Widening the Scope Pt. 2: One of the best posts to come out of Tumblr

So, people may have noticed I've started using Tumblr again. It comes and goes ;) I wrote this post because I saw something on Tumblr a couple of months ago that I didn't simply want to disappear as so many things in Tumblr do.

Already this month, I've written about strength as it relates to characters who are male and female. Now I want to pay attention to a different kind of diversity and, dare I say it, one that is closer to my own heart.

When I was a teenage bisexual girl, I found that there were a lot of books that related my experiences with guys, but none that would give those strange and outlandish feelings I had for girls any credence. Oh, there was Sarah Waters and the book that the BBC mini-series brought out into the spotlight, Tipping the Velvet.

(Also Fingersmith and, to a lesser extent, The Night Watch.)

That was... kinda it. More commonly, there were starting to be books that would feature a side character, or best friend of the main character, who was gay. I think that Holly Black's Ironside was the first book I read where the gay side character featured in a romantic relationship of his own. 

It's not a fun feeling when you pick up a book only to find that the characters that should be there for you to identify with, at least in some books, simply aren't there. 

Polyamory is the other minority that just doesn't get a lot of play in books though, I will freely add, that it has gotten better already since two years ago when I wrote this post.

I mean... people are actually talking about it now. O.o 

Which brings me to the Tumblr post that inspired this babbling:

Hi Sarah, I really appreciated your response on asexual representation and was curious about your thoughts on the lack of poly representation in YA lit. (read more)

What follows is a well considered question asking to the cultural attitudes that may still too much influence what can and can't be published in YA literature. 

What Sarah Rees Brennan did was reply with her own carefully considered responses, even going so far as to post, 

Here is a non-comprehensive but awesome list of YA books with LGBTQ and poly characters I found! http://goforitgenevieve.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/long-post-about-lgbtq-and-poly-too-ya-fiction-is-long/ (Linking to this one rather than the one at gayya.org because it has a few indicators of favourite books and content, but gayya.org is fantastic and amazing and everyone should read it!) ... So these are my (imperfect!) thoughts, summed up with I think it can be done, has been done, and I truly hope it will be done more.

Which even I didn't know about, so I'm more than happy to share about it here.

As if that wasn't all amazing enough, Melissa Marr weighed in with her own opinion:

"I’m always happy when folks comment on the poly resolutions in my Wicked Lovely books.  Yes, Radiant Shadows has a poly resolution.  So, too, does Darkest Mercy.  Sometimes the answer (in both life & fiction) is that what looks like a “love triangle” is actually NOT. Sometimes a person can have a healthy, happy relationship with two other people." (read more)

When people pull me up and ask me why I read so much YA fic, why I think it's so important: this. This is the answer to all those questions.

New Release - Rages & Bones, edited by Melissa Marr.

I have been watching the release of this anthology for what feels like Too Damn Long. I am very excited to say, two weeks ago, this book hit shelves.

Many people would have had advanced reader copies long before that.

But now it's free to the general public!!

Well... not free. I mean, you still have to pay for it...

And why wouldn't you, with the likes of Neil Gaiman, Melissa Marr, Holly Black and Kelley Armstrong filling the pages!

Excuse me while I run around in circles in excitement that this book has finally been released. :D:D

For those people who may have been sleeping under a rock (or who are merely just not so excited about this bunch of authors as I seem to be), the novel drumming up this much excitement in me is Rags & Bones, a new anthology edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt including a list of classic stories that have been revisioned and repackaged.

Let me pull out a line up for you:

Holly Black - Sheridan le Fanu wrote an early poem called Carmilla that is largely known for its lesbian vampire content. Oh, and it was originally written in the 19th century.

Neil Gaiman - After what Anne Rice did to the Sleeping Beauty fairytale in 1983-85, I can't wait to see what his magician of dark fantasy manages to put together.

Melissa Marr - I don't know much about Kate Chopin's The Awakening, which is what Melissa's own story in this anthology is based on, but I can't wait to find out!

Kelley Armstrong - W. W. Jacob's The Monkey's Paw sounds interesting.

Kami Garcia - I've read only a little from Kami before, but with the popularity that Once Upon a Time has shone on the character of Rumplestiltskin, I can't wait to see what this author has devised for us here.

Saladin Ahmed - This is an author I've heard absolutely nothing about before, but my love of Spenser's Faerie Queene won't allow me to let this revisioning go by unremarked.

There are 12 stories in the anthology in all. Well worth it for both favourite authors and for those you've never heard of before.If you're still unsure, io9 has published an excerpt from Tim Pratt's retelling of Henry James' The Jolly Corner:

The Cold Corner

by Tim Pratt

I left home five years ago, and haven’t been back since— so why do I still think of it as home at all?

After almost a week spent driving across the country on I‑40 East, I cut north on Highway 202, and within an hour reached the outskirts of my hometown, Cold Corners. The only corners are in the endless rectangular fields of soybeans and tobacco, and with triple-​digit heat and 90 percent humidity in summer, it’s hardly “cold,” so I don’t know where it got the name.  (read more)

Talking about YA fiction.

When I was young, the television shows I watched would be about saving the planet (Captain Planet, Widget the World Watcher) and young adult fiction was either about the finding a real life threat inside your video games (Space Demons, Skymaze), running off into some wonderful fantasy world where young women could be heroes with a sword too (Songs of the Lioness, The Blue Sword) or finding romance (The Vampire Diaries).

There's still a lot of interest in the latter, as evidenced by the television show The Vampire Diaries. You might even recognise this handsome man as the visual inspiration for one of my own characters. :)

There has also been the popularity of such series' as Cassie Clare's The Mortal Instruments, which I believe they are making into a series of movies due to come out later this year. I've also been a long time fan of Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series, which I've made no bones about loving and having almost a whole shelf dedicated to in my bedroom.



There's also the retold fairy tale genre which is really big at the moment, and includes novelists like Sarah Cross, Alex Flinn, Robin McKinley, Juliet Marillier, Francesca Lia Block and Malinda Lo.

However, there's another kind of genre within the young adult umbrella that has been pushing itself forward. We saw it in The Hunger Games novels (and movie). Marie Lu's novel Legend was another good example of it. Instead of the worries about the environment that categorised the 90s, the media aimed at young adults seems to hold a message that is: don't be so complacent that the government can rule you. Sort of a 1984 for kids, just like Space Demons might have been a good early read for people who would go on to love Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.


Two months ago, I read a book called Delirium by Lauren Oliver and read the follow up sequel Pandemonium this month. Lauren's main character, Lena, lives in a world where love has been labelled a disease for which a cure has been found. (For the full review, click here.) What I thought was amazing was how little the love angle would have mattered at all if not for the backing plot of the story. The same scenario was offered in The Hunger Games; Katniss simply couldn't spend any real number of pages simply falling in love with either of the guys. She was too busy fighting just to stay alive.

I love coming back again and again to the books in this genre. It feels as though there is so much more in YA to read today than there was 10 or even 15 years ago. Subjects like loneliness and alienation are still being tackled, but are now widening to include stories told about interracial and gay, lesbian or bisexual minorities. I read this really interesting interview by two of my favourite young adult writers recently that made me feel really proud to be reading this genre I love so much.

"Both Holly and Sarah are not shy about discussing the difficulties of promoting diversity in Young Adult literature. And they were willing to discuss their experiences in crafting their own works as a way of offering advice to other authors who are seeking to do the opposite of what has been the advice offered time after time to write what they know rather than what they may imagine." (read more)

This interview opens with questions like what advice they would give for writers who want to write outside of their own experiences with gender, race and sexual orientation and goes on through some interesting observations on the way race is depicted both on screen and by readers of these novels, including a quick look at Katniss' depiction in the recent movie The Hunger Games.

Melissa Marr and polyamory.

I just recently purchased one of the signed hard cover editions of Darkest Mercy, waiting patiently -and sometimes not so patiently- for it to be shipped over and arrive here in Australia. When it did arrive, I hugged the book to me for a while, and then commenced reading it. Had I not had work towards my English Honours to get done, it would not have been closed again before I finished it.


I was raving about this series online last night, but the re-tweet I just received that acted in reply to a separate question just about made my morning.

Me: @melissa_marr did polyamory!!! An author of YA fiction did polyamory without stuffing it up!! 
Melissa: Belated reply 2 "what r the boundaries in YA?" RT: @persephone20: "@melissa_marr did polyamory!!! An author of YA fiction did polyamory..."

Two things are amazing about this. One: an author that I think a lot of -and would love to study next year in regards to the re-emergence of faerie fiction, particularly in YA fiction- read my comment and replied to me, and Two: it feels like times, they may be a-changing.

That a YA author would not only just bring out a series of books where a polyamorous trio featured as part of a main section of plot, but would then announce that it is a boundary that can easily be crossed in YA seems like a fantastic step into the future for me.

For a while now, I have been looking with dissatisfaction at the common 'love triangle' trope that seems to appear again and again and again in both books and TV shows in the YA genre. Lately, that trope's been becoming a little bit more interesting in such TV shows as Glee where one side of the current love triangle is a girl who's in love with her best friend (another girl).

I guess for me, seeing polyamoury being written into a book like this, without fanfare or controversy, feels to me like I imagine it might have felt to others when the first gay/lesbian couples started appearing in novels as just another option on the kinds of romantic relationships that can be had between people. In Melissa's books, this touching relationship was shown as neither good, nor bad, but just as three people who happened to all love each other individually, having many of the same concerns within that trio as would be had between a couple.

In short: Go Melissa. I think you're doing a great job and I cannot wait to get my hands on the last of the manga books in your 'Desert Tales' series.

Polyamory in fiction, and other things.

I love Melissa Marr.

After at first being loaned the first book in the series by the friend of an ex-housemate of mine, I have since sought out that book, the rest of the series, including the eBook editions that have been promoted on her livejournal and graphic novels that she's released in the same world.

But the reason I make this post is because of a conversation I was having with yesterday (one of many, so many, conversations) about how the gay element is getting represented more and more often in teen shows. We had it in Buffy, which was the first time I really noticed it but that reveals my age more than anything else. There's been Skins; at the moment there is Glee, and we were talking about an interview where they'd posited introducing it in The Vampire Diaries (which I think could be amazingly interesting, if only because it's something that wasn't acknowledged in the books). 

At this, I believe my retort was that it would be nice to see polyamorous... arrangements represented, then lightly tagged that it would probably be another couple of decades until we got to the point with polyamory in the media that we are currently at with gay representation. At which the fast becoming stock-standard of polyamory, Big Love, was paraded, and I grouched about that, then went to bed.

Heading gradually back around to the first line of this post: I love Melissa Marr. On the eBooks that I have collected from her is the mini series 'Stopping Time' that follow on from her full length novel Ink Exchange. Now this is a great little bit just because it shows the love felt for one character by two different characters, without the need to make it into a love triangle where one gets the girl and the other.. well, doesn't. And as I'm reading this morning's review of the conclusion to Marr's series -linked by Melissa herself- I find myself getting a little excited. 

Certain... "er... arrangements" are said to be satisfied in this book. Pairings and... "er... arrangements", and this gives me hope, not the least for a new variation in an old staple of young adult books. But also for having a chance to see my lifestyle represented in the fiction I choose to read. 

 And while there's a part of me that can't help but think I've horribly re-contextualised Marr's meaning in the writing of this .... arrangement, for myself I choose live in hope!