Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I received a wonderful email today from a Blackstone Academy player today, who is working on a project about influences in a writer's work. My response to the writer (whose name has been redacted) bounced, so I'm posting it here in hopes that they find it. Some of the notes about my inspirations may be interesting to other readers, as well!

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Dear A,

What a wonderful note to receive! I have also been struggling with my love for a certain transphobic author's works (which absolutely did help inspire Blackstone Academy), and to hear from you that the game helped made me tear up. I am so glad that it reached you!

A lot of other works influenced Blackstone Academy, many of which I referenced with little in jokes. In addition to that magic school series, I have absolutely been inspired by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, as well as Terry Pratchett's Discworld books (one of the Mahwees wears an Unseen University ball cap). I'd be remiss in not mentioning the Narnia books, which I grew up with! They're not quite as direct an inspiration, but the idea of finding a magical world within the real one certainly corresponds to the idea of being able to leave normal school to attend a magic school. All of these are works that shaped me as a reader and a writer. I wouldn't say that my game directly responds to any of them--it was created to stand alone, rather than to comment on those other works--but the inspiration is certainly there.

In addition to other children's and adult fantasies, I also was greatly inspired by my new hometown. I moved to Connecticut as an adult, and the Thimble Islands are a real place off the coast near where I live. I wanted to create a setting based on this part of Connecticut, and I very much wanted to honor the indigenous people who lived here before European settlers. Jules's mother is based on actual scholars I've met at the Pequot Museum on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in Connecticut. Esme and her parents are Quinnipiac; the Quinnipiac people are the original inhabitants of the New Haven area of Connecticut, and I wanted to make sure they were present in the narrative! Sleeping Giant State Park is a very real place, and stories of Hobbomock were a big inspiration for me; for years I've been wanting to do a project that brings in that mythological figure, because in addition to being the villain in most of the stories I found, there are really old historical records of stories about him being responsible for healing and warding off disease--and the local Quinnipiac organization claims him as a culture hero. That contrast really appeals to me in mythology and religion (figures like Loki, who are tricksters and are frequently the villains, also have stories where they're the heroes), so I wanted to highlight that about Hobbomock.

I'll also say that the setting first started in my head because I had a dream about students at a magic school racing flying sailboats. I'm not sure where that came from, but it became central to this game!

Regarding the discrimination, I wanted to make sure that was focused on supernatural vs. human magicians. In part, I didn't want it to be triggering to readers who are discriminated against in their normal lives, but I wanted to create a scenario where people could strive toward equal rights for a group. I also have to hugely credit Choice of Games for being so dedicated to representation. They encourage their creators to make it possible for players to create a main character of any gender and sexuality combination, and it is one of the things I most love about creating games with them (and playing their games by other authors!).

This ended up being a long response! I hope it's helpful for your project--and I truly thank you for writing. It made my day!

-Alana

I had a fantastic time at ReaderCon this weekend! I've known about it since my days of writing for Rose Fox at Publishers Weekly, as Rose has long been one of the convention organizers, but I had never been before. So when the Ragnarok Team was asked if we'd be sending an editor to the convention, my hand went up. It was a really excellent time, and I was impressed with the attention to details as small as the production quality of my name badge. Check out my photos on Facebook (as I'm still figuring out how to convince DreamWidth to embed them in my post).

I attended two panels. "It's Complicated: Improving Intersectionality and Representation in Speculative Fiction," featured David Bowles, Phenderson Clark, Hilary Monahan, Catt Kingsgrave, Miriam Newman, and Teri Clarke. It was tremendous fun—despite the seriousness of the subject matter, the panelists knew how to have a good time with engaging the audience while still getting their points across. I hadn't been very aware of the term intersectionality. Phenderson Clark described it as having "all these identities wrapped up in one person," which I think is a really wonderful concept that ought to appear in all characters—David Bowles pointed out "The term intersectionality had to be invented... to actually reflect the real world." Teri Clarke really stole the show, and Miriam Newman, an editor, touched on some topics that are professionally important to me.

The second panel "Sidereal Symphonies: Writing Extraterrestrial Art and Performance" was as much fun as you'd imagine, but got surprisingly (or, perhaps not) mythological at times. The panel included John Clute, Catherynne M. Valente, Caroline M. Yoachim, Henry Wessells, and friend-of-the-blog Max Gladstone. Catherynne Valente had the subject very fresh in her imagination and had most of the best quotes of the panel ("These aliens come and blow shit up. Well, what did they sing about that?" And then, "I refuse to believe that any interstellar culture is incapable of producing a pop song.") I loved Caroline M. Yoachim's overall belief that aliens just aren't weird enough, and I delighted in John Clute referencing Mircea Eliade, whose The Sacred and the Profane was required reading for the mythology tours I TAed.

But probably the most fun I had was just chatting with industry people: I met up with editor Becky Slitt from Choice of Games and we talked about what I'd be writing next. And I had a delightful chat with literary agent Alex Adsett, who represent Alan Baxter, who we publish at Ragnarok. My day ended with a great time chatting with Becky, Max, and Max's wife Stephanie in the restaurant discussing the necessity of chocolate, which is a great way to end any day.

All in all, it was really fantastic, and I hope that we at Ragnarok can have a bigger presence there next year!

Happy New Year! It's been some time since I posted; it was a busy year at Casa Abbott for non-writing reasons. We've welcomed baby Fish into our family, joining his sister Bug, Three-stripe, cats Jack and Tollers, and I as members of our household. But while I'm behind on many things, I've continued to read a lot! Since I posted last year and the year before about my reading goals, I wanted to post last year's results and this year's goals before 2015 progressed too far!

This year, I did not count all the picture books I read, but I did count all my review picture books individually. For the year, I totalled 163 books, which is up from last year's 129 (probably in part due to counting all the review books individually). There was a method to my madness, however: I wanted to see what percentage of titles were review books as compared to non-review books. Here's some of the interesting breakdown:

• 89 titles were review books


• 106 were children's or YA books


• Only 12 were graphic novels, which is rather low


• I read 7 romance, 69 SFF, and 2 nonfiction

I did reasonably well on my goals. The 2 nonfiction titles beat my goal to read just 1. I read 13 out of the 15 novels from my TBR pile I'd hoped to read, 4 titles by autobio writers, 6 rereads (out of a goal of 3), and read one non-genre novel.

The most interesting statistic I kept last year was print vs. digital. I surprised myself by reading 91 books in paper and 72 digitally. I thought I skewed toward e-books, so it's interesting to me that I'm not even at 50% digital reading. Some of this is due to reading for the MFAs. I rely heavily on the library to provide me with MFA reading, and though some are available as e-books, most are more readily available in print.


Highlights of the year?

• Rereading Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead--and seeing it make the MFA finalists list--was great fun. It's been especially fun to read more of the Craft books, both post-publishing and in mss format, in combination with playing Max's Craftverse game Choice of the Deathless. Without the books being required for the game and vice versa, they work so well in conjunction!


• Finishing Devon Monk's "Allie Beckstrom" series was bittersweet, but starting the "House Immortal" books makes me confident there's more excellent reading to come.


• I had the fantastic opportunity to interview Gene Luen Yang for the autobio project, and I read The Shadow Hero and Boxers and Saints in preparation for that. They were both some of my favorite reading for the year, for very different reasons. I'd recommend The Shadow Hero to anyone, but especially readers who have a fondness for Golden Age superheroes. Boxers and Saints is a fabulous moral and ethical investigation of a historical period with a lot of magical realism thrown in, and I found it both enjoyable and tremendously moving.


• The biggest surprise read was probably Eleven by Tom Rogers. It's a book about 9/11, mostly from the perspective of a boy who's just turned 11, and it's fantastic both as an exploration of the event through fiction for middle graders and as a coming of age story. It was also pretty wild to realize that 9/11 happened before the middle grade age group was born--so it qualifies, on some level, as historical fiction.


• I'd also recommend without reservation the Super Lexi middle grade books by Emma Lesko. Lexi is neurologically and developmentally different from her peers, which makes her a fascinating POV character, and Lesko's commitment to neuro-diversity in children's books shows in how beautifully she captures Lexi and makes her so easy to empathize with.


• I loved finally finishing Shanna Swendson's "Enchanted, Inc." series, which for ages looked like it wouldn't get to continue beyond book four. (I'd still read more books in that world!)


• I'm also really eager to see where the "Kate Daniels" (Ilona Andrews) and "Safehold" (David Weber) books end up next!

There were, of course, a lot of other great books, but listing them all would be fodder for TLDR (if I haven't already hit that point).

I was pretty happy with this year's goals, so I'm planning to keep them the same. Here's to another year of good reading!

Way back in 2006, one of the first places where Into the Reach was reviewed was over on Flames Rising, which was the start of a long relationship I've had with the site as an occasional contributor -- and the start of my relationship with DriveThruFiction and the other DriveThru incarnations. Matt McElroy who runs the site has been awesome to work with, and it's through Matt and the Flames Rising team that I got to work on the anthology Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror.

So it's with great pleasure that I've now come full circle with Flames Rising: Matt posted the chapter one excerpt of the revised edition of Into the Reach at the site today. Thanks to all the people who posted the news on Twitter! I saw it from you first!



In other news, I am working on Choice of Pirate for Choice of Games, and the folks over at Facebook have been helping me come up with pirate shanties to listen to while I'm writing. Matt Ledder of Renaissance Festival Podcast had perfect timing with his Pirate Show Special, which he posted on the 24th. The stars must have aligned just right for that to come together just when I needed it. Thanks, Matt!

Several of my friends from the Michigan Renaissance Festival helped me remember the name of a group I'd always tried to catch back between sets when I was singing with the Arbor Consort -- the Corsairs, who sadly disbanded in 2008. Luckily, The Jolly Rogers are still performing and selling CDs, so there's pirate music to spare!

What pirate music and sea shanties do you recommend? If you'd like to recommend the pirate movies in your top ten, come join the discussion on Facebook.

One of the Redemption Trilogy Kickstarter stretch goals that got funded was the re-editing and prettification of Into the Reach and Departure to be re-released as new editions. At long last, Into the Reach has been re-released! It's currently available through DriveThruFiction and Smashwords. I'll be releasing it at Barnes and Noble and Kobo as well -- and probably Amazon, though I'm hesitant about that for numerous reasons (but Bottom Line dictatese that it's a necessity) -- but I'm more concerned at the moment about getting Departure cleaned up and off to the backers than getting the widest distribution possible on Into the Reach. If all goes well, all three novels will be up everywhere by the end of the year.



So hurray! That's a big hurdle jumped, and I can move on to the next things. Or, rather, I can keep working on finishing up the details on Showdown at Willow Creek (renamed to give it more Western flair), which is in beta, and get prepared for that release, while also moving on to the next things. What's in store here for the next few months?

• Edits and formatting on Departure


• Work on Choice of Pirate, my next game for Choice of Games


• Finishing up coding on the autobio project. The project is now in four batches per year instead of two, which means more authors and more fun. This batch features Shiloh Walker and Margaret Weis, who were both fantastic to work with!


Speaking of the autobio project, we've added some fun new structure, so along with the long essays, like Shiloh wrote for this batch, there are also interviews, like the one Margaret participated in. I tend to feature a lot of SFF writers, partly because I'm more familiar with their work, and partly because SFF writers respond really well to being invited. (Graphic novelists tend to be excited to be invited but too busy to contribute, though I keep following up!) I've been focusing on inviting romance novelists and have had a little success there, but I am looking for more mystery novelists, nonfiction writers, playwrights, and literary writers to invite. If you've got recommendations of approachable writers who interact with their readers online (that seems to be the recipe for successful responses to my invitations) who fit into those categories, I'd love to hear them!

I (and the art-reward backers) have gotten two images of Lindsay Archer's progress on the novel cover, and I'm getting very excited about where she's headed. It's going to be a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy!

But speaking of the trilogy, I now have in hand the re-edits from Shawn Merwin for book 1. Within the next month, I will be able to take those edits and turn the newly revised manuscript into an e-book. I told Shawn that the red showing on the first two pages was a little intimidating, but he promised me it cleans up after that.

In the meantime, I've been keeping busy on the autobio project, writing obituaries, and working on my next Choice of Games project, a Western with a little bit of mystery to it. The autobios this batch are tremendously exciting. I've gotten to work with Jim Hines on an original essay that had the same balance of laugh-out-loud and heart-wrenching I've come to expect from his novels. Joseph Bruchac did a fantastic update about his years in Africa, Pat Cummings provided amazing graphics from her illustration process for her update, and Eloise Greenfield wrote about, among other things in her update, filming her "Grandma Rap." I always enjoy working on the autobio project, but this batch has been especially fun, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the final results once they hit the online databases.



Between review books, I'm also reading the finalists for the Mythopoeic Society's Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. I've really enjoyed being on the jury for both the children's and adult lists over the past few years, and there are a bunch of really good ones up this year.

Reading anything good lately?

It's true what they say about Kickstarters being crazymaking. I am vacillating between:



And this:



There are still three days to go and just over $500 left to raise (and another $350 would get the original books reedited and up in multiple formats). If you've been thinking about contributing, or want to send word around to others who will make it a reality, please drop by the Kickstarter and spread the word!

Luckily, I have plenty of other projects to keep me busy! I'm just finishing up a batch of obituaries from famous individuals who died in 2012. One was Roger Sherman, who wrote the songs from Mary Poppins and other Disney films -- including a movie I'd not thought of for years: The Gnome-Mobile. I don't remember anything about the plot, but I do remember the very catchy jingle, "The Gnome-Mobile, the Gnome-Mobile, we're riding along in the Gnome-Mobile. Sooner or later we feel that we'll find what we want in the Gnome-Mobile." (Lyrics are from memory; I've not Google checked to make sure that they're correct.)

I also get to write an obituary for Maurice Sendak, who I'm saving for last.

I'm also delighted to say that I'm signing a contract for my second Choice of Games project, just as soon as the printer cooperates. I'm extremely pleased to be working with those folks again, and I'm delighted to continue to increase the amount of my living that I'm making from writing games. As a high school friend once told me about my career: I'm living the dream!

Well, it's not technically a "book," but "game" birthday sounded weird. Quibble aside, Choice of Kung Fu is now available! If you haven't done a game or interactive novel like this before, you can play through the demo at the main Choice of Kung Fu page. Or you can look at your purchase options at the Choice of Games main site.

Kindle users, Choice of Kung Fu will be out for you in the future. I'll post when it happens!

Art work below is by the excellent Sandy Jacobs-Tolle. (Check out her portfolio at that link!)

It's holiday sale time over at DriveThruRPG, and the Drunken Goblin has a whole stocking full of great stuff to offer -- including the first two books of the Redemption Trilogy. Right now, you can get the books for 99 cents each! You can go straight to my books here, or see what else is on sale on the Drunken Goblin page.



Part of this sale is prepping for a Kickstarter. I've talked with editor Shawn Merwin and artist Lindsay Archer, and they're both on board for getting Regaining Home back out of the ether and into complete digital form. Keep an eye out here for further news about how you can help make book 3 a reality! (If you have any words of wisdom or advice about Kickstarter, I'd love to hear them!)

In other good news, Choice of Kung Fu has been submitted to online app sellers, and it should be appearing on the market just in time for Christmas. Despite the awesome Adam Morse sending me e-mails to keep me up to date on the launch date, I find myself semi-compulsively visiting the Choice of Games home page, so I can be among the first to see the public announcement when it hits. In the meantime, there are a few new games I haven't finished playing through, and I want to try them out before I start on my next game pitch!

While I'm not keeping up with blogs, I do keep up with the articles on Tor.com from time to time. Today I read a great one by Liz Bourke about why saying "it's the past, it was just like that" isn't a good excuse to make all of your female characters simpering, or all of your characters heteronormative. It's well worth reading, and some contributors in the comments section had other interesting historical tidbits that defy the "it's history, it was like that" argument on non-gender issue topics.

In completely different news, I've been having a little anxiety about my black belt test coming up in less that two months. I've also been meaning to rewatch Kung Fu Panda as inspiration for my Choice of Games kung fu project (among other live action films -- although a kung fu practitioner friend of mine claims Kung Fu Panda is the best kung fu film ever made as far as films that reflect actual kung fu philosophy -- take that as you will). The result: not only am I even more excited to get in the zone on Choice of Kung Fu (tentative title), but I encountered a quote that drained my anxiety:

Quit, don't quit? Noodles, don't noodles? You are too concerned about what was and what will be.

So: stop worrying. Live in the moment. "Noodles, don't noodles," will now be my mantra.