Michael Grant's Blog

I don't want to shock my fans who are reading this, but I am good at some things and not as good at others. You want experimental, challenging prose? Not gettin' it from me. You want lyrical descriptions? Not here. Metaphors? I'm not entirely sure what those are.

But I can write the hell out of an action scene. So, for those interested, here are my rules. Or suggestions. Anyway, here's what works for me:

1) Live With The Setting.
By this I mean that you should not design a setting for the sole purpose of placing an action scene there. You must not design the set to fit the action by placing convenient objects in unrealistic ways solely to create a cool scene.

This rule is seldom obeyed in action-heavy movies where cars are constantly finding conveniently-placed ramps. Or where people leap out of windows and hey, guess what, there's a dumpster full of cardboard perfectly-positioned to let you land safely. The real world is not filled with perfectly-placed cables, ropes, ramps, landing pads, doors that can be blocked with beams handily placed nearby. Basically the world is not stocked with props.

Start with a realistic setting. Then, within that realistic setting, you carry out your action scene. The frame is not the enemy of the painting, the frame defines the painting's location in space.

2) Take Your Time
Even if you hate writing action scenes, take your time with it. If you're in a hurry to get done, the reader will sense your indifference. If you don't care enough to make the scene work, if you're in a hurry to move on to writing exposition or dialog, the reader will not take the scene seriously.

Action is choreography. Each move must make sense. Walk through it second-by-second, ensuring that C follows B follows A.

3) No Convenient Discoveries
Oh my God, crocodiles? What am I going to do? Oh, wait, now I remember: ejectum crocodilus! the convenient crocodile-killing spell!

Don't do that. It's a betrayal of the reader. It's the writer treating the reader like a fool.

4) Pain is. . . Painful.
You know how heroes can take a ten minute beat-down and all they have to show for it is a dribble of blood and a stiff shoulder? In real life a punch to the face from a dude who knows how to punch can break your teeth, smash your nose and give you a concussion. A serious beating puts you in the hospital for a week, eating through a tube.

I am a firm believer that violence without consequences is comedy, not action. You can drop an anvil on Bugs Bunny. If you drop one on a human you've either committed murder or you've severely crippled someone. If you want the reader to feel the violence then your characters have to feel it.

5) Signal Seriousness.
Right at the start of BZRK I introduce a character the reader will assume to be the hero. Then I killed him. That's a message to the reader: don't think I won't do it, because I just did.

You don't always have to kill someone in Chapter One, obviously, or kill anyone at all, but you want to push the limits of the story, you want to signal that you will not make things comfortable. You don't want to be predictable. Predictable is safe, and safe is the opposite of 'in danger.' If you're writing action you want the reader to feel the danger, and you don't want them to trust you not to do anything upsetting.

You want the reader to feel fear. You can't make her fear if she thinks you won't actually pull the trigger. I am sometimes accused (by parents, generally) of 'going too far;' I am never accused of writing a shitty action scene. If the reader knows you may 'go too far' they will feel the fear.

6)Detail.
There's a fine line between too much and too little detail. Too much and you're adding excess fat that'll slow the scene. Too little detail and the setting doesn't feel real. See everything in your head, describe enough to make it granular, real, specific. It can never be 'a room,' it's a specific room. It's not 'a riverbank' it's a specific river bank, maybe muddy, maybe concrete, maybe tangled tree roots.

When it comes to describing mayhem, again, detail. Your character isn't just stabbed, she's stabbed somewhere specific. The knife goes through her blue silk blouse. The blood oozes until the knife is pulled out and then it gushes. The blood stains the silk a different color. The blood drips from the blade. Pain comes later, what comes first is shock. The character claps a hand to the wound and it comes away smeared with her own blood. Detail.

7) Distort Consciousness.
I don't know how many of you have ever been in a fight, but danger distorts your senses and screws with your memory. A character in the middle of an action scene isn't seeing everything, he's picking out details he hopes will allow him to live. See the gun. See the finger tightening on the trigger. See the eyes of the shooter. Don't check the clock. Don't notice the shooter's shoes. Do notice the ding of a text as it distracts the shooter.

Play with time. Speed it up. Slow it down. Blur some things, show others in stark detail. Slow down to talk about heartbeat or breathing. Speed the bad guy up while your character seems to be moving through molasses. Slow down to take in an incredible scene. Turn hearing on and off. Have your character's hand move of its own volition, disconnected from consciousness.

Terror and the urge to survive alter your brain. You aren't a teacher or a librarian or a writer, you're an animal using all its senses and resources to stay alive. You are more focused than you have ever been in your life. You are not recalling the wise words your mother once told you. You are not thinking about your significant other, you are a cornered rat who will do anything - anything at all - to stay alive, and everything else is far, far away.

8)The Unexpected.
Use the unexpected cautiously and sparsely. Where you might want to have a bad guy say, "I'm going to enjoy killing you," have him say, "Don't struggle. Help me to kill you and you'll barely feel it." You can drop in bits of humor. You can use weird interruptions - a phone rings, a door opens, a passerby slips on the blood, a FedEx guy walks in with a package.

This throws the reader off. The reader thinks she knows how the scene will play out, she's read or seen hundreds of action scenes, and she can feel the beats. So mess with her. Throw her a curve ball. You don't want the reader knowing what's next, that drains the emotion.

And for fun you can subvert tropes, mess with the reader's know-it-all expectations. Remember the thing about the character who jumps out of a window and lands in a convenient dumpster? Have them jump, have the dumpster there. . . and have them miss and smash their head open on the steel wall of the dumpster. Hah! Fooled you.

9)Aftermath.
Show the consequences. Are you hurt? Where? How does it feel? Is there a dead body? If so, how does it lie, how does it smell, has it loosed its bowels? If you barely survived, are you elated? Exhausted? Sad? Jazzed?

It's also a useful trick to have the character take a beat to imagine how she will feel later, how this will sit in her memory, how she will justify it. This establishes a seriousness that will carry through into subsequent action scenes. Is there a secondary character watching and reacting? How do they see you now, with blood and gore all over you? Are they repelled?

TL;DR: Play fair with the reader, make the action fit the setting, use detail, show the reader you're unpredictable, play with distortion, surprise them and show consequences.

At least that's how I try to do it.

I've written or co-written a big pile of books. Most of them are in series, sometimes quite long series. ANIMORPHS was about 10,000 pages. GONE about 3,000. So I'm generally involved in writing some big, long, involved narrative which is supposed to come together in each book, then make sense overall. I don't always hit that mark, but I do more often than not. So you might begin to suspect that I know what I'm doing.

I do not. At least not at any conscious level where I could sort of outline my notions of how a book or a series is constructed. I only did a semester of college and at that point life was all about getting baked and trying to get girls to like me, so, zero writing classes. Don't get me wrong, I do kinda, sorta wish I knew the theory of it all, but at the same time I'm more glad I didn't. I think you're either a person who reads the IKEA instructions or you're the kind of person who thinks 'Hell, I got this.' I always think I got this. If I were on a plane and the flight attendant announced the pilots were dead and asked for volunteers who thought they might just be able to land a 747, I'm just the kind of dumbass who would raise his hand.

And I would land the damn plane.

No, I wouldn't.

But. . . maybe.

See, that's the kind of arrogance you cannot learn from a book. My writer friend Andrew Smith applies the word 'swagger' to me with some frequency. A former girlfriend used to complain that I would always burst into any room like I expected all conversation to stop. Katherine (Applegate) says that everything I say comes out sounding like the voice of God. It's a very useful trick. Well, not to use on her, she actually knows me and whatever act I put on she's a tough, tough audience. Very low susceptibility to bullshit, that woman.

When Katherine first said we suggested we should give up our exciting careers in home and office cleaning and become writers, I immediately agreed, and immediately assumed I could do it. I was a 34 year old ex-criminal, a high school drop-out, cleaning people's toilets on Cape Cod and I thought, "Become a writer? Eh. Why not?" Some might describe that kind of thinking in polysyllabic psychological terms meant to step carefully around the word, "crazy."

But here's the thing: it worked.

The Catholics have this idea that when your faith goes through a rough patch you should continue acting as if you had faith. Fake it till you make it. I don't know of any statistics that can tell us whether more people fail while faking it, or whether more people fail because they never get the nerve to even try. But I think we all intuit that it's the latter. The two great killers of writing ambition are lack of talent and lack of confidence. If you don't have talent as a writer, well, find some other talent to exploit. Or just learn and work and be a decent human being, you know, one of the people who actually keep the world turning. But if you think you have some talent, and you want to give writing a try, and what's stopping you is lack of swagger, that's just sad.

Michael Grant's helpful advice for fear: Whatever you're afraid of, carry the narrative forward in your head. Explore the possible outcomes. Rank them by probability. Exclude the insane ones: there will be no zombies. And now look at what you have left, your list of 'what's the worst that could happen?' See that list? Is there anything on that list that's going to kill or maim you? Is everything on that list, however unpleasant, survivable? Then quit sniveling, you big baby.

Here's the worst that can happen to you if you want to write, and want to get published: they can say, "No." That's it. Publishers do not send hit squads around to your house. They say, "Nope," and you do a bit of cursing, and indulge in a cocktail of hatred and self-loathing, and then an actual cocktail or six,* and guess what? You're not in Aleppo with barrel bombs dropping on you, are you, so STFU.

If you want to do it, take the chance. If it works, excellent. If it doesn't work after giving it a good try, well, as a wise fellow waiter (yes, waiter not writer) once told me long ago, "Sometimes you just take your beating."

* a) If underage donuts work just as well and, b) if you're under age and you're already giving up, maybe just a wee bit more tenacity?

So, I finally did what I kept saying I wouldn't do. I wrote a sequel to the GONE series. I've been rejecting that word sequel for a couple of reasons, mostly to do with my own pride. I work in series, but once I'm done, I'm done. And I always felt if I started going backward it would be a bad sign, that it would mean I was starting to lose my fastball. I think that's the appropriate sports metaphor, I'm not sure because I know mostly nothing about sports and feel no curiosity about it. Do whatever you like with a ball, I don't care.

But I digress. The other reason I didn't think of it as a sequel is that I came at it from a different direction. I didn't start from, "So what happens next?" I started with, "I wanna make a superhero universe. Waaah." I started there which brought me immediately to the question of how I was not going to just be a YA Marvel slash DC. How was I going to do it differently?

I was more into comics as a kid, and I never got that into them later on. But even my limited exposure is pretty intimidating. Some very imaginative writers and artists have put one hell of a lot of time and talent into leaving no possible superhero universe unexplored. I didn't have a lot of room to maneuver. However, I had two cards that were mine to play: GONE and ANIMORPHS.

So round one of thinking this through was a possible connection between my new thing and one of my old things. I could sort of place things in the GONE world or the ANIMORPHS world. GONE worked best. But then it occurred to me that it would work even better with about 10% ANIMORPHS added for extra flavor.

So, with the concept starting to gel in my enormous head, it was time to look at location and character. I suppose most writers start with character or plot, but once I have my core concept I look to setting because it's the quickest way to convince yourself as the writer that there' some reality to this. As a writer one of the little challenges is to overcome the voice in your head that every so often whispers, "this is just a bunch of bullshit and no one is going to read it."

For setting I went with two former homes - the Chicago suburbs and the Bay Area. Easy, peasy, and I didn't need much detail because they were starting points; I knew we were going on the road a lot.

For my leads I knew I wanted a brand-new character, and one from the FAYZ. As occasionally happens I had the new character's name immediately. She was Shade. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. The last time that sort of instant name-character brain-pop occurred was with Dekka. And Dekka, as it happens, is the lead character I lifted from the FAYZ for the sequel. . . drumroll. . . MONSTER.

End of September, I think. Close to then anyway. Shade, Dekka, Cruz, Malik, Armo, Knightmare and more, some of whom you may already know. Others not.

MONSTER will be. . . well, if you read either GONE or ANIMORPHS, you won't be expecting Sunday dinner at Grandma's.

Probably the question I'm asked most frequently (aside from: Brianna! Whyyyyy???) is, "Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?" My answers have evolved over time, growing steadily more honest. I am pathologically incapable of giving a simple answer because I'm pathologically resistant to bullshit. And a lot of writing advice, especially the writing advice that is soothing and encouraging and affirming, is bullshit.

Just keep trying? Really? Even if you have no talent? Even if it means you chase a future you are never going to achieve and in the process lose out on a wonderful future more suited to your abilities? Shall I 'just keep trying' to get signed to the NBA? I mean, sure, I'm 62 years old, overweight and have zero athletic skill, but gosh darn-it, if I just keep at it. . . How about the space program? I'm out-of-shape and my math skills stop at long division, but sure, why not be an astronaut? How dare you suggest I abandon my dream of being an astronaut? Who the hell are you to harsh my mellow?

Look, writing for fun is a whole different thing than writing for a living. One is a hobby, the other is a career. You can have a hobby of watching House reruns and trying to guess the diagnosis, but that's not 4 years of college followed by three years of medical school followed by not sleeping for a couple of years while patients vomit, piss, crap and bleed on you. And then spending a lifetime looking in kid's ears and going, "Yep, it's an ear infection alrighty, my nine hundredth ear infection diagnosis. Since lunch."

According to the government the average writer/author earns around $66,000 a year, which is a pretty damned good if you live in Mississippi. If like me you live in the Bay Area it's almost enough to let you rent someone's couch to sleep on. And it's deceptive, because a 66k average can mean one writer earns a million dollars and a whole bunch of people make a single dollar. As the old saw goes, there are lies; there damned lies; and then, there are statistics. You know how you can get a $66,000 average? Add every single writer on planet earth to J.K. Rowling and divide by two.

If you seriously want to write for a living, not for fun, not to 'show all the doubters,' not to 'just get published,' but as a job, as a career, as a way to put food in your face, I do have some advice.

1) You are in a vendor relationship with your publisher. You produce manuscripts from which they produce books. If instead of a manuscript you were producing, say, car tires, you would understand that telling Ford to hold up the assembly line because you are a little blocked and not really 'feeling the whole tire thing,' would be really bad for your business.

If you sign a contract to deliver a manuscript of approximately 100k words on January 1, have 100k words ready to go, smoothed, cleaned-up and polished on January 1. Not January 2. January 1.

It's really good to be some transcendent literary genius, a towering talent whose name will be written across the sky in letters of fire. But also, shut the fuck up and get your work done. Don't be a baby. Your editor has a tight schedule and her assistant just quit and like you she also has kids and family and illness and a car that needs to go to the shop, so do not be a pain in her ass. If you're getting paid you are a professional, so act like it.

2) If like me you're in kidlit there are now three entirely different universes for book selling.

First is the bricks and mortar book store. Go to one. Look around. Do you notice how they have a bunch of shelves, but not an infinite number of shelves? A shelf is severely limited real estate. If you're really lucky you get a couple inches of shelf. If you're super lucky you get a couple of feet. And you hold that real estate only so long as you are selling and the minute you stop, poof! All gone book. Bye bye.

The other universe is Amazon. Their shelves are essentially infinity long, and your book, whether paper or pixels, can sit there forever. An infinite space, with infinite duration. Wow, man, just wow.

The third universe is schools and libraries.

Three very different universes, with purchases taking place in very different ways for differing reasons. This is your business, learn it.

3) Get an IP (intellectual property or publishing) lawyer. You presumably already know that you need a literary agent. Your agent will tell you to trust them. Don't. Unprepared, unprofessional and frankly corrupt agents have cost me at least a million dollars, and if I had not had a lawyer covering my back later on, I'd have been screwed all over again. Your agent works for you and ten other writers. Your agent needs to nurture a long-term relationship with the publisher. Your lawyer, on the other hand, works for you, follows your orders, and unless you hire a putz, is better at dealing with the subtle screw-jobs buried in supposedly 'boilerplate' contracts.

4) Know thyself Part 1. You are an employer with one employee: you. You need to get the best possible work out of you. Now, I'm not going to try and guess what's in your head or how your brain works, I'm just lucky to kinda sorta have my own figured out. This sounds a bit schizoid, but you have to figure out how to trick, manipulate and bully yourself into working. I use my overdeveloped sense of duty to anyone who pays me as my core motivator. Then I add a nice working environment, coffee, cigars and Adderall. And when I fall behind on paying taxes, that motivates me, too.

But it's more than that. There are days I know I'm not up for new pages, either because the rest of the manuscript is a mess, or I'm sleepy, or I only have an hour before my doctor's appointment. So I do rewrites. Job #1 is always first drafts because as Nora Roberts wisely points out, "You can fix anything but an empty page." Learn to understand yourself the way a smart, empathetic employer should. Know how to get the best out of yourself.

5) Know yourself Part 2: Before you start thinking about writing for a living, ask yourself: how good are you at self-discipline? How happy are you working in complete isolation? How do you deal with working on something for a full six months or longer, and in the end failing to sell it and thus earning no dollars per hour? And then doing it all again.

Do you want a regular wage? Benefits? Job security? A supportive environment? Be a librarian, they're good people. But don't be a writer. It's the best job ever, for me. But I'm me, and you probably aren't. Which, trust me, is a good thing for you.

6) Know yourself Part 3: do you want to be famous? As a writer? Ah hah hah hah! Good one. There may be as many as four kidlit authors who are recognized in public at all. Ever. If you want to be famous, learn how to sing insipid lyrics into Auto-tune and be super cute but not in a sexually threatening way. Writers are invisible, as we should be. We are skulking observers, not pop stars.

7) If you think this gig is about coming up with 'an idea,' sweetheart, I hate to tell you, but that's got just about fuck-all to do with the actual job. It's not about THE GREAT IDEA, it's about the ten thousand little moves you have to figure out to put that idea on the page. Here's a great idea: these two teenagers fall in love even though their families hate each other. You may know it as Romeo and Juliet, but the exact same premise has spawned thousands of books and pretty much zero percent of them touch Shakespeare's work.

It ain't the idea, it's the execution. Our most lucrative idea ever was, 'Kids turn into animals to fight aliens,' also known as Animorphs. Great idea. Great premise. And it took about five minutes to come up with. The 63 books that followed, took a wee bit more work. Someone else might have taken the exact idea (and they have) and had it not work. Then again, someone else might have won a National Book Award for it, who knows?

8) Do you want to use your book to grind some personal or ideological axe? Eh, you might sell a book or two. Better for the school and library market than either stores or Amazon. But earnest lessons and scolding and 'good for you' lectures have a limited appeal. All that personal stuff you want to get out? You sneak that in maybe, but that's not the book, that's subtext or the occasional easter egg. My personal favorite is still from Animorphs where we created a species of giant worm so obsessed with hunger that it would even turn to orgiastic cannibalism. We named that species Taxxons. And yes, we were doing our taxes at the time.

9) Once you start earning start saving, because it is up and down and sometimes just down. My wife and I have managed to make a decent living off nothing but writing for 27 years now. You know how many writers manage to keep their heads above water for that long without a rich spouse or a real job? Not a lot.

10) Finally, since for some reason we need ten bullet points: always have a next project. Have that next thing sort of simmering in your subconscious. But do not be tricked into a grass-is-greener game. The other book always seems as if it'll be easier than the one you're working on. It never is, and once you start down that path you're on the way to a hard drive full of abandoned manuscripts. And that, my friend, will not pay the bills. Start work at 'Chapter One.' Proceed till you can type the three little hashmarks at the end. You want to know what stops 90% of writers? They don't write, and if you don't write they will totally not pay you. Life is harsh that way.

If there is one thing readers of my books tend to agree on it is that I do not talk down to them. There is a difference in experience levels between old and young, but that doesn't make old people geniuses or young people idiots. So lets do some more of that direct honesty thing.

Yesterday a person here on Goodreads decided that rather than actually read my books, she would call me a racist and an ableist. Did this hurt my feelings? Yeah, it did. It's false, obviously, but it still bothers me.

I've never made myself out to be some kind of role model. Without going into detail, I am not exactly impressed with big parts of my own backstory. I think I have a fair notion of who I am, my strengths and weaknesses. I'm an average prose writer with a world-class imagination and a surprisingly good ability do define character. My secret weapon as a writer is probably that I have excellent work habits and my battery never seems to run down.

On the down side I am arrogant, sometimes dismissive, and always impatient. I have great big, gaping holes in my education - I'm a high school drop-out. In the part of my brain where math should be I have an empty space where I store old episodes of The Simpsons. I have the math skills of a fern. I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and borderline ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and more than a touch of OCD. There's a lot wrong with me, a lot of baggage I'm carrying, a nice big load of guilt, an intimidating awareness of my own capacity to do stupid, impetuous things, and a long list of failures and fuck-ups.

There is in short plenty wrong with me. But racism or ableism or any form of bigotry? No. Categorically, no.

People who actually read my books are likely to be baffled by accusations alleging that I am this or that sort of 'ist.' I've authored or co-authored something like 150 books, including ANIMORPHS, GONE, BZRK, MAGNIFICENT 12, MESSENGER OF FEAR and FRONT LINES. People who read my actual books come away if anything with a sense that I evangelize constantly for diversity, inclusion and tolerance. One might, for example, wonder why if I'm this or that 'ist' I would place an interracial romance at the heart of ANIMORPHS, or why I would carefully nurture Edilio in GONE from despised undocumented outsider to become the most respected person in the FAYZ. Or why I would shoehorn Tulsa in 1921 into FRONT LINES. I could go on and on, but again, the people who actually read my books are not the people attacking me.

People who actually read my books understand perfectly well where I stand on race, gender, religion, etc... They might well accuse me of using too many short sentences, or not exactly knowing how to punctuate, or writing overly-long books, but the people who actually read my books are almost never the ones accusing me.

So, why would people who don't read my books decide to attack me on the most absurdly dishonest grounds possible? Politics. No, really: politics. I am a political guy at least as much as I am a literary type, and in that capacity I have challenged the concepts of 'cultural appropriation,' I've said that 'name-and-shame' is too often a self-defeating tactic that can only hurt allies, and I've criticized efforts to ban books from the Left, just as I oppose such efforts when they come from the Right. Yes, that's what this is all about: a fight over tactics.

I am a man of the Left. I've been a financial donor for Democrats since I reached the point of having money to give. I was for gay marriage literally decades before it was even on the political radar. I have despised racism since as a child I saw 'whites only' drinking fountains at a drive-in movie in the panhandle of Florida. My family was threatened by the KKK at one point because my mother was tutoring kids from the segregated high school. I take these slanders seriously because I take racism seriously. It's not something to joke about or toss off lightly. Racism isn't just wrong or impolite, it's evil. Six million members of my particular tribe went up Nazi chimneys because of racism.

I am a liberal, but I strive to be honest in my politics. I don't fight for a team, I try to fight for principles: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, a free press, equality under the law. So when 'my side' goes in directions I think violate those core principles, and employs tactics I think are unfair, politically stupid and self-destructive, I speak out.

When I speak out, do I know I'll be attacked? Of course. It's quite deliberate. My thinking is that I am in effect the right 'size' to speak out. See, if someone as famous as, say, Suzanne Collins, speaks out it becomes a headline. If someone smaller speaks out they risk their careers, and they'll be ignored anyway. I am not 'big' enough to make headlines, but big enough that people in the publishing world will pay attention, and at 62 I'm not as worried about my career.

What's fascinating and a bit of a lesson in politics is this: the people attacking me have the same exact stated goals that I have. In other words, we both want diversity in kidlit at the level of characters, at the level of writers and at the level of publishing. Yes: we are on the same side. Proof? Well, again, try actually reading my books, there are about 30,000 pages of proof. And that is a big part of the problem because each new generation discovers old issues and imagines that they are the first on the scene, and no one wants some bald old fart to already be there, hanging around and smoking a cigar. Well, sorry kids, but this bald old fart was already on the scene. I didn't need to be 'made aware,' I was aware before most of the people telling me I need to be aware were born.

I have no control over publishing, and I can't change my skin color, so I can't do anything about those two areas of diversity, but I can make a difference at the level of characters. In fact: I have. In fact: no other single kidlit writer has done more. But I am old, an old white guy, born back before we had seat-belts, let alone the internet. Old. Therefore I am assumed-to-be-out-of-touch and quite possibly senile and certainly incapable of the sort of perfect enlightenment that comes only to the very most sensitive of folks. So I couldn't possibly have anything useful to contribute to a conversation on diversity. The mere fact that I've spent 6 million words promoting diversity is apparently not something to be celebrated, it's something to despise because I didn't wait for everyone else, I just went ahead and did it on my own.

My essential crime is that I went ahead and did the assignment at the end of the textbook and did not wait for the teacher or the rest of the class. Sorry. I will try in future not to get the answer before the other kids.

There is a bit of an industry growing up around diversity in books. There's money to be made, publishing deals to be struck, positions to be enhanced. A sort of self-appointed priesthood is forming to act as intercessors, guides, scolds, judges, juries and Twitter executioners. And then I come along and basically tell them all to fuck off because I was doing it all on my own and long before the high priests came along. I can see where that would irritate the priesthood. And honestly, if the priesthood was not actually harming the very cause we both support, I would just roll my eyes and think, 'OK, whatever: yes you are totally the first people to discover diversity, good for you.' Like when college freshmen all suddenly discover the existence of hypocrisy and then won't shut up about it, as if every single generation of freshmen since the Paleolithic Era hadn't discovered the exact same thing. But the priesthood is in my opinion harming the cause of diversity. They are harming the cause of free speech. They are weakening our moral arguments and leaving us vulnerable to counterattack.

Did you know publishers now use 'sensitivity readers?' They get paid a couple hundred bucks to read a manuscript and point out areas where sensitivities might be rubbed raw. There are African-American sensitivity readers and Latino and gay and trans and Muslim sensitivity readers.

So, question: when some alt-right white group demands to have a sensitivity read, what do we say? No? No only to white people? How is that going to work? What core principle will we appeal to? What do you do when Bill O'Reilly makes an issue of it and some hapless kidlit editor is left sputtering weak excuses on-air? What do you do if Scientologists demand equal treatment and insist on sensitivity reads? Why don't Mormons get a read? Or the Irish for that matter?

Obviously we can marshal arguments about historic (and current) inequities, a long history of blatant racism in publishing, the shameful scarcity of authors of color, the institutional racism that blocks so many young PoC from even getting close to publishing, and so on, but will those arguments be convincing in a country where 46% of people voted for Trump? No. Those arguments look like special pleading. The only argument we can advance to rationalize one sensitivity read as opposed to another, is historical unfairness, to which the counter is that current unfairness does not cure historical unfairness, and that we have no rational basis for deciding that any given group is or is not entitled to have its sensitivities considered.

In the end it would look not like a fight for principle, but a fight for 'our' side. It drags kidlit into partisan political warfare, defining kidlit as not just liberal (which it always has been) but as a part of the far left, out of touch and defending ideas which do not hold up to scrutiny. Placing kidlit on the far left is in my opinion, short-sighted, self-defeating and stupid. It harms the cause of diversity. So I said those things.

And, that's why I am the bad, bad old man of kidlit. Is that why this particular woman here on Goodreads decided to call me a racist and an ableist? Nah. She just read the lies and distortions, the deliberate mis-characterizations others have written, and she bought into those lies. Rather than actually read some portion of what I've actually written, she leapt to the assumption that any random slander she saw on the internet must be true. There's an old saying, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." People love to assume the worst about other people, so despite a massive pile of evidence that I'm actually a fairly decent dude quite obviously committed to diversity, the lie is instantly believed and therefore I am a racist, an ableist, and assumed to be guilty of every other ism as well.

I am a perfect target. I made myself the target precisely because I remain committed to diversity in kidlit, as I have been since the early 90's when I first got to the point of inventing my own characters. The proof of who I am, what I believe, what I stand for is to be found in 150 books, 30,000 pages, something like 6 million words. But I differ from some other advocates of diversity on certain strategies and tactics, and therefore my life's work is dismissed as meaningless and I am called the worst thing I know to call anyone.

I can predict the priesthood's responses. They'll drag out their usual array of dialog-obliterating insults and labels. 'Fragile white person syndrome,' no doubt, as if being accused of the worst thing short of pedophilia or murder is something I should just shrug off. Or I'll get the 'white savior complex' dialog-killer. Scorn will be heaped. Memes will be deployed. Or, as one of these people did not long ago, they'll cherry-pick and distort: did you know that I called Edilio a 'wetback?' and therefore obviously hate Latinos? Say what? You think that was a character not me, and the attitude was clearly treated as wrong, and it was all a necessary part of slowly growing the character of Edilio, revealing his strength and therefore making the point that it would be contemptible to look down on undocumented people? Well, sure, you know that, because you read my books. The people attacking me do not.

And yet, despite everything I have put in books over the course of a 27 year career, and despite what I wrote above, you, reader, will nevertheless walk away carrying a shadow of doubt. That's why I titled this post, "Yes, I Know It's Futile." Once accused, however wrongly, you are never innocent.