I’ve been thinking about e-books, and what’s going to happen if Amazon takes over the world and the vast majority of publishing moves to digital formats.

Traditional print books are great at filtering customers based on their demand and their resources. When a new book comes out, some people are going to buy the hardcover new, some people are going to wait for the paperback, some people are going to wait to find it in a used bookstore, some people are going to get it from the library, some people are going to borrow it from a friend, some people are going to find it in a box on the sidewalk ten years after it originally came out. And the person who finds it in a box on the sidewalk might be someone who never had the money to buy it when it was in hardcover — or it might be someone who didn’t hear about it, or wasn’t sufficiently enthused about it, the first time around. And this is a model that WORKS. A person who’s willing to pay $26 or $27 can have a new book in their hand the day it comes out. A person who’s willing to pay 50 cents, or 25 cents, or nothing at all — which may be either “Meh, the book doesn’t look THAT good” or “I don’t have the money, PERIOD” — can still find books at the library, at GoodWill, from their friends.

I’m the kind of person ebooks work really well for. I buy very conservatively — I buy based on friends’ recommendations and starred reviews, and I rarely buy a book unless I have a very good hunch I’m going to like it. I’m rarely wrong. So I typically buy few books — one or two a month — and buy them new because if I really want a book I don’t want to go chasing it around at a used bookstore; and if I’m buying a book at all, it’s probably at least in part because I want to toss a dollar the author’s way.

My friend B, on the other hand, buys a ton of books, shops heavily at used bookstores, and is a lot more willing to buy something on a whim than I am. If you give us both $25 for books, I’ll buy one or two that I’m certain I want; she’ll buy seven or eight that look kind of nifty. Her reading is adventurous in a way that mine isn’t, and she’s the one who’ll recommend me something off-the-wall-brilliant. She wouldn’t be well-served by e-books, and that’s not just because they don’t get cheap enough for her (except for self-published books and out-of-copyright books). The different web sites’ interfaces for ebooks are, as far as I’ve seen, terrible unless you want one of the hundred most popular books of the moment, or you know exactly what book you’re looking for. Last year I was traveling, and looking for an ebook I could put on my iPod, and I skimmed through the Kindle store going “Boring…boring…boring.” (I’m a very picky reader).

I’m the person the publishing industry is more likely to take seriously, because I buy books the month or year that they come out, because I’m aware of publishing news and spend a lot of time in bookstores, because I’m happy to buy a hardcover rather than wait for the paperback. (This isn’t because I have a ton of money, but to me it’s a justifiable occasional frivolty, like a restaurant meal or a couple of movie tickets). But I do think that the book industry is going to be in trouble if books get marketed and sold in a way that shuts out other ways of buying books, and I think that people who can only buy books if they can get them at GoodWill for 50 cents are going to get shut out too.

At one level I would love for ebooks to succeed. I’m absolutely unsentimental about paper, and considering how often I’ve moved in the past few years I feel that the best book formats are the ones that don’t weigh anything. But if the ebook revolution is going to leave behind people who can’t afford to buy new books, people who rely on serendipity and chance to discover new books, and anyone who doesn’t fit the industry’s model of what a good book buyer looks like… it’s not my revolution.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend and Will Grayson, Will Grayson reviewed in the New York Times!

Read This Book! has interviewed me, and is having a giveaway.

Literary Life interviewed me as well.

1. A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is now officially out in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand! I had a wonderful release party on Thursday and I hope to tell you all about it when I get the pictures. But today is not that day.

2. On Sunday I had two computers, an iMac and an itty bitty netbook. By Wednesday morning I had zero computers. Karen Healey says I should tell more embarrassing stories, but I think this is “cringe embarrassing” rather than “funny embarrassing.” Nevertheless I will tell the story to strike fear into the heart of everyone who doesn’t have up-to-date backups. (Do you have up-to-date backups?)

Early Tuesday morning I woke up to my iMac’s hard drive whirling around and around uselessly. This was a Bad Sign. Furthermore, I checked my backups on my netbook. The most recent one was over a month old.

(By the way, cats and kittens: there is a very important lesson here. As my sister’s animation teacher used to say, if it doesn’t exist in three different places, it doesn’t exist at all. A hard drive can fail suddenly and with very little warning… I’m not sure if I just didn’t hear its death rattle over the sound of my air conditioner or what).

After some little attempts to make things better, I brought it in to a technician, who said that the computer was an ex-computer and there was nothing to be done but to try data recovery at a rather expensive price. But there was no way I was going to rewrite 15,000 words from scratch if there was anything I could do to avert it.

So, my Mac is in the shop, and I was down to my netbook. Which is running Linux, and has a few little quirks. That night I thought, “Well, if this is going to be my only computer, let me see if I can fix those little quirks.” This involved downloading the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. I’ve done it before. It’s not so complicated. But… something went wrong. The next morning it wouldn’t boot up again. And I didn’t have a recovery disk. Oops.

(Here’s another lesson: have a recovery disk.)

There was only one thing I could do. Schlep over to my sister’s house, watch home renovation shows on her cable, and download a new recovery disk.

It took several hours, and more than a few frustrations, but I now, at last, have Ubuntu running on my computer. And hopefully I will be able to get back to writing… and hopefully I won’t have to rewrite those 15,000 words just yet.

It’s been a wild, wild week. It can get less wild any time now.

1. WisCon
This weekend I’ll be at WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m hosting the Fiber Circle as part of the Gathering on Friday afternoon (1:00-3:45) — come say hi, and if you knit, crochet, embroider, macrame, spin, et cetera, this is the place for it!

Aside from that, I have three panels:

Teamwork: How Anime and Manga Fill a Feminist Void in SF/F (Saturday, 10:30-11:45)

Feminism is more than just a belief that women and men should be treated equally. At its core, it requests a change in power dynamics that allows all people to be equal. American SF/F frequently rewards solitary heroines and heroes, or portrays partners who happen to work side–by–side. In anime and manga, characters are constantly participating in cooperative training, teaching, and learning from one another. Are those characters more feminist?

What is Feminist Romance? (Sunday, 8:30-9:45)

Romances in short stories and novels often follow traditional patriarchal rules, even when feminist individuals are writing. What does a feminist romantic storyline look like? Do we see these or are they rare? How can writers who consider themselves feminist avoid falling back on the old standbys?

The Works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli (Sunday, 2:30-3:45)

Romances in short stories and novels often follow traditional patriarchal rules, even when feminist individuals are writing. What does a feminist romantic storyline look like? Do we see these or are they rare? How can writers who consider themselves feminist avoid falling back on the old standbys?

Word on the street is that in the dealer’s room, A Room of One’s Own is going to have some early copies of A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend. If you’d like me to sign a book, or if you’d like a signed bookmark, feel free to hit me up after any of my panels — I won’t be at the official signout.

2. Teen Author Reading Night at NYPL

Wednesday, June 2 at 6:00, at the Jefferson Market Branch of New York Public Library (at 10th street and 6th avenue)

Featured authors:

Cathleen Davitt Bell, Little Blog on the Prairie
Lila Castle, Star Shack
Susane Colasanti, Something Like Fate
Donna Freitas, This Gorgeous Game
Emily Horner, A Love Story Starring My Best Friend
Eliot Schrefer, The Deadly Sister

3. Release Party — A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

Brooklyn Public Library — Central Library, 6:30, in the youth program wing upstairs.
At Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn — take the 2/3 train to Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum

There will be food and prizes! There will be ninja rubber duckies! We won’t have books to sell, but we will have books to give away as prizes, hopefully we’ll have books to lend out if you have your Brooklyn Public Library card, and of course if you pick up a book somewhere else I’m happy to sign it.

Hope to see you there!

…Is that where the zombie trend comes from?

I came back from Japan and right afterwards I had to start looking for a new apartment and then I had to move, and it’s been a hectic couple of weeks and I’ve just put “breathing” back on my schedule and I still have no idea where I put my whisk.

But anyway, I was reading an article in Salon about a new book that’s all about how the internet eats your brains, and it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately.

I love to read, obviously. I love to read fiction. But there have also been long stretches of time in my life when the urge to go clicky clicky clicky on Facebook or Livejournal or whatever was stronger than the urge to read a book. This is why I love the subway, by the way, and I’m going to hold out on getting a smartphone for as long as I can: it’s just too dangerous to be able to go clicky clicky clicky everywhere.

The flip side of this is, so often people in positions of power and authority have denigrated other people’s reading choices by saying “you’re reading the wrong thing.” Teachers and librarians have said it’s not real reading to read comic books or sports magazines or gossip magazines. Obviously it is real reading! And reading your Facebook page is real reading, and reading your Twitter feed is real reading, and intermixed with the clicky clicky clicky I read some intense and thoughtful essays. But I still feel like it’s something special to be able to sit down with a book for an hour or two and be swallowed up by it, and concentrate on just one thing.

And this is like ten times as true if you’re a writer. Every time I sit down to work at that seductive blinky box, it beeps at me that I have new e-mail, and then it occurs to me to check if there’s something interesting in my RSS feed, and then I come up for air and it’s an hour later and I haven’t…actually done any work.

For some writers, it works to turn off the internet while they’re writing. And this is a great idea, albeit one that doesn’t quite work for me. The thing is: it’s not about the internet. It’s not about Facebook, it’s not about Twitter. It’s about attention, and energy.

If I can quote a song I love by Bruce Cockburn, “Get Up Jonah”:

I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers
It didn’t take long, I don’t know much about Turkish drummers,
But it made me think of Germany and the guy who’d been in the Afghan secret police,
Who made the observation that it’s hard to live.

And I was reminded of the proprietor of a Vietnamese restaurant in Quebec who used to be head of the secret police in Da Nang,
And it occurred to me that I was thinking all this stuff to keep from thinking about something else.
Isn’t that just what secret police are all about, now?

I’m not really that entranced by whatever comes up on Facebook. It’s just the most convenient thing that’s easier than thinking about what I actually should be doing. It’s the most convenient thing that’s easier than confronting what I’m feeling about what I actually should be doing. If you’re scared about sitting down to work, then you can turn off all the distractions, and you can yell at yourself all you want, but you’re still going to be scared — and you’re still not going to be able to concentrate.

So I’m trying to spend less time yelling at myself about spending less time poking around on the internet, and more time relaxing. And I’m writing more because of it. Really! It turns out that when my brain is going “AUGH! AUGH! I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO! WHY DID I SPEND SO MUCH TIME READING ABOUT THAT FLAMEWAR?” I’m not able to sit down and write. And when I stop yelling at myself, and let it go… I actually can write. Weird, huh?

It’s just worth keeping in mind that the internet isn’t the only thing that wants to eat your brains.

Also zombies. You have to stay alert for zombies.

Contest winners are Snazel, Ru, and Becca H. Congratulations to the winners!

In 10 days I will leave for what will surely be a fabulous, frenetic, and above all else jet-lagged week in Tokyo.

And I am holding a contest to celebrate!

I am giving out THREE ARCs of A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, and each winner will also get a nifty thing from Japan. Will it be something from the Ghibli museum? Something from the youth culture mecca or Harajuku or the geek culture mecca of Akihabara? Traditional Japanese handicrafts? I don’t know! If you have a preference, please say so when you enter the contest, but I won’t guarantee anything beyond it being something I personally find cool, and wouldn’t necessarily be able to get in the US.

You get one entry by commenting to this post, plus one for each of these things you do:
-Blog about this contest
-Tweet about this contest, reply me @takumashii
-Change your Twitter avatar to this crop from the cover of Love Story:

Leave a comment, tote up your points, and tell me what you would do in Japan!
(I’m… actually going to have to miss the ninja museum, because my schedule is frenetic enough as it is and I suspect I’m going to fall over at some point and sleep for 18 hours. I know! It is tragic!)

Contest ends 12:00 midnight Friday April 9th, and I’ll announce a winner Saturday!

I’ll be back from Japan on April 20th and will send out prizes as soon as I can after that.

The contest is now closed, and I will be drawing the winners now!

There is a really good discussion going on at Justine Larbalestier’s blog about whether you can get away with writing badly if you are writing for teenagers. Are you astonished that my answer is no?

I read and loved a lot of really bad books as a kid. But I still have my readers-response journal from when I was in 10th grade and reading Herman Hesse’s book “Siddhartha,” and I wrote down the sentences that moved me and astonished me because they were beautiful. I remember being moved by beautiful language when I was a lot younger — and think of how toddlers respond to the rhyme and rhythm of nursery rhymes. Why shouldn’t they be able to respond to good writing?

Just as a matter of principle, I think that you owe it to yourself and your readers to bring your best work to the table every day, no matter who you’re writing for.

One of the things that came up in the discussion is this idea that fluffy books are like cupcakes, or whatever junk food you might be craving right know. There’s nothing wrong with eating a cupcake occasionally as long as it’s not the main part of your diet, and it’s okay to read a fluffy book occasionally as long as the rest of the time you’re reading, I don’t know, Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville?

I’m not super fond of this kind of classification. It permits fluffy books but can’t resist consigning them to that tip of the food pyramid that really you should avoid as much as possible. But then, I am not wild about the panic about Bad Food, either! I think that we’re in danger of making a chore and a virtue out of eating fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and a dangerous forbidden temptation out of eating cupcakes, and that’s not how I want to live my life. Likewise, it’s way too easy to make reading Important Books seem like a chore. A lot of the time, the reason that they’re Important Books in the first place is that they’re REALLY good. Emma? Hilarious. Mark Twain? Hilarious. Chaucer? Hilarious. (Although Chaucer requires a translation, or footnotes, just like broccoli requires a good cheese sauce on top.) More than any specific nutrient or eating plan, what a body needs is variety, and I think that’s true with books too.

I love Japanese food. I haven’t been eating much of it lately since experimenting with vegetarianism (Japan has a very rich tradition of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine, but it’s hard to find and very expensive in restaurants). And then one day a few weeks ago, I ate a bowl of miso soup, and in that one moment it was the best food on the planet.* That’s how I feel when I read a really good book that’s outside the genres I usually read, a really good book that doesn’t fit the template of what I expect.

So, I’m not comfortable with saying, this is good, this is bad. Or even, this is good but only in moderation. I think it’s more important to go along tasting a lot of things and then you find the thing that’s exactly right and wolf it down, and if you wolf it down then — it was the right thing for you at that time, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else says it’s fluff.

*Yes, miso soup is often made with fish broth, so not vegetarian. I’m not strict enough to be a real vegetarian and I’m okay with that.

So! I’ve been at the NYC teen authors festival, and there are so many fantastic people there that you should definitely run and check out the next events — unfortunately I’ll be working Saturday, and I have nothing to sign for the signing on Sunday but I may get out there anyway.

Today there were a number of panels at NYPL, and I was on the debut author panel with Ebony Wilkins, Angie Frazier, and Alyssa Sheinmel. I will for sure be looking forward to their books.

Just before the panel, I leaned over to my sister and whispered, “I think David Levithan is wearing my shoes!”

You see, I have extremely large feet. I generally wear a women’s 12. But there are a lot of manufacturers whose 12s don’t fit me, especially manufacturers who make formalish shoes rather than sneakers. So when I got out of college and stopped wearing New Balance sneakers every day, I mostly switched over to men’s hiking shoes. And when I have a more formal occasion to go to but don’t want to wear my Girl Shoes, I wear my Fluevogs. (Yes, I know Fluevog makes women’s shoes up to size 12. Their twelves are too small for me too. I am so sad.)

And David Levithan was wearing the same shoes (but in black, otherwise it would have been awkward).

For a huge-footed girl, this feels kind of like a fashion triumph.

Greer Gilman, the author of Moonwise and Cloud and Ashes, has a great post up about style and “transparent” writing.

When I was still just starting out as a writer, I definitely was writing above all else for Story — not necessarily for plot, for I wasn’t great at plot, but for thrilling dramatic moments, for emotional highs and lows. I loved some beautifully-written books, but they seemed like something that I somehow couldn’t emulate, like my friends who dressed dramatically while I wore solid-colored shirts with jeans nearly every day. Maybe I didn’t know how, maybe it just seemed like it wasn’t for me, but in writing I just wanted to be smooth and efficient, getting to the Good Bits without too much unnecessary fuss.

It took a lot longer for me to realize that the words are not the ribbon on the package — the words are the whole package. Samuel Delany, especially, was instrumental in getting me to see that style is not optional. And even if you aspire to write the kind of stories that foreground plot, and Dramatic Emotional Moments, getting any impact from those Dramatic Emotional Moments depends utterly on how words control pacing and rhythm, how words convey tone, how … there may be characters and landscapes in the back of your mind, playing out scenes; but all that you can give to a reader, to reconstruct those characters and those landscapes, is words.

I’m still not a flashy writer by any means. I’m not Greer Gilman or Samuel Delany. But I think I have a better appreciation now for how getting the words right is a crucial part of getting the story right.