I’m part of an email group that discusses children’s literature, and recently there was a conversation about child authors and then more specifically about Christopher Paolini and the derivative nature of his stories. I posted the following, and I thought I’d post it here as well:

Interactive fan culture and gaming seem to be having an effect on the way kids consume stories. Anyone with an internet connection or gaming console can leap into a fantasy world and create characters and adventures of their own.

Middle Earth, in particular, has long become a default fantasy world, a paint-by-number starting point in much the same way as ancient Greek myths or vampire myths. Gaming worlds such as Warhammer and World of Warcraft (and by backward extension, Dungeons & Dragons), with their elegant elves, mountain-dwelling dwarfs, and “evil” orcs, are just two examples. The gravitational pull of Middle Earth is so strong that many fantasy fans are happy not to leave orbit, whether they are participating as creators, consumers, or both. The quality of story in much fan fiction and most video games is highly questionable from a literary point of view, but that’s often beside the point. The point is access to a world, and an open door to make a personal imprint on a fantasy universe you’ve grown to love.

I believe this is an important consideration when deliberating on Paolini’s grand theft tolkein, and particularly when pondering his success. Eragon reads like a meaty piece of fan fiction. And my guess is that part of the success of Eragon, beyond the young author buzz, is that it’s a rags-to-riches tale of a citizen of the Middle Earth fandom.

Personally, I don’t have much patience for derivative fantasy worlds. Life is short, and I’m a slow reader, so I am always looking for something original. Then again, I also don’t have much respect for singers who become famous with songs they didn’t write, and I know I’m in the minority there.

On the other hand, I have a genuine appreciation for straight-up fan fiction and karaoke.

I know the train’s pretty much left the station on this topic, but I wanted to jump on board anyway with my hobo bag and two cents. And it’s also an excuse to show some of the fun pictures that have resulted from the frenzy.

I followed a fascinating discussion on the child-lit listserv about Rowling’s obligations regarding gay characters, and a related discussion about whether Rowling can even make that decision for readers.

On the one hand, the discussions made me feel a bit like I was back in my old litcrit classes, which I did well in, but which always made me feel like I’d left my gravity boots at home.

If something isn’t written into the story, can it be a true part of the story?

What is an author’s obligation when dealing with something that’s politically charged?

Does the author even have the authority to say what’s true and what’s not about her story?

I wriggled my way out of litcrit and into creative writing for a reason, and for the same reason I don’t want to get tangled up in these topics. Nothing against them — I did find the discussion to be (largely) smart and interesting. But it’s just not the angle I’m primarily interested in. And a post by Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book, summed it up nicely and pithily enough for me.

But I do want to add a couple of things to the overall discussion.

First, it’s important to read the actual transcript of what Rowling said. Context matters.

She said “My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”

She seems to be leaving a door open for readers to bring their own interpretations to the character.

However, she then went on to hammer a number of nails into the story. With each “announcement,” with each pound of the hammer, she closed off avenues of imagination for her readers.
This is the second thing I wanted to talk about.

Rowling also did this with the epilogue in Deathly Hallows, which is why you find entire communities of devoted fan fiction writers making a pact to ignore the epilogue — essentially removing it from canon by mutiny — and writing their own epilogues.

I understand the impulse of a writer to stay in control of the story. The idea of fans making it their own can be unnerving.

But (in my humble opinion) when you are dealing with today’s generation of readers (particularly the younger ones), who are accustomed to inserting their own will into the media they consume, a good story belongs at least as much to the fans as to the author. A good story needs open spaces for readers to stick their own flags. It needs unwatered seeds, unfollowed threads, and characters with potential that transcends the author’s own imagination.

And a good story needs an author who admires and respects what the readers bring to the story.

After all, when an author describes something in a story, she is not transferring her own experiences and images into the minds of readers. It’s impossible, no matter how many adjectives she uses. Rather, the author is trying to make something flower inside the reader’s mind, from the reader’s own experiences and images, from the reader’s own soil, water, sunshine.

The author can hope that the image that flowers in the reader’s mind is similar to his own. Or he can hope that their version is even richer, more personal, more powerful.

If an author can’t control even how a reader sees a particular scene, it seems vain to attempt authority over so many plot threads.

The Harry Potter series had enough open spaces to spawn a fanfic leviathan. My personal feeling is that Rowling should have left it to her fans to continue filling in the blanks.

Check out where I’m going next weekend (wanna go, Izzy?):

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Candlewick has officially accepted the final draft of the manuscript for my book, the first book in the five-book Kaimira series. Now it’s in copy editing, and the on-sale date is July 8, 2008.

I’m currently working on supplementary material (back matter, or appendices). You know, all that cool stuff that gets attached to fantasy novels? Maps, little histories, and the sort? As a child, I obsessed over them. They were what gave my my first understanding of the concept of world building, and that the story was only one part of a larger world the author had created. The supplementary materials were what made me feel like I had permission to join in the world building, to sketch my own maps, to write my own heroic poems about the Fellowship of the Ring, or cryptic riddles for the Seeker in The Dark Is Rising sequence. It also gave me the first experience of geeking out over a fantasy world, though we didn’t call it geeking out back then.
To be creating these things for my own story is a bit surreal. I tell myself I have to be careful not to geek out too much, that I have to keep everything as reader-friendly as possible, and then I remember that it was the geeking out that attracted me to those materials in the first place. They were a meeting point between the author’s obsession and my own about the fantasy world that existed just beyond the margins of the page, of which the story in the book was only a facet, the tip of an iceberg.

So my strategy now is just to have fun with it. If it’s something I find exciting enough to warrant a few pages in the back of the book, then I think the readers will like it as well.

Mischievous Twins Now In 50 Countries!

Chicago, IL August 28, 2007 – Edgar & Ellen^® are using their secret weapon, kid-inspired content, to gather broadcasters and licensees around the world. The twin pranksters recently added MBC3 covering 26 new countries in North Africa, Levant and the Gulf, as well as Nickelodeon, the world’s most widely distributed kids’ channel.

This fall, Edgar & Ellen will launch via Nicktoons Network in the US and Nickelodeon in the UK, followed by international roll-out throughout Europe to France, Italy, Netherlands and Scandinavia. Beginning in 2008, the series will launch in 17 new territories across Asia Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand Korea and Singapore.

Viewers will finally see just how wildly creative the twins can be as fans inspire 10% of the content and receive full credit. Every episode contains a short-form cartoon that is inspired by their global fans via www.edgarandellen.com. The twins, in the most startling trick of all, break through the screen barrier and address their fellow pranksters by name.

While many companies struggle to incorporate user-generated content, Edgar & Ellen is pioneering a multi-layered approach throughout its storytelling. The mischief-makers reach audiences through multiple platforms simultaneously. Avid fans in scores of countries read the books and create content online

The Edgar & Ellen series will be screened at MipCom Jr. To learn more about the Edgar & Ellen property and international licensing opportunities, please contact Susanna Pollack at susanna.pollack@starfarmproductions.com, for television distribution in Europe, Ed Galton at Cake Entertainment, egalton@cakeentertainment.com, and for US licensing opportunities, Lisa Marks & Associates, Inc. (LMA) at LMarks@LMA-Inc.com .

Background Information

Edgar & Ellen^®, for ages 6 to 12, are pranksters extraordinaire who crave outrageous fun. The Edgar & Ellen animated series is produced by Star Farm Productions and Bardel Entertainment in association with YTV. It will air on Nicktoons Network US, YTV Canada, Nickelodeon UK, Nickelodeon International, MBC3, Noga, Nickelodeon NZ, and ABC Kids Australia. This multiple media phenomenon also appears in a six-book series with Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing and as a thriving online community at www.edgarandellen.com. Enjoy the ride and savor the inevitable consequences when each of Edgar & Ellen’s plan backfires!

Star Farm Productions^® creates entertainment the way today’s digital generation consumes it. Star Farm merges user-generated content with mainstream multiple media. Partners include Nickelodeon International, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, Scholastic^®, Activision^®, Mattel^® and other global leaders in the family market.

Nickelodeon is the most widely distributed kids’ network in the world and the only multimedia entertainment brand dedicated exclusively to them. First launched in the US in 1979, Nickelodeon today consists of 35 channels, 19 branded program blocks, 10 mobile TV channels, 33 web sites plus TurboNick, Nickelodeon’s broadband video service in Australia , the US and UK. Most recently Nickelodeon US launched Nicktropolis, a virtual community playground, in January 2007. For more information, see www.nickelodeon.com

For more information, please contact:
Colleen Fahey, SVP Audience Development
Star Farm Productions LLC
colleen@starfarmproductions.com
Phone: 312-226-7130

I spent this past weekend in New York at Book Expo America (BEA). It was my second time at BEA (the first time was in Chicago), but the New York version is like BEA on steroids.

My book isn’t out until next year (first in a five-book young adult fantasy series with Candlewick and Walker Books), so I didn’t go there to sign autographs or speechify or anything official. I wandered around, absorbing the vibe of thousands of books and thousands of people whose lives are about books from every conceivable angle–authors, illustrators, publishers, book light salespersons, editors, agents, book marketers, bookmark salespersons, libraries, booksellers, reviewers, and most importantly, readers.

I got to meet one of my favorite YA authors, Kate DiCamillo (author of The Tale of Despereaux), at a party for Candlewick’s 15th birthday party. At the party, I got to wear a pin and play “author,” which meant I stood around with a drink in my hand as people came up and to get my autograph in these cute little autograph books. It was surreal and very fun. I’m highly introverted, and this gave me an excuse to talk to some really interesting people.

I also got to meet Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked) when he stopped by the Candlewick oasis to give a talk to independent booksellers.

But the coolest part of the trip was being able to chat with more of the folks from Candlewick and Walker. I’m rediculously excited about having them as partners for this book series.

Speaking of ridiculous, I stayed at this budget hotel called The Pod Hotel. Apparently the theme is iPod chic. About the cheesiest thing I’d ever heard about, so I knew I had to stay there. Plus, it seemed likely that an iPod-themed hotel, even at budget rates, would have to have decent internet access.

More thoughtful postings on BEA coming later, once I’ve had a chance to process everything I noticed there.

It turns out that naming babies is not much at all like naming characters.

And by “naming babies” I don’t mean naming other people’s babies. I saw a baby once that looked like a Donald Trump puppet, and she would have been fairly easy to name. Trumpet, I was thinking at the time.

No, I mean naming one’s own babies.

When I set about naming a character, I generally have a good idea of the weight that character has to carry on his or her shoulders. I know the character arc, more or less. I know the personality quirks. I know the character in four dimensions, in 3D space as well as across time.

It’s not the same with babies. You can only guess at their personalities. You can only take a wild stab at who they might become. And you don’t want to place appropriate burdens on their shoulders.

So you read endless lists of names, ranging from boring to insane. You read in index of a book on mythology, and decide you don’t want your child to have the name of a car model. You flip through the dictionary, hoping to find that one perfect word that nobody else has thought to use as a name, but only because they weren’t lucky enough to open to that page. But instead, you land on words like intrepid and antebellum.

I wrote a story once called Carter the Farter. This is the second paragraph:

What happened was this: right in the middle of a Friday math quiz, during such a hush that Carter could feel the third-grade teacher staring from her desk, and he could hear the wringing of brains for answers and feel the scratch of pencils, and the occasional coughs and sneezes and sniffles rang like claps of thunder, each drawing the attention of the class, desperately thirsty for any kind of diversion — at this moment, as the clock inched its way to ten, Carter let out one of the biggest farts of his life.

Carter’s name isn’t bad, but it is unfortunate. His last name, Rucker, will likely get him into trouble two or three down the line, but that’s another story, one that won’t be written.

The story is about names and our relationship to them. When coming up with names for babies, we try not to make them bully targets. We try not to give them names that carry too much baggage. We try to give them a name they can own and shape to fit their own evolving characters.

It’s a tough job. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I’ve not been posting blog entries for a while mainly because I’ve been trying to decide what to be when I grow up. I’ve always wanted this blog to have some sort of professional angle, and to achieve that, I need to determine the professional angle of my life.

This may come as a surprise, considering I’m 35 and on my second career, but I’m not grown up yet. Far from it. Because I haven’t settled on what I want to be.

And my definition of being grown up has always been that grown up people know what they are.

My father was a diesel truck mechanic, and my mother was a deboner in a chicken processing plant.

For the past decade or so, I’ve been a specialist in safe online communities for kids. That involved everything from managing teams of chat room monitors to developing and executing online community strategies to creating online safety educational materials. I wrote some articles, presented at some conferences, and I thought I had grown up.

But in recent years, I’ve managed to switch careers. Now I’m these three things at Star Farm:

1) Associate Director of Development. I help other staffers develop their story ideas into multiple media. My focus is Interactive, meaning I help them develop their stories so that they will work well online and in gaming. This is how I keep one foot in my old career.

2) Visionary. I created a fantasy adventure property for Star Farm. My job now is to continue developing the story across several media, from books to gaming to film, and so on.

3) Writer. I currently spend much of my time writing the books (with a co-author) for the property I created.

When explaining what I do to people, it’s easiest just to say I’m a writer. A person can’t be more than one thing, can he?

In my adult life, I’ve done everything from load wood in a sawmill to directing Online Community at a startup near Wall Street to (now) writing fantasy books for children.

My father was a diesel truck mechanic. But he was also a father, an artist and a storyteller. And a charismatic story-gatherer.

My mother was a deboner, but she was also a mother, a childcare worker, a voracious reader, and a cross-cultural adventurer.

I’m a writer. It’s what I’ve been since I was in my single digits. The difference is that now I have the luxury of doing it as my day job. I’m also a cross-cultural adventurer, voracious reader, a story-gatherer. I’m an armchair sociologist and philosopher, a language geek. I’m a futurist. I’m a lot of things that aren’t going to fit into a neat package and form a single angle.

So I’m going to stop trying, and just write about some of the things that interest me.

I’m sure people in the toy business have written plenty about this, but it’s new pondering fodder for me. When I think about entertainment media (mediums? medii? mediosities?), I think about television, film, books, comic books, video games, and mobile devices.

Not toys.

I’ve always thought of toys primarily as licensing and merchandising opportunities, and always as ancillary to the story from a creative perspective (though far from ancillary from a revenue perspective).

Recently, however, I’ve begun to see the role toys play—or can play if done right—in building out an entertainment property’s fictional world.

Imagine a child surrounded by Star Wars action figures acting out a series of battle scenes. In some cases, the child is recreating stories he or she has seen, usually with significant alterations. In other cases, the child is creating original stories. What makes this different from the free-form play you might see with matchbox cars or generic plastic soldiers is that the storytelling takes place within the construct of a specific entertainment property.

Like fan fiction, the creativity is focused on a certain number of characters and a specific fictional world. The child may break the rules of the character and the fictional world, but the play is still tied inextricably to those parameters. But these are not the sorts of rules that limit creativity. Rather, like meter and rhyme and the limitations of language in poetry, they create a structure to house the creativity, a fixed set of points in space inside which the fictional world can evolve. These sorts of limits and rules foster creativity when they’re being followed, and even more so when they’re being broken.

Back to the child with the Star Wars action figures. He (let’s say it’s a boy) is the director, writer, and main character. He arranges the forces around him, setting the stage for a fierce battle involving his entire Star Wars collection. While he directs the larger forces on both sides of the battle, he chooses to be Anakin Skywalker. In the first phase of battle, he is the boy Anakin, using stealth, cleverness, and blind luck to harass overwhelming enemy forces. In the next phase, he is the young man Anakin fighting a random assortment of scary-looking (to him) characters led by Jar-Jar Binks. This is clearly not in keeping with any of the story lines, but this new story adds to the world.

In the next battle, the child allows Anakin to transform into Darth Vader, because that’s what happens in the official story. But this child, as much as he loves playing with villains, does not want to play the villain. So he arranges for Jar-Jar Binks to be killed and for Darth Vader to take over the enemy forces. Then, in a surprising move, the child brings back Anakin to fight Darth Vader in the final battle. Though in one sense this betrays the story line, in another sense the child is telling the same story in a new way, playing out the internal struggle between Anakin and Vader on the battle field.

When I was a child, I had a large collection of Star Wars action figures and a smaller collection of GI Joe action figures. I didn’t have any transforming toys but I was obsessed with the concealment/revelation play pattern. I would do things like cover my favorite character in play-doh, turning him into something resembling the Thing, and let him fight like that for a while, and then bit by bit, during battle, he would lose pieces of his “armor” and ultimately be revealed as his true self. I would take the character through specific movie scenes, such as the first part of Return of the Jedi when Luke is in stealth mode as he makes his way into Jaba’s base to rescue Han. That was really the only part of the movie that spoke to me, and so that’s what I based my reenactments on.

The question I want to pose is how much of this type of story comes from George Lucas, how much from the child’s imagination, and how much from the actual toy concept and design. And how does a toy designer create a toy that optimizes this sort of storytelling experience.

I was also thinking about how this works with books—how much of the story is actually provided by the child, and how a writer can give more creative control to the reader through strategic omission of detail, but that’s a whole other topic, and it’s time to get back to my actual work.