Licensor, e.g. Alloy Entertainment, gets to use those elements without paying you for them even if they’re original?

And I didn’t even get into the whole “Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.” So many issues right there.

And yet despite all these potentially problematic business issues, I think my biggest WTF moment with this comes from a fan perspective.¹ Amazon’s content guidelines do not allow pornography, offensive content, “excessive use of brands,” crossovers, illegal and infringing content, or “Poor Customer Experience”: “We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience.” What does that mean?

Fan fiction is for fans; it’s done for the love of a TV show/movie/book/whatever. It’s not done for money. When it’s done for money, it becomes officially licensed tie-in media. It’s regulated, and it takes the fan out of fan fiction: it basically turns you into a work-for-hire writer. This is fine if that’s what you want. I know writers who make good livings doing that, but it’s not about being a fan. It’s about a job.

Fan fiction is based on (let’s face it) doing what the original author(s) would probably not do: slash pairings, crossover stories (who doesn’t love a crossover?!), hot steamy sex, etc. Some of it is really incredibly well written; some of it is crap. Will Amazon actually succeed in getting anything good out of this? I don’t know. I know that when I’ve read fan fiction, I’ve read it for all the things Amazon is not going to allow.

I think I’m mostly offended by the idea of monetizing fan fiction from a symbolic perspective, not even the legal mumbo-jumbo I picked out above. If you want to write fan fiction, I say do it, but do it for the love.

1. I used to read a lot of fanfic for my graduate school research on X-Files fandom. [↩]

This is an eternal topic in YA Land. Recently, author E.M. Kokie wrote movingly about the appalling lack of specific detail in describing girls’ sexuality in young adult fiction: “If our YA male characters are allowed their experiences of desire, it seems wrong that our female characters are not afforded that same personhood, the same standard.”

On Monday I followed a link via Twitter to this post: Sex in YA Literature: A Presentation by YA author Carrie Mesrobian. It’s an interesting post, summarizing a talk that Mesrobian and Carolrhoda editor Andrew Karre gave in Minneapolis. The post lists a number of points they discussed, including:

5. Recalling your own adolescent sexual adventures will make you cringe. Thinking about what you did, or didn’t do, or how you did it wrong, or what you didn’t understand, though, is the path toward creating  something that readers will find fascinating. STAY in the cringe-y spot when you’re writing about sex. Many YA writers flee the cringe-y spot. This leads to a kind of wish fulfillment about adolescent sex – retconning a story with the adult writer’s context and wisdom about sex, if you will – and does nothing to further the genre or tell a fresh story.

This is something I’ve heard over and over from various people in YA Land when they talk about sex in YA. The idea that nascent sexuality is intrinsically awkard and cringe-inducing — and that it should be described that way in order to be realistic (because if it’s not cringe-inducing, it’s wish fulfillment) — is almost gospel in YA Land.

While I don’t think that YA writers should flee the cringey spot (sometimes writing about things that make you uncomfortable is very important), I  don’t entirely agree with what Mesrobians and Karre advise above. (And I don’t mean to be picking on them; this is something many others have said before, but they helpfully provided that wonderful quote.)

(That said, remember: As with all writing advice, take what works for you and leave the rest.)

Part of my issue is this: I don’t believe writers should refer primarily to their own personal experiences when writing about fictional characters. Sure, you can’t escape your own personal experiences, but don’t forget you’re writing about fictional characters who likely have different experiences than you did. You don’t want to fall into the trap of believing that your own experiences are universal. They’re not.

Because budding sexuality is not always awkward or cringe-inducing — not for everyone.¹ For some people, it feels natural; it feels instinctual. It can be beautiful and life-changing and surprising and sexy. It can make a girl (and a boy) feel absolutely powerful, empowered, desired, and desirable.

I think that a writer who wants to write about sex in a YA novel should never default to the position that nascent sexuality should be awkward. A writer should pay attention, first and foremost, to the characters who are engaging in that intimacy. How would those characters feel about it? Do they feel awkward? If they do, then describe that. But if they don’t, don’t make them awkward against their will.

Sometimes I wonder if the concept of awkward YA sex comes not from adolescents but from adults who are looking back on their own experiences and applying an adult lens to those memories. Adults can look back and compare those experiences to others, but teens — who likely don’t have much sexual experience due to their age —might not be able to.²

When a teen character is in the heat of the moment, are they actually conscious of the awkwardness, or are they completely wrapped up in the now (teen hormones are a real thing), in the physicality of what’s going on? That’s a question of character, and the character’s perception of that intimate moment should be based in the character’s previous experiences.

I think this subject seems so important to me because I write about the coming of age of teen girls. E.M. Kokie’s post that I linked to in the first paragraph really struck home for me, because it seems incredibly wrong that teen girls in YA are so limited in terms of the words they can use to describe their own bodies. I wouldn’t want them to be further limited to only awkward sexual experiences.

So far, I’ve written four novels about queer teen girls. Some of those girls have sex; some of them don’t. They all have different levels of sexual experience, but all of them engage with desire. If I have any political agenda when it comes to representing girls’ sexuality and desire, it’s that I want to describe it positively. I don’t know if “sex positive” is out of fashion these days, but the term still speaks to me. I think it’s OK — and even realistic — for girls to feel desire and to express it physically and with confidence. From the beginning.

1. Nope, not for me. I doubt I’m the only one. [↩]
2. I cringe a lot more about memories of things I’ve done as an adult than about anything I did when I was a teen and didn’t have the experience to know better. [↩]

In 2010, I guest posted at Justine Larbalestier’s site about Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. In that post I began,

“Recently there has been a lot of discussion about race and representation in young adult books. Justine’s blog has become one of the centers for that discussion, and because of that, when she asked me to guest blog I jumped at the chance to share one of my experiences of encountering race in the pages of a book.”

Fast-forward three years, and we’re still having that discussion on race and representation.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and over at Diversity in YA we’ve been highlighting various APA authors and books about Asian Pacific Americans. They reminded me of the post I wrote on Woman Warrior, so I looked it up and reread it, and it still seems relevant today, so I’m reposting it. Let’s continue:

Many of the posts about this subject have focused on the importance of putting people of color on the covers of books so that people of color can see themselves represented. Reading these posts made me remember my junior year in high school, when my favorite English teacher gave me a book to read because she thought I might identify with it. I am Chinese American; the book was The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, an autobiography subtitled “Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts.”

She meant well, but the book made me feel like a total foreigner. I hated it.

It made me wonder: Was this the way white Americans saw my family? Did they really think that I came from a family that believed in ghosts and treated their daughters like property?

I remember being distinctly disturbed by the book, and when I decided to write this blog post, I went back and re-read the first chapter. In retrospect, I’m stunned that my teacher gave it to me, because that chapter alone includes sex, rape, misogyny, and suicide.

I was probably 16 years old when I read it, and while I’d like to think that my teacher thought I might be mature enough to handle the content, I wonder if it was simply the only book she knew of that involved a female Chinese American main character. I have to give her points for attempting to find me a book that mirrored my life, but the fact is, The Woman Warrior made me cringe. CONTINUE READING →

In Case You Missed It

Calling all LGBT Asian Pacific Americans — Add your voice to this survey from UCLA on coming out and mental health

Thinky

• So about the so-called lack of boy stuff in YA (YA Flash) — “So I have a lot of feelings every single time I hear that people are “angry” or “annoyed” or whatever that they can’t find ONE SINGLE YA BOOK IN THE ENTIRE YA SECTION FOR BOYS TO READ…” Me, too. Thankfully this post lays all those thoughts right out there, so I don’t have to.

• Author Mette Ivie Harrison on “What is YA?” — 10 great defining characteristics of young adult fiction, including my favorite, “There is no ennui.”

• “Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived from the the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places” (Smithsonian) (via Bin 42) — Yes, an artist actually has constructed portraits of individuals based on the DNA found in their gum or cigarette butts. Moral of the story: be careful where you leave your DNA.

Quotes of the Week

Lucy Liu, who is apparently also an incredible artist in addition to be an actor, to Hunger:

“I don’t read reviews about myself, even in film and in television, so I wouldn’t read reviews about my art. I think it taints the experience of it. When you do a movie or you are working in television, the people that you work with become your life; it is a very intimate experience that takes you somewhere emotionally. The experience of painting something has the same effect. Whether the painting is a success or a failure, the time that I was involved in it remains the same. To read a review about yourself, whether good or bad, can extinguish your experience and make you feel regretful, and I don’t want to regret time passing.”

Shonda Rhimes, “the most powerful African-American female show runner in television,” to the New York Times Magazine:

“When people who aren’t of color create a show and they have one character of color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as ‘I’m a black man blah, blah, blah’ … That’s not how the world works. I’m a black woman every day, and I’m not confused about that. I’m not worried about that. I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.”

Erin Belieu, poet and co-founder of VIDA, in a wide-ranging and excellent interview over at Lambda Literary, which you should totally read, especially in light of the recent Coverflip situation:

“…VIDA isn’t calling for quotas. We don’t want quotas because that’s not how art works. But we do want people to be conscious of their gender bias and we want men particularly to be more open, and women who’ve been trained in a patriarchal system to be open to other voices, because they don’t always realize how parochial their tastes are, or they’re too afraid to like something on their own. Like, oh we all love Cormac McCarthy or, oh we all love Philip Roth. Well I like Cormac McCarthy but I don’t love him and I certainly don’t like Philip Roth, and I’m okay with that. We don’t all think one thing. We should think for ourselves and have a diverse and healthy and dynamic literary setting in this country that isn’t about worshiping a small group of white straight guys that a very small elite group of tastemakers have decided is the shit.”

Cool

J.K. Rowling’s plot chart for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (via Flavorwire)

This week via Racebending I saw a call for LGBTQ Asian Pacific Americans to participate in a survey for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs Department of Social Welfare. The survey measures mental health, coming out, and parental acceptance, and the three researchers even made a video explaining all about it:

UCLA QAPI Study // Patty’s Experience (Long Version) from audrey bagley on Vimeo.

Beyond the three researchers’ incredible adorableness, I wanted to share this with all my LGBTQ Asian American readers (and all my readers who know LGBTQ Asian Americans) because there is so little data out there about queer Asian Americans and mental health. As an Asian American lesbian who has been clinically depressed at least twice in my life, I know that Asian American families deal with coming out in specific ways that are sometimes not understood by non-Asian American mental health professionals. It’s really important that research like this be completed and that they get as wide a sample as possible.

Note: I don’t know these people at all beyond the fact that I read Racebending (you should, too!), and I’ve read the fine print about the survey. If you’re interested, please do check it out and add your voice to the results.