The Business of Writing
Remember Friday Night Frights? My cousins and I would stay up late sprawled out on the living room pune’e and watch all the B (and C and D) horror and Samurai movies, blankets and pillows over our heads most of the time. I think those classic 5-4-4 your pants monsters are to blame for all the emo wimpy YA/MG fantasy books on the market today. We’re all trying to convince ourselves that the things that left us sleeping with the lights on are no big deal. Jolly Fish Press graciously asked me to guest blog on this topic. The following is a repost.
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It’s all Dracula’s fault.
I bet I wasn’t the only kid who read Bram Stoker’s Dracula or saw one of the million film adaptations in a gloomy movie theater and then went home to sleep with the covers tucked tightly around my neck. Sweat poured down my face in the tropical heat, but there was no way I’d chance a vampire bite by sleeping with my neck exposed or a window open.
Fast forward a few decades and you’d discover that some of us who’d snarfed garlicky snacks before bed and slept with crucifixes under our pillows grew up to be authors, the kind of storytellers who reimagined and repackaged our make-sure-the-closet-door-is-closed and check-under-the-bed childhood fears into books and movies that fuel a thriving multi-million dollar Young Adult and Middle Grade fantasy market. Vampires, shape-shifters, ghosts, witches, zombies—pick one and you’ll find it on the current bestsellers’ list—are all deeply rooted in our cultural subconscious because of folklore.
The reasons folklore themes are so popular with YA/MG readers are obvious. One of the main purposes of folklore is to transmit cultural values and morals, directly speaking to a maturing adolescent’s desire to understand himself and the society around him. Our truest folktales wend their themes of good versus evil through all cultures, eventually becoming familiar archetypes that caution, entertain, teach, and ignite the imagination. It’s not surprising that the same kinds of stories that enthralled adolescents 500 years ago still enchant authors and readers today—in a modern upside-down-through- the-cracked-looking-glass kind of way.
Traditionally, folklore, myths, legends, and fairytales aren’t concerned with understanding the bad guy. Things go bump, bite, and burp in the night simply because they can. Virtuous characters survive by embodying the traits that a culture most reveres while villains are hoist with their own petards. The moral lessons these stories impart are simple; good engenders good, bad gets what it deserves.
My, how times—and cultures—have changed.
It’s no longer acceptable to simply fear and defeat the monster in the closet; we insist our heroes unlock the door, invite him in, and serve him a sugar-free organic macrobiotic snack. We want to understand him, save him, and show the world that it was all a misunderstanding. Popular modern vampire characters like Edward Cullen, Angel, Stefan Salvatore, and Eric Northman differ from the folkloric vampire in ways that make them less pee your pants terrifying and more like the odd vegan neighbor down the street who doesn’t like cats and wears sunglasses at night. For YA and MG readers, that’s key. Adolescents easily identify with the outsider; modern stories that take an archetypical irredeemable monster and turn him into a big misunderstood galoot are especially appealing because if the heroine can overlook the fact that the love of her life sees her wedding bouquet as garnish, there’s a good chance that the cute girl on the bus will overlook a slight overbite. Or propensity to snort instead of laugh. Or a closeted obsession with anime cos-play. The possibilities are as endless as the hope it propagates.
Which brings me full circle: if many of today’s YA/MG authors are reimagining the folklore monsters that made us sleep with the lights on and covers over our heads in ways that allow the protagonist to vanquish evil social prejudices and cuddle up with the claws, I wonder what kinds of stories we’ll be reading in twenty years or so when the kids who grew up leaving the windows and closet doors open and eating garlic-free midnight snacks get around to activating their voice recognition storyware and reimagining things that go bump, snuggle, and kiss in the night. Will they look back and say it’s all Edward’s fault?
Jolly Fish Press to Swim with Sharks Fall 2012
PROVO, UT—Jolly Fish Press (JFP) has successfully acquired the North American distribution and publication rights to Lehua Parker’s debut children’s book, One Boy, No Water.
One Boy, No Water, the first of five books in the Niuhi Shark Adventure Series, is a fantasy based on an island folklore centered on the Niuhi shark people in Hawaii— imagine water people, angry teenagers, confused parents, a looming mystery, and man- eating sharks! The book is scheduled for a Fall 2012 release.
Originally from Hawaii and a graduate of The Kamehameha Schools, Parker—also known as “Aunty Lehua”—has always been an advocate of Hawaiian culture and literature. Her writings often feature her island heritage and the unique Hawaiian pidgin.
The Niuhi Shark Adventure Series will be JFP’s first middle grade series to be released in the Fall of 2012.
I’ve been working off and on a middle grade children’s series set in Hawaii for several years. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy writing it—I did—and it wasn’t that I kept running out of ideas—if anything, I had too many. The problem was a much bigger question.
What was I going to do with it when it was done?
There are as many reasons to write as there are writers, some of them noble and pure of purpose and others more, ahem, monetary in nature. The “what to do with it” question was compounded by the fact that my kolohe characters kept insisting on talking in pidgin. Hawaiian Pidgin English, as in Not Standard English which is what most middle grade kids are learning to read in America. No publisher in his right mind would want to tackle a problem like this and the dearth of Hawaiian writers on the national stage publishing works with pidgin seemed to back up this theory, Lois Ann Yamanka and Graham Salisbury being the few exceptions that prove the rule.
So the series lurked in the background of my mind and computer, rising to the surface when no other productive use of my time could be found to avoid housework. What can I say? Laundry has to get done and dishes washed, but like death and taxes I try to avoid them as long as possible. “Working on the series” sounded like a great excuse to me.
A couple of months ago, bored and looking for “a project,” I attended a workshop on the emerging field of self-publishing. Books and publishing—the act of getting the stories into the hands and minds of readers—are undergoing a revolution not seen since Gutenburg showed off his fancy new press. Ebook readers and new distribution channels have created unparalleled opportunities for authors to reach highly targeted audiences and to achieve that basest reason of all for writing: a paycheck.
I would have shouted eureka, but that would have been a little cliché.
Now that I knew what I was going to do with it, I set about writing again and putting all of the building blocks in place to self-publish. Author website and store, check. Blog, check. Fan Facebook page, check. Research best practices, check. Someone to do cover art, check.
And then a little voice said, “Why are you doing all of this?”
“’Cause I have to do something with all these words and stories,” I replied. “No one else will.”
“How do you know?” the voice chided. “Did you ever give anyone the chance to say yes?”
Huh. All of this work was based on the assumption that no mainland publisher would be interested in a middle grade series with pidgin dialogue.
And I was wrong.
Through a series of events that no one would believe if I told them, I got the series in front of a real live traditional mainland book publisher who is seriously considering the books for publication on the national level in a five book, five year deal that doesn’t seem real. The details are still being worked out and nothing is final until the ink is dried on the contract, but wow lau-lau, apparently there is a Santa Claus, Virginia, and for Lehua, a mainland publisher who thinks there’s a market for middle grade fiction with pidgin dialogue.
Here’s to the new year!
One of the big stumbling blocks to writing Hawaiian fiction in the “bird,” as I recently heard someone call Pidgin, is finding the audience. Native Hawaiian Pidgin English speakers like to talk story and certainly sing story; read story maybe not so much. At least that’s the argument Hawaiian writers have heard for decades, along with it’s too low-brow, too stylized, and since Pidgin spelling isn’t officially standardized, just too much work for the reader, who, the naysayers claim, would rather be surfing or talking story or doing the laundry–anything–instead of reading or buying books.
Having spent a lot of time over many years trying to find other authors publishing in Pidgin and finding something resembling a desert atoll, I think it’s less about whether or not Pidgin speakers are book readers, but about traditional publishing models. The Hawaiian writers are there with the stories, and I think the readers are too, but not on the scale that attracts the big print boys. What Pidgin literature exists is generally sanitized and stripped of most of the rhythm and flow of Pidgin and really just tosses in a phrase or two for flavor–trying to hit the largest audience possible and unfortunately missing the heart of Hawaii.
Traditional publishing models believe there is no significant market for this kind of literature and therefore have found it too risky to promote. But eBooks are changing the way books are published and marketed. Niche markets take time to develop, and eBooks have virtually no expiration date–literally. EBooks allow authors to build audiences and demand over time without the immediate need for high returns to pay back the large investments traditional publishers make upfront in printing and promoting a book.
So maybe with eBooks, we’ll all read a little more da kine. Nice, yeah?
Originally from Hawaii and a Kamehameha Schools graduate, Lehua writes fiction set in the imaginary town of Lauele, Oahu. Her newest book, One Boy, No Water, Book 1 of The Niuhi Shark Saga, is scheduled for hardback and eBook publication on Sept. 22, 2012 by Jolly Fish Press.
The Niuhi Shark Saga books are written in American English with lots of dialogue in Hawaiian Pidgin. Hawaiian Pidgin, or just Pidgin as it is called in Hawaii, is a polyglot language with its roots in Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, English, and Filipino. Hawaiian Pidgin developed as people from all over the world came to Hawaii in the 1800s looking for a better life. Over time, Pidgin has evolved into a heavily English-based language while retaining its original syntax, grammar, and lilt. While almost everyone in Hawaii today speaks, reads, and writes standard American English, true communication, the kind that speaks from the heart is in Pidgin.
This blog is dedicated to all Pidgin speakers and the stories we tell.
The Niuhi Shark Website.
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growing up in Hawaii
isn’t always paradise.
even out of the water,
you’re not safe.
about Zader is a lie.
