Snow Queen Discussion Post

I did a guest post for author Mindy Klasky’s “Inside Track” feature, talking about some of the things that went into Snow Queen. That post went live yesterday, and includes a giveaway for the book. Details on Mindy’s blog or LiveJournal.

#

Given some of the comments and e-mails I’ve been getting, I figured it was time to put together an open discussion post for The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy].

This should go without saying, but just in case…

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS!

I’m happy to answer questions or talk about the story, but I’m also happy to shut up and let folks chat. If you’d like me to jump in, just say so.

In other words, if you say, “Hey Jim, why did you have to go and have Elvis kill Prince Armand?” I’ll try to answer you. If you say, “I hate that Elvis killed Armand in a shoe duel. Glass slippers should have the advantage over blue suede shoes!” then I’ll probably stay out of it.

My thanks to everyone who’s e-mailed me, Tweeted, posted reviews, and generally just talked about the book!

In Which Jim Poops the Parties

Random Thought: I really hope Twitter and other feeds don’t truncate the title of this blog post…

I hate parties.

I get invited to room parties at conventions, and I generally smile and mumble something about how I’ll try to stop by depending on how tired I am. And then, almost without exception, I blow them off.

I appreciate the invitations. Really I do. I just don’t have the energy for them.

It’s not just convention parties, either. I took my son to a birthday party earlier this year, and while he had a blast, I … did not. The kids’ parties at our house aren’t much better.

It’s not shyness. Put me in front of a room on a panel or for a reading, and on most days I’ll rock your socks off. One-on-one or in a small group, no problem. Hanging out at the bar with the other writers? I can do that too … though I tend to get quieter as group size increases, and I eventually need to retreat somewhere quieter in order to recharge.

That’s the introversion thing. I can do crowds, but it takes a toll. While we were up north last week, we went to a few small town festivals and parades, and they were almost physically painful. Too many people, too much noise, too much crowding and bumping into strangers and loud music and everyone’s conversations turned up too loud…

The day after one such event, I hung out at our camp and worked on Libriomancer all afternoon while my wife took the kids back into town. I felt guilty as hell, but I needed that time, alone with the door shut, to recharge.

Laura Anne Gilman had a post a while back wherein she talked about breaking past the usual social circles and meeting new people at parties. I commented that I would love to learn how to do that.

The thing is, having thought about it more, I don’t know if that was a true statement. I ended up at John Scalzi’s birthday party at a con a few years back. I stole a Coke Zero and promptly found a safe spot near the corner with a few other writers. I did say hi to John, and spoke to a few other folks … but mostly I just don’t want the big party experience.

Smaller groups make it easier — for me, at least — to have real conversations. I’d much rather hang out with one or two friends for an hour than hang out in a noisy, crowded room full of people. Even if all of those people are full of 120% awesomeness.

It always felt like something was broken. Everybody likes parties, right? So what’s wrong with me that I don’t? Shouldn’t I work harder to join the parties and enjoy them? Shouldn’t I spend more time learning the behaviors and working to improve that set of conversational skills?

I could force myself, sure. I might even get better at shutting out the conversational/crowd noise for a while. But I don’t think I’d enjoy it.

I can do parties. There are aspects that make me happy. I love seeing my kids having fun with their friends, for example. But they always take something out of me. I don’t come away feeling energized. I come away feeling drained exhausted.

So maybe I don’t hate parties. But for me, parties are work. Sometimes they’re painful — even if I like the people involved. I prefer my social interactions to be smaller. And, at thirty-seven years old, I’m finally figuring out that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Link Roundup

We’re back! Got home late last night, and began working through the backlog of e-mail and comments. It looks like folks enjoyed my trio of guest bloggers. Of course, the problem with bringing three very smart people in to do those posts is that now they’ve gone and raised the bar, and I’m gonna have to add at least 50% more cleverness to my own posts.

But not today. Today is my catch-up day, including some of the links that went by last week…

I was supposed to have a guest post for Fantasy Matters, but I blew it. I’m still annoyed with myself about that one. I hate, hate, hate missing deadlines, and I love the FM folks. They invited me to be a guest back when they were an academic fantasy convention. That’s when I first got to meet Pat Rothfuss and Nnedi Okorafor and lots of other cool people.

Oh, and I’m also on Google+ now, talking about things like lightsaber-wielding dinosaurs. As one does.

I’ll probably do a Snow Queen’s Shadow discussion post this week. Any preference as to what day?

I think that’s all for now. Normal blogging service shall resume soon.

Hope everyone’s having a great weekend!

Guest Post: Alethea Kontis, 21st Century Princess

My thanks to all three of my awesome guest bloggers this week! I hope you’ve all enjoyed the posts.

It seemed appropriate to wrap up the week with a guest post by the princess herself, bestselling author Alethea Kontis. She and I share a ToC in the fairy tale anthology Happily Ever After, and she has a Snow White story coming out in John Skipp’s Demons anthology this October. Her novel Enchanted will be out in the spring of next year. Find her on LiveJournal and Twitter.

#

 Confessions of a Twenty-First Century Princess
By Alethea Kontis

Once upon a time, I was born. I lived in a cottage by the forest in the green mountains of the far north—home of Big Snows and Long Winters and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. The cottage had electricity but little in the way of technology; whatever advancements we had were chiefly employed in the kitchen. My elder sister and brother’s father had fallen down a rabbit hole (as the children of wild aborigines are wont to do) long ago, but my parents were both my little sister’s and mine. In one way or another we were all related by blood, which is really all that matters.

Like many girls, I did not know I was a princess then. How silly I was, but then, princesses often are. My eldest sister was the most beautiful girl in the land and my little sister followed in her very fashionable footsteps. My brother was a hunter. I was a gypsy. I wore layers of skirts tied with sashes and ran wild in the forest under my brother’s watchful eye, climbing trees and making mudpies and playing pretend with the snake children. In the spring I picked Black-Eyed Susans. In the summer I lay in the field and counted the leaves on clover. In the fall I picked blackberries for pancakes and pies. The dark juices always stained my mouth and hands, betraying that as much had gone into my stomach as the basket.

I grew older and the winters grew harder, and finally my parents relented and moved south to the land of Wilting Summers and Strange Dialects and Sweet Tea. My sister and brother stayed behind in the mountains. I was the oldest child now, and it was up to me to seek my fortune in the world.

I did a terrible job of it.

Instead of living my own adventures, I lost myself in the worlds of others’ making. I packed away the skirts and locked myself away in the tower room and lamented the fact that there was no magic in the world. I believed in the Fairy Tale, truly believed, but as much as I believed I knew equally as much that there was nothing here for me. In some other world I Went on Grand Journeys and Traveled the World and Found True Love, but not in this life. I was despondent. Apathetic. I had nothing to live for. The sun that rose every morning mocked my existence. In rebellion, I began to write my own fairy tales.

And then a funny thing happened. Suddenly, there was magic in my life.

It wasn’t exactly the same magic that the Fairy Tales spoke about, with their flying men and talking animals. This was a subtle magic, and I had to learn how to look for it. It was a song or a smile, a rainbow or a penny found. The more I looked for it the more I found it…and the more I found it, the less subtle it became.

Even locked away in a tower, I found myself surrounded by witches and madmen. I had Great Love, followed by Greater Tragedy. I started wearing skirts again. I began to Travel the World. I met Amazing People of Different Cultures. I bought a sword. I was even crowned by a Queen.

But I was a princess long before that. I had just never admitted it.

You listen to me right now, you, person who is reading this blog wondering why some strange girl is prattling on about silly things like princesses where Jim normally posts nice sane and helpful things about writing. Are you listening? Good. Because I am about to tell you a secret: There is magic in this world. Magic. Capital M. Not kidding. If you’re not seeing it, then you’re not looking hard enough….but if you plan to look for it, then you better be prepared for what you’re about to find. Once you’ve seen the magic, it’s seen you too. There’s no turning back. And it grows. I would not be surprised by a flying man or a talking animal now, not one bit.

You plan on opening The Snow Queen’s Shadow this week and losing yourself in the magical world Jim’s created of snowflakes and mirrors and arrows and death. Just remember, in the back of your mind, that there is more to it than fiction, and Jim knows it.

I have already slipped between those covers and reacquainted myself with Snow and her adventures (bwahahaha). What you might see is a gorgeous, rich world you wish you could live in. What I have seen are friends I haven’t spoken to in far too long who still love me enough to remind me that I am a legendary princess of the kick-ass variety. Once a princess, always a princess. I have looked into the mirror, and the mirror has looked into me.

There is no turning back.

Guest Post: Seanan McGuire on Writers with Day Jobs

My second guest blogger of awesomeness is the award-winning author Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant). Her pseudonyms’ newest novels are Late Eclipses and Deadline, respectively. If you enjoy her guest blog post, I’d encourage you to check out her LiveJournal or go say hello on Twitter.

#

…zero hour, five a.m.

When I was a kid, I used to read about the lives of working writers. They seemed to live mostly in one-room apartments, where they hunched over their typewriters and pounded out a living one word at a time. They weren’t, for the most part, rich, but they kept the lights on with sonnets and movie reviews and the occasional filler column for the men’s magazines (and as a little girl, I assumed they were all writing for wrestling magazines and car catalogs, because there were some ways in which I was very, very sheltered). Edgar Allen Poe didn’t flip burgers. Lord Byron…well, he was a lord, which often comes with some financial assistance, but he never asked anybody if they wanted fries with that. Life as a writer was hard, but it was something you could do. All you had to do was write. Like Ewan MacGregor’s character in Moulin Rouge!

Times have changed. Thanks to inflation and a mutating market, it’s a little harder now to make do and keep the lights on with a few short story sales and some ghost-written letters to Penthouse every month (“Dear Penthouse; I never believed it would happen to me…”). It doesn’t help that we have more “vital expenses” than ever before. My grandmother used to talk about thinking of shoes as the sort of thing you only had to buy once every two years. I would go nuts if you took away my internet connection, cellular phone, and cable TV–and yes, I am one of those writers who still watches TV. Sometimes as much as ten hours of TV a week. I watch the shows, they do not watch me.

Regardless, even without children, I have more expenses than my predecessors, and the cost of living isn’t going down. Add on the sad necessity of private medical insurance (assuming I don’t feel like melting any time soon), and it becomes clear why I have joined the ranks of the many, the not so very proud, the utterly exhausted.

Writers with day jobs.

My clade is a strange one, neither fish nor foul, the synapsidian inhabitants of our fantastic ecosystem. Each day, we lumber from our caves, dressed in the colors of the regions, and shuffle into our places in the great working jungle. Maybe we press keys. Maybe we assemble small machines. Maybe we make your coffee. Regardless, we are synapsids in disguise, pretending to be one thing when we’re secretly another. At the end of the day, we shuffle back home, shedding a little more of the illusion with every step, until we fling ourselves at our keyboards, maybe pausing to shovel something into our mouths, and begin our real jobs. The ones we wouldn’t be doing if we didn’t really love them, because damn.

Being a working writer means constantly fighting a battle against our twin arch-enemies, Procrastination and Social Life. Procrastination says “Hey, there’s a big shiny internet right there. Maybe you could learn something cool. Become a better writer. Get even more awesome. Finally get that big break and quit your day job. Or just play Farmville for eight hours. Don’t you wonder which it would be?” Meanwhile, Social Life says, “It’s not like you’re doing anything, you’re just sitting there, we’re all starting to think you don’t like us anymore, you need to come outside, it’s not healthy, it’s not right, and hey, wasn’t that Farmville I just saw?” Sure, we have team-ups from time to time–even Magneto occasionally joins the X-Men–but at the end of the day, Procrastination and Social Life will do their best to make sure nothing ever actually gets done.

Zero hour. Five p.m.

Balancing work and life is hard in our modern world. Balancing work-that-pays-bills, work-that-soul-demands, and life can seem borderline impossible sometimes. Being a writer is exhausting, time consuming, and yes, incredibly rewarding…but it’s reward that comes after hundreds of hours of work that is borderline invisible to the people around us. It’s secret work. It’s work that only the other synapsids really see happening. And it’s work that, unless we have co-authors in our closets, we have to do alone. All this science, we don’t understand, you see. It’s just our job. Eight days a week.

Have you hugged your member of order synapsidia today?

Guest Post: Marie Brennan on Fairy Tales

For the second year in a row, I’ll be up north — likely with spotty internet access — when my book comes out. D’oh! So I invited Marie Brennan, author of the forthcoming book With Fate Conspire [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], to do a guest post.

Please welcome Marie, and if you enjoy her post as much as I did, go check out her LiveJournal. Or take a peek at some of her books over on her web page.

#

Jim has unwisely loaned me his podium for a day while he’s out of town, and since this is the week that The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] launches, I figure I should talk about fairy tales.

I actually have a degree in the subject — nearly had two, before I left graduate school to write full-time. (Yes, they give degrees in folklore.) We studied lots of things, not just fairy tales, but they were always one of my particular interests. So I speak as a semi-expert on the subject when I tell you:

I have no idea what the hell these people were thinking.

You know how you can tell that “The Snow Queen” is a literary fairy tale, rather than a part of the oral tradition? It makes sense. Evil mirror, shard in the eye, everything looks unpleasant; sure, I follow. But what about these opening lines, to a lesser-known Grimm tale? “There was once a little mouse, a little bird, and a sausage, who formed a partnership. They had set up housekeeping, and had lived for a long time in great harmony together.”

Whut?

I’m sure Bruno Bettelheim could explain how this story expresses and resolves the oedipal conflicts of children — but that’s because Bettelheim liked to make up data to support his pet theory. Me, I can’t tell you what the heck that’s supposed to mean. If you think fairy tales make sense, that’s because you’re mostly familiar with the ones that have spent two hundred years going through the rock tumbler of the literary tradition, having their nonsensical edges worn off. We heard things in my folklore classes that simply defied all sense. My professor told us one folktale (non-European, but at this late remove I can’t remember where it came from; maybe Swahili, as that was my professor’s specialty) where the heroine spent most of the tale being chased by the demonic severed head of her grandmother, and then when she finally found a way to destroy it, she got cosmically punished for being a bad grand-daughter. (Moral of the story: you owe filial piety even to demonic severed heads?) If “The Snow Queen” had been an oral tale instead of a literary one, Kay’s mind would have been corrupted by a bit of shell under his fingernail or something.

Sometimes I think the entire thriving sub-genre of fairy-tale retellings is our collective attempt to wrestle the things into making actual sense. Not just the retellings, either; the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen went through seven editions in forty-five years (not counting ten editions of the “children’s version”), and while some of that involved adding and removing tales, there was a heck of a lot of editing going on, too. (Despite Jacob urging collectors to record things “without any cosmetic touch-up or addition.”) They mashed tales together, expanded plots, added Christian elements and tried to scrub out French ones; the 1810 manuscript of “Hansel and Gretel” has the children’s mother sending the kids out to die, before it got changed to a step-mother. Can’t have the story reflecting badly on the flower of German motherhood!

It isn’t that there’s no logic to them; folklorists have spent plenty of time analyzing what makes fairy tales go. It’s just that their logic is not our Earth logic. Vladimir Propp laid out a very clear grammar governing the order of events in Russian folktales, and Max Lüthi did an excellent job of describing their aesthetic laws. None of it is much like modern fiction — not even fantasy. Characters in folktales (European ones, at least) don’t bat an eyelash at a talking lion or a mountain made of glass, and if they have to cut off a finger to make a key to open a door, they do it without even saying “ow.” Modern fantasy more often bears a resemblance to the folkloric category of “legend” . . . but that’s a topic for another post.

The thing about fairy tales is, they’re like Rorschach ink-blots. What you see in them depends on who’s looking. And that, I think, is why we go on retelling them: we keep seeing with new eyes, finding new things to amplify or argue with. Their very simplicity and persistent weirdness makes them nigh-infinitely flexible — and at the same time, the shared familiarity of the most common tales means your audience is already part of the conversation you want to have. No wonder we keep coming back to them.

Happy Princess Day!!!

Today is the day! The official release of The Snow Queen’s Shadow, the fourth and final book in the princess series!

I started thinking about this series … back in 2004, I think. Meaning this has been a journey of at least seven years for me. I remember reading a chapter from Stepsister Scheme for the first time at the Fantasy Matters conference, and freaking out because I had no idea what people would think. (They liked it. Yay!)

I’ve changed as a writer since then … which I think is a good thing. Stagnation is creative death. So there are things I’d probably do differently if I had to write the whole series over again. But overall, I’m proud of the stories, and particularly happy with this last volume.

I’m hoping to have a discussion post in a week or so, once I’m back from vacation and people have had time to read the book. I said this in the author’s note at the back, but I’ll say it here as well: thank you so much to everyone who’s joined me for this journey.

With that, I guess there’s nothing left to do but post some purchase links!

For those who want print copies, you could try:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Chapters
Borders
Mysterious Galaxy
Schuler Books
Indiebound

E-books are available at:

Amazon
B&N
And probably some other places I couldn’t find links for…

So, yeah. Happy princess day, everybody! I really hope you enjoy the book, and if you’re so inclined, please feel free to spread the word 😉

Alcohol, Rape, and Bristol Palin

Last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates blogged about the following excerpts from Bristol Palin’s memoir:

Bristol proceeds to down wine cooler after wine cooler, as she “slowly surrendered to their woozy charms.” (Pg. 3) Levi keeps replacing her finished wine coolers with new ones, and soon Bristol hits “that awful wall” that takes her from a “happy buzz” into “the dark abyss of drunkenness.” (Pg. 3) The last thing she remembers is sitting by the fire and laughing with friends, and doesn’t remember waking up in her tent the next morning “with something obviously askew.”

Bristol awakens in her tent, with no recollection of the night before. She looks over and sees Levi’s empty sleeping bag right beside hers, and hears Levi and his friends “outside the tent laughing.” (Pg. 3) Bristol quickly texts her friend to get over to the tent, and she immediately pops over and tells her, “You definitely had sex with Levi.” (Pg. 4)

Coates asks the question, “Isn’t that rape?” In a follow-up post, Coates adds that the implication of nonconsent comes from another quote:

“Suddenly, I wondered why it was called ‘losing your virginity,'” Bristol writes. “Because it felt more like it had been stolen.”

Um … from my reading, the “implication” of nonconsent comes from the fact that she describes being intoxicated to the point where she couldn’t even remember the events of the previous night.

Naturally, the very first comment to Coates’ article accuses Palin of lying. So damn predictable.

I don’t know what happened between Palin and Johnston. But I do know the scenario described here is a common one. Using alcohol to lower a woman’s inhibitions is a frequently-used tactic. It was a freaking punchline in Friends. “Hey, let’s get you another cocktail!”

Let me put this as clearly as I can. If consent is not given freely, then it’s not consent. If you need to get her drunk, it’s not consent. If you need to threaten her, it’s not consent. If you need to slip something into her drink, it’s not consent.

If the other person doesn’t consent? That’s rape.

The situation Bristol Palin describes? That is not consent. And unfortunately, it’s very common.

So if you’re planning to get someone drunk in the hopes of “getting lucky,” you’re not planning to get laid. You’re planning to commit rape.

Any questions?

Judging Other Writers

Congratulations to tenantofwildfel, who was selected by random.org to win a free book in yesterday’s giveaway!

#

Today’s musing was sparked by Catherine Hellisen’s post here wherein she talks about how selling a book to a major publisher does not, in fact, make you better than someone who sold to a small press or self-published or writes in that other genre or even that person who sold to Publish America.

All of which is absolutely true.

That said, there are assumptions I can and do make about stories based on where and how they were published…

  • If your book is published by DAW (my publisher) or another major publisher, I assume that someone liked your book and thought it would sell well enough to offer you thousands of dollars up front for the right to publish it.
  • If your book is published by a small press, I assume someone liked it and thought it would sell well enough to invest their time, money, and resources in publishing it.
  • If your book is self-published, I assume you can finish a novel manuscript book and follow the instructions to upload it to Amazon, B&N, etc.
  • If your book is published by a vanity press, I assume you can finish a novel book.
  • If your book is published by Publish America, I assume you can finish a novel book and either have no interest in doing any research whatsoever, or else you simply refuse to listen when others share their experience and warnings.

There are others, of course. For example, in categories one and often two (depending on which small press), I assume the book was probably edited, professionally typeset, and so on.

I believe these are reasonable assumptions. None of them are judgments on an author or his/her particular story. Nowhere do I assume that your book bites the wax tadpole.

However, from my own reading experience, I know that the odds of me tossing a self-published or micropress book aside unfinished are much higher than the odds of doing the same with a book from a major publisher. Does that mean I can pick up a random self-published book and declare it to be crap without reading? Of course not. But if you give me a choice between a Tor book and a self-published book, then all else being equal, I’ll pick up the Tor. Because historically, those books have been more enjoyable to me.

Does getting a deal with Tor make you a better person? Not at all. Tor publishes assholes just like any other publisher.

Does it make you a better writer? Nope. Writing better stories makes you a better writer.

But are my odds of finding good stories higher with a major publisher’s titles than with Publish America’s list? Without a doubt.

Any questions?

I’ll close with one last judgment. If you say “There’s no such thing as a good or bad story; it’s nothing but personal preference!” then I’ll judge you to be either naive or silly, and sentence you to thirty days mining slush for a publisher.

Discussion and debate are welcome, as always.

—
ETA: Tweaked the wording for my assumptions, since “book” is more inclusive and accurate than “novel.” Thanks, serialbabbler.

«< 161 162 163 164 165 >»