B-Novels of the Eighties

So for some reason last night I was really craving some shoddy B-Fantasy, to the point where I would have been willing to do embarrassing things to get my hands on a Mercedes Lackey...

What's that?  B-Fantasy?  Oh, it's the same concept as B-movies - formulaic, low production value, flat characters - just with fantasy literature.  Basically, what normal people think of when they think of fantasy, with the teenage protagonist who has to save the world from the Dark Lord and runs all over the countryside learning magic and eating stew.  Etc.

Anyway, since all I brought with me to my apartment was some beautiful magic realism and some weird children's genre-benders, I was stuck.  See, books are like food.  Sometimes you want to go out to a fancy restaurant for steak and shrimp alfredo, or whatever you order (that actually sounds really good right now...) and sometimes you just want to heat up some Kraft mac and cheese in the microwave, because that's what you grew up on, and even if as an adult it disgusts you intellectually, and you can't bear to read the list of ingredients, it just tastes so bad, but so good.

But since I didn't have any to read, I started listing and categorizing and researching to try and pin down what makes B-Fantasy B-Fantasy.  Because apparently when I want mindless entertainment, I have to analyze it.

I started doing a little research, and here are my findings thus far.  Mostly is it some half-assed hypotheses and some Wikipedia trawling, but I intend to reasearch the matter further, I really do.

B-Fantasy was inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1954), and augmented by LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy (1968).  From LOTR we get the epic quest, magical macguffin, underdog hero, and Dark Lord.  After Earthsea, the protagonist is allowed to use magic, and magic becomes institutionalized.  However, many other aspects of Eathsea, such as the protagonist aging, did not catch on.  The first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published in 1974, which codified the Fantasyland setting and rules for the narrative.  This I need to look into further, but currently I blame D&D for making every fantasyland need 3races+2 - elf/dwarf/human, and two of the author's own creation; usually one of the extras is evil, and the other is unimportant to the plot.  No one besides Tolkien wrote about the elves until D&D! (needs fact-checking)

1977 saw The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, and also the Star Wars movie.  I try not to mix fantasy and scifi, but Star Wars has the traditional epic narrative wth the whiny hero that all B-Fantasy uses, and is a potential forerunner.  Shannara had 3races+2, and all the trappings of LOTR, except instead of quiet little middle-aged hobbit protagonist, it had a dopey teenage male protagonist, likely in reflection of the anticipated audience.  It is also serialized; while Tolkien stopped with a trilogy, a prequel, and a manual, if Brooks isn't dead then he's still writing to this day.

Now we come to the 80's, which is the birth of B-Fantasy proper.  David Eddings, I kid you not, saw the emerging market and decided to jump on it for the money - literally, created a formula and cranked out books for profit.  He ditched the races (though they still remained prevalent elsewhere), instead creating a multiracial and paradoxically racially uniform world of humans (everyone of every race is the same as each other member of the race), and added meddlesome deities.  Also, the hero is allowed, in fact required, to use magic.  There is also the annoying crossdressing spunky princess love-interest.  Like Leia but less badass.  Oh, and she hooks up with the teenage protagonist.

1983 - Tamora Pierce sees the spunky crossdressing redhead princess and decides that she needs her own story, thus bringing about the start of feminist fantasy that tries too hard. Also the practice of making fantasyland be America with a medieval veneer, though Eddings hinted at that with Sendaria and I can't believe I remember the name of that country.  Hero's homeland, go figure.  Also has institutionalized magic (school of magecraft and blah blah), rather than random wizards who just float around organically to make plot things happen.  Wizards become working-class.

1984, ten years after the first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published, the Dragonlance  series is born.  It was based off of a D&D campaign.  No, honestly, it was.  We have races, we have quests, we have institutionalized magic and meddlesome deities.  For the most part, they do ditch the dopey farmboy, replacing him with the naive warrior, who is supposed to be all troubled and dark, but is really just naive and angsty.  Also, the focus is more on the quest group than any one hero.  It still has very black-and-white morality.

In 1987 Mercedes Lackey published her first book.  So here we have feminist fantasy, and clique fantasy.  I have to backtrack a little for that.  In 1967, Anne McCaffery started the Dragonriders of Pern  series.  So we have a special clique of people with special powers whose job is basically to be heroes.  This solves the problem of how to keep having the same person solve all the problems; it's their job, because they are telepathically linked to a magical critter.  Because that totally makes sense.

Now we come to the 90's, which may be the Golden Age of B-Fantasy.  Most of these series started in the 80's, but gained momentum throughout the decade and eventually came to dominate the 90's.  There was still some very original stuff in the 80's - Kushner's Swordspoint, Diana Wynne Jones's everything, Suzette Hardin Elgin's Ozark Trilogy about a planet that was colonized by the South and people who ride flying Mules (it's good stuff).  In 1990, however, Robert Jordan published the first book in The Wheel of Time.

What did WoT do that other books didn't?  It's basically the same setup as Eddings' Belgariad.  Teenage farmboy whisked away from his home by a wizard, told it is his destiny by birth to save the world from the newly reawakened Dark Lord, oh yeah and he has magic powers.  All I can say is that Jordan made it bigger (800 pages per volume, minimum), he made it better (the world at least makes slightly more sense and is more memorable than Eddings'), and he made it with love.  He kept writing even when he was dying, because he loved those books so damn much.  And I can tell you a hundred things that make the books awful (don't call me on that, please), but I can at least understand why they are so loved.

Lately, however, there has been a mainstream movement away from B-Fantasy.  Conflicts have become less idealistic, between the innocent and the Evil, and more political, between the jaded older warriors and the forces of society - kind of like the teenage hero grew up.  I won't be able to say much about George R. R. Martin, because I haven't been able to get through more than three chapters, but I think he is the key to this movement.  The current generation of writers grew up on B-Fantasy, and are too jaded with it in today's society. 

Other books like David Anthony Durham's Acacia (2007) have similar political orientations - I can't talk much about this one either because I ran into the same problem as Martin, though in Durham's case the last straw was not "I don't know which of these characters I'm supposed to care about" (though there was an element of that) and more "That is the stupidest fencing lesson I have ever read."  Then there are more direct criticisms such as E.E. Knight's Age of Fire series (2002), which is basically what Wicked did to Oz, only to Dragonlance.  Sure, there are still throwbacks like Eragon (2002), but the mainstream voice of fantasy is shifting from a teenage coming-of-age quest to multiperspective stories of human conflict.  Though in fact this sort of storytelling started in the 80's as well, with the Mannerpunk movement started by Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.  It did not gain momentum until just recenty, though.

And of course there are all the little splinter genres like Feminist Fantasy, which I touched on a little, and Queer Fantasy (people say that fantasy is really homophobic, but I think that the fantasyland setting actually makes it easier to include gay characters without stigma; again I point to Swordspoint), and I've already ranted about Dragonrider Fantasy, which is actually a subcategory of Animal Companion Fantasy or perhaps as a genre rather than a device, it would fit better under Heroic Clique Fantasy - you have this world where there is this institution of heroes, be they dragonriders or Jedi or what have you, and every book/trilogy is about a different one whose turn it is to save the kingdom/world/continent.  Then there's the Supernatural Ensemble, which I'm not sure belongs in fantasy proper - technically its roots are in horror.

But right now, I still just want to read a magic pony story.

(Top) Five Books About Griffins

Why am I doing all these lists?  Because I'm bored!  And I read too much!  And I've been watching a lot of Nostalgia Chick videos!  And because I can!  And because I just finished a griffin book.

I like griffins.  You may have guessed from the title of this blog, even though it is a word I got form watching a spelling bee years ago and apparently means messy handwriting and has nothing to do with griffins.  The thing is that griffins are way underdone, especially compared to, say, dragons, or wolves.  So instead of being a "Top" Five, this is really just a list of the five books about griffins that I've read and ranked.

5.  The Griffin Mage Trilogy - Rachel Neumeier

This one I only read a couple years ago, but I had to do a library search by "griffins" because I could remember neither title nor author, nor the names of any of the characters, nor exactly what happens.  I only read the first book, Lord of the Burning Sands. So let's see.  There's this girl, who's an orphan, and lives on a horse ranch (points for not making it a generic farm) and then a bunch of griffins swoop in and make the area a desert because they have some kind of Grogromon effect on the environment.  And then they kidnap the girl because she has some special magic.  And...stuff happens, and there's a big fight at the end.  Oh, and there was some sub-plot with this soldier boy, and apparently certain humans have a kind of magic where they can control a particular type of animal, and the big twist at the end is when the soldier boy discovers he can control griffins.  Which makes them animals or what?  They seemed pretty sentient.

What I did not like about Neumeier's griffins is that she focused on making them savage and unhuman, which to me made them uninteresting. 

4.  The Fallen Moon Trilogy - K.J. Taylor

I was at the new bookstore, and I felt like I had to buy something, so when I saw The Dark Griffin  I was like "Hey!  I like griffins.  It can't be too bad."  And it wasn't.  More on that later.

My first big hurdle reading this was when I realized that people are riding these griffins.  They're  bond creatures.  But it is fairly integral to the plot, so I got over it.  And I mean, I had a griffin-rider fantasy when I was, like, twelve, so I can't really judge.  The prose isn't the best - it reads like a draft, but a draft by a rather good writer.  It's like in the original draft she wrote "And then the baby griffin grew up on its own" and by the final draft had to wrack her brains for details that really didn't matter to the plot overall.  And there there was the food.  Literally.  Her characters always eat "food."  As in:  "The food was plain but nourishing" or "His house had been ransacked, the food trampled into the floor."  Again, it seems that she put it in as a placeholder, and by the time she got to later drafts was like "Crap.  What do they eat instead of pizza and ramen?"  Her answer:  Bread.  Cheese.  Dried meat.  Apples.  Oh, and cabbage.  That was the one original item mentioned, only the thing is, you don't eat cabbage raw.  You have to cook it.  So what do they do with cabbage in...whatever the country was called?  Steam?  Boil?  Bake?  Fry?  Pickle?  Or do they eat it raw?  At one point the main character eats stew at an inn, and that's as excitingly detailed as it gets.  Read Redwall if you need inspiration, girl.

The only real problem I had with the book, though, was the characters.  They were so flat I could not tell that the one chick was the main character's actual established girlfried until they were having sex.  This was about three or four conversations in, and I had been wondering if they were a pre-couple.  There were so many times during the book I was practically shouting "Why are you doing that?  You have no motivation!  Real people don't talk like that!  Real people don't act like that!  Real people aren't motivated like that!"  Namely the part where the main characters friends all try to help him feel better after his griffin dies (oops, slight spoiler, but it's fairly early on).  And I'm thinking Dudes, his bond creature just died.  Some 'verses don't have people survive that, though that's usually the telepathic ones (points for no telepathy).  And the friends...you don't get any real sense of friendship.  The author was just "Hey, main character must have social life (insert friends here)"  None of them have a distinct personality and one can tell their only purpose is to be the failed support network.  They are characters playing a role, not people.  Also, more amusing than anything else - the one friend seems to be the only cop in town.  I mean, it's implied that it's kind of a bigger city, but every single time the cops show up, Bran is there.  Every.  Single.  Time.

I will give credit where credit is due, though, and say that the book has a very good plot.  As in I want to read the sequel even though the characters are flat as paper.  It's a Martinesque rather than a Tolkienesque story, meaning (I think; I'm just making this up and I've only read about three chapters of GRR Martin) that it is a human story with twisty political gimmicks, rather than a quest to destroy a Great Evil*.  The main character is sent to capture a wild griffin and told "Oh yeah, you'll be fine"  when really that sort of operation takes a specialized team, but he manages it even though his griffin partner dies.  And there's a mini-conspiracy against him, and this racism subplot that makes it really obvious the writer is white.  The second plotline follows the titiular dark griffin that he captured.  On the whole though, it's a really intriguing story despite the blandness of the chracters.  Plus there are references to Diana Wynne Jones, I swear there are.  The oranges.  The arena that is totally Costamaret.  You don't...?  Oh never mind, just keep reading.
(*Just read on author's website that it is supposed to be a villain origin story.  I am intrigued.  Library, y u no have sequels?!  I don't like it so much I want to spend more money on it.)

3.  The Black Griffin - Mercedes Lackey

Yes, I ranked a Mercedes Lackey book this high.  I actually kind of like this one.  Mostly because of the griffins.  This book is about...um...a sort of masseuse/psychotherapist/companion who hangs around an army camp in the middle of a war.   And so do a bunch of griffins.  Okay, they're fighting in the war, but I think the reason I actually like this book is because it is more character driven, rather than trying to destroy the Great Evil.  The war is there, but it is background to the story until the very end.  The other books in the trilogy are meh at best - the second book could show them rebuilding after the war, except by then everything's kind of rebuilt and Lackey has to introduce a new conflict from the Other Continent.  And the third book is a Disney sequel where the offspring of the main cast go off on adventures that are not nearly as interesting as the parents'.  But the first book is solid.

2.  The Firebringer Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce

Yeah, okay, the main focus in this series is on the unicorns, but the griffins are a major subplot, and there's one of the cover of the first book.  They are shown as enemies of the unicorns at first, but then they are shown to have their own culture and traditions, and eventually make peace when the unicorns decide to drive the wyverns out of their ancestral lands instead of squatting on the griffins' ancestral hunting grounds (really, the griffins were only hunting them because they drove out the deer.  It's all just a misunderstanding.).  Only it gets a little weird when the one griffin has a romancey relationship with one of the unicorns, and it's implied that they have offspring, which is like, wut?  I would kind of like to read something about that, though.  The offspring, that is.  Except it would end up being full of race-angst, so maybe it's better she left it at that.

1.  Dark Lord of Derkholm/Year of the Griffin - Diana Wynne Jones

Of course I rank Jones at the top.  Am I biased?  Only because she's a damn good writer.  Was, I mean.  Fuck.

Book 1 of the...duology...introduces Wizard Derk genetic engineering wizard, and his genetically engineered griffin offspring.  Plus the two human ones.  The rest of the plot is about how the pseudo-medieval fantasyland is being exploited for tours from a parallel world.  Wizard Derk is bullied into running the operations for a year, and his kids, griffin and human, all pitch in and help.  The second book is after the tours are abolished, and follows one of the griffin children at college dealing with the aftermath of the tours.  And yes, that makes it sound like a Disney sequel, except 1) Elda was around in the first book, she was just too young to do much, and 2)  Even though it is technically less epic, it is still quite interesting - perhaps even more interesting.  It's not a sequel, it's completely different, slightly related story.  I like these griffins (okay, they were my first impression of griffins) because they are people, not talking animals or mysterious "others."  Lackey actually managed to do that too.  Huh.  Whodathunk?

But I wanted another sequel, dammit!  I wanted to see Elda and Flury hook up!  That would have been so adorable!  And I wanted to see the Other Continent.  And now Jones is dead and there will be no more, ever!

Anyway, we have, in ascending order:  Griffins as Grogromon, Griffins as bond-creatures, Griffins as created race, Griffins as...other race, and Griffins as created race AND other race on the Other Continent.  Griffins as different magic-users from humans, griffins as the ONLY magic-users (I thought that was pretty cool, especially since the didn't spend a lot of time on exposition, just snuck it in there periodically), griffins as the same sort of magic-users as humans, griffins not exactly using magic any more than anyone else, and griffins as mostly the same sort of magic-users with cultural and personal variation.

Shortlist:  Squire by Tamora Pierce, in which there is a griffin on the cover and the main character takes care of a baby griffin for a while which does absolutely nothing to further the plot.  The griffins are just part of a magical ensemble and aren't really important.  And it's Tamora Pierce.

That's about all I had to say about griffins.  Or, well, books.  I realize I may very well be obligated now to read Game of Thrones if I'm going to be making claims like that the Tolkienist movement has now split into Eddingsian and Martinesque factions.  Or maybe I'll just stay with my indie-fantasy.

I like griffins.  I've had a griffin story on backburner for years.  Must write before they become the new dragons...do you think that could ever happen?  There's been a lot of indie dragon deconstructions lately, so they might be on their way out.

Hmm.

Top 5 Best and Worst Books About Dragons

Mostly because I'm bored, and I just found out that Dragon Fate is not even in the library catalogue yet, even though it's been out for over a month.

5 Worst Dragon Books

5.  "Joust" by Mercedes Lackey. 

It's Mercedes Lackey.  What more need be said?  Few writers can pull of such cliche, shallow characters, long-winded monologues, or overly detailed, prettified worlds.  Worldbuilding details are good, but they should always be plot-relevant and not mere decoration.  "Joust" is actually not too bad as far as dragon books go.  The dragons do not talk (At least not in the first two books, and I don't see why that would change), and seem to be on a level of very clever animals with slight telepathic tendencies.  They are fed a fantasyland drug to keep them tractable, though of course un-drugged dragons that bond with humans as hatchlings perform much better.  Really the only problem with this series is that it is by Mercedes Lackey.

4.  "Dragonflight" by Donita K. Paul

This is a kid's book, so I can't really complain of the black-and-white morality, although I would...is that Jesus?  Why is there a Jesus in a dragon book?  Not that there's anything wrong with that necessarily, and kudos for not having a typical vague pantheon, but...the distinction is between a book about religion, a book about religious characters, and religious allegory.  The first is acceptable if it asks more questions than it answers (read:  The Sparrow), the second if the characters behave like actual religious people and not idiotic fanatics (though there are real ones of those, I suppose.  But read:  Firethorn) and the third...if you subscribe to the religion and don't want to have your mindset challenged?  The Dragonflight series, however, uses religion to support its very simplistic and childlike moral structures.  It is a kid's book, I suppose, so I can't really be too hard on it.

3.  Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffery

May her soul rest in peace.  I never got into the series.  I can't remember why; I can't remember many details of what I did read, so I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that the characters and stories were not very memorable.  Everything else I have is hearsay; namely, some very problematic portrayals of gender roles and relationships.  However, since this book is what started the whole dragonrider craze, I shouldn't be too hard on it.  Or maybe I should.

2.  "Eragon" - Christopher Paolini

The fifteen year old kid had enough dedication to sit down and write a novel from beginning to end.  I'll give him that much credit.  I can also list all of his sources:  McCaffery, Eddings, Tolkien, and Star Wars.  David Eddings is the reason fantasy is shit.  No, seriously, he codified if not started all of the needless traditions that the genre bears today, though most writers have the decency to not rip off his dull magic system word for word...Anyway, let's talk about Saphira.  For starters, she has no personality.  A few of the other characters in the books have some interesting quirks, so I'm going to count that as a fault of the character and not the book in general.  Basically, she's only there to make Eragon look cool.  Like a motorcycle.  But for her, Eragon (not quite an anagram of "Garion") is the whiny little bitch hero typical of the Eddings and Star Wars traditions; can't blame Tolkien for that one - Frodo was middle-aged!

1.  Dragonlance - created by Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman

Hoo boy. Where to start?  The plots are based off of D&D campaigns.  No, really, I'm not making that up.  The writing quality varies because there are so many different writers, but the dragons.  Ah, the dragons.  I don't believe they are actually in a lot of the books.  When they are, they are color-coded for your convenience.  Shiny dragons are good, rainbow dragons are bad.  And they talk, but they don't really do much when they're not being ridden around.  The only good part I can see is that since there are so many writers, some have tried to play around with the structure; there's a short story about an awkward misunderstanding with an albino silver dragon, and one where an evil dragon questions his evilness but doesn't actually follow-through (I think he dies, actually...).  On the whole, though, for a serial with "Dragon" in the title, they don't really do a whole lot.  Only ranks above Eragon because it is written by adults who should know better, but let's face it.  They don't.

Now before you start calling me a hater, here are my top 5 good dragon books

5.  "Eon:  Dragoneye Reborn" - by Allison Goodman

Full review here.  If you're too lazy to click on the link, it's about a girl who dresses as a boy in order to get a dragon companion.  Which is a horrible plot, so you can imagine my surprise when it didn't quite suck.  The setting is randomly Asian, and the dragons are life-draining energy beings rather than scaly kittens.  The story isn't exceptional, but it has some good points and on the whole isn't bad.

4.  "Dragon's Milk" - by Susan Fletcher

I haven't read these books in forever, so I can't give too many details.  It might not be as good as I remember, and if I haven't read it in forever it probably isn't the best thing ever.  But since I kept excusing "Dragonflight" for being a kid's book, here's another kid's book for contrast.  The story is about a girl who ends up caring for three dragon hatchlings after their mother dies or something.  They have to go on the run because people kill dragons in this world.  And there are people in difficult situations making difficult choices and facing the consequences, instead of people in difficult situations making difficult choices and having their problems vanish as a reward for making the right choice.  I think maybe one of the dragons died, too.  Not sure.  Kid's books can be pretty dark, you know.

3.  The Dragon Quartet - by Marjorie B. Kellogg

This series is just frickin' weird.  The first book takes place in medieval Germany, where this girl finds an earth-dragon and goes on this journey with it to find her destiny or something, ends up falling through some kind of time portal where, in the second book, she meets a boy from modern-day Africa who is bonded to a water dragon, and then they go back to medieval Germany for a brief bit and end up in this post-apocalyptic future run by a fire dragon, and the air dragon is really a computer, and the dragons are really transdimensional beings who incarnated at certain points in time in order to save the human race from global warming...or something like that.  I should really re-read those.  They're just so...weird.  And different.  See, that is what fantasy is supposed to mean - creating your own unique vision of a world.  Not pseudo-medieval whiny farmboy kill the dark lord questing. 

2.  Age of Fire - by E.E. Knight

Think "Wicked" for Dragonlance.  The original book, not the musical.  It's a sort of dark reimagining of a familiar world (not Krynn specifically, just the whole freaking genre paradigm).  You've got your elves/dwarves/humans/+2, and all kinds of crazy race relations.  And you have the dragons.  The book is told from the dragon's point of view as hominids try to kill them or enslave them.  They end up sort of turning that around and starting a dragon empire and making it very clear that in the dragon/rider relationship, the dragon is boss.  The characters are all very interesting, and in the latest (well, next-to-latest) I actually started to feel for them a bit (That poor Copper! - oh yes, it has amazing technicolor dragons, but physical appearance does not correlate with moral alignment), and I really want to read the last one, Dragon Fate.

1.  Temeraire - by Naomi Novik

Napoleonic Wars.  With dragons.  It is awesome.  Yes, the dragons tend toward the scaly kitten end of the spectrum, but they are not pastel greeting-card kittens, they are real live animals that poop on your floor.  Metaphorically speaking.  Actually, they are not animals.  They are people, and Novik does well building a subplot of a sort of impending dragon civil rights movement (I'm only about halfway through the series).  Also, historical detail.  England, Africa, China, Ottoman Empire, Prussia...Holy crap, that woman has done her research.  So yes, Temeraire is adorable.  He talks (not telepathic, thank the gods).  He chose his rider from the egg and loves him oh-so-much.  And he is a slave.  And seeing him struggle to compromise that with his love for his rider is so...woobifying.  Squee.

Yeah.  Dragons.  You probably think I think too much about dragons.  Funny that I don't usually write about dragons.  There might be some in my shapeshifter story, but they're not really in the plot.  Dragons just seem so overdone and so rarely done well.  At the same time, all the possible subversions are already being done (and done well).  So for the time being, I remain a dragon appreciater rather than a dragon writer.

Re-emerging Into Reality

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat less diligent about posting in this month of November.  That is because I have been participating in a cult group madness challenge called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.  50,000 words.  30 days.  One writer.

Okay, not one writer.  That is what is so wonderful about NaNo.  Writing is by nature a solitary activity, and sitting in a group of people all absorbed in their own laptops writing their own novels does not sound like a party by anyone's standards.  Still, it is a great way to stay motivated.  I tend to write in creative spurts, but I have a hard time finishing.  I get about half or two-thids of the way through, and the story starts to sag, and I start to see all the places I went wrong, and I want to start over and fix things.  And I get to a point where I don't know where to go next and I don't really care.

But with NaNoWriMo, every word counts.  Rule #1 is DO NOT DELETE.  Rule #2 is DO NOT GIVE UP.  I was up to being seven days behind, but I made up the difference in the last few weeks and pulled across the finish line with hours to spare.

I have done NaNo several times in the past, and this was a year of firsts for me.  It was the first year I made an outline the night before from a story I thought of that day.  It was the first time I threw out that outline on the first day and started with a story that had been smoldering in my head for a while.  And it is the first year that I re-started on the second day with a completely new story that had been gestating but I had not considered ready to be born; but it was my most viable option.  It is the first year I had no idea where the story was supposed to go.

That is another thing about NaNo.  It forces you to be creative.  For the first 20k or so I was writing myself in circles.  Then I added witch hunters.  I never thought I would until I realized that I needed something new.  And there they were.  That got me close to 40k before that arc came down.  The rest was a first person account filling in the gaps of the first arc.  Note:  First person in lovely for wordiness.  You can throw in so much opinionation and asides and rants.  It's wonderful.

Then I was still about a thousand short and spat out half a bonus scene with the witch hunters.

Every year after that first one I have told myself that I won't do NaNo - I don't have time, I don't any good ideas, I'm in the middle of another project - and yet somehow I always do.  And I don't regret it.  Any of it.  Even though all my drafts so far have been shit, and I don't very much think this one is any different, I wrote that damn novel.  I have proven to myself that I can can overcome my creative barriers.  It does not take skill to write, after all.  Skill can be learned.  It takes determination and persistence, and I definitely leveled up in that area this month.

Now for a rest. This is also the first year my wrist actually started twinging (at the 47k mark, when I was starting to think I might actually make it).  That has not stopped me from starting a new crochet project.  I want to get back to my translations - I've been making trips to the career center to see what the heck I can do with my life, and translator is still one of my options.  I also want to start reading books again.  Am halfway through the third Temeraire book and also for some reason have a strong urge to re-read the entire Chronicles of Chrestomanci.  Oh yeah, finals are coming up too.

Blah blah words blah oh wait, I don't have to count them anymore.

Bisexuals in Literature

This post was inspired by reading Libba Bray's novel Beauty Queens, which is awesome and hilarious and the good kind of feminism, even if it does have diversity issues.  Like the fact that the only characters with distinct personalities are the white ones; the supporting cast the Black Girl, the Indian Girl (who become besties based on the fact they are both not white, which is actually played straight rather well), the Tomboyish Lesbian, the Transgender Girl, the Deaf Girl, etc.  Whereas the white characters that the story spends a (admittedly slight) majority of the time with include the Friendless Intellectual, the Psychopathic Perfectionist, the Wild Girl, and the Dumb Blond With A Heart Of Gold.  Y'know, actual personality types instead of just Issues.

But today's rant is about the Bisexual Girl, who in Beauty Queens doubles as the Deaf Girl.

What happens in the book is that a plane full of beauty pageant queens crashes on a deserted island (think Lord of the Flies with girls).  At one point, the Lesbian is wandering through the jungle, when she rescues the Deaf Bisexual Girl from being eaten by a snake, and falls in love.  Before she has any inkling that this girl might not be straight. 

Problems so far:

1.  The cardinal rule of being gay is DON'T FALL IN LOVE WITH A STRAIGHT PERSON.  For us, the question "Are they gay?"  has to come before "Do I like them?"  Granted, this might just be a me-thing, but it always irks me when I read a book where a girl falls in love with a girl before she has reason to thinks he might not be straight.  It just doesn't work like that.  To put it simply, heterosexuality is a real turn-off.

2.  If I were wandering through the jungle and ran across someone being eaten by a snake and had to rescue them, what are the chances we would have compatible sexualities?  If it were me, it would turn out to be a gay man.  Seriously.

Anyway, the Lesbian falls for the Bisexual Deaf Girl, who, as she is also a dancer, incites some oddly homoerotic moments with the Lesbian, who draws a fantasy comic with her as a superhero rescuing her love, when the BDG walks in on her, sees the comic, and they make out after only a brief:  "Are you gay?"  "Are you?"

3.  I'm not going to knock the coincidence.  The entire premise of the book is ridiculous, and it only gets wackier from their, with government conspiracies and insane third-world dictators.  But since BDG is established as bi, she really should have realized that asking the Lesbian to dance with her is rather flirtatious.  And since the Lesbian is sort of dykish tomboyish, BDG ought to have suspected her of not being straight, even if the Lesbian could not ping on her because you can't tell with bi girls.

There are about two paragraphs dedicated to the fact that the Deaf Girl is bi. And when hot male pirates show up on the island, she doesn't seem to get the slightest bit of enjoyment from the sight of all that man-candy.  Sure, she's dating the token Lesbian, but she can still look, can't she?

4.  Here we get into the problems extant in the wider literature.  YA authors who are big on diversity will throw in a token bi character to date their token gay character, so they can be super-extra representative.  The problems arise when bi characters are simply treated as gay characters.  Exhibit A, Alex Sanchez's masterpiece of the 90's, Rainbow Boys.  The Token Bi here actually dumps his girlfriend to be with the gay main character.  Bisexual, sure.  Bisexual training wheels maybe.  A later book mentions him grinning at the sight of a naked girl, but that's about all we get.

Exhibit B:  David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, and if you ever want to gag on a rainbow made of pure sugar, read that book.  Anyway, the bi guy there serves absolutely no function with regards to the plot, and has a backstory of making out with the main character and then claiming he was taken advantage of and really likes girls.  This is supposed to be in a fantastical super-tolerant queer utopia.  He can't be like "Oh, I'm bi, I guess that's okay"?

Exhibit C:  Brent Hartinger's Geography Club.  This one is a girl.  Who is dating a lesbian.  I believe in later books she crushes on a girl.  But she keeps referencing the fact that she is bi, and talks about hot guys with her gay bestie.

The root of the problem, I hypothesize, is that it is difficult to realistically portray a character who is attracted to both guys and girls without making them a slut.  A character gets only one designated love interest per story, after all, and a love triangle would be tricky because resolving it would make it seem like the author were favoring one orientation over another.

Solutions?

1.  Spend time talking about the bisexual character's emotions and development and coming out.  Bisexuals never come out!  Why is that?  Is it somehow not necessary?  Are they not a "real" queer unless they are dating a member of the same gender?  Is it because bisexual has the word "sex" in it?  I don't know.  But think about your heterosexual characters, and how they react to characters of the opposite gender who are not their designated love interest.  There can be sexual tension without a romantic subplot.

2.  A bi girl can date a guy, and still be active in queer rights stuff.  Trust me, I know people personally.  They don't lose their gay if they start dating someone of the opposite gender.  In fact, in brings up interesting plot points.  How does the boyfriend feel?  Is he weirded out, or chill?

3.  Heck, you could have two bisexuals of any gender combination date each other.  That would be an interesting relationship dynamic.

4.  Back to Beauty Queens:  When I saw the two token queers were going to hook up, I groaned and came up with an alternative subplot involving a token bi and a token lesbian.  Suppose it is a bitchy lipstick lesbian.  In fact, she might be the Psychotic Perfectionist.  Then, there's also a bi girl, one of the quiet ones who silently hates the lesbian's guts.  *Gasp!*  No token queer solidarity/romance?  Unthinkable!  If this were to happen, I would not even mind if the bi girl were crushing on a straight girl, as long as she eventually got over her.  Maybe hooked up with one of the hot pirates.  And then the lesbian can date some chick in the epilogue after she becomes a nice person, to prove that homosexual relationships are okay too. 

Seriously, not all gays like each other.  You can't put a pair of us on a deserted island and expect us to automatically mate, any more than you could put a heterosexual guy and girl on an island and expect them to.

(On the plus side, they don't hookup ever after; they break up amicably and the bi girl is dating a guy in the epilogue, while the lesbian is married.  So it ended up not being too bad.)

What Not To Read

My latest obsession, it seems, is dragonriders and gender roles.  So, in order to make my research complete, I tracked down what might be the only book by a male about dragonriders, that is not a subversion or Eragon:  Dragonmaster,  by Chris Bunch.  It has been most educational.

Things I have learned from two chapters of Bunch:

1.  Do not use run-on sentences, they are not, and will never be, your friend.  Fragments, only sparingly when effective.

“Somewhere in the crags just above the village, and Hal thought he knew just where from his solitary, but not lonely, hill explorations, the beast had its nest.  The nest where dragons had hatched their young for over a century.”

2.  Do not overly smeerp.  Worldbuilding is your friend, and if you can’t be bothered to think about how your society works, then you should not be writing fantasy.

“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the warder…Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll ride for the city and hire the best advocate I can…That’ll put a bit of a stave in their wheel.”

Suppose he had written:

“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the police...Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll drive into the city and hire the best lawyer I can…That’ll put a bit of a wrench in their works.”

Creating a medieval fantasyland is more than just replacing any modern references with period-sounding alternatives (though a toothbrush is still a toothbrush*).  Apparently, even in this world where the poor are really oppressed, there is still a sort of justice system that even a poor restaurant owner tavern keeper can call on.  Which never comes up again (presumably).

3.  Your main character is not an author avatar.  Go play a video game for that.  Your main character has his (or her) own personality and ambitions.  Don’t have them wander around aimlessly until they find plot.

“He’d been offered other steady work in the two years since he’d left the stony mining village, but had never accepted, not sure of the reason.”

The reason?  The author needs you to not have any attachments so you can drop everything and chase the plot, whenever it should appear.  He also needs you to keep moving so that you eventually find the plot.  If you’re going to do that to your character, at least give them a real reason to be a rootless wanderer.  It also doubles as character-building.

4.  I don’t care how beer is made.  The point of the chapter is that Hal gets drunk and tries to ride a dragon.  We don’t need digressions into beer-making at the hops-picking harvest festival thingy that is never going to be mentioned again.  There’s worldbuilding, and then there’s relevancy.

*A note about toothbrushes in fantasyland:  They don’t often exist.  Occasionally I have run across a mention of scrubbing teeth with baking soda (once, in 10,000 page series), or “tooth-sticks,” whatever those might be.  They do seem rather modern to be in a pseudo-medieval world.  However, according to Wikipedia, methods of dental cleaning have been around since 3000 B.C.  Some ancient cultures chewed twigs from certain trees, and around the 14^th century A.D. toothbrushes with animal-hair bristles were in use in parts of Asia.  However, it is most likely that only those of wealth and status would have the luxury for that.  Toothbrushes were not mass-produced in Europe until the late 18^th century, but the word itself dates from 1690.  Interestingly, tooth-brushing did not catch on in the U.S. until after WWII, when soldiers were required to brush their teeth every day.

In other words, if you want your characters to brush their teeth in fantasyland, you can damn well have them brush their teeth.  It’s your world.  The humble toothbrush does a good job of illustarting how difficult it is to make a convincing fantasyland; you have to consider every aspect of daily life, up to and including brushing one’s teeth.

Dragons Are Ponies For Boys

I just watched about a quarter of "How to Train Your Dragon."  Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading the book first.  I did keep my expectations prety low, but I had hoped that I would at least be able to recognize the story.  I was quite disappointed, because the book showed the book as nasty, selfish creatures that had to be tamed by brute force, as opposed the the love-at-first-sight telepathic bond, and I had hoped that Dreamworks would be able to work with that; that they would like the gruesome and unromanticized view of dragons instead of the ponies.  Alas, it was not to be.

No, seriously.  Ponies.  Dragons have been receiving the same sort of treatment for a long time.  They are that beautiful creature who will carry you around and do anything for you because he loves you and you have a telepathic bond. 

The funny thing about the dragonrider subgenre is that it is propogated almost solely by women.  Yet most of the protagonists are male.  It is as though girls are not expected to like dragons, even though the number of female writers in the subgenre begs to differ.  Men, on the other hand, write more about dragonslaying than dragonriding.

What does this say about the sexes?  Girls are more interested in having relationships, boys are more interested in killing things.  So what else is new? 

Girls like big scaly flying monsters is new.  Girls don't just want oddly proportioned pastel equines.  Girls like cool as much as cute.  Why is this so hard?  Why does this have to be disguised so much that McCaffery's weyrs are exclusively male except for the token chick, Goodman's Eona even has to disguise as a boy to become a dragon-whatever (okay, I haven't actually read that one.  You know how I feel about Crossdressing Epics).  In Eona's case, anyway, it seems like it should be the other way around.

Apparently, this concept is quite hard to grasp.  Well, I guess I'll add "female dragonrider" to my list of ideas for stories I may or may not ever write. 

The Crossdressing Epic

This issue annoys me so much I can't sleep until I rant about it.

It all started with Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, which I am currently reading because I feel obligated too, and because I might get money for writing a review of it.  If you don't know, it is about an alternate history where WWI is fought with giant steampunk mechas and genetically engineered mutant creatures.  It is a really cool setup, and it is a shame that it is ruined by completely awful protagonists.

To be fair, the boy protagonist is not so bad, and by the time he is standing on top of a running mecha while being shot at, trying to cut loose a signal flare using his dead father's sword...yeah, he's cool.  The girl is the one I want to punch in the face.

The problem with crossdressing epics is that, rather than providing a unique and intriguing view of gender roles, they fall far too easily into the trap of relying on gender stereotypes.  Second, every sentence devoted to the girl worrying about someone discovering she is a girl, is a sentence in which nothing happens.  I don't care if she is supposed to be a strong female protagonist, and a role model proving that girls can do stuff (if they dress like boys), I want to go back to the flaming sword mecha fight.

The girls who follow this path are all luckily tall, skinny, and flat-chested, but none are actually lesbians (or trans, for that matter).  Because lesbians did not exist before the 60's, and certainly none of them tried crossdressing.  I am not saying that the heroines of crossdressing epics should necessarily be gay; I'm just saying that it seems to never even have been considered.

Furthermore, CE's act all progressive and feministy, but again, why is being a boy the only option?  Why can't she wear skirts and be married and be a devious manipulator, the power behind the throne?  Or a spy?  Or a badass housewife?  Because people want to read a typical boy's adventure story, but be feministy and include a female protagonist who is not a princess that needs to be rescued.  Or they are too lazy to come up with an original plot. 

This is another problem of society marches on, and literature stays stuck in a rut, blindly following the patterns of novels from before and ignoring the plots of real life.  Sexism does still exist today; a woman in a typically male profession will face it, leading to complications more interesting and relevant than trying to avoid being seen naked.  At least Westerfeld does have historical context.  Though considering girls have a lower body mass, you'd think they would be more in demand on bioengineered airships...

Which brings us back to my original complaint of wanting to punch that particular protagonist in the face.  Her only defining character trait is being a girl.  Otherwise, she behaves just like your average dopey farmboy protagonist (I have no idea if she actually comes from a farm or not).  Westerfeld tries to compensate by assuring the audience that she is in fact a very good flyer.  However, it comes off as insecurity in writing a female protagonist.  She just has to be really super good at what she does.  You know, to prove the sexes are equal and all.

I did track down a quote from Discworld that might help potential writers of CE's:  "in an age before unisex fashions, trousers meant 'man' and skirts meant 'woman'. Trousers plus high-pitched voice meant 'young man'. People didn't expect anything else, and saw what they expected to see."

Which makes complete sense; if a girl is doing something so unthinkable, why is she so worried someone will think it?  She's tall, skinny, and flat-chested, so what's to worry about?  Get back to the plot already!

Quoth the Rowling, Pottermore

Sorry about the title.  Couldn't resist.  Despite which, I still don't have a clue what Pottermore is.

I am the Harry Potter generation, defined here as someone who 1) waited for a letter from Hogwarts, 2) went to a midnight book release.  So I read it.  I liked it.

Then it became popular.

If HP had not become so popular, I can see two ways my life might be different.  1)  I would like it more than I do now, treasure it for its nostalgia purposes, immerse myself in the world.  Or 2)  I'd stick it in the back of the shelf and forget all about it.

As far as stories go, it is rather forgettable.  There's a kid who discovers he has special powers and has to stop some evil dude from doing evil stuff.  The characters are rather bland, rather stupid at times, and the magic stuff (wands and broomsticks etc.), which start out as delightfully whimsical, become more narmy as the series grows darker.

That last paragraph could get me burned at the stake.  Or at least accused of being a snob (why yes, I am still bitter).

Stop hating on Harry, he says.  It's just a kid's book.

Just a kid's book.

So too is Warriors.  So too is Artemis Fowl.  So too is almost...every...single...frickin'...thing...by DIANA WYNNE JONES.  And did I mention Narnia?

The problem of the matter is that Harry hits puberty.  Narnia is like a roller coaster; you must be less than this high to ride.  Rowling, with a book series that spanned seven years, had two choices: She could pretend puberty does not exist and keep her target demographic as 8-10 year olds.  Or she could anticipate her aging readers and transition her books to YA.

And that, I think, is why HP became so popular.  It aged with the readers.  Not well (see Potter Puppet Pals Wizard Angst), but it is the only series I can think of that started out with a child protagonist and ended with a teenager that was written to act like a teenager.  While most other books have to rely on new generations after the old one ages, the HP generation stuck with those books.

I can't think of many other reasons HP became so popular, though  I suppose I could hazard a few more guesses...

-The action took place in a school.  Everyone knows about schools.  But this was a magic school, so it was interesting.  Fantasy stories have a tendency to take the reader away from the familiar and recognizeable.  Lots of forests.  Castles.  Places most people don't live.

-The magic was very generic.  Nix had his light magic (or bells, but Sabriel isn't as nostalgic to me), Duane had her mystical Speech, Jones had...whatever Jones had.  But to the average layperson, the connotations that go with the word "magic" are still waving a wand and mumbling a few funny words.  So an ordinary person (for want of a better term) could pick up HP and recognize the magic.

And that's it.  I mean, does anyone really care about any of the characters' personalities?  Besides Sirius, that is?  No, because the characters simply play their roles as Designated Hero with a saving-people thing, Designated Sidekick who backs him up in everything, and Designated Smart One who dispenses plot-relevant information and gives advice for the hero to ignore.  Oh, and Designated Love Interest to...be fallen in love with.  Though in all fairness, Ginny seems to be able to do a better job getting Harry to listen to reason than Hermione does.

I did not realize I was quite this bitter.  I know that the world is not fair, and that Jones, who is the superior being, will never be as rich or famous as Rowling.  And I wouldn't want her too.  I would rather keep her private, personal, something I can form an instant connection over with a person.  And I have resigned myself to the fact that HP has altered the face of fantasy forever.  If I say I like fantasy, I usually hear a response like "Oh, like Harry Potter?  Like Lord of the Rings?  Like Terry Pratchett?"  And the answer is no; like Sarah Monette and Diana Wynne Jones and Galen Beckett and Meredith Ann Pierce.  Books by people who like magical stuff, but don't feel bound by genre constraints or the expectations of the readers. 

Dammit, I guess I am a snob.  I still remember those few years when fantasy was mine, and the choice was to feel like a freak for reading about magic, or to be proud of being different.  So when the public eye turned on my secret niche, the only choice was to seek deeper obscurity.  Or maybe I'm just irked that for most people, HP is the definition of fantasy, when it is so much more than that.

Deconstructions

I predict that within 10 years, Hollywood will have made a movie about Osama bin Laden's death.  It makes a great story, after all.  Those rugged, underdog, freedom-loving Americans taking down that evil warlord.

And now for something (almost) completely different.

We know the formulas.  We know what to expect from your typical action movie, romantic comedy, superhero movie, or fairy tale.  That is why "historical" based movies (as well as movies that come from books, or in fact any other source material) suffer so badly.  They have to be shoehorned into the mold, often distorted beyond recognition.

However, there has been a recent trend among moviemakers and novel writers of deconstructing the familiar motifs.  With varying degrees of success.  Superhero stories with a sympathetic villain, for instance.  Or fractured fairy tales.  These deconstructions fall into three types.

1)  Satirical deconstruction, in which the story is written using the formula in order to make fun of itself.  Slapstick comedy.

2)  Brutal Deconstruction, in which the story is shown to have a darker, often gorier side.  Keyword, ick.

3)  Practical Deconstruction, in which the story is played straight, but tries to act more realistic.  Focus on characters.

And if you don't want to take my word for it, I have a long list of examples.

The main culprits for the formula/deconstruction trap are variants of the Hero's Journey - namely, Superheroes, Fairy Tales, and fantasy literature.  For instance, a satirical deconstruction of the superhero genre would be...well take your pick.  I have not seen "Kick-Ass," but from the trailers I believe it one of these.  What I am familiar with is the film "Mystery Men."  A ragtag group of heroes with some awkward superpowers defeat a not very memorable villain.  Played for laughs.

A brutal deconstruction, on the other hand, is Watchmen, both the film and the graphic novel. No superpowers, just the silly costumes and crime-fighting.  The characters are set along a scale of pathetic idealist to villain who kind of has a point.

The closest thing to a practical deconstruction that I am familiar with is "The Incredibles."  Yes, it follows the typical superhero pattern, but it has a few deconstructive elements.  It might almost be considered a family drama. 

Now for Fairy Tales.  You know what I'm going to say.  Yep.  Shrek (Note that "Fairy Tale" in this sense is more of the Disneyfied version, rather than actual folk legends).  In fact, Shrek was created by a disgruntled former Disney employee and is essentially a declaration of war on the entire Disney franchise.  Need I say more?

A brutal deconstruction is, without a doubt, Gregory Maguire.  Author of Wicked.  No, not the musical - that got re-Disneyfied until it wasn't sure what it was supposed to be anymore and sucked.  Good music, though. 

A practical deconstruction is harder to pin down.  I have not seen "Enchanted," so cannot offer any opinion on that.  Perhaps "Ever After."  She marries the prince after talking and having an actual relationship with him, and becomes a princess to actually take care of the people in the kingdom.

And of course my passion, fantasy.  You may have gathered by now that as much as I love this genre, I love to hate it as well. 

Terry Pratchett is definitely the iconic satirical deconstructor.  I have only read one of his books, so I don't have much to say about it, but there isn't really that much to say.

Brutal deconstructions of fantasy have been gaining in popularity.  Terry Goodkind was the first one I have been aware of.  Before he went all crazy anti-socialist and still thought he was writing a fantasy epic.  Very...detailed battle scenes.  Other writers such as Mercedes Lackey sometimes attempt to do this, and heap misfortune and trauma upon their characters, but somehow at the end, all the important people get to ride away on their pretty white horse with seemingly no lasting psychological harm.  This is a case of Failed Deconstruction.

My very favorite books ever - The Last Rune series, by Mark Anthony - is a practical deconstruction of fantasy.  In fact, it is hardly a deconstruction at all.  The story is played completely straight, with the ordinary protagonist from the Real World becoming the prophecized Hero who has to save the Pseudo-Medieval European Fantasyland from a Dark Lord.  The reasons that this series is not cliche garbage are many and subtle, so I will only mention one:  Anthony treats his characters like real people.  All of them.  He also (okay, two) strikes a very delicate balance between "Good always wins," and "The world sucks."

What did any of this have to do with bin Laden? 

The key to a practical deconstruction is making the story realistic, which also has the effect of making the story complex.  But complex stories don't make money.  When we go see a movie for an afternoon's entertainment, we want to be entertained.  We don't want to think.  That is why formulas are so useful.  The audience already knows what is going to happen and can enjoy the movie without any major worries. 

Bin Laden's death changes nothing, and I don't have to know anything about politics to be certain of that.  Al-Qaeda is not going to fall apart like the army of orcs at the end of Lord of the Rings.  But America is so locked into our ideals/formulas/tropes/narratives that we fail to realize that.  Real life is a messy and boring deconstruction of fiction that nobody wants to read.

Was ist Literatur?

What is Literature?

What kind of stupid question is that? 

This is why I do not like literature classes.  I do like reading, and analyzing, and asking questions about texts.  The problem is that sometimes people get a bit carried away with regards to asking questions.  You are only supposed to ask them when you actually want an answer - and when you have something to gain from the answer.

Literature is just a word; and like every word, it has several meanings and shades of meaning.  For instance, it is often thought of as 1) what pretentious old academics call their favorite books (or the books they want you to think are their favorites), but anyone who works with it in depth usually takes the broader definition of 2) any and all written art.  A colloquial meaning, and the technical meaning.  No need for a philosopher; this is a job for a linguist.

I do not care if "a book is the ax for the frozen sea inside us" (Kafka).  I do not care if the goal of art is "to capture this world in such a way as to show how it is, but as though it had its source in human freedom" (Sartre).  All I know is that I need books the way I need food, and that if I don't write, I will die.  And that is enough of an answer for me.

In Memoriam: Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones:  1934-2011

Funny how Death always comes in waves. 

This one, at least, I was expecting.  She had cancer for a few years, and knowing I was in the midst of a deathwave, I already somewhat expected it to happen about now.  That doesn't make it any easier.  I have read quite literally every one of her books (except maybe one or two obscure ones)

If Jacques was my gateway to fantasy, Jones was my addiction.  She taught me how magic works, and how cats talk, and about parallel dimensions, and how to blend science fiction and fantasy until one isn't sure what the difference is any more.  And more than any of that, her characters are more like people than any other writer I know of can manage.  The children are children and are sometimes selfish, the adults are sometimes helpful, sometimes well-meaning but useless, sometimes merely useless.  Yet you still have to love all of them. 

Sarah Monette (another one of my literary heros) says it best here.

In my own writing, I would have to say that Jones is my top influence.  I want to build a world that is whimsical yet plausible, with large parts unexplained but that somehow makes sense.  Nor are any but the most plot relevant aspects of magic ever explained - after all, it's freaking MAGIC. 

Howl's Moving Castle made her if not popular, at least somewhat known in mainstream.  I have to point out that I was a fan long before that.  And then, the way Harry Potter took my private love of fantasy and made it mainstream, the movie made Howl's Castle known to more than a select few.  It feels something like a betrayal when that happens.  You were once mine, and now I must share you.  Even though a private love is lonely.  I once fell in love based solely on an association with a book, but that is a topic for another time.

Diana Wynne Jones wrote in a way that I will never be able to, and I'm okay with that.  That does not mean I am going to give up writing.  It just means that I am going to try harder than ever to write MY book.  And it will be for Jones, and Jacques, and Lloyd Alexander, and every single author whose books I have read, the good and the bad, and every single person who has ever given me a story.  But Jones will not be able to read it.  She won't even know that I loved her so much, or that she had more than passing resemblence to an English teacher of mine.

So what is the moral of this story?  Meet your heros before they die?  A generation of greats must pass to make room for new ones?  In the face of death, carry on so that the lost ones did not live/die in vain?  I don't know.  All I know is that I love her books and I could not stop writing if I tried.

"Frostfire" by Kai Meyer - Chapter 2, Part 1/4

The Chapter In Which We Meet the Girl-Boy Mouse.  And The Dangerous Roundsman.

            It is true that Mouse was a girl.  But only a few knew that.  Most took her for a boy.  And when Mouse looked in a mirror, sometimes she even believed it herself.

            It is also true that she was a thief.

            As though harried by a thousand devils, she ran through the corridors of the venerable Grand Hotel Aurora.  The man that followed her was hard on her heels.  Not a good day for a hotel-room thief.  Not even when she committed her theft with such great dexterity as Mouse.

            The upper floor of the Hotel Aurora was reserved for special guests.  At the front facing the boulevard, the famous Nevski Prospect, lay the splendid Czar’s Suite; a single night there cost more than Petersburg’s simple citizens earned in a year.

            Mouse rushed swiftly under the silver candle holders that emitted electric light.  The spittoons in the corners were of the finest porcelain.  Heavy commodes of mahogany stood against the walls of the corridor.  Lacy doilies fluttered in the backdraft as Mouse was chased past them.

            Sometimes she looked over her shoulder to see whether her pursuer had caught up to her yet.  But she still held on to her head start.  It was not the first time that she had escaped him.

            Mouse wore a page’s uniform that was patched in many places, if not so many that one of the highly esteemed guests would notice at the first glance.  Pants and jacket were of violet velvet, set with gleaming buckles and even shoulder loops sewn of golden carpet fringe.  Her patent shoes were immaculately cleaned – because that was Mouse’s task here in the Hotel Aurora:  to collect the shoes from the doors of all the guests at night, bring them into the celler, there to polish them bright and distribute them in front of the rooms before dawn.  Without switching a single pair, you understand.

            That took talent, claimed Kukushka, the dancing partner in the ballroom.  That took absolutely nothing, Mouse said.  Only the willingness to spend the night on your feet and to sleep during the day.  And not even that was an achievement, when one had no other choice.

            The footsteps behind Mouse grew louder.

            Was there a particular reason why, after all these years, she was about to be caught?  That evening she had cleaned her plate of the guests’ leftovers, and silently let the teasing of the pages and chambermaids pass over her. “Girl-boy,” they sneered.  “There goes the girl-boy, and it stinks like old shoes.”

            All this she bore every day.  She had done nothing to call blame upon herself, really nothing.

            Except perhaps this tiny theft.  Not her first by any means, but until now she had always gotten away with it.

            She looked back again.  The heavily carpeted floor almost entirely swallowed up her pursuer’s footsteps.  Mouse took the golden brooch out of the pocket of her uniform and tightly closed her fist around it.  The door to the room had been unlocked – that wasn’t her fault, was it? – and the brooch had lain out in the open on a heap of clothing.   And thieves were warned of everywhere at that, especially in such bad times.  Couldn’t the owner have paid better attention?

            No, Mouse was really not at fault here.  She had only accepted the invitation to put the thing in her pocket.  And what had happened, had happened.  Apologies, madam.

            It was a question/matter of honor to bring her loot to all the rest in the cellar.  Later, anyway.  For now she had to get rid of the thing.  Namely, a place where no one at all would stick their nose.  First of all, away with it, so that none but her could find it.  Certainly not the Roundsman, who had been waiting to catch her in the act for ages.  No evidence, no theft.  No punishment for Mouse.

In Memoriam: Brian Jacques

Brian Jacques, author.  June 15, 1939 - February 5, 2011

When I was eight, I discovered the Redwall series.*  I think my dad started reading it to me.  Every night, another chapter - or more, if I was able to beg it out of him - until I realized that I actually read faster on my own.  Then I burned through the entire series, and read them over and over again while impatiently waiting for the rest to be written.

My Redwall obsession lasted two or three years, peaked at fifth grade and was gradually replaced by other interests.  But for a while, I hardly read anything else.  I always had one of the books on me.  Always.  And I swear not one single other person in my school had ever heard of it.  Is it any wonder I had no friends, if I was surrounded by people who didn't even read?

But what is so special about these mice?  Yes, there is a little mouse who just wants to be special and finally gets his chance - isn't that a fairly common motif in normal fiction as well?  But the rest of the books feature a variety of heroes from all different backgrounds - what is the common factor here?

I can narrow it down to two:

1)  All of the stories feature a hero facing real danger and impossible odds, but they simply have to accomplish their quest or the world will be left in ruins.  It was my first exposure to something truly EPIC.  It's just so much more interesting to read about a story that matters. 

2)  They were mice in a forest, not children in a school.  I had enough of children in school in my life - I didn't want to read about it too!  I didn't want to be reminded of how unlike everyone else I was.  Furthermore, I was never a very girly girl -  in the Redwall books, there are very few instances of actual gender roles.  Really the only difference is arbitrary pronouns.

Perhaps I could even narrow it down to one factor:  Books about mice with swords asked questions I actually cared about.  When is it okay to kill your enemy?  vs. say, How do apologize to your best friend for talking about her behind her back?  How to stand up to a bully, make a best friend, improve your home life, and succeed at your artistic goals, which is nowhere near as difficult/interesting as following a cryptic song to a mysterious place along a path fraught with danger in order to get allies to help you defeat the impossibly large evil horde.

I realize that I cannot claim that Redwall as the best series ever.  It has absurdly formulaic plots and a bad case of Slytherin Syndrome, which was what eventually caused me to lose interest - the villains obviously only existed to drive the plot forward.   Jacques did manage to do something truly creative at least once per book.  You know - an gigantic army that wears blue war paint, a hare with multiple personality disorder, etc. 

Still, it was a good introduction to the hard questions in life (simplified) and the dark side of the world (softened).  Moreover, it was just plain cool.

Brian Jacques, you will be missed.

Redwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllll!

*If somehow you don't know, it is a set of books about talking anthropomorphic mice/other woodland creatures, who battle against evil rats/other woodland creatures, with swords/other medieval weaponry. 

Märchenmond - Fablemoon - Magic Moon

I am now reading a book entitled Märchenmond, by Wolfgang and Heike Hohlbein.  There is an English translation available entitled Magic Moon, though "Märchen" is actually the German word for a fairy tale.

I suppose something needed to knock German children's fantasy off the pedestal I had put it on.  Kai Meyer = Amazing.  Cornelia Funke, same.  Michael Ende (of The Neverending Story) as well.  The Hohlbeins...

It isn't bad.  Just so-so.  The story tells of a boy who is ten(?), whose four(?) year old sister is in a coma.  A mysterious old man appears and tells him that his sister's spirit is trapped in the magical world Märchenmond by an evil sorcerer, and so the boy, Kim, has to travel there to get her back.

My critique as follows:
1)  Kim, the hero, is established immediately as a sci-fi reader.  However, as soon as he enters Märchenmond, this fact is forgotten (though he did have to get there by flying a spaceship).  Regardless, unless the authors are trying to pull a Neverending story where the magical world is causing him to lose his memory, they are wasting a great opportunity for some wrong genre savvy conflicts.

2)  Even though Kim knows nothing about fantasy worlds, he should know better not to let the army of Black Knights take him anywhere without asking them a few questions.  Or drinking an unidentified substance given to him by them, though it seems not to have done any lasting harm.  In fact, he adapts almost too well to be believed. 

3)  Yes, it is a fantasy story, which requires a bit of suspension of disbelief.  Perhaps it is reasonable that he managed to knock out a Knight and steal his armor and horse and travel undetected with the Black Army for, what, over a week?  I mean, evil minions aren't expected to be bright.  And okay, maybe he wouldn't quite die of starvation from not eating because he was too afraid to take off his visor even for an instant.  But that begs the question - if he does not take off his armor for a week, how does he take care of certain functions?  There is a line between no one really wants to read about it, and you kind of have to wonder...

4)  I'm really not sure what kind of person Kim is.  Probably he is supposed to be an Everyman with a Hero Complex.  It's entirely possible that I am merely missing subtlety by reading a book in a foreign language, but Kim seems to be a very generic protagonist.  Sister in danger?  Go rescue her, without a care for the danger.  Magical world in danger?  Go rescue it.  Plus, the only characters that seemed to give him any development were one-shots (or possibly Chekhov's Gunmen). 

Example:  As Kim flees the evil citadel, he is conveniently rescued by a swamp-prince, Ado.  Ado asks to join Kim on his quest, but Kim tells him to stay in the swamp where he is needed.  First off, where did that bit of insight come from?  Personally, I find that Ado would have given Kim a lot more character development than the WTF companions he ended up with - a gentle giant and a grouchy bear, neither of which are very bright or have much personality.  So we don't get to see Kim's (presumeably) rational and caring demeanor contrasted with a rash and heedless best friend, but rather a hero surrounded by bumbling mistfit companions.

In short, this is the sort of story that blindly binds itself to genre constraints and does not even have any interesting side characters, cool scenery, or beautiful prose to make up for it.  Granted it was written in the eighties and seems to be a nostalgia piece for many, but I am nearly halfway through and as yet have not seen anything remarkable about it.  Besides the above remarks.

Translation - Übersetzung

My somewhat career goal is to be a German-to-English translator.

Realistically speaking, I am probably going to end up working with the EU translating documents and contracts and boring stuff like that.  But while I am still young and free, I can dream about introducing Amercans to German children's fantasy.  You've probably heard of Cornelia Funke and Inkheart, but do you know Kai Meyer?  He is (nearly) as brilliant as she.

I may be violating copyright laws by doing this, but here is the Prologue from Meyer's book Frostfeuer ("Frostfire"), translated by my very own self:

                Where night and north end, over the mist lies the fastness of the Snow Queen

                Nobody had ever charted the range of her icy kingdom.  None went there without a good reason.  And hardly anyone thinks that her palace still stands today, on top of the last and tallest of all cliffs, where snow and ice melt into eternity.

                The Snow Queen is old, but no one knows when she first strode through this ice-cold waste.  From wind and frost and magic she built her palace, and even today the stroms whine for mercy, when they lose their way in the endless halls and corridors.  Snow blows through the winding chambers, without ever seeing the sun.  And even the starlight of the Beginning is enclosed here, in towers of ice crystals and in the deadly eyes of the Queen.

*

                Years ago, which today in fact appears to many to mean only the blink of an eye in the lifespan of the palace, a snow-eagle hunted through the labyrinth of halls and chasms.  It was no ordinary eagle, but that was known only to itself and the one whose hate-filled gaze followed it.  It had stolen what was most dear to her.

                In its talons, covered with glittering hoarfrost, it carried an icicle – a icicle that held the heart of the Snow Queen.

                One so old and cold and clever as the Lady of the Northland does not bear her heart in her chest.  A heart can warm even the blackest soul – sometimes even when the worst would not hav counted on it – and even one such as the Queen would well have felt joy now and then as well, or have it beat more quickly in a rare moment of joy.

                But the Queen had guarded against all that.  In her was only ever cold.  Many ages ago she had plucked the heart from her breast and since then saved it in a chamber in her palace, unmolested by human or magical influences. 

                No one had ever succeeded in casting a glance upon it – until that day, when the snow-eagle flew through a crack in the ice of the fastness, lighted down on the heart of the Snow Queen, and broke an icicle from it.  The pain that this theft brought forth quickly dissipated.  But in that same moment that the icicle split from her heart, she lost the better part of her power.  Even a being such as she had a weak point, and this was, as she now knew, her own icy heart.

                At once she called her cruel servants to her, to capture the eagle and being the icicle back to its place.  And yet she was not to catch the bird.

                With widening wingbeats, it swept through the halls and the labyrinthine ways.  Once it was frightened when its reflection on the bare ice flitted past it, and when an avalanche of snow rampaged through the corridor, and struck at him with crystal talons.

                But at last the eagle found its way back to the crevasse through which it had penetrated into the inner sanctum of the Queen, and with him came the trapped storms out into the freedom of the northland waste.

                Fog billowed around the icy steep face, which melted into edge of the cliff underneath it.  Not even the eagle’s eyes could peer deeper in:  Whatever surged against the crags from beyond the see, it was not an ocean.  Perhaps the end of the world; or a remainder of that which came before it; or ever that which was yet to come, at the parting of all days.

                The snow-eagle hit a snag and glided inland, carried by the unleashed winds which, out of joy for their freedom, carried it over the white waste faster than any other bird before.

                On the ground, the snow-covered roofs of a city that stayed behind clawed at the cliffs of the fortress, crooked, humped, in humility and fear for the the Lady.  The eagle knew that eyes were watching it from under there, hidden in the shadow of thick fur hoods, people who knew what it had done and were thankful for it.

                Quick as an arrow it shot over the frozen polar waste.  Once it thought it heard a terrible cry behind it, half crazed with rage and the thirst for revenge.  But it did not look back at the castle because it feared to see the face of the Queen, high above over the battlements and towers, formed of driving snow and the night-black of the edge of the world.

                It held the icicle of her heart fast in its talons, flew as fast as it could, far, far, far into the land beyond, thither to the south to the Czardom, there, where it could catch its breath and hide both itself and the icicle.

                On the way, the eagle turned back into a woman with blue hair who resumed her journey by sledge.  Next to her stood a suitcase and an umbrella.  She still did not look over her shoulder.  She suspected that she was being followed.

                A long way.

                A peculiar woman.

                And the beginning of a wondrous story.