Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I've been busy at work on Choice of Pirate, my next game for Choice of Games, and the rewrites on Regaining Home, so there hasn't been much time to keep up on blogging. (Except, of course, on Questia, where I just got to write about Wonder Woman and the Bechdel Test, and Cengage Brain, where I wrote about the Beatles new bootleg track releases and Amazon's future drone delivery service. You won't find anything about what's going on with me over there, but I do get to write about interesting stuff!)

I was, however, on Twitter fairly regularly at the beginning of the month, promoting the (now over and unfunded) Kickstarter for Noble Beast's classics line, which will reappear in a different form next year. Since I am not frequently on Twitter, it was completely random that I caught this post by friend of the blog Seanan McGuire:



Seanan wrote about how, at Disneyland, you're going to see people of all shapes and sizes, but that while she craved being a part of fandom, much like Disney's Little Mermaid wanted to be with humans, "Then I got there, and people were nicer to me when I wore short shorts and tight shirts and pretended not to notice where their eyes went. Because yeah, maybe I sold my voice a little bit to be a part of that world, and maybe I thought it was worth it." Seanan is among SFF creators calling for fandom to be more accepting, particularly to women and People of Color. My social media circle is filled with people who are highly critical of the exclusionary feel of some areas of fandom, out of love for fandom and a desire to make us "better than we are," in Seanan's words.

I appreciate these crusaders, because I think they're improving fandom by making it more welcoming. Sometimes it seems easy to get bogged down in what's going wrong in fandom, though, so I thought I'd share some anecdotes of fandom experiences that got it right -- which are, possibly, due to the efforts of people like Seanan.( Read more... )

We don't get everything right in fandom. We've got a lot of work to do to make everyone who loves what we love feel included. But there are these great moments when we get it right, and those are worth celebrating.

I first discovered Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) when she created some fan art for Anton Strout's Deader Still. He posted it up over at antonstrout, and I was intrigued enough that I thought, I should find out who this Seanan person is.

In short, she's amazing. She's one of those super talented people who is an artist, a musician, and a writer, all wrapped into one. She has three albums of her music available at CD Baby and she performs at conventions, seemingly all over the place. Her first novel, Rosemary and Rue, debuted last month to excellent reviews, and was recently the bookclub pick over at Genreville. I'm incredibly tickled that Seanan took the time to talk about fairy tales here at Myth, the Universe, and Everything.

Without further ado, I turn it over to her!

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CONFESSIONS OF A FAIRY TALE GIRL.

Hello. My name is Seanan, and I'm a folklore addict. I started small, like most addicts, with Disney movies and the Brothers Grimm, and branched out from there into the Colored Fairy Books, Child's ballads, the works of Shakespeare, and the fabulous scholarship of Katharine Briggs. It didn't take long for me to lose my way completely, falling into bad company, like the hero with a thousand faces, and the princess of the glass mountain. Pushers were everywhere, and I was weak.

I'm not sorry.

The urban fantasy of today is built atop the folklore and fairy tales of yesterday. True, a lot of it draws on archetypes that we've classified as "horror," but if you look at the roots of those stories, you'll find that witches and werewolves originally appeared next to pixies and elves. The divide between fantasy and horror is a modern construction. We're just getting back to our roots. Our bloody, bloody roots.

The gradual blanching of all the blood from the fairy tales is responsible for a lot of crimes against folklore, not the least of which is the relegation of the fae to cute nursery illustrations and CGI movies featuring Tinker Bell and her friends. Most of the traditional fae would kick your ass for even suggesting that they might be "cute," and they definitely aren't the sort of people you want in your nursery. The irony of decorating childrens' rooms with the very creatures we used to protect them from with horseshoes and rowan wood has not escaped me. (It's also not a good thing to explain while standing in the Disney Store.)

So what is folklore? At its simplest, it's the oral or written tradition of a culture. Tall tales, fairy tales, ghost stories, urban legends, they're all folklore. Every human culture has its own folklore and its own folkloric traditions, and no one is completely familiar with absolutely all of them. Folklore changes constantly. The old-school Cinderella may have sent pigeons to peck her stepsisters' eyes out, but there's room in the tradition for the Disney Cinderella, too; as soon as little girls started to retell the story of the movie, she became just as valid (if a lot newer).

As urban fantasy becomes more and more established, tropes and concepts go from "fresh and new" (and five hundred years old) to "been there, done that," which is especially comic when you consider that it's all been done before. Everything old is new again once it gets old enough. Even the fairy tale girls.

There's a lot of freedom in the urban fantasy playground, and a lot of history still waiting to be remembered. We've found our roots. All that remains to be seen is what we're going to plant this time.

I don't know about you, but I'm planting myself a pumpkin patch.

I keep a release list on Google docs of all the upcoming books that I want to purchase. Sometimes, "upcoming" turns into "missed that pub date last month," sadly. I also keep an excel spreadsheet of all the books I've been reading (which I started because the Glamazombies, Mark Henry's mailing list community, put up spreadsheets for everyone to track their reading on the 50 Book Challenge during the first six months of the year; most of us had hit 50 by the time we quit tracking). It helps when I have to come up with a book to nominate for an award or recommend to a friend.

While I manage to be behind on other things over the past few weeks, I've been keeping up with reading. Sometimes sitting on the couch with a book seems like the only thing I can manage to accomplish. (Well, that, or watch The Guild, Felicia Day's web show that I've finally gotten around to watching; I'm somewhere in season 2.) So, two lists: first, a short recap of some of the books I've read in the last few weeks, and second, a list of the books I just bought today.

• Dead Girl Walking and Dead Girl Dancing by Linda Joy Singleton. This is a great YA series about soul swapping, starring likable narrator Amber who just happens into other people's bodies. While she does get sage wisdom from her grandmother, a kind of celestial bureaucrat, she also has to face off against Dark Lifers who want to drain her soul.
  
• The Mermaid's Madness by Jim Hines. Second in the Princess series, the novel features our trio of heroines facing off against another princess -- the little mermaid. In order to save Queen Bea, the three princesses have to confront the mermaid and convince her to release Bea's soul -- or take it from her. The book is just as much fun as the first volume, and some of the story lines that started in book one are gaining new developments.
  
• On the Edge by Ilona Andrews. Ilona and Gordon are doing it again -- raising the bar on what I expect in their genre. On the Edge is closer to paranormal romance than the Kate Daniels series, but like the Kate novels, there's a lot of great world building and mythology-mixing going on here. Also: it's smexy.
  
• Soulless by Gail Carriger. This definitely lived up to my expectations -- except perhaps that there weren't quite enough dirigibles. (The sequel promises more!) There was actually quite a bit more romance than I'd anticipated, as well, but I think Carriger mixed all her subgenres (and there are several) successfully. Definitely fun.
  

As for today, I brought home:

• My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent
  
• Demon Inside by Stacia Kane
  
• Thorn Queen by Richelle Mead
  
• Unbound (anthology, including Jeaniene Frost and Melissa Marr)
  
• Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire
  

In the mail, two preorders also arrived:

• Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
  
• Heat Wave by Richard Castle
  

Which means, with the exception of a few anthologies, the most recent Succubus book by Richelle Mead (which came out back in June!) and Rampant by Diana Peterfreund (which wasn't on the shelf today), I'm nearly caught up with everything that's come out that I had on the list. There are, of course, others I'd like to own... and my TBR pile is still stacked ridiculously high... and I have review titles that are still not reviewed... but these are really small obstacles to overcome!