Rant. Women. Writing. Chicklit.

So there's been a bit in the media lately about women writers and some other related bits and pieces. And I know this is a soapbox that I've jumped up and down on before, but I'm going to have to keep jumping for now.

First, there's an article in the Telegraph about the Orange Prize, a literary award for women writers:

Given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. They are favoured by what is overwhelmingly the most important publishing prize (the Richard and Judy list), and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.

Well. A few points, if I may.

• Six out of the last 20 Booker Prize Winners have been women.
• Two out of the last 20 Booker Prize Winners have had a female protagonist. That's 10%.
• Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of 2010 list are all by men.
• Our own Miles Franklin longlist features 3 women and 9 men.
  
• There are more women working in publishing than men, more women write books and more women read books. This is all true. Yet capital-L-literary awards are undeniably skewed towards men.
• There are more female teachers because teaching continues to be a low pay, low status job.
• Despite this, the vast majority of class texts are by men, and feature male protagonists.
• In VCE this year, there are 9 texts available by women, and 27 by men.
  
• I know of a local private girls' school where, from Years 7-10, not one text is studied featuring a female protagonist. NOT. ONE.

What this is telling us, and the message we are sending to young people (both male and female) is this: despite the fact that the majority of people involved in the publishing industry are women, our society as a whole deems women's stories as unimportant (at least as far as capital-L-literature is concerned). Female authors only get recognised when they write about men. And I am not in ANY way blaming men for this. It's something we're all doing together. As a whole literary culture. Here's Lizzie Skurnick:

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting."
Our default is that women are small, men are universal.

Here's a (relatively mild) comment from that article about the Orange Prize:

I am a life long reader and have read thousands of books, however I have read probably less than 20 books written by women. Women write differently from men and I feel their efforts appeal mostly to other women.

Which brings me to our friend Nicholas Sparks. Nicholas is the author of The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe and Dear John, among others. First, I have to admit that I've never read any of his books, nor seen any of the film adaptations. But I've seen the previews, and that was enough to know that it isn't really my thing. On the whole, I prefer my rom to also include com.

So Nicholas recently gave an interview*.

If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section... I don't write romance novels. Love stories — it's a very different genre. I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels...
There's a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It's a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it's very rare that it works. That's why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It's all drama...
I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophoclies and Euripides.
A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms.
There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.

Apart from, hmm, I don't know. A WHOLE BUNCH OF WOMEN.

Hmph.

Thanks to Karen Healey, Meanjin and Bookslut for bringing all these articles to my attention.
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*Did I mention that the interview was a joint one? With Miley Cyrus?

Parallel imports

For those of you who didn't see last night's Lateline debate between Garth Nix and Dymocks CEO Don Grover on the proposed lifting of Australian territorial copyright, here are the salient points.

Firstly - what's territorial copyright? What are parallel import restrictions and why do we have them?

Basically, there's a law in Australia where, if a book is published in Australia within 30 days of it being published overseas, an Australian bookseller cannot import and sell the international edition. Now there's a proposal to remove that restriction. The people in favour of getting rid of it say that it will make books cheaper - we all know that books are cheaper in America, we can see so on Amazon.

But why are books cheaper over there? Two main reasons. The first is that the US is a much bigger pond than Australia. There's more people to buy books, therefore publishers can print more, at a lower cost. The second is that, because of the big pond, most books in the US come out first in hardcover (which is expensive), and then later in a very cheap mass-market edition, printed on very low-quality paper with inferior binding.

In Australia, we generally don't print in hardcover, because there aren't enough people to buy the books to make it financially viable. But that means our first edition paperbacks are pretty high-quality - usually a B or C format, and on good quality paper and embellished covers.

So why not remove this territorial copyright? What purpose does it serve? A few, actually. Firstly, both the US and the UK have full territorial copyright - they don't even have the 30-day rule. They fully protect their publishing industry and authors against imports from other countries. The only country, in fact, to remove its territorial copyright is New Zealand, a country with almost no local publishing to start with. And there is no evidence that it has resulted in cheaper books.

But here's the main reason. If it is cheaper to buy an overseas edition of an Australian book, chances are the consumer will do it. Which means that the Australian publisher doesn't get the money, and the author gets a much lower royalty. With less money flowing through Australian publishers, they become unable to support the smaller books, the niche books. The books that might not sell a squillion copies but are still worthy of publication. Australian authors will turn to the US and UK markets for publication, instead of publishing locally first. In order to appeal to overseas markets, the Australian-ness of their stories will be stripped away.

Dymocks CEO Don Grover has this to say: "I don't think the Australian consumer cares (about buying Australian products), they care about price". He obviously has a lot of respect for his customers.

And let's talk about booksellers for a moment. Customers are already shopping in an international market - you can order any book you like from the US or the UK as an individual, online or through your local bookshop. Australian booksellers are already having to compete with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk - so why shouldn't they be allowed to import cheaper books?

Because if we did lift the restrictions, how long do you think it would be before an Amazon.com.au sprang up? With a US-owned Amazon warehouse in Australia, how many Australian booksellers would be able to compete with the scale of Amazon, without the overseas shipping costs? Not Dymocks, that's for sure.

Ex-Premier Bob Carr is a member of the Coalition for Cheaper Books (along with such august establishments as Coles, KMart, Big W and Dymocks). He says that our current comparatively high book prices are resulting in kids who don't read*. He says that the average book price is $35, which is driving consumers away from buying books for their children. This is a very irritating non-sequitur. Because sure, if you average out all the books in the bookshop, including coffee-table books and cookbooks, the average price is $35. But go into the children's and young adult section of a bookshop, and you will be unlikely to find many books that cost over $20.

My next book Pink, is set in Melbourne. It mentions Flinders Street and trams and the GPO shopping centre and many other places. When it gets published in the US, it won't be set in Melbourne anymore. The footpaths will be sidewalks. The Mums will be Moms. Maths class will be math class, and Ava's high school will no longer be named The Billy Hughes School for Academic Excellence, after an ex-Prime Minister. And that's fine, for my US readers. I understand why those changes need to be made. But for Australians to have to read the de-Australianed version because it's cheaper? It's just wrong.

(this post is a modified version of my submission to the ACCC)

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*Will somebody think of the children! Let them have cheap books! Mandatory internet filters will make them big and strong and put a rose in every cheek... Or is that Vegemite?

Sugar and Spice and All Things Not Award-Winning

Last week the Children's Book Council Book of the Year Shortlist was announced. There were sixteen books on the Older Readers Notable list, with six books on the actual Shortlist. Of the sixteen Notables, four books have female protagonists. On the Shortlist, there's just one.

Firstly, congratulations to all the authors on the lists. Please don't think for a moment that what follows is a criticism of your work. You're all awesome and totally deserve to be there.

But where are all the girls? Where is Simmone Howell's Everything Beautiful? Or Joanne Horniman's My Candlelight Novel? Or Michelle Cooper's A Brief History of Montmaray? Or Julia Lawrinson's The Push?

If you take a look back over the years at the books that have won and been shortlisted in the past, you'll notice that there aren't many girls at all (Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca are among the handful of girl-protagonist books awarded the gong in over 60 years).

And it's happening everywhere! Today the Miles Franklin shortlist was announced. How many women writers on the shortlist? NONE. Ironic, huh? For a literary award that was named in honour of a woman who had to pretend to be a man in order to get published. A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

What's going on? Why, as a society, do we privilege stories about boys and men? Why are their stories more Literary? Is it because people figure that girls will read books about boys, but boys won't read books about girls? Is it because girl-stories are often focussed on an emotion-based arc, rather than an action-based one?

I'm currently in the very early stages of thinking about The Next Book. And I wanted to try writing a book for girls, but with a male protagonist. But now I'm not so sure. More girl books, I say! More spunky girls being awesome! Awards be damned!

(for more on this, check out Kirsty and Adele and Judith)

The Story Machine

So I just had this really interesting meeting at the Australian Children's Television Foundation. And it got me thinking about stories, and narrative. And the way we consume those things.

There was an article in the New York Times that I meant to blog about a couple of months ago. It was one of those OH NOES kids don’t read anymore articles. The kind that seem to be written entirely with the purpose of pissing people like me off.

One of my favourite bits was this:

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

This is the kind of ridiculous truism that really gets my hackles up. No, electronic media doesn’t provide the same kind of intellectual and personal development as reading does. But neither does watching TV/ getting plenty of fresh air and exercise/ eating leafy vegetables/ being good to your mother. BECAUSE THEY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS.

Nobody (outside the sensationalising of journalists) is saying that one should replace the other. And there are plenty of benefits sustained from engaging in electronic media that are not sustained from frequent reading.  

I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and librarians about technology, and why it’s important to use it in their classrooms (and why writing up an essay using Microsoft Word isn’t using technology any more than using a pencil is). I also spend a lot of time talking to teachers about how to foster a love of reading and books in the classroom.

The other day someone asked me if I thought there was an inherent contradiction there.

And I laughed.

Back to this New York Times article. It mentions a teenager called Nadia, who got really attached to a Holocaust memoir, and her enthusiastic parent tried giving her a fantasy novel (because that’s OBVIOUSLY the next step), and she didn’t like it.

Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online. Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. 

Okay. So she didn’t like the fantasy novel, and that experience turned her off reading novels. That’s sad. But she reads manga, and online fanfic, often. Voraciously, even. So exactly what part of this demonstrates that she is not a big reader? None of it. Nadia is a big reader. She spends a significant amount of her leisure time reading comic books, and reading online.

As do I.

The article goes on to say that Nadia writes her own fanfic as well, but then spends several paragraphs pointing out that some fanfic has lots of spelling mistakes.

Way to bury the lede, New York Times.

Can we go back for a minute? Past all the doom-and-gloom-kids-today bullshit and just rethink this?

This girl, Nadia, loves story.

She loves it so much that consuming it isn’t enough. She wants to spend more time with her favourite characters. She wants to push them into situations beyond the ones they experience in canon.

And every time Nadia reads or writes or watches or hears a story, it feeds her own story machine. It deepens her understanding of the way narrative works. And this understanding of story, of the mechanics of story, makes her love story even more.

Every time you read a book, an article, a piece of fanfic, watch TV, go to the cinema, you are feeding your story machine. It’s like breathing in.

And when you write a story, or blog, or draw a picture, or tell someone a lurid anecdote about what your crazy aunt got you for your birthday, or make a video, or write a song… you are also feeding your story machine. You breathe out.

And everyone who loves stories does this. Even if it’s just telling someone about a great book you read. 

It’s all breathing in, breathing out. 

Feeding the story machine.

(for a good way to feed your own story machine, check out the Inkys Creative Reading Prize)

Shame on You, Fairfax

The A2 section of today's Age contained some great stuff. A fabulous article by Ursula Dubosarsky about darkness and the bleak life of Rudolf Těsnohlídek. A good (if short) review of Philip Pullman's Once Upon a Time in the North. A good start really, including these two profound and achingly beautiful voices in young adult literature.

Then, there was a review of Nam Le's The Boat, an adult novel that apparently contains no lesbian vampires (although why the reviewer chose to point this out, I'm not sure. A good headline, perhaps?). The review was by James Ley, can be found on page 31, and contained the following sentence:

"It reads like an unusually well-crafted piece of teen fiction, the work of a gifted imitator rather than a unique talent."

While I understand that hanging Mr Ley up by his thumbs until he squeals is probably not an option, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that Mr Ley should try reading some teen fiction (like that written by "unique talents" Dubosarsky or Pullman, as an example). And perhaps The Age could, in future, think twice before publishing such patronising and uneducated drivel.

Poetry

I'm not much of a fan. Oh, I like Aussie YA poets like Steven Herrick, alicia sometimes and Adam Ford. Sharon Creech's Love that Dog is one of my all-time-favourite books. I like e.e. cummings and Lewis Carroll and Walt Whitman and that guy who wrote the poem about eating all the plums. I can even recite all of The Lady of Shalott, and know that it's 'clothe the wold and meet the sky', not 'clothe the world and meet the sky'.

But I don't really like poetry. Mostly because of the way it's abused. In fact, the only way I would ever read a book about poetry, is if I found an audiobook about it read by Stephen Fry. Which I did, and so I am.

Fry points out the problem with poetry, using another highly-structured art form as an example. Music, he says, (and I paraphrase because I was on the train and couldn't write it down) may provoke an intense emotional response in the listener. But an intense emotional response is not enough to make music.

You don't come home from a crappy day when your boyfriend got runover and your cat ran off with a supermodel and think - I'm going to write an emo symphony about how nobody ever really loved me. You need to have some sort of learned skill that involves reading music or playing chords on a guitar or knowing what a 3/4 time signature is.

So it's not that all poetry is crap. It's that most poetry is crap. Your average amateur poet thinks that because poetry is constructed out of language, and language is something they have a grasp on - they can do it. Most of the time they are wrong.

This is the same kind of logic that made Heather Mills say that she thinks she'd be good at writing children's books because she has a daughter.

In other news, I'm planning a new career as an entymologist, because there are moths in my pantry so clearly I'd kick arse.

Saturday morning rant (story v language)

I've been thinking a lot about the war that is being fought between story and language.

It shouldn't be a war. Language and story should work together. But people don't seem to want to let them, and so they fight.

I heard someone say recently that they didn't like books they couldn't put down. This person felt manipulated by a gripping plot. I found this astonishing.

It goes hand-in-hand with the snobbery towards mass-market fiction, chicklit (see Maureen Johnson's awesome post for more on that) and, of course, YA.

Nick Hornby has this to say:

“In a way, I think all books should be teen books. I can read them quickly without getting bogged down, and feel I’ve read something that was meant in the way literature’s supposed to be. They’re very digestible, designed not to bore people.”

But if you have a look at the kind of books that win the Miles Franklin and the Booker, it seems pretty clear that the literati don't agree. Literature needs to be dense, beautiful and obfuscating.

I love beautiful language. Writers like Margaret Atwood (pre-Oryx & Crake), Jorge Louis-Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And of course the beautiful-language YA writers Ursula Dubosarsky, Margo Lanagan and David Almond. But as well as having a truly magical control over language, all these writers also know how to tell a cracking good story.

Making stories is an art. It's difficult and complex and there are rules and structures, and if you don't want to stick to those rules and structures, then fine, but you'd better have a damn good reason. In my four years of studying creative writing at Uni, not one class mentioned the importance of structure, except of course, for my screenwriting class.

The story vs language brawl spills over into visual media as well. Film can be loved by our intellectual elite because of its 'language' - the cinematography, metaphor and mood. Television, however, is much more reliant on story. Smaller screens, heavily prescribed time limits, and a need for continuity mean that TV shows have more rules and structures.
But that doesn't mean they can't be art, too. There is often more thought, care, craft, put into an episode of The West Wing, Six Feet Under or Veronica Mars, than into a feature film of the kind that our intellectual elite favour.

I'm not really sure where this rant is heading. I suppose it's a plea. Don't be ashamed to read The Da Vinci Code just because it's mass market fiction. There are plenty of other reasons to be ashamed (ie: it's crap). Embrace your love of chicklit (and its cinematic equivalent, the romcom). Read a fantasy novel. Watch Battlestar Galactica.

Yes. There is bad chicklit. And bad fantasy novels. And books like The Da Vinci Code.

But here's a revalation: there's a lot of bad books, full stop. Some of them have won prestigious literary awards.

You will judge a book by its cover - everyone does. I certainly do. But I try not to judge books by what section of the bookshop they are shelved in*.

Send in the peacekeepers! End the war! Give story a chance.

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*This isn't entirely true. I tend to avoid self-help and true-crime. But in terms of fiction, I'm showing the love for all shelves.

Real or Fake? The Christmas Tree Dilemma

I love Christmas. I love everything about it. I can even tolerate a tiny bit of Jesus-lovin' at Christmas time (as long as it's the Away in a Manger kind of Jesus-lovin', not the 'Jesus wants me to carry a gun' kind).

And one of my favourite things about Christmas (apart from the food) is a Christmas tree. But there is the dilemma: real or fake?

Real is nice because it's... well, it's real. It is a tree and it smells nice. But there are a couple of things that are problematic with real ones, namely:

1. They go brown very quickly, and don't last until twelfth night.

2. Things live in them. Like snails who eat wrapping paper.

3. I am violently allergic to them, and can't be in the same room as one without medication.

and

4. Monterey pines, which are the only kind of Christmas tree available in Australia.

These are Christmas trees:

This, however, is not a Christmas tree:

It just isn't.

So I've gone fake. If I could get a Douglas fir or a Fraser, then I might be prepared to deal with the snails and the vast amounts of Claratyne. But not for a Monterey Pine.

The Inevitable Post about Dumbledore

"The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance,"

-JK Rowling

I find with all things Harry Potter, that I really enjoy it, until I start thinking, and then I get irritated. It was the same with Rowling's recent announcement about Dumbledore's sexuality.

At first I thought "awesome! positive gay characters in children's literature!"

And then I thought 4 things.

Thing #1

"He is my character. He is what he is and I have the right to say what I say about him."

Once your book is published, it doesn't belong to you anymore. It belongs to your readers. Let THEM tell YOU what happens next, not the other round.

Thing #2

"If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!"

No. You should have announced it years ago anyway. You should have put it in the books. You are probably the most influential human being in the world for young people. You have more power to influence young people's attitudes than the United Nations, Sesame Street and their parents combined. You had an opportunity to present them with a positive gay role model, and you chose not to, I assume, because you were scared of the reaction from the religious right.

Thing #3

[Rowling] didn't feel the need to be explicit about Dumbledore's sexual preferences because she wanted to focus on character development.

I'm going to skip over the fact that many gay people might find that sentence deeply offensive.

Dumbledore was brave. Dumbledore liked to stick it to the Man (no pun intended). Dumbledore was never afraid to tell anyone his opinion, no matter how powerful or dangerous they were.

Except no one in the Harry Potter world knew he was gay. Not Harry, or anyone else that we know of. So he was in the closet.

So if a man as open and brave as Dumbledore felt he needed to keep his sexuality a secret - exactly what kind of a world is the Potterverse? How homophobic must the world be for Dumbledore to conceal such an important part of his identity? That's not a "positive message" at all, or a "prolonged argument for tolerance". It's sad and regressive and scary.

Thing #4

Seriously. Like Rita Skeeter wouldn't have known and put it in her book.

Making a difference

Watch this if you're a teacher. No, watch it if you think that being a teacher is a soft option. Just watch it.

Spoilery Pottery Initial Thoughts

I have such a complicated relationship with Harry.

I approach him as a reader, a fan, a critic, a children's literature professional and a writer.

I spent the weekend with my peeps, curled up on sofas under doonas, munching on pumpkin cupcakes and bagels and listening to Snaz read the book aloud. It was awesome. We laughed, we cried, we complained at the huge tracts of exposition. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, as I always have whenever I've read a HP book.

There are a lot of criticisms I could make, but I'm going to skip over most of them. You can overlook a lot of faults for a book that inspires so much hype, joy, love and enthusiasm.

BUT.

There's just this one thing.

The muggles.

I really, really, really wanted there to be a Muggle in the final battle. I wanted, just ONCE in the entire 7 part series, for there to be a Muggle who was a Good Guy. Not someone nasty or stupid or ineffectual. Someone GOOD. I really thought that we might see the New Improved Dudley again.

And after the series railed for so long against the Slytherins and Death Eaters for their attitudes towards halfbloods and mudbloods and purebloods - what happened with the Good Guys in the end? All the wizards married wizards and had little pureblood wizard babies. No mixed marriages. No 'squibs'. It just totally validated everything the bad guys were gunning for.

Even the single interracial relationship (Lupin and Tonks) wasn't permitted to exist in the Happily Ever After. And tell me Dobby wasn't totally the black guy who dies in the first half of an action movie.

Finally, I just need to share the cover of Melbourne's right-wing tabloid propaganda machine Sunday Herald Sun, on the day when most of the English-speaking world were reading Harry Potter:
For a moment I wasn't sure if I was seeing the Herald Sun or the Daily Prophet. Then I saw that peculiar use of the word Wizard! and wondered if there was a Harry Potter musical.

The Good Fight

At the launch of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist*, both Ros Price (the publisher) and David Levithan (one of the two authors) said some very nice things.

I don't think it's entirely true to say that the book only got published in Australia because Mike and I pushed so hard for it. The book got published in Australia because it's fucking awesome. We just pointed that out to some people (okay, everyone we met), and Allen & Unwin were nice enough to listen.

It is very gratifying to learn that, when it comes to YA in Australia, my opinions count for something. It's flattering. It also feels like a responsibility.

I have a pile of signed books from Reading Matters, from writers who I respect more than I can say. And many of these authors, above their signatures, thanked me for "fighting the good fight".

This is, in part, a reference to David Levithan's amazing, moving, provocative and inspiring talk about "Killing the Vampires" and making sure the right books get to the teens who really need to see themselves on the shelves of their library.

I can't do justice to what he said with a neat summary. You will have to hear it yourselves. It was a talk for librarians, but everyone needs to hear it. At the conference, it received a standing ovation. I was not the only person moved to tears.

And you need to do more than hear it. You need to copy it, you need to put it on your blog, you need to tell people about it, talk about it, think about it. It has a Creative Commons license, so use it as you will.

Help us fight the good fight.


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* review here and first chapter here

Ephebiphobia

Dear Mr Schembri,

My friend Jellyfish has just sent me a rather irate email containing a link to your latest offering in The Age.

In response to your '10 key reasons why children should not be allowed in cinemas', I would like to alert you of '1 really key reason why Jim Schembri should not be allowed in print'.

The other day, David Levithan said that homophobia was the last acceptable prejudice. He was wrong. There is another one, and it is ephebiphobia. The fear of young people. (or pedophobia, the fear of children and babies).

Do you think if Jim Schembri had written an article on 10 reasons why we shouldn't let WOMEN or JEWS or BLACK PEOPLE into cinemas, it would have been published?

Why does our society see young people as some kind of lesser species?

Apart from all of the absolute bollocks you see in the media about "teens running wild" and all of the head-shaking and 'in my day'-ing that goes on today, have a think about these 10 things:

1. children as young as 12 can be tried for crimes as adults

2. children can't vote, as they are cited to have a lower level of reasoning. But adults don't have to prove any level of reasoning to vote.

3. the 'lower level of reasoning' line was also used to prevent people with different coloured skins and vaginas from voting up until the 20th century.

4. Senile people have a say in how their country is run. Alcholics and psychotics and murderers and rapists have a say in how their country is run. Not young people.

5. children are forced to attend underfunded schools, have little or no access to free health care, and will have to grow up coping with catastrophic global warming, but have no voice to protest or bring about change.

6. they also have to pay taxes AND superannuation, if they are earning money (not to mention the fucking GST), but with no legal say in how those funds are managed.

7. in the US, poverty among young people exceeds all other age groups, yet the government spends 10 times more on each poor senior than each poor child.

8. you can be a Christian and a child. A Muslim and a child. You can be gay. You can be disabled. You can be poor. You can be homeless. But you're not allowed to have an opinion. (or, if Jim Schembri has his way, go to the fucking cinema)

9. many people in Positions of Influence seem to think that young people should constantly be educated - that books must be either Classics or about Real Issues (see the YA winner of the WA Premier's Award for a recent and tooth-grinding example), television should only be documentaries, and computers are just plain evil.

10. I'll stop ranting now and quote Goosebumps author RL Stine: I believe that kids as well as adults are entitled to books of no socially redeeming value.

Stop picking on the young people. Or at least give them an opportunity to respond.

(With thanks to the NYRA and this episode of the West Wing.)