Category: writing

Ranting

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.

My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.

 

There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”

An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

Down the Rabbit Hole

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A white rabbit wearing a coat, standing on its hind legs and staring at a watch. Painting by John Tenniel from an early edition of Alice in Wonderland.

It is common, in my circles, to speak of “going down the rabbit hole.” Writers, of course, are notorious for starting to research some minor point and emerging hours later having chased down one idea only to find another sort-of-related point that must also be investigated and so on.

My partner, who only writes when he has to, does the same thing just for the hell of it – and then bemoans the fact that he stayed up too late chasing down ideas on his screen. He complains he spends too much time staring at a screen, but of course what he’s doing there is reading something interesting that leads to something else interesting, which I don’t think is the real problem with too much screen time.

I mean, people like me and my partner and most of the writers I know would be doing the same thing without the internet. We’d just be doing it with dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, various other books around the house and – once we’d exhausted those sources – the nearest library.

Going down rabbit holes is part of what makes life worth living.

Funny, though, when I looked the phrase up online – to determine if, in fact, it does come from Alice in Wonderland (it apparently does) – I saw a few comments that implied that it’s not a positive thing.

For example, the Wikipedia entry says:

It has come to mean that someone has become interested in something, usually by accident; and often the subject does not deserve the amount of attention that a person gives.

I say “bah.”

The reason I am writing about this is because I read a piece in The New York Times by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff entitled “We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask.” (gift link). In this essay, which among other things critiques the use of so-called AI, she observes:

Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting.

That resonated with me deeply. I love undirected exploration. I’m very inefficient at research. And more than anything else, I love connecting things from very different points of view, things that might not seem connected to anyone else. Continue reading “Down the Rabbit Hole”…

John Warner’s More Than Words

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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cover of the book More Than WordsI’ve subscribed to John Warner’s newsletter, “The Biblioracle Recommends,” for some time now. It’s all about reading and writing, a thoughtful source for ideas on how to teach writing and for clear criticism of so-called AI.

He publishes every Sunday and I set aside time to read his essay carefully because he always gives me something to chew on. With that in mind, I checked his latest book More Than Words out of my library.

I was not disappointed.

Warner writes lyrically about writing in ways that will make perfect sense to all writers. For me, reading this book put a name to many things about writing that I knew but had never put into words.

For example, he says:

If we consider writing as the fully embodied practice that it is, words and sentences are not the basics or base units of writing. To start writing, first you need an idea.

Then he adds, after having spent some time thinking about what he just wrote:

It’s not even a full-fledged idea that’s the base unit of writing. It’s something smaller. Let’s call it a “notion.” If an idea is the atom, the true building block of writing matter, consider the notion a subatomic particle, perhaps along with the “inkling,” “sense,” “suspicion,” and “hunch.”

He also quotes from other good writers.

I often feel that I don’t think hard enough about things until I have to write about them.
—Rebecca Solnit

 A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann 

Continue reading “John Warner’s More Than Words“…

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

The Physical Act of Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A friend on Facebook pointed to a study that said writing by hand used more of the brain than using a keyboard. As someone who prefers keyboards to writing by hand and has since I learned to type at 16, I was a little skeptical.

I looked up the study and not only found it, but found a significant critique of it published in the same journal.

When I read over the study, I discovered that the participants did the “writing by hand” using a digital pen on a screen, while they did the typing using only their right index finger – that is, the equivalent of “hunt and peck” typing, which is not the way that people generally type on a keyboard. They limited it to right-handed people as well.

According to the study, they did this because using both hands would make it hard to interpret the results. The critique noted the one-finger typing as a problem, as well as looking at other things from the perspective of researchers and finding it wanting.

And I came away deciding they hadn’t really proved anything about the difference between keyboard use and writing by hand.

I suspect there is some value in learning to write by hand – the study points to the understanding of how each letter is constructed, which makes sense to me. But if you want to convince me that it’s better than using a keyboard, you’re going to need to study people using pen on paper and typing with both hands on a keyboard.

I am assuming that most people who spend time using a computer keyboard use it with both hands and know the QWERTY layout in their fingers. If a large number of people are actually doing some form of hunt and peck while staring at the keyboard rather than the screen, the bigger question is why aren’t the kids learning to use a keyboard properly.

I have seen all kinds of arguments about whether kids should still learn cursive. There are those who argue that learning to print is enough. Perhaps it is, but printing was always harder for me than longhand. So I’m inclined to go for teaching all those things – printing, cursive, and typing – and letting people decide which to use when.

Lately teachers have taken to requiring students to write by hand in blue books in class to keep them from using LLMs (“AI”) to write their essays, so they need to be able to print or write longhand. A friend of mine tutors a high school student who is finding the physical act of writing difficult because he wasn’t taught it well when he was younger.

I take notes by hand out of the books I read in my morning reading practice and have noticed a slightly different need for paying attention when writing by hand. But here’s the thing: once I learned to type, I vastly preferred writing on a keyboard where I could see what I was turning out much more easily.

manual typewriterNow mind you, I learned on an actual typewriter back before the personal computer existed. In typing class we used electric IBMs – not the correcting ones that I lusted after as a college student, but still fine machines. At home and for my school assignments, I used an old style manual typewriter, one of the ones that takes effort to punch.

Despite what the research implied, typing is a physical act. Using a keyboard is embodied in my physical self. And while computer keyboards don’t require as much effort as the old fashioned manual machine, the physicality is similar.

I put my fingers on the keyboard, think of what I want to say, and it comes out. I don’t have to think about the individual letters unless I use a word that I’m not sure how to spell.

I like writing this way much more than I like writing by hand, because writing by hand requires more concentration on the physical act of writing – making the letters clear enough, staying within the lines, and so forth.

I pay more attention to the idea when typing, and that’s what I want to pay attention to. Continue reading “The Physical Act of Writing”…

What Novels Can Be

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A sailboat on a blue sea. The cover of the book The Curve of the World.Some years ago I took a workshop with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he pointed out – referencing criticisms of his books for being too expository – that one of the things a novel does is give you room to put all those details in.

Short stories are best when they leave out everything that isn’t essential. Flash fiction is the most extreme version of this. But novels can be expansive.

In keeping with this, I remember a concept that I believe I first heard from Vonda N. McIntyre: there are rules for writing a novel but no one knows what they are.

Of course, Vonda didn’t ever write the same book twice. Neither, by the way, does Karen Joy Fowler, but I’m thinking about Vonda today because her last book, The Curve of the World, just came out from Aqueduct Press.

It’s a fabulous book, but it doesn’t fit easily into people’s preconceptions about what a novel ought to be.

Vonda always described herself as a science fiction writer, even when some people persisted in calling The Moon and the Sun “fantasy.” In the chat on the online launch of The Curve of the World last Saturday, John Berry observed that Vonda didn’t consider the book to be alternative history.

I’d call it speculative history, but I’m pretty sure Vonda thought of it as science fiction set in the past – speculation about what those cultures and lives might be.

As someone who has read David Graeber and David Wengrew’s The Dawn of Everything, I think Vonda’s speculation about the past is, at its core, as true to what might have happened as it can be for a time about which we have little information. Things could have happened the way Vonda imagined them. Continue reading “What Novels Can Be”…

Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It’s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:

On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

I mean, has this guy ever spent time around musicians? All they want to do is mess around with their instruments or their songs or jam with others. My own experience of music is mostly from marching band and church choir, places where you spend a lot of time in practice and don’t get paid.

And even the people who do it for a living also do it for fun. One of my favorite musicians, Joe Ely, passed recently, and almost every one of the many appreciations I’ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.

It’s obvious if you hang out with writers or artists or musicians or a lot of other people that many, many human beings love to do things that take a lot of work before you get good. And many of those things aren’t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.

The only people using the predictive software labeled AI to do those things are people who want money more than they want to create. I don’t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You’ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.

I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers – who often work for free these days – and he didn’t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian’s review of the book.

(The chatbot can’t read, so it didn’t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn’t read the book either.)

The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work. Continue reading “Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work”…

Pocket universes and super heroes

personby Gillian Polack
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Eight years ago I spent ten days in Amiens. I had great aims and ambitions. I wanted to explore how World War I changed the people and the landscape. I did a lot of research in Australia early on, which was just as well, because my body was beginning to ache at the seams and I could only do half the research. I did that half, and I also did the related research for a novel. That novel is timely now, for all the wrong reasons.

It’s about the Green Children. There are medieval tales of the Green Children of Woolwich, and they are oddly consistent. I wanted to add a pocket universe to the story and turn it into fantasy with a little bit of scientific underlay. The best place to do this wasn’t in England, where the story came from. It was in the Zone Rouge in France.

I wanted to understand how Jewish superheroes would create themselves if they weren’t strangers in a world full of hate, but refugees in a tiny universe where they were the majority. I wanted to see the stupidity that comes with confidence and being the centre of things, and to put a non-Jewish superhero at the heart of the story, showing how she saw the world around her and how she dealt with some really bad cards. In other words, I wanted to reverse some of our assumptions.

Part of this was asking, “What would our world be like with magic?” I’m an historian and for me there is not one simple type of magic, but complex systems that interact and that change over time. In my novel I used some historical systems and some less historical, and added a couple that only belong in that other world. If there are many systems and if they’re not simplified for ease of tale-telling then they leave more chaos in their wake when they’re abused. Also, how would magic be regulated? I used the UK for the regulation of magic, because I could bring important and old families into the story. Also because it means I could play in the wonderful sandpit of alternate history in London. Imagine a history of England where Jews were brought back in the 15th century? I wrote a short story to explain a part of this, and it was a finalist in the Sidewise Awards, which means… it’s Alternate History, even though it has magic. I rather like this. The story is in Other Covenants.

I lived in London and I lived in Paris for a little, many years ago, and, historically, London is a lot more fun for the type of story I wanted to tell. Pop-up history, small churches with pits to hell… I needed to know that terrain. I know the church in question (and its history) and I know the streets in question. This is not just due to having lived there for a little, many years ago.  It’s because I used to teach students about medieval London at the Australian National University, and because I spent a whole day walking the whole of Cheapside because the maps of it showing it in the Middle Ages did not fit the modern maps. I took photos that document how and why Cheapside changed and can explain what this means to the wider City of London. I looked at the difference between Old Jewry, the newer Jewry where my family came from, and Golders’ Green. I walked all these places an took pictures, at various times.

A small US imprint published my novel as their first book. I never got to do a slide show of all the places and explain how the Somme and how London and Paris came together and how I used my historian-self to furnish the novel. Before the novel came out, I talked with a writers’ group about the layers of history in landscape and how war changed everything, using the Somme as a case study. Then COVID hit. Most novels published in the first two years of COVID are lesser-known. This doesn’t change the fact that my world-building for The Green Children Help Out was amazing fun.

What book should I introduce next week? Time-travel, magic in Canberra, non-fiction? I’m open to suggestions.

Distracted Reading

personby Madeleine Robins
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I just read a book that took me forever to finish. As it was one of the many, many books I have to read as a World Fantasy Award judge the slowness of the read was a problem. Well aware of the stack of “to be reads” teetering in my room, I kept wanting to move faster. But I couldn’t. Why? It’s not a bad book, the prose is readable, most of the characters are interesting, the setting, based on an African culture, is intriguing and lovingly detailed. Sounds great.

But there was a pronunciation guide at the front of the book.

I am a whole word reader: what this means in practice is that I will note a word without hearing it (trying to learn to read using phonics slowed me down so much when I was a kid that I thought I was developmentally challenged). Even with names with multiple diacritics (signaling intonation, stress, and pronunciation) I sort of note the shape of the word and zip on past. Unless there is a pronunciation guide at the front of the book. For some damned reason, paging past that guide meant that thereafter, every time I encountered a name, I was compelled to page back to the pronunciation guide and see if I was reading the name correctly–even with the names with no diacritics. Nine times out of ten I was correct. The thing is, to get to the story and keep everyone straight, I didn’t need that pronunciation guide. So why is it there?

I generally find maps, lists of characters, explanations of social hierarchies, glossaries, and other world building stuff to be distractions. If they exist, I think they should be at the back of the book (yes, even those pages long lists of characters in Dostoevsky which I think must be provided lest the Western reader get tangled up in patronymics). I also tend to think, in modern fantasy, that these things signal, either that the author has not done a good enough job massaging the world-building into the text, or that the author is so in love with their world-building that they want everyone to see what they’ve created.

I recognize that impulse, believe me, I do. 9/10ths of the worldbuilding work I do when I’m writing second-world fantasy never makes it to the page, and yet it is work I’m proud of, and why can’t I show it off? But I don’t think it helps most books, and in some cases it actively hinders it.

In the case of this book, I think there may have been another reason for all this front matter. The author is writing for a Western audience that may not be (probably isn’t) well versed in her culture. In using a pronunciation guide she’s offering that audience an opportunity to learn her language, to get it right, to hear the names as if she was pronouncing them.

The problem is that, by doing this, the author privileged her desire that the reader get it right, over the reader’s (which is to say my) desire to stay in the story and get pulled along with it.

The presence of the pronunciation guide at the front of the book made it impossible for me not to check each time a name showed up. Why couldn’t I ignore the guide? I am not certain–maybe because for me it turned the book from a story to get involved in into a lesson. I realized the further I went, the more invested I was in sounding out the names–even names I was familiar with. I don’t think that’s what this writer intended.

Don’t get between me and your story, please. I’m distractible enough.