Well, now that everyone has already posted, I’ll shout out to all my LiveJournal friends I saw at the SCBWI meeting in LA last week. I went out to dinner Thursday night with a whole group of LJ-ers including Mary Cronin, Jody Feldman, Melodye Shore, and 15 others.
Got to lunch with Debby Garfinkle and hang out with Jody Feldman. Jody signed up for the Pro Track, so she attended some different workshops than I did, and also participated in the Editors’ Luncheon and Authors’ Reception and Sale. This is me and Debby and Jody.
Lest you think I just ate and drank and schmoozed my way through the conference, Bruce Coville’s keynote was totally inspiring, just what an opener should be. He discussed the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Deadly Virtues of Writers. Illustrator Mark Teague told the hilarious story of how he stumbled into illustration via a degree in American history. It seems unfair that so many illustrators are witty as well as graphically talented. Later that day, agent Steven Malk shared strategies for developing a long-term career.
On Saturday, Rachel Cohn spoke on Embracing Your Inner Teen. She actually brought her inner teen with her and displayed her to the audience. Jay Asher’s presentation on injecting suspense into any novel had us on the edge of our seats. And Adam Rex, another unfairly witty, articulate, and otherwise talented illustrator discussed how to get a kid’s book published.
Here Jay Asher uses Grover and There's a Monster at the End of This Book to make a point.
On Sunday, I attended John Rocco’s session on book promotion, a good review of tactics to use before and after publication. The Golden Kite luncheon was inspirational, and in the afternoon Lisa Yee had us working very hard in her workshop on revision.
On Monday, Bruce Coville’s workshop on Plotting provided a lot of take-away, though I was tempted to go to Katherine Applegate’s How to Write and Stay (Relatively) Sane. Editor Donna Bray and agent Steven Malk spoke about collaboration and interaction between agents and editors. I heard from Jody that Sara Pennypacker’s session on Firt Pages was awesome. And Susan Patron was like the perfect dessert—a satisfying finish to the conference. And afterwards, I stood in the autograph line and had Susan sign
The Higher Power of Lucky. This is me and my hero, Susan Patron.
Jody and I each furiously took notes at the seminars and workshops so we could share with each other.
Afterwards, I linked up with Ellen Hopkins and Susan Lindquist and others for a little happy hour out on the patio before I left for the airport.
That's Susan, me, Ellen, Kristin Venuti, and another friend.
Today's word of the day is 70s, a ten-year period of polyester and platform shoes, when disco balls ruled the world.
I'm starting this post with a classic television show followed by a segue into a work of modern YA fiction--stick around if you're interested in that and feel free to leave early if you're not. Also, if you're looking for a comprehensive survey of how the spirit of a decade can be reflected in contemporary artifacts as well as nostalgic works with the benefit of distance and context, I can't really help you, since all I've got are two stories from or about the 70s which happened to come at me from two directions at roughly the same time...
First, randomly surfing channels last weekend, my wife and I came across a marathon showing of classic "Three's Company" episodes from the late 1970s. We had to watch a few, in memory of the late John Ritter, who was so funny and full of life on that show.
If you're not familiar with this series, it was adapted from a britcom called "Man About the House" about one single man and two single women sharing a single apartment in an arrangement that was totally innocent, or would have been if not for all the other people assuming it wasn't. In the United States, "Three's Company" milked double entendres and unlikely misunderstandings for eight seasons, which was enough time for a very young me to grow into its sensibilities and then beyond them. But the life lesson of "Three's Company," boiled down to "don't jump to any assumptions based solely on overheard snippets of conversation," remains drilled into my head and has served me well ever since.
Four observations:
1. My wife and I wondered whether Norman "Mr. Roper" Fell was still alive. I didn't think he was but had to had to look it up to be sure. He died in 1998. Cancer. He was 74.
2. What about Mrs. Roper? Was she still alive, and did she ever appear in any other major roles? Audra Lindey died in 1997. Leukemia. She was 79.
Aside from "Three's Company" and her co-starring role in its spinoff, "The Ropers," Lindey's IMDB page reads like a brief history of television. It starts in the 1950s, when shows were named for their corporate sponsors and helpfully included the word "television" in the title because people were still likely to try tuning them in with a radio. If you were looking for Audra Lindey in those days, your viewing options boiled down to whether she was being sponsored by an aluminum producer, an electronics company, or the makers of individually wrapped slices of American cheese.
In the 1960s, Lindey did shows with promising sci-fi or occult-type names like "Another World," "Search for Tomorrow," and "The Edge of Night," all of which, upon further research, turned out to be ordinary daytime soap operas.
In the early 1970s, Lindey was all about the sitcoms. "Chico and the Man," "Maude," "Barnaby Jones..." I'm not sure the last one was a sitcom, but what else could you do with a name like Barnaby other than work as a circus clown? During and after "Three's Company," Lindey made TV movies, guested on shows like "Matlock," "Tales from the Crypt," "Murder, She Wrote," "Friends," and "Cybil," and even had a few theatrical releases. Long story short, she kept very busy!
3. The economics of 1979 were such that a two-bedroom apartment near the beach in Santa Monica cost $300 per month--and every month was a new struggle for three working adults to pay the rent. All right, make that two working adults plus Chrissy. And Jack was attending cooking school, so he had an excuse for being perpetually short on cash. But Janet had a solid job at the flower shop, so no reason for her to complain about beachfront living on $3.50 a day.
4. There's a line in the opening theme song that doesn't sound like English and goes something like "Dominominay voo." I always assumed it was French, back before the Internet made lyric searches so quick and painless, so now... "Down at our rendezvous!" Of course! It's only half-French!
These episodes showcased 70s hair and clothing styles, 70s technology, and 70s moral values. We see the singles' scene before AIDS--without any mention of STDs, really, but specifically without the foreknowledge that a fatal new disease would soon put an end to the Sexual Revolution. We see outrageous stereotypes based around the fascade of presumed homosexuality that Jack Tripper must affect for the sake of his landlord, Mr. Roper, who can apparently accept gays more readily than he can acknowledge the possibility of platonic friendships between members of the opposite sex. And we see some then-controvercial issues of feminism.
Case in point, one episode featured Mrs. Roper taking a cafeteria job because she's fed up by the miserly allowance her husband gives her to maintain the household. Yeah, that's right, a grown woman was receiving an allowance like a child might get and her husband is outraged that she might want to do something with her day other than cooking and cleaning for him. This was an episode from 1979, just a stone's throw from the 80s, so recent and so blatant that I could hardly believe it was thought up by 70s sitcom writers for a 70s show that was broadcast to a 70s audience as just another episode.
Because I'd so recently watched this "Three's Company" episode, it was hard not to keep it in mind while reading Trapped in the 70s by D.L. Garfinkle, which is set in 1978. In the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Grey are a typical California couple having marital difficulties to which their children, seventeen-year-old Tyler and fifteen-year-old Heather, remain willfully and blissfully blind. Mr. Grey has become absorbed in his work and isolated from his family, while Mrs. Grey is unfulfilled to the point where she cries herself to sleep at night. A crisis point is reached when Mrs. Grey takes a job at, yes, a cafeteria, just like Mrs. Roper. But instead of being prodded to her act of rebellion by a pair of spunky 20-something tenants named Janet and Chrissy, Mrs. Grey finds her encouragement from Shay Saunders, a time-travelling teen from the early 21st Century.
The story of women's lib and marital strife is really just a subplot of Trapped in the 70s, with the main story being a boy-meets-girl drama in which the boy is a native of 1978 and the girl is an unwilling visitor from 2006 who is found naked and unconscious in the family bathtub--which, come to think of it, is similar to how Jack Tripper ended up living with Janet and Chrissy in "Three's Company." The narrative of the book shifts back and forth between Tyler Grey and Shay Saunders, with margin tags and alternate fonts to help readers tell which protagonist is speaking.
As a disclaimer, Debra Garfinkle is a friend, so I am greatly biased in favor of her book. I'm likewise biased in favor of books about time travel, and ones in which beautiful naked girls suddenly appear in random bathtubs on page one.
Four observations:
1. Star Wars was still in the theater at this time of this book, mostly because teens like Tyler and his friend Evie kept going back for multiple viewings. Younger kids like me did as well--I was seven and probably went to at least a dozen showings. Evie especially is shown as being obsessed with the characer-themed collectables. I understand trademark sensitivities when writing a book like Stuck in the 70s, but in real life Tyler would have relentlessly pumped Shay for every tiny detail about the next five movies. Also in the real world, Shay would have called up George Lucas and warned him not to create Jar-Jar Binks.
2. Strange that Tyler doesn't mention (or doesn't realize) that Shay didn't come from the future entirely by herself. She also brought with her a bathtubful of 2006 water, assuming she didn't sploosh naked into a tub of 1978 water that had been left out overnight. If only somebody had thought to save a sample of that water, it could have been analyzed to see if it differed from water that hadn't travelled back 28 years in time. Perhaps it would have been different in some subtle way, maybe on a subatomic level, or maybe it would have shown qualities of quantum entanglement with the 1978 version of its molecules. Great mysteries of the universe might have been solved by even a tiny drop of that water, which would have remained untainted a lot longer than a 2006 girl breathing 1978 air and eating 1978 food.
3. It was interesting that Tyler's and Shay's school, which each of them attended in their respective eras, did not seem to have changed much in 28 years while the local mall underwent a major transformation. Shay instantly masters the politics of popularity in the 1978 cafeteria, but she is nearly crippled by the lack of a Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, or frozen yogurt stand.
I've had a similar experience. The mall my family shopped at when I was a kid has since expanded from two anchor stores to four, added a food court, tacked on a second level, and most recently popped out an entire new wing of upscale trendy shops and restaurants. My old high school, essentially unchanged since it first opened in 1973, is now considered inadequate and obsolete. A new $200 million school is currently under construction to replace it.
4. From the setup--modern teen travels back in time by, more or less, a single human generation within the town of his or her own birth--I expected Stuck in the 70s to be more in the mold of Back to the Future.
One of the things I took for granted was that Shay would run into her mother as a teenager, or the parents of friends from her own time. It's not really a disappointment that this didn't happen, since it might have been a little too much like Marty McFly trying to set his future father up with his future mother, but it seemed to defy the odds that the only future-adult she meets is her future housekeeper who just happened to spend 1978 as a cleaning lady in the diner where Shay takes a part-time job.
I also expected that there would be an explanation for how and why the time travel event had happened, or at least a closing of the circle. Closing circles are almost mandatory in traditional time-travel stories. One way or another, Shay is going back to 2006--either by some sort of time machine, or by the same mysterious force that sent her back in the first place, or by living through those 28 years and aging accordingly. Even if she ends up dying before 2006, she can still close the circle by sending a message to her mother on the day after her disappearance, explaining some of what happened. I maintained the expectation of a closed circle until the very last page because I couldn't help thinking of this book as primarily a time-travel story, but it's not. The essense of the book, when the setup and setting are boiled away, is all about identity and percpetion.
Mrs. Grey is only one of several characters in the book who, through the chain of events begun by Shay's slip through time, come to realize that they are not being true to their inner selves and that they can change for the better. Mrs. Grey develops a life outside the home, Mr. Grey starts to appreciate his family more, Shay develops some much needed self-esteem, Evie learns to express herself, and Tyler gets a new haircut and bitchin' surfer duds.
This is what separates novels like Stuck in the 70s from sitcoms like "Three's Company," in which characters are not allowed to learn and grow from their experiences. At the end of the episode I described above, Mrs. Roper simply quits her job and Mr. Roper gives her a raise in her allowance--enough so that she'll now be able to buy the maple syrup he likes when she does the weekly shopping. The episode ends with the status quo restored, which is the golden rule of 70s sitcoms.
Would I, as a teen in the mid-1980s, have picked Stuck in the 70s off the shelf to read? Actually, I can avoid answering that question because this book, as a time-travel story with teen protagonists that also includes underage drinking, sex, and drug use, would not have existed in the mid-1980s. But if a copy had somehow fallen through a temporal wormhole from 2006 and landed on my desk in 1986, I think I would have been disappointed by not seeing that circle closed at the end. Which is why I'm proposing an alternate ending as my latest episode of Book Review Theater!
<BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER title="Stuck in the 70s">
Exterior, night, outside Jake Robbins's house in 2006. Three adults in their mid-forties sneak up the front walkway and hide in the bushes. They are TYLER, EVIE, and SHAY.
TYLER (whispering to Shay and nodding up at an illuminated window): So you're up there?
SHAY: Yeah.
TYLER: Right now?
SHAY: Yeah.
TYLER: Having sex with...Jack?
SHAY: Jake. And it's not me, technically. You know that. It's my seventeen-year-old former self from the future.
EVIE: Except it's not the future anymore. It's the present.
TYLER: I should go in there and break that up.
SHAY (grabs his arm): You know that's not how it's supposed to happen.
EVIE: We can't afford to mess this up, Tyler. We only get one shot and the entire space-time continuum depends on making things happen the way they're destined to.
SHAY: But I do appreciate your overprotective nature...Dad.
TYLER (blushes): I only had that one-night stand with your mother because the paternity test said I had to. You know Evie's my one true love.
EVIE: Thanks, babe. Hey, here she comes!
MARIEL steps up the walkway and glances into the bushes. Shay flashes her a thumbs-up signal. Mariel nods and begins pressing the doorbell over and over again. A crude dragonfly tatoo can be seen on her wrist.
SHAY (winces): I told her not to get that tatoo.
EVIE: She had to. We've got to make things happen exactly the way you remember. That's why Mariel had to take a job as your family's housekeeper and pretend to only speak broken English. I bet that's been almost as hard for her as it's been for me to get any work done in the particle physics lab without my best research assistant.
TYLER: But you did get the project done, right?
EVIE: You bet! Funded by the enormous fortune we've amassed using Shay's knowledge of stock results and sports scores for the past 28 years, and using my obsessive investigations into quantum mechanics and the secret files Tyler obtained as Albert Einstein's official biographer, I've wired up Jake's Jacuzzi to the world's first and only working time machine. In theory, it should work.
SHAY: In theory?
EVIE: Like I said, we only get one shot. 1.21 gigawatts of electricity doesn't grow on trees.
TYLER (as Mariel is finally let into the house by a towel-wearing Jake Robbins): She's in. Now we just listen in and wait for Mariel to give us the signal.
SHAY (listening to a portable radio receiver): She's reaming teen-me out in Spanish. That really takes me back. I don't know how Mariel ever put up with-- Oh, there's the code word!
EVIE presses a button on a remote control device. The street lights dim, then come back up. The trio anxiously watch the window above them.
MARIEL's voice from Shay's receiver: What you do with her? Where she go? Where you hide her?
JAKE's voice from Shay's receiver: I don't know! I didn't do nothing! Please don't call the cops--I don't want to go to jail!
TYLER, SHAY, and EVIE break down laughing.
SHAY: Mariel's getting her revenge. Poor Jake--I almost feel sorry for him.
TYLER: I'll give her another ten minutes, then Jake's getting a visit from Shay's father.
EVIE: Go get him, babe!
Caption across the screen: AND WITH THAT THE CIRCLE WAS CLOSED, THE END.
</BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER>
Today's word of the day is: Workshop
I'm back from Nashua, where the New England SCBWI conference was a huge success and my four-hour workshop on web design and blogging was well-attended and well-received. The grand finale was a live update of my website to include news about the presentation itself, thanks to a kind volunteer photographer in the audience.
That's my
new website design in the background, and see how exhausted I looked by that point? Since I was presenting for both sessions on Sunday, I didn't get to attend the equally well-received workshops going on at the same time:
- Toni Buzzeo on self-promotion;
- Brian Lies and Lita Judge on illustration;
- Sarah Aronson on point of view;
- Harold Underdown on an overview of the basics;
- Debra Garfinkle on humor writing;
- Emily Herman and Anne Sibley O'Brien on writing tools;
- Sarah Shumway on pitches; or
- The Write Sisters (Janet Buell, Kathy Deady, Muriel Dubois, Diane Mayr, Andrea Murphy, Barbara Turner, and Sally Wilkins) on critique groups and collaboration
In fact, with all of those other workshops going on, I was amazed that anyone wanted to come to mine at all. We really did have a great group of authors and illustrators who peppered me with enough questions to last the entire time--and we probably could have gone for another four hours if I hadn't lost my voice by then. Thanks, everybody!
I love Julie Olsen’s blog! Thanks so much for suggesting it. Her writings make me feel like I’m sitting at a table sipping tea and having a good heart to heart…wonderful site.
Hey Amy I added her Julie to my blog reader. Her work is really wonderful. Thanks so much for blogging her!