The Legacy Of Harry Potter
I don’t know if the Harry Potter series will become a beloved classic, like Narnia and Little House and Oz. I think there’s a chance they might dry up and disappear.
Not right away, of course; Harry Potter was so absolutely huge that whole generations of kids who grew up on Harry’s brave adventures are planning on reading it to their kids. So the next generation is going to get a earful of Harry, whether they really want to or not.
But will that Harry Potter dosage be satisfying? Because when I think about Harry Potter, I think about my daughter Amy.
Amy was eight when we started reading her Harry Potter, and back then there were only two of them. She read the first one and absolutely adored it, and thought the second one was too scary but she kind-of liked it because, well, she liked the first one and when you’re a kid and decide you love something, you kind of cling to it. So even though she sort of had to race past certain sections of the second book, she still listened to it on CD about a bazillion times. (And why not? Jim Dale’s voice was awesome.)
And every couple of years, a new book came out! And she found Azkaban to be really terribly scary, and it was, but by then Amy was a little older and used to frights. And the death at the end of Goblet of Fire – a very long book – was very sad, but by then Amy had been to a few funerals, so it really resonated with her. And by the time Harry got all snotty in Order of the Phoenix, Amy was starting to creep into her teenaged years, and hated the book because Harry was mirroring her own uncomfortable rebellion. And then there’s the really big death in Half-Blood Prince, which by then Amy was coming to realize that anyone could die and was starting to come to terms with her own mortality, and then by the time the final book came out she was pretty much done with high school.
I think of what eight-year-old Amy, scared of the basilisk, would have thought of the terrors at the end of Half-Blood Prince. I wonder if little Amy would have related at all to the comparatively plot-free antics of Harry in Order of the Phoenix – would it have emotionally resonated with her?
No, the specialness of Harry Potter is that for her entire childhood, Amy had a book series that grew up with her. Just as she matured, Harry did, and together they walked a path. I know for a fact that Amy found it comforting that Harry struggled with some of the things she did, even if she never articulated it as such – but if the Boy Who Lived had to worry about dating and felt awkward and didn’t know what to do sometimes, well, that’s why she clung to those books.
Now, I have no doubt some parents will try to dole out Harry Potter one year at a time, reading the next one as a birthday present – and this is wise, even if it’s doomed to fail. (Too many movies out there, son, and too many friends with DVD players.) But I think pouring all of Harry Potter into a kid at any age is going to be a little disappointing – at thirteen, they may find the beginning books a little too twee, and at Amy’s age they may find Dumbledore’s journey in the cave to be uncomfortably terrifying.
I think Harry Potter will be around for a while. But I also think there’s a good chance that we literally got the magic of an age, and in a hundred years Harry will be one of those beloved classics that adults will read for pleasure, but the kids will have moved on to something else.
That’s fine. Not everything has to last for the ages.
Facebook Selfishness, Redux
Yesterday, when I yelled at people for being selfishly rude on Facebook, I got some comments that went roughly like this:
“Well, Ferrett, Facebook’s UI is terrible. It doesn’t present everything in chronological order! That confuses people! You can’t blame people for being baffled by that.”
Yes.
Yes, I can.
This is Facebook, arguably the single most popular application in the world today. More people use it than anything else aside from, possibly, a web browser (and the number of people who access it through apps may change that). And anyone who has more than ten friends knows that Facebook doesn’t present everything, and doesn’t always present them in order. Hell, my blind mother who logs into Facebook once a week to check in on me knows that, and she’s got like fifteen friends total. And is, you know, blind.
Furthermore, the question of whether the UI is terrible is up in the air. Facebook presenting everything in chronological order has its own downsides, because once you reach a certain level of friends – say, 100, which is pretty low for anyone who’s been through college and high school in this day and age – the chatty Facebook people drown out the people you like, and you never see the people you care about again. So if Facebook’s admittedly non-optimized attempts to bubble the important updates to the top is bad UI, then so is chronological order, as it’s a very understandable and reasonable design choice that will never show you what you actually want.
(Not that Facebook’s status-bumping algorithm is good, mind you, but I understand it’s a very complex challenge to try to figure out what things I want to see from which of my friends. I’m surprised they manage it at all.)
Further to the furtherest furthermore, if you look at the idiots who do this sort of thing, they’re usually Facebook natives. Yes, I’d forgive my mother for being confused by this, but in general when I see this irritation, I click through to the idiot who did it and lo! S/he has 800 friends and is constantly posting on people’s walls and oh, here’s seventeen pictures of their last fun run. Either they know what’s going on, and can’t be bothered, or they’re such a fucking moron that they use this thing every day and are still confused by how it works, in which case their slug-like intellect approaches levels of discourtesy.
Look, English Grammar is also complicated. But I don’t really cut people all that much slack for typing “U no its not rite wen ur GF cheets on U,” and that’s not even adding more stress to anyone in a stressful position. If someone’s just posted something obviously bad, the least you can do for a friend in time in need is learn how to use a fucking program that you should probably know how to use already. It’s not rocket science.
Wanna call me an elitist? Go ahead. But if you are, you’re lowering the bar for “public Internet usage” to the point where malformed mice can hop over it, because this isn’t elitism; it’s courtesy.
Vote For Pedro, Redux
Apparently, my clerical coming-of-age-via-a-stabbing story “My Father’s Wounds” has made it to the final round of the “Best Of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year Three” poll. Which is amazing! I’m glad to see people liked it.
Now, the run-off is on a Facebook poll, where I am getting thoroughly trounced by Michael John Grist’s “Bone Diamond” and Heather Clitheroe’s “Gone Sleeping,” both of which are excellent stories. But if you liked “My Father’s Wounds,” and feel so motivated, and have a Facebook account, then please go hither and vote.
(Side Note #1: I idly considered having Opposite Cat vote in the poll, but Opposite Cat mostly reads nonfiction.)
(Side Note #2: I really hate it when someone votes for someone just because they like the person in it, not because what s/he did was good. It’s like, “Oh, my friend is in this beauty contest, vote for her!” No, really, vote for her if you see her and she’s pretty to you. Likewise, if you didn’t like “My Father’s Wounds,” or didn’t read it, kindly abstain. That would just irk me.)
Four Years After Clarion: The Work Done And The Results Achieved
So four years ago, I graduated the Clarion Writers’ Workshop – six weeks of intensive training that broke a decade-long stagnancy, and allowed me to “go pro” when it came to writing.
But writing? It’s a lot of work. I used to do monthly round-ups of everything that I submitted/wrote/got rejected, but it was a lot of work and was usually boring. But since it’s been four years, let’s tally up everything that I’ve done:
In four years of writing, I have:
Started 62 stories (or, started one new story every 3.4 weeks).
Finished the first drafts of 57 stories (or, finished 91.9% of all stories I started writing).
Polished and submitted 39 stories (or, gotten to a final draft of 62.9% of all stories I started writing – which is a misleading number, since I’ll complete some percentage of the stories I started during this four-year period – it can take me up to two years to get to final draft).
Sold 25 stories (three of which were to markets that imploded, or sold 40.3% of all stories I started writing).
Retired 6 stories, deciding I wouldn’t be happy at this point if someone actually bought them.
Received 219 short story rejections, or an average of 1.05 rejections every week.
Each published story was rejected by an average of 6.42 markets before it found a home.
Written 1 complete novel. Which is currently making the rounds among too many agents. (Will share data once it’s accepted or retired.)
Been nominated for 1 major award. Reprinted in 0 best-of year’s end collections.
Made infinite supportive writer friends at conventions and on Twitter. Thank you all.
Based on a calculated life average of 75.44, I intend to keep at this for 32.24 years.
(If any of this impresses you, then I urge you; please donate to my Clarion Blog-A-Thon.)
Facebook Selfishness
“I’m still numb,” the Facebook post reads. “Sitting in the hospital, I can’t imagine this happened to me.”
Followed by a comment of “OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED?!?! ARE U YOU ALL RIGHT?!?”
Followed by me wanting to punch someone in the face.
It’s a small mercy, I admit, but if I see someone posting incomplete snippets about some major tragedy in their lives, I click on their name and see what else they’ve posted recently. Because, you know, if someone’s undergoing a mind-shattering trauma, the last thing they probably want to do is bring lazy sons-of-bitches up to date on something they posted about half an hour ago.
Yet I always see that flood of slothful, inconsiderate ignorance, and the only reason I don’t start a flame war with these morons is because, well, “moderating a flame war between two friends in the middle of a mind-shattering trauma” is probably actually the last thing they want to do. But still. These people are oafs, selfishly shouldering their way to the front of the line and saying, “Yeah, I could click something to find out what’s going on, but instead why don’t I suck up more of your time and energy with demands for news you’ve already given?”
How self-centered do you have to be, really? Not to see what else they’ve been up to, and find the news so easily discovered? Do you think you’re actually being a friend by offering not support, but a redundant demand?
What dicks. I hate them with a tabasco-fiery passion. Unless I click through to that poor suffering bastard’s Timeline to discover that no, they’ve given no other updates and are just being annoyingly cryptic about the nature of this hospital stay, in which case I’ll ask, “OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED?!?! ARE U YOU ALL RIGHT?!?”