Paksworld

A month or two ago, I wrote a post over on LiveJournal about cooties, following on a fun discussion at this year’s World SF Convention. In this context, cooties are elements of someone’s work to which a reader has an aversive allergic response. Stories that contain common cooties will repel segments of the possible readership. Cooties are most common in the areas of sex, violence, religion, and power/politics, but are so widespread that a writer cannot possibly avoid including some cootie-generating element.

Cooties generate their strong aversive signal because they’re associated (not always accurately) with an array of things the reader doesn’t like, and serve as a distant early warning of ick ahead. (“Ick” is a technical term for what sickens a reader if he/she encounters it.) Thus someone for whom girl-loves-horse storylines are Ick will see the appearance of a horse and a girl in the same book as a cootie. “Not another stupid girl and her horse!” Eye-roll.

I was reminded of the cootie factor at a choir party this past weekend, when someone asked about my new book, and I mentioned the proposed title, Blood and Bone. The listener immediately recoiled (classic cootie-phobic reaction) and said that she probably couldn’t read it, as it was going to be too violent. When I presented the title as referring to characters’ bloodlines (which it does, in part) and to a reverence for the bones of their ancestors (which it does, in part), the listener sat forward, seemed interested, and no longer repelled. For this listener, the words “blood” and “bone” had cootie power that made it impossible (without specific guidance) to consider the many other possible meanings.

Another characteristic of a cootie-phobic reaction is that the amount of cootie-material in the story is magnified by the cootie-phobic reader. A single cootie can contaminate the entire book–a minor character in a minor subplot with a cootie-marker will turn off a reader sensitive to that cootie, and if asked, the reader may insist that the entire book is about that cootie-marked character. One character using a cussword (even if true to character) will make the book unreadable to someone with a profanity-cootie phobia. (This is why any writer who attempts to show realistic diversity is doomed to hit multiple cootie switches.) Readers with many strong cootie phobias are like the hyper-allergic person, constantly on the lookout for something that might bother them. Everything in the book must be cootie-free (allergen-free) for them to risk it.

From the reader’s perspective, cootie-phobias are often–like the behavior of an over-active immune system–more the cause of distress than the story itself. Reading past cooties can widen a reader’s literary enjoyment. I know this from having pushed myself past some of my own cootie-phobias–though I’ve also found myself in a pool of piranhas when the cootie warning was in fact accurate. But testing the cootie’s accuracy refines it–makes it more useful, so that it doesn’t keep me from reading books I enjoy, but still warns me off the piranhas.

From the writer’s perspective, cootie-phobias are a minefield, and trying to avoid all the mines means a very slow and (even if successful) uninteresting journey across the length of the book. Better to write the story as it needs to be written, and accept the loss of readers whose cootie-phobias were triggered by something. I’ve been told by upset readers (and by those who won’t even consider my work because they have a genre-cootie-phobia, or a cover-picture cootie-phobia) that my books have cooties. Yup. They have cooties, because cooties reside in the minds of readers.

Since I write them, and write what I like to read, they don’t have my cooties.

(What are my cootie-phobias? Not telling.)