IllogiCon 2, Day 3

 Click here for Day 1, or here for Day 2.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Got there late, of course. The first panel I managed to attend was "Humanizing Villains," which started at 2. I came in at 2:15, and missed a lot of the discussion, but enjoyed what I was able to see. The panelists were Misty Massey, John Kessel, John Hartness, Natania Barron, Ada Milenkovic Brown, and Garth Graham.

Illogicon 2: Day 2

Before I begin, let me say that I think I was unfair in my last post. In my Friday writeup, I suggested that the all-male panels I'd seen had been the result of some negligence on the part of the con's organizers. Yesterday, Margaret McGraw told me that the panels were actually self-selected--that the guests had chosen whatever panels sounded interesting. There was still a gender imbalance among the guests themselves, but if this is one of those cons where you have to apply to be a guest, then the organizers really can't be blamed for that. Sorry I implied it was their fault!

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Day 2
(Click here for Day 1, or here for Day 3)

Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/2/13

Not too many links today. While you read, here's Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American mouth." Yes, I know it's from the Twilight soundtrack. The Twilight movies have excellent soundtracks.

1. "Loved Your Book, Can't Publish It." Lynn Price at Behler Blog writes about the frustration of trying to sell an excellent book that's not currently marketable.

2. "Just Shut Up." An excellent post about loving problematic media.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a child, nobody sat down with me after I watched Beauty and the Beast and said, “Okay, this is a movie, and it’s okay to enjoy this movie! It’s okay to think this movie is great! But just so you know, if someone in real life did to you the things the Beast does to Belle, that wouldn’t be okay. That wouldn’t be right.”  When my mind was young and malleable, there was no trusted adult pointing out, “This is a movie, and it’s okay to like this movie, but the relationship it shows is unhealthy.” And that’s not because I didn’t have those trusted adults in my life! I was lucky enough to grow up with two intelligent, liberal, kind, forward-thinking, active parents; they didn’t tell me because they didn’t know to tell me. They didn’t tell me because nobody told them. (via not language but a map)

3.  "Research -- All The Layers." An ode to research at YA Highway.

4. "How Long Should You Keep Trying To Get Published?" Jane Friedman discusses when not to try for publication, when to start thinking about it, and when it might be good to step back and take another look at what you're doing.

5. "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known." Julianne Lee at Book View Cafe talks about things beginning writers should know about the publishing process.

6. "Prophecies." Patricia C. Wrede weighs in on prophecies, why they often don't work in modern fantasy novels, and why they absolutely can work if used correctly. 

And that's all for this week! Going off to work on the winter story, and then to edit more of WOODS. Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season, and that 2013 is your best year yet. : )

Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 12/26/12

Since all the cool kids have been doing it, I thought I'd put together a little Wednesday links post every week. I'll keep it short, since the big news roundups tend to cover the major stuff. These are just favorite posts I've come across in my day-to-day surfing.

While you're reading, here's a song I revisited last week. Isn't it lovely?

"Soul Meets Body"--Death Cab For Cutie

1) Brilliant author/blogger Foz Meadows wrote a guest post for The Book Smugglers, which is one of my favorite book blogs.  The post is about literary bad boys, and astutely explains the difference between the "Classic Bad Boy" (the literary equivalent of Danny from Grease and Johnny from Dirty Dancing) and the more problematic kind that's become popular lately. This type--which Meadows describes as the "New Abuser"--includes specimens like Edward Cullen and his spinoff, who are bad not because they reject the status quo, but because they're actively dangerous for the (usually female) protagonist. Here's a snip:

And by abusive behaviour, I mean behavioural patterns which are listed by domestic abuse authorities as warning signs that you’re in a toxic or dangerous relationship. These are all clear indicators that something is seriously wrong, especially when they appear in confluence; and yet these are exactly the same characteristics which, time and again, I see being displayed by the male love interests in YA, PNR and urban fantasy novels, as though aggressive behaviour somehow becomes sweet and acceptable when the abuser loves their victim, or vice versa.

For those who are interested in trends and patterns in YA literature, this is definitely worth a read.

2) In a post called "Ladders," accomplished fantasy author Patricia Wrede reminds us that publication is not the end of a writer's journey.


3) In a brief post called "What's Not Working," agent and blogger Wendy Lawton considers whether several popular marketing techniques are really effective.  

4) China Miéville rants brilliantly against Belgium's reaction to the blatantly racist Tintin in the Congo. This post is from February, but still worth reading. I got it from a year-end link roundup on a great blog I recently started following, Things Mean A Lot. 

5) "Stories Are Genderless," another post by Foz Meadows, is another one from the link roundup in #4. It's from April, but an excellent read. It deals with the oft-cited conceit that boys won't or can't enjoy books by female authors. 

And that's it for right now! I had a wonderful holiday--quiet, at home, with family--and, hope you all did, too. New Year's is coming up! I have a "Favorite Books of 2012" list almost ready to post (that's read, not published, in 2012), and am working slowly on my winter story. I hope you have a safe and happy New Year!

XOXO
Kate

RTW #115: Best Book of January

(Mandatory plug: Check out my new short story!)

Two posts in one day? Surely the world is turning on its head. It's Road Trip Wednesday, though, and I actually have something to say about today's prompt, which is: "What is the best book you read in January?"

There's not much of a choice: I only finished three books in January. One was a romance novel, which was okay but only just. One was Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, a very informative book that I definitely recommend. The third was Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men. Not surprisingly, the third one won hands-down.

Dangerous confidence

I went to a book signing tonight. Marissa Meyer was at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, promoting her novel Cinder.  I unfortunately missed the reading, due partly to my propensity for tardiness and partly to a wrong turn at Albuquerque, but it seemed to have been a very nice reading, and the bookstore was lovely. The author herself was sweet and charming and well-spoken, and her signature message is adorable: "May the glass slipper always fit." (The book is now on my shelf, trying to cut in front of the other books on my to-read list. I think it's about to get into a fistfight with my copy of Anna Dressed In Blood.)

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Seeing people promote their books-- hearing authors talk about their careers-- inevitably makes me desperate to be one of them. I feel like telling people, I'm like you! I'm an author, too! You can't see it, but I'm almost done, and soon my book will be published and it will be on the shelf like yours! Even though it's not finished yet. But it's almost there, and it makes me crazy with anticipation sometimes. And ambition, as well. 

The thing about writing is that until you are published-- until you have an actual, physical, beautifully-bound book with your name on the cover-- authorial ambitions are generally seen as empty daydreams. "Yes, dear, you want to write a book, just like everybody else. Maybe you'd better do something else in the meantime-- you can always write in your spare time!" 

And I want to say, No! Not me. I can do this. Other people might give up, but I'm going to make a career as a writer. Someday I'll have a whole row of books on the shelf, each more beautiful than the last, and people will see them in the bookstores and point them out to their friends. And then their friends will pick up one or two of them and take them to the register, and maybe read them and fall in love with them and point them out to their friends, later. And all the while I'll be writing more.

And on that note:

Inspirations: The Perilous Gard

Let's go back in time to the year... what was it, 1992? I was a fourth-grader in Mrs. Van Aken's FOCUS 3-- a combined fourth-and-fifth-grade class for the... academically-inclined. I loved every minute of it.

Mrs. Van Aken was an awesome teacher. The most memorable parts of that year were the theme lessons-- multi-discipline mini-curricula, each focusing on a different time period. My favorite, of course, was the medieval theme. We read Adam of the Road, The Door in the Wall and The Trumpeter of Krakow. We broke into teams, chose medieval names, and played a "simulation" game where we started off as serfs and had to work our way up to "lady" or "lord." I still remember marking off little squares of my graph-paper "garden" with beds of carrots or potatoes, which we had to "sell" for the best price we could get for them in order to move up. At the end, of the lesson, Mrs. Van Aken "knighted" us--  sword-taps to the shoulders, "in the name of God, St. George and St. Michael," and all the rest. It was the coolest learning experience ever.

There were other things to like about that year. There was a class play about the Amazon Rainforest. There was a long-term writing project in which we made our own bound storybooks. (I still have mine, a series of adventures about a pair of sisters who fight pollution. If you are lucky, I might share it with you some day.)

Anyway. The most tangible remnants of my time in Mrs. Van Aken's class are the books I got from the Hot Box.

As I mentioned, Mrs. V was a bibliophile-- and her reward system proved it. If you amassed a certain number of brownie points-- and oh, did I amass the brownie points-- you were given a choice of rewards. The one I always chose was to select a brand-new paperback book from a cardboard box Mrs. Van Aken called the Hot Box. (As I'm sitting here, the thought occurs to me that it might have been my third-grade teacher who did this... but I've always remembered it as Mrs. V, and anyway I'd rather write about her.)

There was good stuff in this box. They were all "young reader" titles of various levels-- many of them prize-winning. Some were more excellent than others, of course--The Fair-Weather Friends was pretty entertaining, but it couldn't come close to the haunting weirdness of The Snow Spider. (Holy crap, that's a trilogy? I can't believe I never knew that! Must... read... sequels... now...) Jacob Have I Loved was a good one that I didn't appreciate at the time; Lyddie was another.

My favorite Hot Box book of all time, however, was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard.

The Perilous Gard-- for the many, many people who've never heard of it-- is about a teenaged noblewoman named Katherine Sutton. She and her younger sister Alicia are ladies-in-waiting to then-Princess Elizabeth Tudor, who is kept in a cold, drafty castle with insufficient supplies of coal and blankets (in hopes of killing her off? I do not know my history on this point.) Alicia, who is none too bright, writes a critical letter to Queen Mary about the situation, and Kate is blamed. Branded a troublemaker, she is banished to the remote estate of Sir Geoffrey Heron, a man the Queen says she "can trust."

When she gets there, she finds the place alive with hints of the strange, and even the supernatural. The Perilous Gard, as Sir Geoffrey's house is called, is a grim and shadowed place, much like Sir Geoffrey himself. Villagers are terrified of a woman in green who haunts the local woods. Most strangely, a man living alone in a leper's hut proves to be Sir Geoffrey's own younger brother, Christopher Heron-- who says he lives there by choice.

One night, sticking her nose where it probably doesn't belong, Kate witnesses an ominous meeting between Christopher and a strange man, who offers him the chance to atone for past mistakes. She is caught spying, and-- to keep her from talking-- kidnapped. When the drugs wear off, she is far underground, in the halls of the "fairy folk." With other "human" women brought there for the purpose, she is put to work as a cleaning woman-- though she resists the drugs that keep them from living in constant terror of the crushing stone above them. Her bravery catches the eye of the Lady, the queen of the people beneath the hill, and she begins to be taught some of her captors' ways.

At the same time, she is befriending Christopher Heron, who has been locked away to prepare for his death. In the end... well, the ending of the story is based on SPOILER. That ballad and others are woven throughout the whole novel, giving it a nice medieval feel despite its Renaissance setting.

--Vague and continuing spoilers below.--

What has always kind of stuck with me about this story is that the heroine is effectively given the chance to become one of her captors-- to "turn herself into a fairy woman," in the words of one of the characters. At the climax, she has to take drastic and immediate action to turn herself off that path. However, in stories like this-- and it's an old convention-- I've always kind of rooted for the heroine to give in and become the enemy--because you know what? The enemy is cool.

In The Perilous Gard, the Fairy Folk are depicted as cold and heartless people-- but they are also beautiful, graceful, dignified and clever. There's a lot about them that I found enviable-- especially since I first read the book during the most awkward phase of my whole childhood. At the time, I was too tall, too scruffy, slightly bucktoothed and completely unsure of what to do with myself in social situations. (I have since grown into my teeth.) I would have killed to become one of the Fairy Folk. I always wondered what would have happened if Kate had given in and gone with them.

(I probably wasn't at the point to appreciate this properly at the time, but I think Pope was actually trying to make Kate particularly sympathetic to kids like me. Book-Kate, too, is tall and awkward (and ugly as "a stone wall," to boot.) Though highly intelligent, she has no idea what to say to people, and has trouble making friends. It's quite conceivable that such a character might have wished for beauty and grace as desperately as I did. Viewed that way, her choice to remain herself is even more impressive.)

Regardless of the intended message, this book had a deep and lasting effect on my psyche. I read it many, many times (and it would still be on my shelf at home if my sister hadn't kidnapped it). Other stories affect me the same way. In 2003 I watched Peter Pan, and was riveted by the scene where Captain Hook tempts Wendy to join his crew. I badly wanted her to give in, and even though I knew it would never happen, I was disappointed when she rejected his offer.

I think that my love for "fallen" fantasy heroines stems from the fact that fairy-tale heroines in general are so insipid. I read a lot of fairy tales when I was little-- the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, especially-- and was always disappointed by the girls. Fairy-tale men are expected to be clever and resourceful, spirited and tough-- even underhanded when they have to be. The women, on the other hand, are expected to be beautiful, patient and obedient-- not much good if you're looking for a role model you can relate to.

Anyway. I've listed The Perilous Gard as an inspiration for A SUNLESS COUNTRY for a number of reasons. The underground setting is an obvious one, of course. Pope does a great job with it. She makes a big deal of the characters' reaction to "the weight"-- the constant awareness of the millions of tons of earth and stone over their heads. I might give the book a reread just for that, because I don't think I'm dealing with that enough in my current draft. There's also the "hidden court," which I haven't gotten into yet but will start to play with soon. The most important connection, though, is probably the chance for the heroine to become one of the enemy.

The "goblins" of my story-- which are actually a multicultural, multiracial amalgam of all intelligent things that go bump in the night-- share the vampiric tendency of turning people into themselves. It's not a deliberate action, like a vampire's bite. It's just that if you stay around them long long enough, you start to think and act them-- and pretty soon there's no difference between you. I've been wanting a long time to see what would happen if a heroine gave in to the temptation to "fall"-- and so, in this book, we might get to find out.