Tag: writing

Interviews, news, and Tu’s new submission guidelines

- Stacy

Link roundup from the coverage that Tu Books has been getting on the web, including interviews of me and coverage in Publisher’s Weekly:

ETA: Opening New Doors (PW)

Lee & Low Gets New Imprint

Interview at The Enchanted Inkpot (also be sure to catch their discussion of diversity in fantasy, if you haven’t seen it yet) (Oo! Just saw this–they also interviewed Clint Johnson, the author of Green Dragon Codex, which I edited)

Interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith at Cynsations

For those of you wondering how and where to get the information you need to send me your awesome fantasy or science fiction YA or middle grade novel featuring characters of color, check out the submission guidelines over at Tu’s new website. Note that there are a few changes to bring it in line with Lee & Low’s submission policy, such as the new no-response policy. Please be sure to note the new address, as well!

Thanks so much, everyone, for your support of Tu Publishing. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without you.

Writing Excuses hilarity, conferences and conventions for children’s/YA

- Stacy

Today’s Writing Excuses covers conventions you (writers) should be attending, but they didn’t really have time to cover conventions and conferences specifically geared for children’s books (and I actually am not sure if any of them have been to anything except the occasional BYU Writing for Young Readers). I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while, so this sparked me to remember to do this post!

(And remember to go back to Writing Excuses next week, when they talk about what you should be doing at a writing conference/convention.)

Before we get into that, though, I had to share a hypothetical scenario that Brandon and Peter, long-time friends of yore, came up with after I twittered about Dan‘s US cover. My tweets get imported into Facebook, and in answer to this tweet:

I am Not a Serial Killer (and you can too)–friend Dan Wells’s book’s US cover is revealed: http://tinyurl.com/kkfrjx (he’s @johncleaver)

Peter posted this in reply on Facebook:

Well, according to Brandon:

Q: If the gang from Writing Excuses were put in a horror film, obviously Dan would be the killer. But what order do you think everyone would die in? And how would they die? (The victim list includes: you, Howard, Jordan, Pemberly, Stacy, and Peter)

A: Ha! Well, let’s see. If Dan were the killer, I think he’d try to take out Howard first, since Howard is obviously the most dangerous of us all. Though he sees me more often, so he might try to get to me first. I’d put it in this order:… Read More

Howard
Me
Jordo
Peter
Pemberly (he’d leave the women for last because he’s a very gentlemanly killer.)

And then Stacy would take Dan down in a surprise ending. She’d edit him out of the script or something.

So if you know the Writing Excuses guys, watch out for Howard, but perhaps even more, watch out for me!

On to conferences. In the podcast, the guys cover several different types of gatherings that writers might attend: literary conventions, anime conventions, media conventions, conferences and trade-shows. In children’s books, we don’t really have conventions for fans in the same way that fantasy/scifi has conventions (Comic-Con, DragonCon, anime conventions–these are big gatherings where vendors set up booths to sell (or give away) things directly to fans). Though we might consider a parallel to that to be school visits, which aren’t exactly a big thing in adult books.

Trade shows, of course, are the same for both adult and children’s–BEA (Book Expo America, a show for booksellers), ALA (the American Library Association’s annual and midwinter conferences, a trade show for librarians, obviously), IRA (the International Reading Association, a show for teachers, especially elementary teachers), NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English, kind of more of a conference than a trade show compared to the others above, high school English teachers). Obviously, IRA and NCTE tend to attract more children’s and YA books, and of course educational publishing, but there’s some crossover.

In the children’s book community, though, the biggest conferences to be aware of fall under either literary conventions (according to their definitions, though we might call them conferences interchangeably) or conferences (again, according to their defs). Which ones should you be aware of?

Literary conventions

  • SCBWI New York
  • SCBWI Los Angeles
  • Local SCBWI conferences like those hosted by the Seattle, Chicago, Houston, and New England SCBWIs

All of the above are great — and inexpensive — places to attend classes on craft, getting published, and marketing your book, meet guest editors and writers, network with other writers, and all sorts of other beneficial activities. You might meet people who you’ll end up forming a critique group through, or you might discover that a guest editor is looking for something that you write; often editors who work at houses that are closed to unsolicited/unagented submissions are open to submissions for a limited time from conference attendees.

Connected with these things, if you aren’t familiar with the activities hosted by your local Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), you should investigate. Most chapters host a lot more than their yearly conferences–they often have monthly meetings, offer a listserv, have members looking for critique groups online and in person, and man other local resources. You’ll be able to find out information on both the national and local organizations at the link above.

Conferences (aka workshops or seminars)

  • BYU Writing for Young Readers
  • Clarion
  • Chatauqua
  • …I know I’m missing several — what am I forgetting?

It’s getting late, which is why I’m forgetting a lot. I’ll save this post and add to it tomorrow, but in the mean time, feel free to post conferences I’m forgetting in the comments.

Upcoming books by friends

- Stacy 1 Comment

For those of you who are RPG players or DMs, here’s a book for you. Back in April, I got the chance to line edit/copyedit X-treme Dungeon Mastery, a new book by bestselling fantasy author Tracy Hickman and his son, who is a magician in his own right, Curtis Hickman, and illustrated by Howard Tayler. It’s now available for pre-orders through the Tayler Corp. If you are familiar with Howard Tayler’s excellent webcomic Schlock Mercenary (and the books they publish from that content), you’ll already know about it. For those of you who don’t know the Taylers, well, you should.

The book is a hilarious and enlightening look at how to make your game nights more entertaining and fun for both the dungeon master and your players–including how to wow your players and bring the magic in your game to life with step-by-step instructions on a number of magic tricks. Howard’s excellent illustrations enliven the already-fun text. Here’s a taste of what you’ll learn, from the marketing copy:

Throw off your chains! Too long have your role-playing games been held in the bonds of substandard gamemasters, bound in needlessly complicated rule sets, and enslaved by players who will avoid doing anything unless it counts toward leveling up! It is time to take a stand!

Learn from the masters the ancient secrets of how to:

  • Become a certified XDM and impress dates (Do-it-yourself secret initiation rites included.)
  • Design epic adventures that tell stories.
  • Perform magical feats to amaze your players, and even make them disappear!
  • Employ actual combustion (yes, “fire,” and yes, it’s dangerous) to enhance your games!
  • Hijack any game as a player, and deal with any player revolution as an XDM!

God does not play dice with the universe. We do.

______________________________________

Also, for those of you who are writers, you’ll be interested to know that editor Cheryl Klein–she of the Arthur Levine imprint at Scholastic, who keeps an informative blog and whose writing advice is excellent–has announced that she’s going to collect her many helpful speeches into a book. She’s decided to self-publish this book (remember how we talked about how some projects lend themselves well to self-publishing?) and is raising the money for the initial print run through Kickstart.com to make sure she has enough interest to pay for the project. I’m sure there are enough people in this world who would love to have a copy of her wisdom in a collected form (especially talks that have not been shared on her website), so if you’re interested in getting a copy of the book or just want to support the project, wander on over to Cheryl’s post explaining the details, and she’ll link you to her project page.

______________________________________

I’m forgetting someone. There was someone else’s book I wanted to plug here, but it’ll have to wait for another post when I remember. Instead, I will just tell you that I’m in the middle of (finally) reading The Hunger Games, and BOY is it good. I bought the book way back in February or March, but was so busy I hadn’t had a chance to read it yet. Then I took it to the seminar I taught in March to use as an example of a great opening line (I had gotten that far), and then when the seminar was over, I brought my big tote bag of books home but never got around to putting the books back on the shelves. I spent most of May and June wondering if I’d dreamed buying the book! Thankfully–because I was in the bookstore mulling over whether to buy it a week before–I’d put the book down to wait for the King’s English’s sale a few days later and then never made it back up to Salt Lake to buy it, because in preparing for my seminar last week I finally found the book at the bottom of that tote bag from March.

Whew! So now I’m reading it, and though I’ll save a real review until after I’ve actually finished it, I just have to say–she already had me tearing up in the first three chapters! It’s that good.

Another post on self-publishing

- Stacy 1 Comment

Today the #followreader conversation on Twitter covers self-publishing, and I just wrote this post to the Utah Children’s Writers list in answer to a similar question, so I’m reproducing it here for a wider audience:

I think you could pretty much group everyone’s comments on what someone who self-publishes has to do under the umbrella of “you’re the publisher.” That means you take on ALL the roles that a publisher does, without the clout a mainstream publisher has. That means you’re no longer just the writer — all the pre-production and production issues are yours (editing, copyediting, proofreading, design, interior and cover artwork, administrative tasks like ISBNs (beware a vanity publisher who says they’ll get your ISBN — often they’re getting it in THEIR name, not yours, which causes problems in  reprints if you get that far), copyright registration, getting quotes from printers and other vendors, etc.), and then the marketing, PR, sales, and distribution are a major hurdle that you’re handling yourself as well. As many have already noted, you’re not going to get your book in most bookstores unless you have several books, and the quality of the book in presentation and editing are always going to be an issue.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some great self-published books out there — look at Schlock Mercenary and several other webcomic artists’ books. But they definitely fall in a niche — a niche for which they already had a built-in audience from the webcomic of tens of thousands of fans. If you don’t already have an audience in place, it’s definitely something you’ll have to consider, because building an audience for most books, at least fiction, tends to be easier through a mainstream publisher.

Again, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but it is definitely daunting. It’s daunting for me as I start my small press, because I’m taking on a lot of these roles myself, roles that when I worked with a larger publisher were delegated to other employees. I will have to use all these kinds of skills — skills tha t I’ve gained through working in a publisher —  and be very active on the selling end (going to shows, etc.) until we get at least five books out because no distributor will even look at a small press who isn’t a self-publisher until you have at least five titles out.

The stigma against self-publishing in the publishing world is simply that with all that up against the average self-publisher — and nowadays the average self-publisher *tends* to be the kind of person who insists they know publishing better than the experts, despite never having worked on either side of publishing as a writer or editor/other publishing staff — few people have the expertise to manage all those roles and come out with a well-written, well-edited, well-designed book that also sells well. Heck, it’s hard enough to do it when you’ve got a team of experts on your side.

Now, when I said “the average self-publisher” that often rules out anyone who’s doing their research, like networking through lists like this and so on. Already you’ve got more knowledge than the literally millions of self-publishers out there — most people who go to self-publishing honestly think that’s how a book gets published. I had an old roommate, who knew I was an editor, ask me how much it costs to get a book published by Random House — she honestly thought you had to pay to be published, and without more information, would probably have ended up going with a scam.

The reason why the number of books published every year is so large is because of all those self-published books. Few can stand out from a crowd in the sea of all those books. But the ones that do know how to capitalize on the skills everyone’s talking about here. And it can be a very good option for all the reasons Rick and several others have mentioned here. I know an author who just wanted a copy of the book to hand to her daughter at a certain age, so she decided to self-publish her picture book. For that goal, it succeeded. She hasn’t succeeded in selling out her print run, but the emotional reason was more important to her at that time, and she has other books she’s writing for the traditional publishing route. Certainly family and local histories have a limited, niche audience, and self-publishing can be a great boon for those kinds of stories. Self-help nonfiction, as someone mentioned here, can do very well in self-publishing because of all the opportunities to use your platform at conferences and such to sell the book, especially if you’re already an expert in your field. I’ve heard the same about real estate and finance kinds of books — again, those are authors with built-in audiences, so the books will probably sell themselves.

But the thing to remember as you consider self-publishing is whether you truly want to take on the roles of the entire staff of experts — or if you don’t want to do it yourself, if you want to enlist the help of independent experts (there are a lot of freelance editors out there who would be glad to help, but as Rick said, good help doesn’t come cheap — I myself charge $50 an  hour for a developmental edit of a full manuscript) or if you have family members with these skills. It’s definitely possible, but it’s a whole lot easier to have a team of experts who are paying *you* to work on your book.

Keep in mind that the Eragons of the world are literally one in a million. There are a million books out there, wanting the limited attention span of the audience you’re trying to reach. It’s definitely wise to consider whether you can and want to take on all the roles necessary to really capture that attention. If you do, go for it. If you don’t, keep going for a regular publisher, working on getting your polished book into the right hands at the right time — and they’ll have that team of experts ready to go at the right time.

Sorry if this appears pessimistic. I may have been the editor at last year’s WIFYR that someone said told them that “all” self-published books are bad. If it was me, I believe I was misquoted. As I said above, *many*–not all, but MANY–self-published books tend to be of a low quality simply because the author doing the publisher is a *writer*–not any of the other roles that you have to fill to publish a book. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s always best to consider these things and consider how they’ll affect the end product of your book.

Spaces still left for worldbuilding seminar

- Stacy

We still have about 11-15 spaces left for the worldbuilding seminar this Saturday, so if you were thinking  you might come but weren’t sure if there’d still be room for you, be assured that we’ve got plenty of room. If Paypal was the trouble, at this point, just bring your check ($45 for an individual, $35 if you’re in a group of 5 or more) with you to the library, but still be sure to email my intern, Chersti, at cjstapley AT gmail DOT com with your registration information to let her know you’ll be coming.

Hope to see you there, and for those of you not local, I’m still working on the online workshop idea. Last week was rather slow on that end, however, due to a family emergency and my own asthma problems–I’m still waiting to hear how my ten-year-old niece is doing (thank you all for your thoughts and prayers–she’s doing better, and every time they do a test, like taking her off the heart bypass machine, she continues to improve, but we’re still just waiting to hear about a number of tests that I’m not sure that they’ve been able to do yet). I’m trying to get that ox back out of the mire from last week, which means getting several critiques back to people who have been very patient as I’ve been dealing with other things. Thank you all for being so kind and thinking of my niece–between all of my friends, and all of my siblings’ and cousins’ and aunts’ friends, I think there must be thousands of people thinking of her and praying for her. Thanks, everyone.

More seminars in the works

- Stacy 2 Comments

I’ve been brainstorming topics for seminars that would be useful to you, giving an editor’s perspective on topics specific to writing for children and young adults and to writing SF/F for that audience. I’ve got several topics in mind–and plan on repeating the worldbuilding and beginnings seminars, as well–and I’m working on ways to host an internet-based seminar on these topics so that attendees aren’t restricted to locals.

I’d also like to take the in-person seminars on the road, however. I was thinking that hosting one in Idaho Falls, for example, might be able to reach the many writers in Idaho who can’t always make it down to Salt Lake or Provo for Utah-Idaho SCBWI events. It’s also conceivable that I could do a seminar in Tooele, Salt Lake, Vernal, or St. George, Utah, or possibly even Vegas, if there were enough interest to fill a session. If you live in any of these places and would like for me to come do a seminar in your area (or even further out in the Intermountain West, Pacific Northwest, or Southwest), I’d be glad to talk about how to make that happen.

Here are some of the ideas I’ve got bubbling in my brain. Please comment and suggest other things you’d like to learn directly from an editor. All seminars will include writing/brainstorming exercises to address the specific topics, as well as workshopping time on your own work, allowing everyone in the class to get each others’ suggestions as well as my opinion on ways the piece can be improved.

Seminar topics

(First of all, the obvious ones–a split of the one I did back in March into two more specific topics, and the worldbuilding seminar that we’ll be doing a week from Saturday. Then other new ideas, which look generic but will always be discussed in the context specifically of SF/F for young readers.)

  • The basics of writing SF/F for children and young adults (and how to convince editors and agents that you’re good at it)
    • Hitting the right voice
    • Point of view: first person, third person, or omniscient?
    • Building sympathy for your characters
    • Crafting a story your audience won’t be able to put down
    • Current trends in SFF for children and young adults
  • Hook your reader: How to hook an editor and, later, a young reader within your first three chapters
  • Worldbuilding in MG and YA SF/F
  • Writing a killer plot: the structure of your story (lots to explore there — making promises, raising the stakes, internal and external arcs, etc.)
  • Knowing your market (audience and the business of writing)
    • Being a partner in the publicity of your book
    • School visits
    • Social networking
  • Line editing yourself: How to get down to the nitty-gritty and make your sentences sparkle
  • Characterization

What else? Please feel free to re-suggest things that we might have discussed in earlier posts–I need to do a search for what people have suggested in the past and I’d rather have them all right here in one place to reference. Also, feel free to suggest ways that an online seminar might be accomplished. I’ve had several suggestions, from a private page here on the website that only attendees have the password to (which are more text seminars than live), to Skype, to Go to Meeting (which is something like $50 a month, which seems a bit expensive, but I haven’t looked deeper to see if there are different levels of service that might suit a more sporadic seminar schedule–though perhaps we might be able to do one once a month and then it wouldn’t be an issue!), to the examples set by a couple of online writing workshop sites, and I’m open to more possibilities so that I can choose the best option for what I want to accomplish.

New seminar: Worldbuilding in MG/YA science fiction and fantasy

- Stacy

I have a confirmed date, time, and place for our next local seminar on writing fantasy for children and young adults. This time we’re going to focus specifically on worldbuilding–how it’s different for younger audiences (and how it’s the same as worldbuilding you might hear about in adult books), how to really hit the right tone with the audience you’re seeking to reach, how to use key details to flesh out your setting, how to use worldbuilding to create character, support the plot, and make your world come alive!

Here’s the skinny:

Provo Library, Provo, UT
Bullock Room 309
1-5 p.m.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Deadline: June 19

Cost: $45 for individuals (the increase in price is because I reserved the room for another hour, so we have plenty of time to workshop)
$35 for groups of five or more (make sure when you register to tell me who is in your group, or at least tell me who the “group leader” is)

We’ve got a bigger room this time, so be sure to tell your friends and anyone who might be interested–instead of being limited to 24 people, we can have 30-40 (I won’t want to get bigger than that, because we want to have a good number of people who want to workshop to be able to read).

On the day of the seminar, be sure to bring a sample from your current work in progress. It does not have to be the first chapter! Whatever section you think is the best representative of your worldbuilding and/or that you want the most help in creating a sense of worldbuilding: that’s the section to bring.

As with the previous seminar, we’ll start with me lecturing a little, giving you information on the topic and plenty of examples from great books. Then we’ll start workshopping! You don’t *have* to share your own work, but you’ll get a professional editor’s opinion on how you might improve a particular aspect of your story, and great feedback from all the rest of the people in the class, too.

My intern will be helping me with registration, so the directions for registration are a little different this time. As before, if you want to pay via PayPal, send the payment to me at stacylwhitman AT gmail DOT com, but then send an email to Chersti at cjstapley AT gmail DOT com, giving her the following information:

Name
Address
Phone number
Email
The one thing you’re most hoping to learn about from this class (this helps me to gauge the learning levels of everyone in the class so I can tailor the seminar to the people who are attending)

Note that my email is down, so I won’t be able to answer any questions today until it comes back up. But Chersti will confirm registration, and once I receive the payment I’ll notify her and she’ll keep track of who has paid, confirming with you that we got your payment.

Also, watch that deadline! If I don’t have enough registrants (I need at least 10 people registered to make it worth the room rental), we’ll cancel. But I don’t think we need to worry about that–just a head’s-up to let you know that we need at least a certain number of registrants for it to happen. We’ll have plenty of room for everyone, but you’ll want to register early so that I know you’re coming.

3-chapter critique catch-up

- Stacy

I’m catching up on a multitude of 3-chapter critiques and one novel critique this week that I’ve owed to people for a few weeks now. If you’re one of the people waiting on me to get back to you for a 3-chapter critique and you don’t hear back from me by late Thursday (I have ConDuit on Friday and Saturday), then please email me, as your file might have slipped through the cracks. I don’t want to miss anyone!

For those of you waiting on full novel critiques, I am still a few weeks behind, but catching up. Thanks for your patience!

Portraying people of color in children’s/YA fantasy–are we anywhere near “there” yet?

- Stacy 7 Comments

3/21/2012, ETA: Because this post has been linked a lot over the course of the last several months, I just wanted to point out that this was posted when I was in the process of starting the small press that became Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, where we publish middle grade and young adult science fiction, fantasy, and mystery starring main characters of color. We’ve published five books so far, and I think you’ll love them. If you believe, as I do, that more stories like these are important—awesome fantastic adventures in which people of color are the stars—please check them out and share them with your friends.

***

When I was in the fourth grade, I always wondered why I wasn’t born Japanese. You see, back then (mid-80s), the news was always saying that the Japanese had the best education system in the world, and that Americans were falling behind. Given that my life goal at the time was to be the smartest kid in the world, I really, really wished that I had been born Japanese.

Nothing I could do about that, but I could do my geography project on Japan. (I was in the accelerated group, and we did countries of the world instead of state history in the fourth grade. I also did Australia and India.) But the only resources I could find in our relatively small school library were a decade-old encyclopedia and several books from the 50s. I ended up making a small English-Japanese dictionary with about five words (which I still have around here somewhere) for my project to go along with the report.

I can’t recall having read one single book from the time I was able to read until the time I graduated high school about any character who was from an Asian country or about an American whose family background was Asian, however. There just wasn’t anything like that available to me in small-town farm country in Illinois. I’m sure this is as much to do with librarian/teacher selection as it had to do with publishing availability, but that’s just the way things were.

Looking at the CCBC’s report from last year of books published in 2008, however, I’m not sure we’ve come very far from that. We’ve come a long way, yet how far is there to go?

Ever since Race Fail 09 (which I didn’t follow much of, but even reading a part of which was very thought-provoking), I’ve become even more aware of this issue as it relates to fantasy than I have before (even though before that, as an editor, I always tried to acquire books that were as diverse as possible, whether that meant magic-wielding kender or girls from all over the world battling vampiric fairies). I’ve pondered on it for several months, and it’s been great to see so many authors pondering on it in their blogs, too. Just in the last few days, I’ve found a couple great posts on it by authors R.J. Anderson and Mitali Perkins (Mitali has a lot of great insights into this, as you can see from her blog).

The biggest thing I’ve been pondering is that it seems to me that in children’s and YA fantasy, we’re probably at a smaller percentage of multicultural themes and characters than realistic books (note that I’m conflating race and culture here on purpose—I’m using race and culture in an and/or way). Note how in the CCBC report, they say that “A significant number—well over half—of the books about each broad racial/ethnic grouping are formulaic books offering profiles of various countries around the world.” Of the rest—and I’m just mostly guessing, because they didn’t break it down into realism and fantasy in the multicultural books—but of the rest, I would assume that a large portion of the multicultural books were either nonfiction or realistic fiction, rather than fantasy. I’m not even sure how they broke down “fantasy” and “multicultural”—fantasy with multicultural characters may or may not have been included in the “multicultural” count, for all I know.

My point is that in genre fiction, even more than in realistic fiction, I find (anecdotally—I haven’t actually counted) a significant lack of multicultural characters compared to the portion of the population that is actually multicultural. Given that such a large percentage of authors are white, are we perpetuating a culture of predominantly white fantasy readers because so many books are written from that point of view? Consider Mitali Perkins’ quote from Ursula Le Guin:

“Even when [my characters] aren’t white in the text, they are white on the cover. I know, you don’t have to tell me about sales! I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that ‘what sells’ or ‘doesn’t sell’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don’t buy fantasy—which they mostly don’t—could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?” [my emphasis]

As Ursula Le Guin pointed out many years ago and reinforced when Earthsea was submarined by SciFi, in fantasy worlds not based in our world, our characters can be any shade we like them to be–and the default doesn’t have to be white. (This is not for lack of trying on some authors’ parts—anecdotally, some authors have told me they’ve been asked to change the race of their characters because a white author writing from a black character’s point of view, for example, might be seen as offensive. So there is some ground to cover there.)

So where do we go? How do we become more inclusive in genre fiction for children and young adults? One answer, of course, is to champion the great genre books that are coming out right now with multicultural themes and/or characters—to all readers who might have an interest in them, not just in readers we assume might want to read them because they might have a cultural affinity with them (also something Mitali has covered more in depth; seriously, go read her blog). But it’s much more nuanced than that. What about those white writers who want to include interesting characters from interesting cultures not their own? There’s some great discussion of that in an old thread over at The Enchanted Inkpot that I’d recommend browsing (they’ve also discussed variations of that question since then, and some really interesting things completely unrelated to that, so check it out). Mitali also has a handy checklist of things to consider when writing race.

I think that the more we become aware of this issue as gatekeepers (publishing people, writers, librarians, teachers, parents—in general, the adults in a child’s life that recommend/create books), the more we’ll be in a position to remedy the problem. I’m pretty sure that there isn’t an intrinsic lack of interest in fantasy on the whole, among young people of color (obviously, individual tastes vary!)—but we might be able to interest and engage those readers more fully if fantasy grew to encompass the many and varied cultures and backgrounds this world has to offer. I’d love to see a revival of fairy tale retellings, for example, from Gullah or Creole cultures, or the incorporation of those tales into a modern urban fantasy. I’m excited to read Cindy Pon‘s Silver Phoenix and to see how she incorporates ancient Chinese culture. I just had a great time editing a book for an author of a fantasy based in ancient Korean roots. Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days, a retelling of a Grimm tale but set in a fantasy country inspired by Mongolia, is my favorite of her books (with Goose Girl running a close second). And where is the Latino fantasy? South America had a great magical realism movement, but what about fantasy that connects with a modern young Latino audience and others who are interested in reading about that culture? (Here is where I falter—I can’t think of a single example from that culture. Someone please point me in the right direction.)

ETA: Oo! Oo! I thought of one in a Latino tradition (but well-adapted to a completely original fantasy world): Flora Segunda! Which is one of my favorites of the last few years!

There’s so many rich cultural traditions to draw from, not just the medieval Western European trope we see so often, and I’m excited to see how many authors are engaging in that challenge, no matter their own culture.

As an editor, it’s made me even more aware of this issue in the stories I’m reading for both acquiring and editing purposes. As a writer (which I do occasionally, though often when I have enough work as an editor I find I go months between writing spurts) it’s made me look at my work in progress and find solutions for something that’s been nagging at me for a while: my protagonist has a friend who she wants to be more than just a friend. He’s kind of been this nebulous guy for whom I didn’t have a mental picture, but over the course of the last few months, I’ve really felt more and more that this guy needs to be Asian-American. Well, at least, the people in town think he’s Asian-American (heh, we come to find out he’s actually not even from this world, but you didn’t hear that from me; if I ever actually finish this book, erase that from your mind). Even before I read Mitali’s SLJ article, I wondered the same thing as she did: “When was the last time, on an American TV show or movie, you saw an Asian-American man as the object of attraction?” I hope that I can make this character live as the attractive, hot, intelligent, awesome good friend and love interest that he is in the life of my main character.

I’ve rambled on long enough—I just wanted to get my thoughts on this subject down somewhere and organize them. Well, at least get them down somewhere, I suppose—I’m not so sure on the organization part. But feel free to share your thoughts on this subject in the comments.