Some Fruit-y Thoughts On Dialect

I hate tomatoes.  I loathe bell peppers and red peppers and, well, any peppers at all.  And even after two years of eating berries and drinking smoothies for my health, I still don’t like fruit.
These are legitimate dislikes.  They taste bad to me.  I’m quite justified in not ordering the peppers-and-tomato dish at the local Italian restaurant.
But I can also acknowledge that though my dislike is genuine, I may have some pretty awful underlying reasons for not liking veggies and fruits.  I got targeted hard by General Mills and other food corporations when I was a young kid, with thousands of advertisements aimed at deepening a nascent addiction to sugar and fat – no, seriously, read how they planned to warp my tastebuds – and when they were done, what tasted “real” to me were processed foods.  To this day, I’ll choke down some berries and a salad, but what really satisfies me is a bacon-burger and a milkshake.
I don’t like fruits and vegetables.  But I was also trained by people of varyingly active agendas that hey, these Pop Tarts are much tastier, they come in a fun box, all the other kids are eating them.  And so I have to acknowledge:
My dislike may well have emerged from some pretty fucked-up underlying reasons.
I’m not saying I should like bell peppers, but I am saying that the problem may not lie with the bell peppers.  Maybe the problem’s with me, and the culture I grew up in.
The reason I am in a fruit-discussing mood today is because a reviewer at Strange Horizons said this about a story:

Troy L. Wiggins’s “A Score of Roses” features heavy use of phonetic dialect, a literary trick which works perhaps one time out of a hundred—a shame, because the story underneath all the “chil’ren”s and “yo’self”s is charming.

Now, this caused – well, not quite an uproar, but a lot of discussion, because dialect is actually a really powerful tool.  Tobias Buckell discusses it in much better detail than I do – and I’d advise you to go read the entirety of his essay, because it’s that good – but basically, by squashing everyone’s native dialect into clean, white-friendly English, you erase whole cultures.  People around the world do actually talk in dialect, this is an authentic representation of the way they speak and their lifestyles, and asking them to write in the words designed by people who wear bowler hats and drink proper tea under the British flag actually kinda erases them.
And I get that.  If I had to write my stories exclusively in African-American Vernacular English, they’d lose a lot of the flavor that represents my view of the world.  The tale would be less me, filtered through someone else’s cultural perspective, and maybe it’d still work but it’d be as different as an indifferent translation.  (You can actually see a fascinating comparison over at Abyss and Apex where they have a “mostly-dialected” published story intended to be readable by English-speaking readers, compared with the original “full-dialect” version submitted to them.)
Thing is, though, I totally agree with what that reviewer said.
As a reader, I don’t like dialect.  I’m a huge fan of transparent prose – I like to fall into the story, just lose myself in the plot and characters and forget entirely about the words.  There are times I like a dense, chewy-prosed novel, but mostly I read very pulpy stuff.
And that applies to pretty much anything that gets in the way of my reading, including weird other-languages or complex worldbuilding infodumps I have to spend too much time on.  There’s the infamous Junot Diaz quote about “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and [white people] think we’re taking over,” but that doesn’t apply to me – it took me four or five separate tries with Dune to get into it, because I didn’t know what the fuck a gom jabbar was and what the hell is going on and fuck it, I’m putting this book down.
I probably never would have read it, too, if it wasn’t my sainted Uncle Tommy’s favorite book.  And when I got through it, I felt somehow more educated, stronger for having stuck with it, having learned fictional lessons about a new world – but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading the book all that much, merely the satisfaction I get from solving a hard programming problem.
So hand me a book like Trainspotting and I’ll read a page or two and decline.  I don’t wanna work that hard at reading, man.
Yet that’s my dislike of bell peppers, coming to the fore.
Because yeah, I love transparent prose, but that prose is transparent to me because I was lucky enough to have the New England language my family and friends spoke marked as the language of the whole world.  Any book I picked up when I grew up in the 1970s was damn near guaranteed to have people who spoke pretty much like me.  Publishing industries had decided that this was how people spoke, and so like the Pop Tarts in their brightly-colored boxes this became my comfort reading, and even now when I settle in with a good book I’m feeling the echoes of cultural decisions made for me years before I was born.
I don’t like dialect, but I can also acknowledge that this genuine dislike is not necessarily a good thing.
Plus, as Joe White Dude, dialect is something that is often cringeworthy.  I don’t have the ear to know whether dialect is good or bad, and unless I know the author well enough to trust them, I have this nagging fear that maybe I’m reading something hideously insulting and actually demeaning to the people who genuinely speak this way.  There’s a lot of talk about “Hey, people should feel great about reading dialected books!” but what I don’t see anyone invoking is The Help, which has a lot of fairly wince-inducing dialect in the early chapters, used to propel a story that a lot of people feel was written by a white woman in a way that actually made a story about the African-American Civil Rights movement mostly about white people.
(I read the book, and I didn’t feel that way – I quite liked it – but The Help is still a point of controversy.)
Thing is, dialect is really good when written by people who know it well.  I’ve read pretty much all of Nalo Hopkinson‘s books and enjoyed the fuck out of them.. but I think that’s because with Nalo, I have the trust that I’m learning something genuine and real.
If I read Dune, and internalize its concepts, and start dropping muad’dib references in public, then I’m being a big fucking nerd but I’m not actually hurting anyone.  If I read Joe White Dude’s Badly-Researched And Poorly-Done Assimilation Of Someone Else’s Culture and start going, “Yeah, boy, you new hair a total dreadnut!” then I’m actually kind of a douche.
So with Nalo, I have the twin joys of reading a fun story – seriously, try Midnight Robber or Brown Girl in the Ring – and when I’m done, I have that programmer-like satisfaction of having inhaled some new concepts and slang that I know to be either completely manufactured or accurate representations of her culture, and if I decide that I start liking the word “bumbaclaat” then hey, it may be cultural appropriation but at least I’m using the fucking thing accurately.
But yeah.  For me, dialect involves some serious trust on the part of the author, because I’m simply not educated enough to know when it’s done poorly.  So when I’m reading dialect by an unknown author, I have this constant ongoing question of “Can I enjoy this?  Or should I be irritated?”
And honestly?  A lot of the people who try dialect are uneducated people who are stretching their wings as writers in some experiment – hey, can I write like the dudes I hear down at the barbershop? – and fucking it up.  Maybe not all of ’em, but enough that I can’t dismiss ’em.
Yet again, it’s like unpacking all my seething hatred of strawberries – and I do not like strawberries, Sam-I-Am, unless they’re coated in dark chocolate – in that I have an instinctive dislike, but that dislike stems from pretty sucktacular reasons.  Hey, I don’t like reading about dialect because I’m too lazy to do the research on someone’s culture enough to be familiar with it!  So I rarely read dialect!  Now there’s a vicious circle, ain’t it?
There’s not a good ending to this essay, though.  It’s messy, like real life.  I’ve made a conscious effort to eat fruit more over the past two years, and my palate has expanded considerably; I can eat bananas, don’t mind blackberries, and you put a few blueberries into my cereal and I can deal with that.  But still, when I’m having a bad day and I just need to comfort-eat, I have never once gone, “Awww, yeah, frickin’ banana in the house.”
Yet my cardiologist will tell me: You’d be better off if you did.
Likewise, dialect is almost certainly never gonna be my go-to reading preference for the reasons I’ve outlined.  But I do read occasional stories with dialect as a change-up, and I can acknowledge that my dislike of dialect is a flaw not necessarily within dialect itself, but rather a flaw instilled upon me for a myriad of really complicated cultural reasons, and I should occasionally get out there and challenge myself because dude, there is a whole fucking world out there with people who don’t speak like you, think like you, believe like you, and shouldn’t you creep outside of your nice suburban house every once in a while to explore the great and meandering halls the world has to offer?
Yes.
Yes, I damn well should.

You Know How I've Been Yammering About Numenera? Buy It Cheap!

There is a Numenera Bundle of Holding that just went live, wherein you choose a price, donate to charity, and get all the Numenera you need to start a campaign.
Minimum donation is $9.95, and you get the core rulebook and GM’s screen.  For $19.95, you get the Player’s Guide, the Bestiary, and the Devil’s Spine adventure.  As you know, I’ve been running a Numenera campaign, and the system is just fantastic – and the setting gets deeper with each supplement.  It’s a total joy to watch the world grow, one module at a time.
This is a fantastic deal, and a portion of the profits are donated to Human Rights Watch and Women’s Learning Partnership – ’cause Monte and Shanna are just cool that way.  If you’ve been waiting to get a solid intro to this exciting new RPG, well, now’s your shot.

The Irony Is….

….I wrote an essay that, if I were to summarize it, went something like:
“I thought this girl cut me off without any explanation.  But when I really analyzed what happened, it turned out she’d been trying to tell me that I was doing things that hurt her, and I dismissed her concerns because I was incapable of comprehending what she told me.”
However, when someone else summarized it, their interpretation was:

He was in a relationship, or so he thought, and then rationalized it as he is wrong for feeling attached.
Male emotion doesn’t matter.
Show me where I’m wrong in that conclusion.

The irony is that this guy did a shitty job of reading the text, basically stripping out a lot of context and meaning to arrive at the conclusion that “male emotion doesn’t matter,” and…. he has exes in his past who’ve clearly, based on his outrage, cut him off without explaining to him what he did.
Dude.  They explained it to you in the way I explained it you.  And you misinterpreted it in the same crappy way you’re doing now.
I feel safe in saying the problem isn’t that she didn’t tell you, the problem is that you can’t fucking interpret words correctly.
(….But for the record, “male emotion” does matter, as much as any emotion matters.  I’m not down on masculinity, I’m down on emotion.
(I’m of the fairly firm opinion that you reach wisdom once you start recognizing that “I feel this strongly” does not necessarily mean that this is true, and much of maturity comes from being able to truly feel the roiling stew of emotions that are telling you to do all sorts of damn-fool things, and instead choosing to do the right thing.  Whether that’s putting aside your anger to be a reasonable person to someone who deserves the benefit of the doubt, or suppressing your insecurity to handle someone else’s hurt, or tucking aside fear to go do the things that will actually make your life better, or suppressing revulsion at your own wrongness to actually acknowledge that this factual argument is correct, I think “emotions” are overrated.
(We all feel emotions.  They’re useful.  I’m no Vulcan.  But though I felt justified emotionally in what I did to Allie at the time, that does not make my actions actually justifiable.  And that distinction is a critical life lesson for people to learn.)
(And no, I’m not linking to the comment; it’s in one of the cross-postings somewhere, and I don’t particularly feel like sending the flying monkeys at this dude, who has enough problems of his own to deal with.)
 

Two Deserving People Who Could Use Some Help

Regrettably, I don’t link to every GoFundMe campaign people create for personal life’s events; in a lot of cases I don’t actually know the people posting, and am uncertain of what they’d do with the money.  And in other cases, there’s a kind of “donation fatigue,” where if I ask y’all to shoot money at someone every week, it loses its effectiveness.
But here’s two people I know would use the money well, if you chose to give it to them.
The first is my friend Jeff, whose wife has cerebral palsy and a botched brain surgery that she’s recovering from.  Watching the Meyers go through what they’re enduring with my Goddaughter Rebecca, the one relief is that they’re financially well-off enough to pay the bills; Jeff and his wife, alas, are not, and they’re drowning in medical expenses.  As such, they’ve started a campaign to try to raise funds to help them keep their two kids happy and hopefully stop the searing pain that his wife feels. Well worth a few spare bucks, if you have it.
The other potentially life-saving campaign is a little more proactive: my friend Angel, who is a true badass of a woman, works in private security doing alarm responses – and she’d like a ballistics vest so if she gets got in the course of duty, she doesn’t, you know, die.  Unfortunately, most ballistics vests are fitted for men, and she needs something to go under her clothing to be plainclothes.  Donating a few dollars could keep someone I admire alive, so, you know, also worth a few spare bucks.

Things Nobody Told Me About Selling A Novel (Part 2): The Importance Of The Elevator Pitch

“You gotta work on your elevator pitch,” Michael Underwood told me in my first marketing meeting, shortly after I’d sold Flex to Angry Robot.  And then, at the next con I attended, I saw why that mattered.
I’d been on a panel with an author who’d done the thing that all struggling authors do: propped her book up in front of her, cover facing the audience, to remind them oh, I have a book. (I’ll be doing that come September.  Copiously.)  And afterwards, as we were packing up our bags and walking away, she struck gold: an audience member walked up and asked, “So what’s your book about?”
The author sort of flopped her hand on the cover, pointing to the furred person on the front.  “Well, it’s about his attempts to be normal.”
And you could see the audience member freeze in place a bit, waiting for an explanation of what his problems were (aside from being magnificently furry), and why this furry dude wanted to be normal.  But no such explanation was coming.  And so the audience member shrugged and drifted away with the rest of the crowd.
I had not read the book, but that description instilled in me zero desire to read it.  Which is a shame!  It could be a great book!  After all, the author in question was charming and funny on the panel – so insightful that a complete stranger walked up to her afterwards, curious to see what sort of fiction this personality wrote.
There had been an opportunity to make a fan there, and it dissipated like cologne spritzed into a high wind.
Now, as an author, I hate the hard sell.  (Even if I’m on a panel about writing short fiction, I fricking hate bringing up my own stories as examples because I do not want to be That Guy who only talks about His Magnificent Stories.)  But I do realize that even if you’re going the low-PR route, eventually someone will find out you’re an author, and they’ll ask, “So what do you write?”
Having an interesting, one-sentence pitch ready for these moments – and as I’ve already discovered, there’ll be more of ’em than you think – is a good thing to spend some time honing.
You want it short enough that you won’t take up minutes of conversation, but intriguing enough that someone might be lured into asking follow-up questions.  My problem is that “short” thing: I’m awful, awful, awful at condensing my novels down into synopses.  To me, everything is important – hey, that delivery guy on page 224 brought in a very important pizza! – and so when asked to summarize my book, it goes something like this:
“Well, uh, it takes place in a world where magic is created by obsession, you know, if you love something enough it wears a hole in the universe and weird shit happens.  Like, if you’re a crazy enough Crazy Cat Lady, you become a felimancer, and you can do Crazy Cat Lady-related magic.  But by then, you’re pretty nuts, so the magic you want to do is only related to getting and protecting more cats, so really magicians are kind of fucked.  And then there’s a dude in the middle of it, his name is Paul, and he’s been working in insurance for so long that he’s become a bureaucromancer, just nuts about paperwork – dude can, you know, create a lease for a fantastic apartment out of thin air, or maybe backdate an arrest warrant to have a squadron of cops showing up on your door.  But a terrorist ‘mancer burns his daughter so badly that he needs the funds to surgically reconstruct her face.  Except, oh, yeah, whenever you do magic, there’s a backlash that has a good chance of killing you, so he’s terrified he’ll fuck her up even worse by using this new magic, and so he has to team up with this kinky Nintendo-obsessed videogamemancer to brew magical drugs….”
Maybe you liked that summary.  But read it out loud.  Imagine you’ve got a table of four mostly-strangers looking at you when you say this.
Imagine trying to hold their attention through that whole rambling spiel, and you haven’t even said the name of the damn book yet.
No, for politeness’ sake, you owe it to your buddies to construct a quick pitch so you can tell them what it’s about in about twenty seconds, then let them decide if they want to ask follow-up questions.
And for this, you must not be afraid to compare yourself to other authors.  As my friend Steve noted, it seems a little squicky, but it actually does the hard work in people’s minds – they know Author X, they know whether they like Author X, and they have a decent idea of what Author X does.  And for this to work, you need a popular author, because “I write like Nir Yaniv” will score you hipster points among a small (and smart) crowd but will merely baffle most people.
So if you’re a person who writes light, humorous fiction, telling people “It’s kind of like Terry Pratchett” informs them right away whether they’re gonna be into you.  You don’t have to compare yourself, but it’s not the obscenity it seems.
(Unless Terry’s at the table with you.  Then you might wanna reconsider.  That could get embarrassing.)
For me, Michael Underwood helped me narrow it down to something close to this:
“It’s called Flex, and it’s basically Breaking Bad meets magic – a bureaucromancer has to brew magical drugs to save his burned daughter.  Some people say it’s a lot like Jim Butcher.”
There.  I just timed that on my iPhone, and I can say that in nine seconds.  Anyone can endure me talking about that for nine seconds.  And if they want to ask more, then I can blather.
(Of course, that assumes I’m not at a table with a high-powered author who I’m intimidated to be around, which happens a lot, in which case I’ll just mumble and go, “Itsabook.”  But I’m working on that.  I really am.)
(Also note that Michael Underwood has his own new hotness, described as “In a city built among the bones of a fallen giant, a small group of heroes looks to reclaim their home from the five criminal tyrants who control it,” which is available for pre-order right now.)