You have made Jane's torment very real, though, if that's any consolation.

Write what you know, and all that.

When I'm brainstorming an idea, I use pencil (only! never a pen!) and a notebook, and draw lines and sidebars and asterisks all over the page as I go, making a big, incomprehensible-to-anyone-but-me map.

But, like Deb, all writing of the actual piece (unless I'm shipwrecked or something, without computer access) is done right on the computer.

I loved A Handmaid's Tale. And it seems that so many people who like Atwood's other work don't, but I love Cat's Eye and Lady Oracle and Bluebeard's Egg, too. And while I might not have objected to being nominated for a prize myself, I can see where she might have thought, Hey, I win that and everyone is going to assume it's sci-fi. And it really did read as fiction to me, plain and simple, or at the most a modern fable.

Having worked in publishing, though, I know too well how marketing and sales want to be able to put something very specific on the spine. Even the book I'm writing now (or will be when I finish the novella that was due last week--gulp) is a mystery/romance hybrid that we definitely want to appeal to mystery readers, but we're NOT putting "Mystery" on the spine because we don't want to deal with the mystery buyer. (And why that is I don't know--just quoting my editor.)

Categories are good and bad, like most things. I think Alexander McCall Smith (is that right?) who wrote The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency should sue someone for categorizing his books as mysteries, because they're just not, not in the way most mystery readers expect. There are brief, amusing cases that Precious solves, but the books are about her not the cases, which are never complex enough to sustain a novel-length plot anyway.

Ack, baby's crying.

The largest section of fiction at my local B&N just says "fiction".

It's as large as the entire genre ghetto.

I'd say "mine too", but we're probably talking about the same store. And in the mini-bookstores in the malls, "fiction" is usually along the wall covering nearly half the store, while each genre gets a few of those little stand-alone island shelves in the middle of the floor.

And if you get any good ideas for getting the flow back, let me know. I'm having trouble getting the Anna characters to be people instead of little wooden puppets, now that I'm working on it for the first time since Feb. or March. I'm thinking of doing something I swore I wasn't going to do this time around, and skip ahead to the scenes I've already vividly imagined rather than writing straight through.

You have made Jane's torment very real, though, if that's any consolation.

She's right. You have. We feel her agony.

Seriously, Plei, sounds like you're doing a distancing thing, which sounds, now I look at it, an unbelievably pompous phrase. But really, I just mean a sort of internal lethargy which sets up a "if I get involved with feeling this shit that my characters are dealing with, I'm going to be reeeeeeally tired and pissed off and involved and I don't waaaaaaanna" chain. At least, that's where I tracked my distancey moments to, anyway.

The characters had a totally different feel in my head to see their names in typeface rather than in their usual scrawl, like a signature. But in the end I realized it was the most important step, making them independent to stand on their own merits, rather than keeping them, despite their individuality, simply facets of my own psyche.

Huh. I've never had that at all - I've always just felt I'm drawing them. Sketching-drawing, I mean.

P-C, the local biggies no longer do, except tucked away in a corner. Now it's "Best Sellers".

That's...odd. I could swear the Borders has a fiction section, or else what else would they call all those other books?

And as far as labels go, wasn't Atwood's latest, Oryx and Crake, kind of science-fiction-y? Yet, I don't think you'd find it on the sci-fi shelves. And I saw this really cool book whose name and author I don't remember about a woman married to a man who's continually jumping through time, and it explores their relationship in different time periods, as they're different ages, and it was, to my eye, marketed as regular old fiction. I think it's a matter of how much you use the elements and to what purpose.

I'm about a third of the way through Plainsong, and while I wouldn't find it out-of-place in the fantasy section, due to the talking animals and shit, I really don't think it would be so odd to see it marketed as straight fiction today. Writers are doing a lot of fantastical things (take Wicked, for example) now, and they probably benefit from not being shoved in the fantasty or sci-fi section just by virtue of using one or more of their tropes. Not to diminish hardcore fantasy and sci-fi.

And actually, anecdote: Neal Stephenson's wondering why the hell Quicksilver would be nominated for a Hugo, since there's nothing sci-fi about the Baroque Cycle at all. But he's known as a sci-fi writer (for that matter, there was nothing truly "sci-fi" about Cryptonomicon, which was nominated for a Hugo), and as he said when I saw him at Borders, who knows, maybe Isaac Newton sails away in a spaceship at the very end.

Well, Daddy walked in, in time to pick up crying baby. How convenient.

See Jane crumple the page up in disgust and curl up in fetal position while she weeps in frustration. See Jane offer sacrifices to the powers that be. See Jane scream. Scream, Jane scream.

Hey, I know Jane!

And our B&N has Fiction, but they have all sorts of other distracting things, too, like the Bestseller shelf, and the New in Paperback shelf, but Fiction is there, with Mystery behind it, and Romance and Sci-Fi/Horror off to one side. No idea where Poetry is, now that I think of it. The Borders near us is similar, but I do find their shelving system odd, because they sub-categorize even further.

Susan, what are mini-bookstores at the mall? We don't have those - just the biggies.

Fiction (as an example only) in my nearest branch of Borders, is invisible when you walk in. The first thing is the table with the staff picks. Running along the lefthand wall is the "NY TIMES BEST SELLER LIST!" (their caps, not mine). Off to the right is the line of cash registers; beyond that, the magazines and newspapers.

You walk in and there's the vast bulk of the store, with its signs to various sections: Philosphy, Religion, Womens' Studies, Mystery, Science Fiction (I don't remember, honestly, whether there are romance and/or fantasy sections). There, in one corner, is a section called "Literature", where they dump everything they can't categorise.

The Starbucks and DVD/CD sections, on the other hand? Really large and visible.

P-C, there used to be a category called "Speculative Fiction". Atwood wanted Handmaid shelved there, or in lit. Lucky for her it was a best-seller, and a controversial one.

Susan, what are mini-bookstores at the mall?

Waldenbooks and B. Dalton and so on--the ones that seem so tiny now that B&N and Borders have such a strong presence.

Oh! I was envisioning little stall things, and was about to swoon in envy.

We have one that I can think of, at one local mall: a B. Dalton at Serramonte. That's about it.

Waldenbooks and B. Dalton and so on--the ones that seem so tiny now that B&N and Borders have such a strong presence.

I have this almost instinctive tradition of going into B. Dalton's and skimming the shelf on the left wall (fiction) for the presence of any Lorrie Moore. I just like seeing her on the shelf.