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.

A Senseless, Tragic Accident

http://www.startribune.com/local/south/118025164.html

I knew that kid.

And now he's dead.

I found out over a Facebook message, of all things.  His mother must have sent out a message to all of his Facebook friends, a brief, generic message telling that he died in a car crash.  A freaking car crash.  In fiction, a car crash is a euphemism for "killed by plot."  You forget that since it is used as a generic cause of death, that it really does happen a lot to people.  Sometimes people you know. 

I'm sure there's a plot in here somewhere, though.  I met him in high school.  In a film club that a mutual friend had started, and even though I had no particular interest in film, he needed a certain number of people to keep the club going, I liked the people there, and I had no better way to spend a Friday afternoon.

I think we first started talking when I was reading Stephan King's Dark Tower series.  (Of course everything comes down to books in my life.) He thought they were the best thing ever.  I thought they were good, but kind of a mindscrew.  I gave him a copy of King's Insomnia for his seventeenth birthday. 

And my senior year of high school, his junior year, I was not so dense as to miss the fact that he sort of indirectly asked me to prom.  But I was dumb enough to accept.  I brought my best female friend along, because it wasn't like a date or anything, I didn't like him that way...and I think I forgot to make that quite clear.  But hey, prom is an important plot point in any high school drama, and I was intrigued by the image of doing something so normal as going to plot with a boy (and a girl).  I wore a dress that night for the first time in about 12 years.  And even though I had probably one of the sweetest, most gentlemanly prom-boys (not a date) ever, I realized that night that I would never be able to like him as he (might have) liked me.  He was a nice boy, but he was still a boy, with a boy's sense of humor and a boy's taste in literature, and we didn't really have much in common anyway.  Nothing about him even struck me as particularly interesting, though admittedly I was wary of getting too close to him.  But his friends seemed to like him, and when I say he was nice, I'm not just searching for a generic, positive adjective; he really was one of those people that really tried to be polite and never really acted like a jerk.

So then I graduated, and we went on with our respective lives.  I thought of him only occasionally, mostly as a stepping-stone in my coming out story.  There was a squirmy feeling of unresolved issues, that I never really told him I didn't like him back, because I was not quite sure that he really liked me as such.  And going along with that, that I never came out with him.  That I more or less went to prom with him under false pretenses.  I felt that I had used him.  But such is life, and you move on until the pain is nearly forgotten, and you never see these people again, except perhaps at a reunion, or by mystical accident.

But not even that will happen.  I'll never be able to explain any of this to him.  That brings me no relief.  The only relieved feelings I have that I might feel guilty about are because I am in Germany and don't have to feel obligated to go to the funeral, to mingle with his relatives, and his friends who I vaguely knew in high school.  People who feel a greater absence for his loss than I do. 

It's strange.  When someone close to you dies, you go through the grieving process, that's perfectly understandable.  But when someone dies who wasn't particularly close to you but you knew beyond merely a face and a name, you don't know how you're supposed to feel.  Or you feel guilty because you aren't sad enough.  There's just shock, and the guilty relief at surviving this round, but you're still shaken by how close it was.  And of course life/death doesn't work like that, but emotions don't know that.

Plot:  A lesbian goes to prom with a boy who dies two years later.  What a stupid story.  I've put up with my Author's inanity thus far, but he really has a lot to answer for now.

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.