Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I meant to post earlier this week about my goals for Kaz's Summer Camp, but it's Friday again, and that means guest blog day, so you'll have to wait in suspense to find out what I've been up to until another post!

For those of you who have read "Nomi's Wish," you may have heard some of the true story behind the piece. While I was working at Gale as an editor of Something about the Author, I had the opportunity to exchange letters and phone calls with Naomi Lewis, a British writer and critic, and one of the foremost Hans Christian Andersen scholars and translators. An article in Books for Keeps (linked in full here) that I read while working on her profile for the series called Lewis a fairy herself, which was a grain of inspiration for the story. Later, on the phone, Lewis told me that she sometimes gave young women wishes, so long as they never told how they used them, and wished them the very best luck in using their "fourth" wish first. (In theory, the first two wishes always bring trouble, and the third wish is always used to undo the trouble caused by the first two: if only the heroes were given four wishes instead of three, they'd have the real wish to make good use of.) During our last conversation, she gave me a wish (which I have since used and, to the present, it has come true).

I discovered, while doing some research this week, that Naomi Lewis died last July at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. She didn't use the Internet when I was corresponding with her, and I'd always meant to send her a printed copy of "Nomi's Wish," but was rather afraid she wouldn't feel as honored by it as I had been inspired by her (especially as it features the death of the character named and modeled after her!). In honor of her life and memory, today's guest blog is an excerpt from her Classic Fairy Tales to Read Aloud, for which she wrote a brilliant four page introduction, only a small part of which I'm quoting here. Cheers, Naomi, and may all your wishes in the after life be fourth wishes!

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"The Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling," (Tolkien wrote), "and to it have always been added new bits, dainty and undainty." Helpings from that cauldron are the contents of this book. "But why do you call them fairy tales?" asked a quibbling friend. "Where are the fairies?" They are there, all the way through, whether or not with gauzy wings and tiny wand. In these pages you will find pixies, a goblin, a troll or two, a seal-fairy, a fairy godmother (and daughter), the immortal witch Baba Yaga, and a marvelous unseen spirit ("that which was down the well"). Gifted helpers include a cat, a doll, a wolf, a fish, even a three-legged stool. Above all you will find magic itself and its ways to solve all problems.

Still, the question does have an historical answer. The term that we use so easily comes from 17th-century France: conte de fee. It stood for a tale in which needed supernatural aid came not from the Church but an older less rigid power....

Fairy tales: yes or no? What do you gain by meeting them as a child? Better to start by saying how much is lost if you fail to meet them then, or do so only through cartoon films of the Disney type, or videos. The words are part of the whole. In the landscape of the mind, whatever is planted early lasts and grows through time. Reality may be a featureless urban-suburban street; but the mind of the fairy-tale reader holds mountains, oceans, distances, a forest that is haven, shelter, and mystery, some day to be explored, with a pathway that leads to the very edge of the world. Adapt this to your liking.

The stories also offer a useful guide to behavior. Be courteous to crone and spider--or ant, or bird, any creature really. Help given is help returned, at time of greatest need. The baddies never learn that politeness serves you best. Be generous: share your crust. And, above all, wish with care. Think well before you start: your wishes may come true....

Does all this stand for belief? That's an elusive word. We believe in the moon of song and verse, while we also know that it is huge and cold and gray, pitted with craters. Fairy tales grew out of want and need, hope and dream, desire to defeat the impossible. And in every tale it is defeated, a special gift to the listener. What is that gift? Imagination. No wonder Pushkin said, "Each story is a poem." And though today we have light and flight, music and pictures at a touch, and all manner of other marvels, are there not other impossibles? So when I am asked now and then if I believe in fairies, as a fairy-tale reader I answer with prudence, "Of course. The real question, though, is--do they believe in me?"

nalini_singh guest blogged today over at Silk and Shadows, listing ten things that were always true about her books. I thought it would be a fun experiment to try this on my own, so I did in the comments over there. It's hard! It's particularly hard since the space western story, "Rodeo in Area 51" took out a lot of the short-cut kind of things I could use if all of my stories were fantasy. But most of these even apply to the contemporary fiction pieces I wrote in my thesis.

Of course, when I look at this list, I imagine I see things that only I see when the writing's done.

1. There’s always an element of faith or belief, even if it’s the person fighting against their faith.
2. Borrowed mythology shows up, sometimes recognizably, sometimes disguised. I couldn’t use real-world myths for the Redemption trilogy, so I had to clothe them differently. (I'm not sure that "Rodeo in Area 51" fulfills this qualification.)
3. There’s often an unstated reference to a philosopher’s ideas (I’ve drawn on Owen Barfield and Jon Kabat Zinn for various tales).
4. There are strong women.
5. Often times, the people playing the role of nurturer or poet/romantic are male.
6. Relationships are a core focus, but often, the relationships between people who aren’t romantically involved are as important (or more important) than the ones that are. Sisters, friends, strangers who accidentally become important to each other, and even the relationship between my rodeo rider and an experimental motor-bike in the space western — they’re all over the place.
7. The cast is almost always multi-cultural, even if that just means elves or split generations. ("Nomi's Wish" is the hardest to fit into this category, but the age difference between the modern girls and Nomi, and the difference in her culture as a child from their own, is about as close to qualifying as I can bring it. I'm actually working harder on this, particularly given that rantsplosion that happened last year on various SF blogs, and I think it's important to have characters of different cultural backgrounds. In Blackstone Academy, the main characters are still predominantly white--one is learning about her Quinnipiac heritage over the course of the story, and one grew up with eccentric, mixed-religion parents, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking that they're not closest to my own culture and world-view than--but I want the school to feel diverse. Right now, I've just made a point of diversifying the names of the secondary characters, but I'm trying to be incredibly conscious of multi-cultural awareness as I'm writing, so I don't get to the end and feel like the setting is white-washed.)
8. Often the characters start out having failed at something, and part of the story is their having to overcome the emotions of having failed.
9. The emotional core of the story is almost always a moment that happens in a character’s head, rather than in a direct action climax.
10. Um… they all have my name in the byline?

As you can see, I ran out of steam for number ten -- but try this with your own writing and see if it's as challenging for you as it was for me!

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Quick link: YA writer Albert Borris had a stroke in December, so he's been unable to promote his novel, Crash into Me, which releases this month, as he's still trying to get his words back. I wish him healing and recovery, and hope that a positive book release will help spur both forward!

The last two days have been fuller than I'd anticipated, leaving me little time to post here. (Tonight, my poor vampire character in a Dogs in the Vineyard game was almost slaughtered by zombies. This took time.)

But I do need to post my lovely news! "Nomi's Wish" has found a home! In August, the story will be appearing in Coyote Wild, an online magazine of speculative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that publishes monthly. "Nomi's Wish" is appearing in the teen issue, guest edited by Sherwood Smith and a number of teen readers. I am absolutely honored that they selected my story; "Nomi's Wish" is the story I've written that I still think is my best, and is certainly the one closest to my heart.

This also ties into Monday's conversation (and I'm thrilled how many people posted there with insightful comments!), because I didn't know that "Nomi's Wish" was a YA story. I didn't necessarily think it wasn't YA, but I was just thinking of it as a story about two sisters, most of which happens when one has graduated from college and the other has graduated from high school. They're both, in theory, adults. But the story of their relationship, and the parts of the story that delve into their histories growing up together, are the core of the story--and they must have hit a chord with the teen readers selecting the stories! I've sent "Nomi's Wish" to adult magazines before with no luck and I suspect that this is because, all along, I didn't realize it was a YA piece.

So I'm incredibly tickled with my August. "Nomi's Wish" will be on Coyote Wild, "The Best Things Get Better with Age" will be in Serenity Adventures, and "Don't Let Go" will be in the ransom anthology (which has a title I don't yet know) edited by Dylan Birtolo (eyezofwolf). What a fun time!