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Archive for About Writing

City Magic

I have a love-hate relationship with “urban fantasy.”

On the one hand, I love cities.  I think they are magic by their nature.  When I was a little kid, we lived in Buffalo, New York.  I could walk, on my own, to school, to ballet class, to the stores (especially Herzog’s Drug Store which had orange creamcicles), to the movie theater (saw Godzilla vs. The Thing at the Granada before I was 8.  Life was good), to Parkside’s Ice Cream (which had peppermint stick ice cream, the only substance known to humanity better than an orange creamcicle).  Okay, at the time, Buffalo was collapsing along with the steel industry, but when you’re a kid you don’t notice these things.

We spent summers at the family property in the country.  Fresh air, hills to climb, a creek to splash around in and fossils to hunt on the rocky banks, big patches of raspberries.  Mom telling me to get outside, which invariably led to me climbing a hill with a book and my lunch so I could sit and read.

Then we moved to Trenton, Michigan, to a street that was like all the other streets around it, that is, it was block after block of houses.  I could walk to school, and home, and past block, after block after block of houses.  Even on your bike, it was forever to anywhere.  It was safe (it was also a complete monoculture), the schools were good.  I was BORED.

So, for me, urban fantasy should have the emphasis on “urban.”  A lot of urban fantasy is about vampires and werewolves and wizards who happen to live in a city.  For me, if you’re going to have magic and magical beings in a city, they, and their magic should be related to the city.  It should grow out of that envirnment.  It should be filled with the mysteries and influences you can only find in the cities, that tumult, confusion and combinations and places that cities possess.  That was one of the things I was aiming for in my Chicago in BAD LUCK GIRL, and the Halfers.

The Halfers are city dwellers.  Some of them are immigrant ghosts and legends, carried by beliefs and dreams to their new world city homes.  Some of them are the result of magic, used and disregarded and left loose on the streets to animate…whatever it finds.  They are creatures of tin and paper, electricity, even iron.  They are not loved, they are not respected.  They are new and they are confusing to some of the older powers that exist in the world, particularly the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts who like things…well-defined.  Pure.  Familiar.  Controlled.

I wanted the Chicago magic to be a chance to explore the contradictions of both the magic and the city.  In modern history, in Chicago History, things are always changing, the new and the strange is always moving in, and the results are frightening, confusing, surprising.

Magical.

Chicago Magic Piao

Sweet Home Chicago

From the time I started thinking seriously about the American Fairy books, I was sure Callie and Jack were going to end up in Chicago.  It was, in fact, one of the first things I knew about their story.

Fairies and magic have always been linked to beauty, creativity and glamor.  For a story set in the 1930s, it was easy to take this and run with it so that the Seelie Court — the bright, beautiful, literally glamourous fairy — would gather in and around Hollywood.  Once I realized that the focus for the Unseelie was going to be jazz — wilder, dangerous, villified, any yet profoundly powerful, that made New York city, a natural base of operations for them (yes, jazz has its origins New Orleans, and strong roots in Kansas City and St. Louis, among other places.  Jazz comes at you from all directions).

That made Chicago the middle ground.  A strong city with its own history, it’s own character and characters, filled to the brim with all the tensions and creativity that make America unique.

The Second City also happens to be my first city.  My mother grew up there, my father went to school there.  I joke about their mixed marriage — he was a White Sox fan, she was a Cubs fan.  I visited my grandparents there, spent hours in the Field Museum, saw the Christmas displays in the Marshall Fields windows and ate Frango mints when that was the only place you could get them.  There’s still something about downtown Chicago that feels more comfortable to me than any other city.  It’s still the place where the train tracks meet and the music, the blues, is distinct.  It’s a place where people come looking for work, looking to profit, looking to hide.

It was the only place I could picture Jack and Callie making their stand.

Sweet Home Chicago

 

Sarah Zettel and the Big Book — Part Four

TARDISNO MORE TIME TRAVEL THAN STRICTLY NECESSARY PLEASE

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK REVOLUTION BY JENNIFER DONNELLY.

Okay?  Okay.

So, I took a break from reading The Big Book and read a smaller book also on the 6ft tall TBR Pile of Doom — Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly.  Overall, very good.  Emotionally gripping.  Wasn’t sure about it at first, the emo at the opening felt a bit…obvious.  But it all settled down.

And then I found out that Revolution and The Big Book both pull a similar trick.  Both jump from modern times to the past.  Both have a modern person looking back at the life of a doomed historical person.  Both portray the past very, very well, and weave the tension between past and present very, very well.

Then both insert a person from the present into the past — in the case of The Big Book via a play written by one of the modern protagonists, and in Revolution by an actual (or was it all a dream?) act of time travel, via the time honored means of the blow to the head.

In both cases, all that emotional tension drops out of the narrative like air out of a balloon.  Both authors have done such a terrific job of creating the separate worlds, the separate problems and the separate POVs the change just feels cheap.  Gimmicky.  It’s a narrative layer I not only don’t need, I actively don’t want, because what I’ve got has been so lovely.

It’s a lesson about the importance of simplicity, even within complexity.  Note to Self:  Sometimes it’s worth it not to take that extra step, and flow, familiarity and follow through can be more important and more effective than that final twist.

And no more time travel than strictly necessary.

Sarah Zettel and The Big Book — Part Three

FriendshipFRIENDSHIP

As you might expect, HUNGER’S BRIDES, otherwise known as The Big Book, is a complicated book.  Wow, is it complicated.

It’s a time-jumping novel.  Not time travel, but it divides its storyline between the story of a modern girl, mostly told from the point of view of her professor who was a self-excusing womanizer, and who was sleeping with her because she was pretty and didn’t think much of it (yeah, he’s a peach of a guy), and never bothered to understand that she had issues.  Okay, not issues.  She had subscriptions — abuse leading to anorexia and other self-destructive behaviors.  The other part of the story of Sor Juana Inez Delacruz, who was a scholar and nun in the time of Imperial Mexico and ultimately falls afoul of the Inquisition.

It’s an ambitious trick, and when you’re doing it in 1300 pages, it’s pretty natural that some bits would succeed better than others.  I want to talk about one of the places that really succeeds.  The depiction of friendship.

Female friendship is something a lot of authors seem to grapple with.  In SF, we’ve gotten used to seeing a woman paling around with the guys particularly if she’s a military officer, a kick-ass heroine of some sort, or a prostitute.  But she’s on her own.  She gets to be friends with the guys and fall in love with them, but friends with other women?  Nope.  Not there.

In The Big Book, there are lots of friendships for Sor Juana.  Her life is not ideal.  She’s tightly cloistered, but within the cloisters, she has a tight circle of friends, and Anderson portrays them very believably.  They’re genuine, complicated, have good days and bad days, little secrets, little confidences, big blow ups, small ones, attempts to help that are sometimes clumsy, sometimes successful and always human.  Not afraid of this strange world, not afraid to show these people as fully human.

It made me so happy.  It’s a simple thing, but I can’t help thinking that the portrayal of friendship is startlingly absent from a lot of genre fiction, especially for women.  It’s one of the reasons I love the Thor movies.  Dr. Jane Whose-last-name-I-never-Remember has a friend, one who is roughly her age and is also a woman.  They talk, they tease, they help each other out.  Stop a second and do a count.  What other genre movies have you recently seen where there’s a scene between women friends?  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.  I’ve got the most recent Hunger Games, and even there it’s sketchy, and Frozen, which is between sisters.  How about you?

Interestingly, the miserable, abused, self-destructive modern woman has no women friends, not currently.  She meets up with an old friend during the course of the book but does not let herself stay with that woman.  She doesn’t make any new female friends.

For all of us, gender aside, friendship is a huge part of our world.  We get so caught up in talking about sexual relationships, we forget about the complexities, the intricacies, the vitality and absolute importance of friendship.  We need to remember more, inside the genre and out of it.

Starting Over, Again

I’m starting over, again.

This is nothing new.  The life of the writer is about starting over.  Fiinsh one project, close it out, hopefully send it out, and start the next.  If you are not living this cycle, as a writer, you are doing something wrong.

That doesn’t mean it gets easier.

This time I’m starting over on the last book of a series — Palace of Spies, Book 3.  So far, I’ve got a lot of characters, a time line, a deradline and no plot.  At all.  None.  Zip.

I’m not panicking, just a little frustrated.  I know that whatever plot I may have thought I had, as I write, it will change, kind of a lot.  Okay, you can take the kind of out of that sentence.  It will change a lot.  But I do need to have at least some kind of line of sight so I can start stringing words together.

But rest assured, Dear Reader, Peggy and Friends will be back.  I’ve left the door open, and the coffee is waiting.  I’m quite sure there is nothing to be alarmed about.  After all, what could possibly have happened to them?

Oh, wait…this is Peggy we’re talking about, right?

Time to get started over…

Sarah Zettel and the Big Book — Part Two

TROPHIES
bookshelves    I belong to the Subculture of the Book.  In my culture, books are not just containers for words, they are prizes, trophies, and they come with bragging rights.  I have had whole conversations with friends about how many books we own, how many new bookshelves we’ve had to buy; the problem of trying to squeeze one more bookshelf into a small house or apartment; how many individual volumes we own and whether they’re double stacked on those shelves.  We bemoan the difficulties of book storage and management in that particular way that is really kind of closer to bragging than actual regret.  And we always buy more books.  The size of your To Be Read pile is a big part of the Subculture of the Book.
Ebooks have not changed any of this.  That may be because I hang out with fellow geezers, but there you have it.
The Big Book is emblamatic of my culture.  I did buy it because I was curious about the contents.  But I also bought it simply because it was big and beautiful and I wanted it.  Some people do this with shoes or cars.  I do it with books.  And clothes.  But mostly books.
Lately, though, I’ve begun to question the subculture of the Book, and I hate to say, it’s in part because of the Big Book.  It’s turned out to be a good book.  There are parts of it that are really brilliant.  But like I said in my previous post, this Big Book sat on my shelf for years, and it had plenty of company.  That shelf?  Let me show it to you.  It’s six feet tall, four broad and it’s stuffed with books I haven’t read.  And I keep buying more and piling them in.  I mean there’s a TBR pile and there’s hoarding.  If books were cats, the neighbors would have called the humane society by now.
A few years ago, I tried be systematic about things.  I was going to start at the top left of the shelf and read every book in order.  I mean, I bought them, right?  I bought them because I wanted to read them, not just own them right?  What is the point of a book you don’t read?
That effort, I confess failed miserably.  So, there it sat, big and beautiful and completely unread, with all those other beautiful, unread books.
Books are a good thing.  You can never have too many, right?  This is practically the motto of the subculture of the Book.  And yet…and I ask this seriously…what is the point of having more than you can read?
Has counting coup and the luxury of ownership become more important to me than the stories?

Sarah Zettel and The Big Book — Part One

BRINGING HOME THE BIG BOOK
books and pen graphic    I’m reading a Big Book.  Seriously.  This thing is big.  Douglas-Adams-space-metaphor-level big.  Over 1300 pages long.
It’s called Hunger’s Brides and it’s by a Canadian scholar/author named Paul Anderson.  In part, it’s about a scholar nun in 17th century Mexico named Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1032),  who was a famous poet and thinker and who I’d never heard of.  She also, incidently, fell afoul of the Inquisition.  Wrapped around this is a modern story featuring a couple of literary tropes: the Middle Aged Man who is discovering he’s missed the point of his own life, and the tragic, sexually abused girl.  More about them later.
The Big Book has actually been sitting on my shelf for a long time.  I admit, it came home with me under somewhat shameful circumstances.  I got it on a vulture run.
My town used to have a bookstore in my town called Shaman Drum.  Shaman drum was kind of arty, and more than a bit highbrow.  Great poetry section, lots of “literary” novels, and a lot of obscure and scholarly history books I’d never see anywhere else.  This was mostly why I went there.  I’d get a new project going and I’d always drop in at Shaman drum to see what they had on the relevant area of science, history or politics.
This was where I first saw The Big Book.  It was hard to miss.  It had a lovely cover, all black and terracotta, and took up as much shelf space as 3 regular books.  Plus, it had a little staff recommendation card underneath it, attesting to the fact it was not just any old Big Book but a Good Big Book.  I’m pretty sure I remember picking it up at the time, mostly to marvel that such things were still being published.
Then came the Millenium and all that followed, and like a lot of bookstores, Shaman Drum closed.  With the closing came the sale, and I went, with mixed feelings as I do to such sales.  I want the books, but hate the fact that I’m buying so many because they’re cheap because the store is closing.  I hate the feeling of not just robbing a corpse, but a friend’s corpse.
Well, there I was, trying to sort out which books a) were the most interesting and b) I was least likely to stumble across elsewhere, and there it was — The Big Book.  I could not resist.  It was a lovely book, with a lovely cover, and, in case you haven’t guessed by now, it fed into my fascination with books as artifact.  This one was dramatic.  Big Book came home with the rest of the stack, and went onto the 6 ft. tall Ikea bookcase that is my personal TBR pile.  There it sat, for…years.

Forever Off to See the Wizard

Oz CoverI am an Oz geek.  I am not ashamed to admit it.  I quite literally grew up on the Oz books.  I learned to read out of The Wizard of Oz.  I had a babysitter, the teenage daughter of family friends, who had a bunch of the Baum sequels and whenever she came over to sit, or we went to their house to visit, those books were open.  When she went away to college, she gave them to me, and I still have them.  I’m now reading them to my son.
And let me tell you, these are some truly weird books.  You get past THE WIZARD OF OZ and you find out Piers Anthony’s Xanth has got nothing on Oz.  There’s a magnificently strange scene in THE TINWOODMAN OF OZ where Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodsman, discovers his old head, in a cupboard, and has an argument with it.  Or there’s the magician who makes a glass cat, but doesn’t want it to have the to repeat Tin Woodsman’s problem with not having a heart.  So, he puts in a ruby heart.  The problem is, because the heart is made of stone, the cat is hard-hearted.
But it’s the story in the first book that everybody knows.  The tale of Dorothy and her three companions that we all love and that gets re-told and re-worked and is so firmly a part of the cultural landscape.
Why?
I’ve tried to work this out every so often, but I’ve got to say I’ve never quite managed it to my own satisfaction.  I mean, I love the stories because I love them.  Because they’re neat.  Because they’re weird.  Because Dorothy is unflappable without being cloying (all props to Judy Garland, but she didn’t get across the sheer nerve of the Dorothy in the books).  But clearly I’m not the only one who remains captivated by the story.
I mean there’s the obvious reason that they’re out of copyright and so anybody can do anything with them, but that wasn’t true for the 20th century when most of the great adaptations were made.  So it’s got to be more than just found material.
The movie’s got a lot to do with it, of course.  Although, it didn’t at first.  It never made back its $3 million budget and was considered a flop (!!) until it was rescued by TV (ain’t that just the tail wagging the dog?), and we all came to know it with Judy Garland’s breathless, dreamy Dorothy, Margaret Hamilton’s amazing Wicked Witch of the West, not to mention Burt Lahr’s Brooklyn-accented Cowardly Lion and those wonderful songs by E.Y. Harburg.
SIDE NOTE: I think it’s because of that movie that the sequels never seem to quite work.  The road trip finished and the books shuffle the chacacters around, but no one has ever managed to approach the emotional connection the movie creates.
But it’s the story itself that does it.  In a lot of ways, Oz is the first iteration of the road trip.  Seriously.  The Yellow Brick road is the most famous thoroughfare in American letters.  And on it we have a group of buddies each of whom is searching for something (all together now:  “A heart, a home, a brain, da noive!”) to make them complete.  They are not princes and princesses, they are working folk who have all had hard luck somehow; a poor farm girl, an unsuccessful scarecrow, a cursed lumberjack (if you’ve read the book you know he’s made of tin because the Wicked Witch of the East put a spell on his axe and he cut himself to pieces), and a cowardly lion.  They are all looking to a Wonderful Wizard to save them from their troubles, but in the end, they all save themselves.
Which is what is really remarkable about the story, because it is reconstructing and deconstructing the traditional fairy tale at the same time.  The tales the Brothers Grimm collected there are endless variations on the clever peasant boy or girl heading out to find something they need (you can actually measure the age of a fair tale this way.  In the oldest stories, they get food, in the newest they get royalty), and finding help on the way.  But in the traditional stories, what is needed is genuine, as is the king or wizard who can ultimately bestow it.  In Oz, the characters have what they need inside them, and the wizard is a con man.  In fact, in the book anyway, the Emerald City itself is a fake.  All the people have to wear green glasses, supposedly so they’re not blinded by the brilliance of it, but actually so that it will look green.
It’s a story of independence as well as friendship, personal triumph as well as a successful quest.
There’s also the fact that what they’re after is not riches, or royalty or even a decent lunch.  One wants to be smarter than he is, one wants to be able to love, one wants to be brave and one just wants to go home.  Except for Dorothy, the quests are internal.  The three companions all want to be better people, but not like Pinnochio who had to change his whole nature and then get a fairy to decide to make him real.  Lion, Scarecrow and Tinman are happy enough in their own skins.  None of them considers himself unreal in any way.  They just have parts of themselves they wish were better.  The belief in the possibility of self-improvement and getting along on the your own strengths is what makes this story uniquely American.  There’s no miricle of birth, no fairy godmother, no divine intervention.  It’s just people doing their best.
What’s amazing about Oz is that it really is an incredibly gentle work, and Baum did that deliberately.  He was reacting to the horrible Victorian-era moral fables like Shock-Headed Peter (in which boys who suck their thumbs have them cut off) and The New Mother (in which disobedient girls are abandoned by their mother to the care of a monster), but it is notably lacking in moralizing or attempts to be Improving or punishments for evil.  Even the death of the witches is accomplished pretty quickly.  Nobody is rolled downhill in a barrel stuck full of nails (as in the Brother’s Grimm), nobody dies and goes to Heaven to get their happy ending (as in Hans Christian Anderson). That whole speech Dorothy gives at the end of the movie about how she’s learned to never look for paradise beyond her own back yard?  That’s Hollywood adding an air of hard-nosed Protestanism that never shows up in the book.   Baum just has Dorothy hold out bravely until the end, when she really makes it home from the real journey she has been on.  Oh, she’s a good kid, but no one lectures, no one moralizes, and God does not enter into the question at all.  The story was written for fun to entertain children and as such it holds up beautifully.
And that’s the other reason it’s lasted.  Because Baum declined to give it a specific moral, it can be read and re-read by each generation with fresh eyes.  Like Shakespere (yes, I said like Shakespere and I meant it), the story is simple enough that everyone can see a new way to tell it, a new setting to place in it.  Oz is a big country and leaves plenty of room for the imagnination.

My Excuse

antique bookpile    Writers are famous for complaining about their jobs.
I don’t have a job.  I have an excuse.  Writing is an excuse.
See, being a writer gives you special license to do all sorts of things that normal people might want to do, but just can’t quite come up with a justification for.  With writing, I already have that justification.  It’s built in.  I’m working on a book.  I need to do research, and it is truly amazing all the categories research can cover.
Because I’m writing, I can travel to odd, off-the-map places.  You never know, I might want to set a book there.  I can go into every little, tiny local museum I can find and engage all the docents in long, detailed conversations about the house and the artifacts.  I mean, I might find a fantastic idea in there.  You never know.
I can spend hours looking at how things are made.  I can poke.  I can prod.  I can climb over and crawl under.  I can delve.  I can meet the raised eyebrows of all kinds of people and say “Oh, sorry.  I’m working on a book, and I was wondering…”
I can and have sat under cliff faces, or sit in the back in the dark of whatever theater I happen to be in, or in the shadows of a busy restaurant and watch the people who don’t notice me go past.   I can linger in the food court in the mall, or in the park.  I can eavesdrop.  I can stare.
I can take up new hobbies, go to new concerts, try new foods and spend entire afternoons at new classes and lectures.  You never know.  I might learn something that will lead to new ideas.
I can go into every single old used book store, every single cardboard box at every single garage sale, every single library sale and buy any book on any obscure point of history, technology, science or geography that catches my restless eye.  I might need it one day.  You never know.
Those may be the three most dangerous words in the writer’s arsenal.  I used to think the most dangerous words were “What if…” because those are the words that give birth to every single novel on every single shelf or in every single eReader.  But “you never know,” are at the heart of the writer’s working life.  You never know what you’ll need.  You never know what will happen next.  You never know what you’ll see, or discover; whether it’s in the pages of a new book, or on the road, or in the mall.  It’s exhausting.  It’s exciting.  It can be frightening and sometimes a little depressing, because it never stops.  As a writer, you never do know and you have to live there whether always you want to or not.  You never do know, but you want to.  It’s uncertainty and curiosity together make for creativity.  You never do know, but you want to.  So, you go and find out what you can, and you make up the rest.  The more you find out, the more you can make up, and the more you do make up and the more you make up the more you wonder about what you do know and the more you have to go find out.
So you have to go out again, and do, and listen, and see, and read.  I have to.  I’m a writer and I’m working on a book.
I have an excuse.