Karen Sandler

Karen’s Blog

  • 5 Things I’d Tell My Teen Self

    A lot of time has passed since my teen years. They were decades & decades ago, and you would think the memories might have been washed away by the intervening events in my life. I’ve finished college, worked at all sorts of interesting jobs, met my now-husband, bought a house, got married, had two kids, moved from my birthplace in Southern California to Northern California, sold my first book, then many other books.

    I’ve cried innumerable tears, have had many hours filled with laughter, had to say goodbye to a dog, several cats, a few horses, and most heartbreaking, my mother. I’ve seen my father decline until he no longer knows me.

    So my teen years should have been washed away. How could those seven years have compared to the decades that followed?

    And yet, I remember so much of that time. Some experiences seem as real and immediate to me today as they did then. I haven’t forgotten the turmoil and the triumphs (however few they seemed at the time), the heartache and the joy (however infrequent it was).

    I started thinking about what I would tell that confused and often heartbroken young girl I once was. I came up with the following thoughts and advice:

    1) Other people’s opinions of you have nothing to do with who you really are.

    If they think you’re ugly, stupid, awkward, dorky, screw them. They know nothing, nothing about what’s really inside you. You might be just as klutzy as they say you are, but you have beautiful ideas. Maybe according to them you don’t wear the “right” clothes, maybe you don’t even like them yourself, but your Mom/Dad/financial situation made you wear them. But that can never change your heart, your soul, your dreams.

    I was a frequent target of derision and torment by a certain group of girls back in junior high. It hurt terribly and made me feel worse about myself than I already did. But I was smarter than those girls. I had a wild imagination their worst bullying could never touch and I channeled that creativity into stories and later, books.

    2) The pain doesn’t last forever.

    If it does, if it’s unrelenting, then you need some help outside yourself. If you can’t share that pain with your parents, find someone else you trust to talk to.

    But if it’s heartache because the boy doesn’t like you back, or you’ve been made to feel like an idiot once again by that same cruel bully, the hurt will heal. It takes time, it seems impossible sometimes to get past. But your heart will let go of the pain eventually. It will find a new focus, whether it’s a new love or a new passion. The hurt will lose its grip on you, and you will look at the world with fresh eyes.

    3) You won’t die from embarrassment, even though sometimes you’ll wish you had.

    I was a pretty smart kid in school. Maybe not straight A’s, but I got a lot of good grades. Teachers liked to hold me up as an example.

    But that meant nothing when I did some awkward, bonehead thing that made me feel like the biggest idiot in the world. It often had to do with me regularly blurting out something that should never have been said out loud. When I’d do something like that, I’d want to just crawl under a rock and disappear.

    But I lived through the mortification. I came out on the other side, still me. I learned, one agonizing experience at a time, to count to ten, hold my tongue, and rethink my words. I’m not perfect (still planting my foot in my mouth upon occasion), but I’ve learned to live through the awkward moments. Teen self, you will too.

    4) You can’t always get what you want.

    Not every dream is going to come true. Not everything you wish for can become reality. Some of your dreams might rely too much on what other people will do. You can’t make someone like you. You might never be one of the popular kids, because the gatekeepers might never want to let you in. Instead you have to walk right past their gate, and find your own meadow that isn’t confined by certain rules of what popular is.

    You can’t wish your way into winning, because the ones judging are outside yourself. You can work your hardest and still fall short because that dream just wasn’t meant for you (sorry). And sometimes, you’ll let go of that dream to pursue another. Or you’ll put a dream aside for years, then when you take it up again, you’re ready for it, you have the skills you need, you know the right people who can help you, you have all the information at your fingertips. And everything will fall into place.

    5) Love yourself. Love yourself. Love yourself.

    Even if your nose is too big, or your hair always sticks out everywhere, or it seems like everyone is beautiful except for you. It is impossible to feel the love of others, to believe you’re worthy of that love if you don’t love yourself first. Yeah, this might sound phony and woo-woo, but it’s absolutely true. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, pretend. And hopefully, someday, you’ll really feel that love, you’ll really know it.

    That’s it. That’s all I’ve got, teen self. I’m glad to have known you. And glad to have been you.

  • Happy Turkey Day

    To those in the U.S., happy Thanksgiving! I hope whatever you feast on Thursday is abundant, delicious and entirely to your liking. Even that weird green bean casserole with the funny crunchy stuff on top.

    Now I’m off to make some pies.

  • The Mystery of Where We Come From

    My husband and I do genealogy as a hobby. My husband more than me because his relatives are much more organized. He got a head start with a cousin who’d explored that particular branch of the family in great detail. Then there’s the fact that there are so many cousins that make it easy to stumble across a Sandler or other relation in the census or birth records.

    My ancestors are much more evasive. There’s my father’s father’s family, the Stiers, who were Austrian (Hungarian?) Jews. They came here sometime in the mid to late 1800s, had a few children, which might have involved more than one marriage. They then conveniently scooted off to Britain for a few years in such a way that they avoided the census, so I have no idea where they were when. My grandfather was born in the UK (supposedly in Greenwich–no idea for sure since I can’t find the records), then the whole family returned to the U.S.

    Problem #1 with the Stiers is that this seems to be a common name among German Christians. While I do have another relation of German ancestry (don’t get me started on the Satenburgs), I know my Stiers were not German, nor Christian. But was Samuel married to another wife before Fanny? Is that why his oldest daughter is so much older than her brothers? No clue.

    Ida (Chave), Louis & Harry (Aaron) Beckenstein

    The Beckensteins, my father’s mother’s side, are much more orderly. That’s them to the left. Because of their somewhat unusual names, I found them fairly easily in a ship manifest. The person transcribing the manifest had made a bit of a hash of their names, but still, my Ellis Island search led me to a record with Aaron and Chave Beckenstein. Aaron later changed his name to Harry and Chave to Ida.

    What’s kind of cool is that there is a definite family resemblence between Ida and my niece (my niece would be Ida’s great-great-granddaughter). Aaron even looks quite a bit like my niece’s brother.

    A few others who are hanging out in my family tree–the great-grandfather who was a stowaway coming over from Italy, the grandfather who changed his name from the unusual (Fratantonio) to the common (Russo), perhaps because he was into some shady dealings and wanted to stay on the down-low. That grandfather, Domenic Russo, died in prison when I was an infant.

    Then there’s this mystery man who’s not even related to me. He was apparently the friend of my great-uncle Sam Beckenstein. Uncle Sam saved a ton of pictures from the 40s, mostly photos of his girlfriends of which there were many (he never married). I came across the photo to the left amongst his other pictures, which I’m guessing was taken during WW2. Uncle Sam had written on the back Lew Gill standing in front of our tent.

    Since I have no idea who Lew Gill is, I posted the photo on Facebook and Twitter in hopes someone would jump out of the blue and e-mail me to say, “That’s my dad/grandfather/uncle!” It would be very cool if that happened, but so far, no luck.

    As a writer, I can’t resist wondering. Where exactly was the picture taken? Here in the States, or overseas? Did Lew survive the war? Was he married before he headed off to the army, or did he marry when he got home? What kind of life did he have? Did he raise a family? Could his children/grandchildren be out there somewhere?

    It would be lovely to have those questions answered, to solve the mystery. In the meantime, my imagination will just have to fill in the blanks.

  • RTW – Required Reading

    YA Highway this week wonders what books I might recommend as required reading in a high school English/Literature class. You gotta figure that the first title that springs to mind is Tankborn, because a girl’s gotta promote. But actually, if I say so myself, Tankborn would be an excellent choice for a high school reading program with its themes of class, race, and what it means to be human. Okay, shameless plug over.

    The first non-Tankborn book I thought of is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This is a mind-blowing book in terms of gender identity, but also a fascinating piece of worldbuilding. I can imagine long discussions about what might be different about earth’s societies if we truly lacked separate genders, if we were only sexual beings a few days a month.

    Even more intriguing is the main character Ai Genly, a male-gendered person through whose eyes we see the people of Gethen. They consider him “the pervert” because he’s stuck in his male body. The students could imagine themselves as either the single-gendered person or an androgyn. Or that androgyn in his/her monthly “kemmer” when their body chooses a specific gender. One more possible discussion topic is the fact that the Gethens are living in an Ice Age. The students might be asked to consider how a people could survive in that kind of environment.

    A second book that comes to mind is Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. This is a post-apocalyptic story, set on earth a few hundred years after a catastrophic war. In the particular community of Women’s Country, the women live a largely agrarian life within a walled city with a few male servants. The remaining men are warriors who live outside the city.

    The men who live with the women are gentle beta types, while the warriors, as you might imagine, are fierce alphas. The women only interact with the warrior men once a year, when they are brought in to father the next generation. However there’s more to the relationship between the warrior men and dominant women than it seems on the surface.

    There’s plenty to discuss here–the impact of a feminist-dominant society, the usefulness of aggressiveness in this world, what it truly means to be a man. The roles we play in the world, and which of those we choose ourselves and which we let society place upon us. On top of this, it’s a beautifully written book.

    You might see a common element in these two books. They’re both written by women. So many (nearly all) of what are considered the classics were written by men. Yes, there are the Bronte sisters’ books and Austen’s. But while those offer an intriguing look into the society of the time, they don’t give as much meaty food for thought as the two SF books that I mention.

    So that would be my final recommendation: Add more women-authored books to the required reading list. There are many out there besides Ursula K. Le Guin and Sheri S. Tepper. Octavia Butler, Julian May, Nancy Kress to name a few. It’s time for school districts to seek them out.

  • What’s Science Got to Do With It?

    Last Thursday, #MGlitchat’s topic of the week was science fiction in middle grade books. I write YA rather than MG, but I was kind of jonesing for a writerly discussion (and science fiction is a subject dear to my heart), so I joined in. It proved to be a lively topic.

    In the course of the hour or so I was participating, a few of us got into a side discussion of what constituted science fiction. Since I’m of, ahem, a certain age, and have been reading SF for a few decades (no, I won’t tell you how many), I ascribe to the classical definition of the genre. That is, it’s science fiction if, were you to remove the science element, there would be no story.

    One of the other folks on the chat wondered if that definition is no longer valid. I think it’s a fine question to ask, but I just can’t think of another definition that would serve the same purpose. It is, after all, science fiction, so there has to be science. I guess the only question would be, can you call it SF if there’s no actual science? Or if the only “science” aspect are space ships, or laser guns, or people use unfamiliar slang?

    Are there books that one might want to call science fiction, but have no science integral to the story? For instance, is Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games science fiction? It certainly has a science fiction feel to it. But what’s the science?

    How about the Games themselves? There’s a great deal of science not only in the creation of the horrific arenas, but also in the tracking of the participants every moment. There’s a certain scientific aspect to the projection of the future as well (although that element of the series could also be labeled “speculative fiction,” which is a more generic term).

    What about my own book, Tankborn? Is it truly science fiction? I believe it is. Yes, I could have created a straight fiction novel based on the Indian caste system but it would have been an entirely different book. Instead I used caste in a futuristic novel in which a bastardization of that system re-constitutes itself in a society that has left earth and colonized another planet. There is science in the creation of the genetically engineered GENs, science in the circuitry wired in their bodies that is used to control them, science in the devices that are used to interface with the GENs’ annexed brains. Some of the “science” in the book, e.g., my lev-cars and illusory holographic projections might not be strictly necessary to the story, but they do flesh out the setting. However if the science of the GENs were pulled out of Tankborn, many crucial aspects of the story would fall apart.

    So are dystopian books, in and of themselves, automatically science fiction? I can’t speak for every dystopian out there since I haven’t read them all (yet :-)). But in addition to the Hunger Games trilogy, there are other dystopians that would certainly qualify in my mind as SF. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind is an excellent example, as is Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In both books, certain scientific advances (in addition to social changes) led to the dystopian world depicted in the story. In fact, without the science and social aspects in tandem, there would not be a story.

    I’d love to hear others’ opinions of what science fiction means to them. I’d like to hear what books you think are science fiction and why you think they are. For instance, I believe Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a fantastic SF book, but some might call it literary. So what are you reading in science fiction? And what’s science got to do with it?