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Archive for About Writing

#writerreadswriting Recommends: The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life

I loved this book. Flat out. Had me at hello.

I found it when I was on vacation in Atlanta. My husband was at a conference, so The Son and I were doing a bookstore-and-ice-cream tour of the city. Atlanta, BTW, is a fabulous place to do this particular tour. I had heard about this title on the Smart Podcast Trashy Books podcast, and I opened it in the store to see if I’d like it.

Now, I am very leery of the “narrated by a ghost,” trope. It’s gotten a bit old, but in this book it’s handled deftly and with humor, as is everything else. There’s a lot of serious stuff going on, but all is given it’s appropriate emotional weight. The characters are all engaging, the time-shifting narration flows smoothly, and I _adored_ the passages from the romance book THE PIRATE LOVER.  Cuz I’m a romance reader too.  Sorry not Sorry.

Anyway.  To sum up.  This was suspenseful but not dark, engaging, and highly entertaining.

Out of the Omnibus: The Corsican Sisters

During the Age of Empire, a particular sub-genre of thriller/horror stories emerged in English letters.  It involved English travellers finding out that the natives of whatever country they were tramping through might not actually like them.

This sub-genre includes “The Corsican Sisters,” by Violet Hunt.

The sisters in question are two beautiful peasant girls whisked away from their humble existence by an English family determined to give the girls a glorious season in London.  They are then returned to Corsica and the family moves on.  The sisters, however, do not, or rather, they cannot.

The story is told from the point of view of Lelis, who is the daughter of the family and a child when the sisters are brought to stay.  In the story, she has just gotten married to a childhood sweetheart (and cousin), and has decided that as part of her honeymoon trip she wants to go to Corsica and see the one sister who still survives, and meet the family who have…a rather different view of what happened when the English travellers took their daughters, and then discarded them.

SPOILER ALERT: It does not go well.

This is a very strange, very rambling story  It’s much more a nineteenth century story than a twentieth century one.  If Dickens drives you to distraction, don’t read this.  But, if you’ve got the patience for a long, winding ramble of a story, you will be rewarded.  This story has some of the most amazing atmospheric writing and slow, steady mounting creepiness I’ve ever read.  Hunt takes the idea of setting as character and dives into it headfirst.  The relationship between the narrator and her husband is deeply flawed, but spectacularly drawn with both wife and husband being shown as full, complex and truly believable people.

I need to read more Violet Hunt.  And so do you.

Out of the Omnibus: Violet Hunt

Who?

Don’t worry, I’d never heard of her before either, and I have no idea why not.

I started my dive into THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME in the back, in the section labeled: MACROCOSMOS (Stories of the Human and Inhuman) pt. 2: Tales of Blood and Cruelty.  Why?  I’m not sure, except it sounded good.  And of the six stories there, I decided to start with “The Corsican Sisters,” by Violet Hunt.

Who?

Well.  Let me tell you.

First of all — this is Violet Hunt here.

Now, that’s an interesting face.  She’s an English writer, and nobody I ever heard of before.  But I like her.  A lot.

She is, or was, according to this NYT review of her biography the daughter of a pre-Raphealite painter and a novelist.  She was friends with Oscar Wilde.  She was a feminist of the era of Mrs. Pankhurst.  She had affairs with Somerset Maughm and H.G. Wells.  She wrote some seriously creepy mysteries, if “The Corsican Sisters” is anything to go by, and apparently also went in for horror and the supernatural.

Um. Whoa.

She’s still in print too.  I found her over at Indiebound.org  and, yes, she seems to be on Amazon in various forms.

And you can be I’ll be bugging the good folks over at Aunt Agatha’s to find out if they’ve got any of her stuff in house.

NEXT UP: “The Corsican Sisters” A New Review of an Old Tale

Who’s Real?

Mary BellendenYes, “Careless” Mary Bellenden’s is real too.  As annoying as it is to have a Molly and a Mary to keep straight, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.  Mary apparently regularly stole the show with her appearance, and her behavior.  She certainly had the eye of the gentlemen poets of the day

THE HON. MARY BELLENDEN

Now to my heart the glance of Howard flies ;

Now Harvey, fair of face, I mark full well.

With thee, youth’s youngest daughter, Sweet Lepell,

I see two lovely sisters hand in hand,

The fair-haired Martha, and Teresa brown Madge Bellenden, the tallest of the land ;

And smiling Mary, soft and fair as down.

Epistle to- Mr. Pope by Gay.

Maleficent at 47

MeleficentTHIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!

You read that up there about the spoilers right?  Right.  Okay.

I saw the original Disney Sleeping Beauty in the movie theater.  I was 9.  Disney was doing one of it’s periodic re-releases of its classic animated features, and Mom took me as a reward for having memorized my multiplication tables  up to 6.  I never saw the ending (at least in the theater), because Mom also had to haul me out of the theater because when Maleficent turned into the dragon I started screaming in terror.

So, me and that bad fairy, we got history.

I took my son to see Maleficent this weekend, just in case one of us needed a hand to hold.  I’m 47 now, he’s 12.  He loved it and didn’t scream once, although he did hide his eyes a couple times.  Me?  I was deeply interested in what I was seeing.

It was a Disney production all the way, which meant it looked spectacular and plot-wise was about as subtle as a gold-plated brick upside the head.  I epxected that.  What I did not expect was to see a movie that would not have been made 20 years ago, possibly not even 10, DEFINITELY not when I was 9.  And I am not talking about the special effects, which were massively impressive.  Or the fact that I finally saw a Fairyland that really convinced me (God, I hope Brian Froud got royalties for those little guys).  I’m talking about the character arc for Maleficent herself.

Here we had a powerful woman, she is stated to be THE most powerful fairy of her time.  She’s is the protector for her people.  She’s good at it.  She is betrayed and she gets angry, fully, completely, furiously, vengefully, angry, and because of her anger, she makes a mistake.  A biggie.  She realizes it, eventually, and works to correct it.

Now, here’s the amazing part.  She does correct it.  She fixes her mistake and she regains all her powers.  She is not in the end damaged, weakened, chastened or dead, the traditional choice of movie fates for a powerful woman who has realized she has made a mistake.   She is never once lectured by a man (okay, maybe a little by her servant).  When she chooses to forgive the bad guy, it’s after she’s regained her powers and she knows herself to be strong and him to be weak and pathetic (he dies anyway because he can’t walk away from the fight, and I’m okay with that).  She is not rescued by a man, but by the other female lead and because she’s strong enough to hold out in the fight (and it’s a nasty fight) long enough for help to arrive.

She’s a mother figure who is competent at mothering, and yet does not have to die to save the child.  I was really afraid of that, because that’s what happens to strong mother figures in genre media.  They die for their kids.  She didn’t have to die.  She didn’t even have to live crippled.

Here’s the other reason I was afraid M. was going to end up dead or severely weakened at the end.  There’s a scene which is clearly a stand in for a date rape during which M. is drugged and has her wings cut off.  Now, in classic lit and a whole whopping great load of movies what happens when a woman is raped, or lets herself get seduced by the wrong guy, or falls for a guy who later trades his affections for someone else, or otherwise makes a mistake involving sex and/or love is she dies.  Maybe she lives for awhile weakened, and chastened in saintly retreat, but mostly she dies.  She doesn’t heal.  She certainly doesn’t come out on the other side with her full strength back, ready and able to not only face the world but love again.

Maleficent does.

This is new.  This is huge.  Not because it hasn’t been done elsewhere, but because it’s Disney doing it.  EVERYTHING The Mouse does is safe.  It’s audience tested to hell and gone.  It is calculated NOT to offend.  So when Disney thinks its okay to subvert the images of women with power, to show a full-blown traditional hero’s arc from anger to mistake to triumphant return to power, we know there’s been a real change.

This is also the second Disney Blockbuster in rapid succession (the other being Frozen) where it is acknowledged that the affection women have for each other (mother-stand-in/daughter in this case) is as strong, as real, as “true” as heterosexual love between men and women.  This is also new and huge in a medium that is still not comfortable with showing two women on screen at the same time having a conversation about something other than a white guy, or having an unequal power relationship that does not involve one of them being a stone-cold bitch who needs to be humiliated before then end.

Now, this was not a flawless movie.  As far as the writing went, it was a finely crafted piece of Swiss Cheese.  The 3 Pixies were a huge disappointment.  One of the things I loved about the original was those goofy little fairies when it came down to it were extremely powerful (turn a whole rain of missels into flowers?  No problem.  We got this.)  But in this they were just limp really limp comic relief.  And the king really needed to fire whoever was in charge of the spinning wheel destruction committee.  Also, I had to tell myself firmly that traditionally, fairies do not play well with each other, which might explain why none of them got together and said “Uh?  Mal?  You’ve been acting a little strange lately, anything you want to talk about?”

Still, I submit that in terms of shifts in the image of women and power, of whether women are worthy to hold and wield power even if they make mistakes, of the RIGHT of women to hold power, this movie, along with Frozen mark a significant pop-culture moment.

Plus, those wings?  Seriously, astoundingly kick-butt.

That Old Time Feeling

fireworksWriting is, by necessity, a profession of emotions.  Emotions are at the heart of character, and character is at the heart of story.  And at the heart of the human brain is a quirk that by describing a feeling, you invoke it in yourself.  So, there’s no part of writing a novel that is not going to put the writer on an emotional roller coaster.  And people wonder why we tend to drink so much…

But there are other ways that the work itself gets emotionally involving.  One comes at the very beginning.  There is a moment when that first scene, that first bit of dialogue or description just sort of…shows up.  Of course, it doesn’t come from nowhere.  It’s the result of a long process of mental and emotional synthesis that’s been going on, partly in the conscious mind, partly in the  unconscious.  But there does come this one moment when your whole brain gets together and says “Yes, this.  This is it.  This is my way into this story, this world, the home of these particular people.”

It’s going to change, of course.  It might be a dead end, but it is the way in and from there you can explore, you can follow your nose and your mental guides.

It is the beginning, and it feels great.

On Diversity

This is going to be short and to the point:

We need more diversity in US publishing.  There is no question.  This is not limited to the very real need for more writers representing the full spectrum of the native and immigrant peoples of the USA, but we desperately, desperately need people from across a far wider range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds as editors, publishers and marketers.  Because it is only when the institutions that create the books that most people still buy and read change their composition that we will get meaningful, lasting and needed change across publishing.

I admit that when I first came to the idea of fairies in America, I did not set out to write a heroine who had African Americans in her immediate ancestry.  However,  I’d been struggling over the nature of the Unseelie Court.  I didn’t want it to be the court of monsters, as it frequently was in the older and more traditional legends.  I wanted it to be not just dangerous and powerful, but attractive, mysterious.  Glamorous.

I’d already settled on the idea that the Seelie Court was going to find its gateways in Hollywood.  After all, this was the 1930s.  Where was more intensely glamorous than Hollywood?  But what about the Unseelie?  Magic, in my stories, was going to be attracted to creativity, to beauty.  What was the flip side of Hollywood?

I was grousing about this problem to my husband, and he looked at me and said.  “You want a court?  Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lady Day…”

Of course.  Of course.  The Unseelie Court was jazz.  The quintessential American art form, one of the few forms of music that is genuinely ours.  The music that was insanely popular, roundly condemned, that opened doors, that changed the soundscape of the nation and the world for all time.  Of COURSE.  As soon as I had this in my head, new ideas and realizations started tumbling through my imagination.

One of them was that if I was going to do this, my heroine (I’m not sure if I’d even settled on her name yet), who was half-fairy, would also, as a daughter of the Unseelie court be half black.  This would change her, because it would change how she thought of herself and how the world treated her, because it does.

That was it.  More or less the whole of my decision process.  History and magic and story demanded that the character be who she was and I tried to make it so.  Is this a good reason?  Enough of a reason?  Should there have to be a reason?  These are questions I don’t have an answer to.   Did I do a good job with the character, her identity, her triumphs and struggles and friendships?  I hope I did.  I tried.  Maybe I failed.  Maybe because of my own background, and because of the stark, sad, complex  and ongoing history of cultural appropriation, I can never do well enough.  I don’t get to check out of history just because I’m a nice person.  Wish I did, but there it is.

What I do know is what I said up top, this profession that I practice and love needs a much wider range of participants at the very top than it has.   What I also know is this, if we as readers want to promote that idea, and that diversity, we need to take charge across the social media and talk about the titles and authors we love who represent the broad sweep of our culture.  This will speak to the publishers in most basic language they understand…money and sales.

So, folks, here’s the question that can be answered.  Who are you reading?

Duke Ellington