{"id":5293,"date":"2014-10-23T12:16:18","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T20:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5293"},"modified":"2014-10-23T13:12:25","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T21:12:25","slug":"climbing-mount-canlit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5293","title":{"rendered":"Climbing Mount CanLit."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAn adolescent girl comes to terms with her burgeoning lesbianism on the windswept shores of Canada\u2019s west coast while dealing with her emotionally distant father.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus goes my stock exemplar of that branch of fiction known as \u201cCanLit\u201d. Some of you may find it familiar; I\u2019ve certainly recited it often enough. Others may find it resonant because they\u2019ve, you know, actually read CanLit.<\/p>\n

CanLit doesn\u2019t like us genre types much, as many of those who\u2019ve applied for a Canada Council grant might tell you. That\u2019s okay. I don\u2019t like CanLit much, either. (Except for Margaret Atwood, actually. I devoured her early stuff, back before she ascended into Heaven with the gods. Life Before Man<\/em>, Cat\u2019s Eye<\/em>\u2014 I even liked Surfacing<\/em>, believe it or not, although I suspect it may not have aged well. The woman\u2019s biology connections really shone through, and this was way before she started stealing gengineered dystopias from the ghetto.)<\/p>\n

Anyhow. CanLit and I don\u2019t generally get along, and that\u2019s okay. Like certain people you run into at cons, there\u2019s a kind of unspoken agreement to look past each other when you both end up at the same room parties. But while I take a kind of live-and-let-live attitude to the stuff, I\u2019d certainly speak up were anyone were to try to put my own writing in that camp. Not that that would ever happen in a million years, of course.<\/p>\n

At least, that\u2019s what I thought until yesterday, when Amazon.com declared otherwise.<\/p>\n

It almost slipped past me. I don\u2019t check my Blindsight<\/em> ratings all that much any more; I\u2019ve been hitting refresh a lot more often on the Echopraxia<\/em> page, fighting off the inevitable growing despair that accompanies confirmation of that old rule about 90% of sales happening in the first 6-8 weeks. (My baby is already nine weeks old.) But for the past couple of days I\u2019ve been poking at a retrospective comparison of the Blindoprax titles, weighing their reader reviews, running rudimentary stats on their respective rankings\u2014 and it was during such a data-gathering expedition that I encountered the following flag.<\/p>\n

\"CanLit2\"<\/a>

Click to embiggen. Because you probably don’t think you’re seeing it right at this scale.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Here<\/a>

Here are other titles on the CanList, just to show what weird company I’m keeping.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yes, you read that right. For a few hours yesterday\u2014 at about the same time that a crazed gunman opened up on the steps of Parliament\u2014 Blindsight<\/em> hit #1 on Amazon\u2019s CanLit chart<\/em>.\u00a0 Pretty sure that was a coincidence.<\/p>\n

Note that this isn\u2019t even Amazon.ca. This is Amazon dot com. If you\u2019d tracked that orange flag back to the .ca site you\u2019d have seen\u2014 digging down within this Arkansas-sized market\u2014 that Blindsight<\/em> was not only the #1 CanLit title, but it was also the #1 seller under both \u201cCanadian Short Stories\u201d and<\/em> \u201cShort Stories, Canadian\u201d (although if anyone can see a meaningful distinction between those categories, I\u2019d love to know what it is). Which, while inaccurate, is nice\u2014 although not quite so surrealistic as seeing Firefall<\/em> sitting at #1 on Amazon.uk\u2019s \u201cReligious and Inspirational\u201d chart a couple of weeks back.<\/p>\n

You might also notice that the title most commonly bought together with my novels is Let\u2019s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste<\/em>. I reserve comment on the potential significance of this.<\/p>\n

\"Presented<\/a>

From Amazon.ca.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAn adolescent girl comes to terms with her burgeoning lesbianism on the windswept shores of Canada\u2019s west coast while dealing with her emotionally distant father.\u201d Thus goes my stock exemplar of that branch of fiction known as \u201cCanLit\u201d. Some of you may find it familiar; I\u2019ve certainly recited it often enough. Others may find it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5293"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5315,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5293\/revisions\/5315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}