Peeking into the rock

There's been a nice healthy conversation going on lately about how editors can recruit marginalized writers to submit to their magazines, websites, and anthologies. Tonight I hit head-on to a barrier that I don't believe has been discussed lately: the actual language of the submission guidelines. I seriously had to guess and google several terms, including one that simply didn't appear anywhere until I input the whole phrase it was in. Well. The string of letters showed up, but in every result they pointed to cell phone technology, and I was pretty sure that wasn't the thing at issue.

I'm an old-timer, which means I know a lot of jargon but also that a lot of jargon sprung up while I wasn't looking. I'm also a lot more bullheaded than I was when I was younger--I might have given up after the second paragraph, even though there were sentences meant to reassure the potential submitter that they didn't have to be a particular type of person. But. It was quite clear that when the guidelines were written, the editors had simply assumed that anybody who fit their desired demographic and was interested in these issues just would know these words. They hadn't questioned themselves at all on what being inclusive means, in the larger sense.

Imagine this: you're a young person and your pockets are burning up with that great new passionate story you've written that seems like it maybe fits that anthology you stumbled on. And there's a whole pile of stuff in the guidelines you think you can guess at the meaning of, but you're not sure, and oh well crap, they probably only want somebody who can use those words correctly anyhow. What next? What fantastic new writer will not be submitting to that anthology?

Don't assume that everyone who wants to submit to your publication is a Tumblr or facebook activist or has had queer theory classes in a high-tone liberal arts college. By this I mean, don't use buckets of jargon and words which mean one thing in context and another thing in general language without defining them for the newcomer. Assume that you might be interested in very young or very old working-class writers who might even be new to the internet, let alone your specialized vocabulary. Welcome them by giving them a bridge. Define those terms in a casual, friendly, accessible way.

I definitely do not mean "don't use the vocabulary your cohort has been carefully developing to make it easier to talk with precision about things that matter to you. I mean do enrich your prose with embedded definitions so you don't make people do crazy google search term gymnastics just to know what the hell you're talking about.

I read The Alchemist's Door by Lisa Goldstein last night. It's not terribly new- twelve years old -- but it's new to me. It showed up when I was searching books about Prague in the library and I said, sure, why not read someone else's Prague-inspired fantasy?

It has a decidedly weird relationship to history. On purpose. It's not a book where you can say "She got it wrong" (except for a little movie geography, which I'll nitpick in a bit: but it's not important) because what she's done is completely sideways on purpose. I will say this: she hasn't violated the space-time continuum with the characters' movements around Europe.

The premise is this: "What if John Dee was totally sincere and of course there's real magic, and he teamed up with Rabbi Loew to fight against Edward Kelley, and also King Rudolf and Elizabeth Bathory and also demons?" The sticking point is "John Dee as a sympathetic hero," but as stuff you have to grant an author to get along with the story, that's not too bad.

Some things I liked: the everyday life parts, the constant worry about money, the personalities of some of the characters. When I set aside the fact that the protagonist was John Dee and forgot about his historical ickiness, I liked him a lot. I liked his wife. I liked Izak the bastard. I was usually annoyed with Rabbi Loew, but I think that was about right. I liked that his status as an oppressed Jew didn't make him into a saint. I like that the fact that he had a bit of magic and was an oppressed minority didn't make him into a Magical One-Dimensional Prop Character. I adored the character of Magdelena, the street-dwelling apparent old lady who wants to learn magic. I liked that when she wrote John Dee as sympathetic and also a product of his times, she didn't feel she had to defend his prejudices. I've always said that if your protagonist has bad ideas or ideology and the reader feels as if the writer is promoting them, it is a failure of craft. So no failure of craft on that front here. No preachy-preachy either. Just clarity.

I am of two minds about the setting. Maybe I'm prejudiced because of my own romantic attachment to Prague. Maybe I'm territorial. I hope not. The movie geography wasn't usually actually important. Though I was thrown right out when there's an emphatic two paragraphs describing the very impressively long walk from Stare Mesto to Faustuv Dum (Faust House, where Kelley was living). I've done that walk, and it's like six blocks. Maybe eight, if you go the long way round. Maybe when Goldstein went there she was tired, or maybe she got lost on the way. It's easy to get temporarily lost in the center of Prague, though if you are patient you will get unlost eventually.

Another set of tiny details that threw me out of the story -- again, this is not really fair because it's a little thing -- was the description of how the spoken languages sounded to John Dee. They didn't read right. They read like descriptions of what the written language looks like, not what the spoken languages sound like. The thing about Czech not having any vowels -- it doesn't sound like that when spoken. The vowels are quite prominent and fluid, the consonant clusters don't stomp all over them at all. And Hungarian dolesn't sound hissy and sibilant, either. It looks sibilant, but it doesn't sound like that.

People call time to tell John Dee stuff about history and geography a lot. Of course they do that in real life. But it reads a little clunky. I actually think it would be a non-problem altogether if it were cut by only a little bit.

I was hoping for a different resolution to the golem part of the story (what, you thought that there could possibly be a story about Rabbi Loew that did not include the golem?), that would involve greater emotional and moral growth for Rabbi Loew, but the resolution here doesn't violate the source material (by the way, I just did a quick check on the dates for these guys, and as I thought, she has them right).

So anyway, if you like alchemist stories and stories with demons and Mad King Rudolf and the Golem, you might enjoy this. I'm going to look for other books by Lisa Goldstein, though I might hope they are set somewhere else so I don't get sidetracked with nitpicks.

1. Martin Cruz-Smith told Diane Rehm on her NPR show that his Russian detective character in Gorky Park and other books is an anti-hero of course, because Russian. Right. Only Americans can be heroes.

2. The New York Times regional dialect quiz, based on various research projects, placed me in succession as most likely from "Fresno, Stockton, or Anchorage:" then "Fresno, Stockton, or Modesto:" and finally "Fresno, Oakland, or San Francisco." Then I was satisfied and stopped. The characteristic question? Not having heard of a word for a drive-through liquor store. The other characteristic questions were what you call a road that parallels a highway (a frontage road), and what you call a flying insect that glows (don't have my own word for it, since I've never seen one in real life: I use whatever the person uses who I'm reading or listening to).
Notice that only one question was for a word I use. The rest is for stuff that I don't. Also, the "heat map" showed me most similar to . . . most of the country. And least similar only to Minnesota and Louisiana. But the heat maps for individual words seemed to me to mostly show the Southeat and the Midwest as "most similar." Though I thought California usages largely came from whatever you call the southern midwest, at least in the neighborhood I spent the largest time in as a kid. Which was neither Fresno, nor Modesto (neither of which I even saw till I was an adult), nor Stockton (where I visited when I was too young to go outside by myself). And definitely not Anchorage.

Apparently my three years in Philadelphia have left no marks on my speech that this test could uncover.

3. I've had K living with us for almost two months. He's a friend of the kids initially, and came to me because I invited him a long time ago when he went to Bakersfield to live with his mother. Now his mother has died and he's trying to get back into the work force. It's a terrible time to do that, but he has a couple of extremely classy nibbles and he's otherwise working very hard at this jobhunting gig, and also doing some freelance editing. And doing tall-person odd jobs around the house. He's a sweet guy. All my friends want to introduce him to their daughters. But while Truffle loves him and wiggles at him and cuddles right up to him she doesn't want him to take her for walks. She wants nobody but me to take her for walks. I suspect this is because her eyes are getting a bit cloudy and she just feels more vulnerable when the person she's with is not her main one. But I don't know.

I can't remember what I've been reading lately -- mostly old Russian things on Gutenberg.

My brother-in-law, who has made his living in the past because of a fluency in Russian, somehow doesn't know the word "tvorog" (actually I don't know how to spell the Russian version in Latin letters, the Czech version is "tvaroh." Google informs me that the English word for it is "quark." Also that the Cyrillic is творог. My impression is that it is a pretty common food all over the place in Central and Eastern Europe. But he didn't know what I was talking about.