Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I don't know what week it is. I'm beginning to think that will be a condition for the rest of my life as a mom. I do think a lot about how last year at this time, I was falling asleep for hours unintentionally and feeling sick to my stomach, and that my act of creativity was biological. Bug's "story," thus far, has been a delightful one, and I'm looking forward to her becoming a progressively bigger collaborator.

But on to my goals. I said last week: when you leave a story alone that long, is it yours any more? Is it the story you're meant to tell if you can set it down and walk away from it for a full year?

A lot of people had great things to say in the comments on that entry. jeff_duntemann's struck me as particularly poignant:

It may be less fair to ask "Is the story still mine?" in these cases than to ask, "Have I changed too much to remain its author?" Stories are not the only things that may be considered "works in progress."

This is sort of where my thought process has gone. In my questions, which are related but not intimately, I was seeing those two changing factors in two ways:

1) If I've left a story alone for a year, am I still the person who should write it? Does that story, as I would have told it, belong to the writer I am now? To echo Jeff, "Have I changed too much to write this story?"

2) If I've walked away from a story for a year, and wasn't compelled to write any more of it, it may be that the story I was trying to write isn't the one that needed me to write it. I think about that in terms of the Blackstone Academy project a lot. There are elements in that story that came from an earlier story that was also not the story I needed to write. So I think what will be best is leaving that draft, those three chapters I've already written, as scaffolding. I think I should scrap them and start over. And based on where I am in my writing goals these days (inspired largely by slwhitman and her Tu Books project and the entries about the importance of multicultural F/SF over at Genreville), I think that some of those elements will stick around, and others will go by the wayside.

Now, the quantifiables:

Reasonable goal:
* With my cowriter, finish the draft of our serial novel. (We're at chapter 10 of 20 -- halfway there!)
I finally went over lyster's chapter 11, and in response, it's now been made into chapters 11 and 12. My goal is to write chapters 13 and 14 to be ready for his review after his upcoming life event. I've already written 800 words (of the 1500 to 3000 word limit per chapter) of chapter 13, but there's a lot to accomplish in those two chapters, so I'm not sure what percentage I've actually finished. Still, progress is progress, and I revised the outline for the rest of the story, getting some good feedback from Max, so we're solidifying the awesome of here to the end.

* Write one short story.
This one is sneaking up on me fast. I want to have a solid short story ready for a submission deadline on August 1st; my short story writing tends to work in spurts, so there's still hope. I've settled on the idea that I'm going to work on, and if I can get a few hours with no other priorities, I should be able to slam something out in time to actually do revisions before the submission.

* Write multiple book reviews.
Since last week, I've written a PW review, two reviews for Mythprint, and one that will appear here at MtU&E in honor of m_stiefvater's awesome recent release, Linger. I still have more reviews on deck, but I'm actually making progress here.

* Additional contracted work that's come up has been going reasonably well, also. Lots of copyediting, but also some writing -- I finished a short essay on the Harry Potter books and will be writing four more essays this summer about various notable novels.

Extended goal:

* Write three chapters of the YA novel I'm working on.
Well, you already heard about this one above. Scrapping and starting over.

* Write three short stories (including the one above).
When I was looking at my percolating ideas, I came up with a couple that might be worth following up on, besides the one for the deadline. At least one involves giants.

* Restart the adult novel I haltingly began last year now that it's percolated and I have an idea of where it's going.
I think I'm going to reprioritize this -- meaning that I'm unprioritizing it. I'd rather see what the restart on the YA novel becomes.

* Blog at least three times a week
Ha! Well, that may actually happen this week, but I've not established any sort of pattern, have I? :)

I had the good fortune to work with Stacy Whitman back when we were both at a Barnes and Noble in Boston. We discovered a mutual love of children's and young adult fantasy (she was in the process of getting a graduate degree in children's literature; I, then as now, just love reading from the kids' department). Stacy left Boston for Seattle, where she worked as an editor at Mirrorstone, the YA imprint of Wizards of the Coast, where she edited the "Hallowmere" books by Tiffany Trent (tltrent) and co-authors Amanda M. Jenkins, Paul Crilley, and Angelika Ranger (dragonegg). Now, she's started a new endeavor: Tu Publishing, a house for multicultural fantasy and science fiction for children and young adults.

I asked Stacy to pop by the blog and talk to us about Tu, asking her some questions in my initial e-mail. Happily, she responded to all three. So now, I'll turn it over to Stacy. (If you'd like to contribute to getting Tu off the ground, you can visit the kickstarter page to make a donation.)

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One of the things I love most about fantasy and science fiction is that you can imagine yourself, the reader, in the characters’ shoes in these fantastic worlds and epic stories. What I love most about reading SFF stories set in cultures I’m not a member of is that I can do not only that, but also see things through the eyes of someone very different from myself, yet still identify with that character and feel the human connection—that perhaps we’re not as different as outward appearance might imply.

This is why the small press I’m starting, Tu Publishing, will focus on multicultural fantasy and science fiction for children and young adults. And there’s another reason, too: serving underserved readers, opening up FSF to readers of color who might not have felt like FSF reflected them. Think about it: how many fantasies have you read in which the mythos is NOT based in Celtic or Western European folklore? How many fantasy feature protagonists who are Asian, African American (or black, if in a world that doesn’t have an “America”), or mixed-race?

They exist. But there aren’t that many of them. After all, that’s why Racefail was such a huge discussion.

There are SO many cultures, fairy tales, myths, and legends from all over the world that writers can tap into, so when we open for submissions (which I hope will be in January, if our Kickstarter campaign is successful), there are a few cultures I’ll be looking for more actively because I’m more familiar with them, but I also love to just be surprised by a dang good story. For example, I’ve only read one YA fantasy based on Japanese mythology—Little Sister by Kara Dalkey—and would love to see more. I also love Chinese, Lao, Thai, and many other Asian stories, and would love to see more stories here in the States that draw upon those cultures.

I also think that there is a largely untapped amount of African American and African folklore. One of my first books with Mirrorstone, for example, grew out of the author wondering what kind of story she might get from mashing Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Marsh King’s Daughter” with Gullah culture, one of the cultures that grew up among African American slaves of the South. The reason I jumped on that story was because I’ve never seen a fantasy story set in Gullah culture, that truly researched hoodoo and voodoo and other religious beliefs and treated them in a non-“magical Negro” sort of way, but rather approached it from inside the culture. Nnedi Okorafor’s The Shadow Seeker does this, and there should be more books like this out there.

We had a book in the Hallowmere series (which is the same series that grew from “The Marsh King’s Daughter”), that featured a Hopi girl. Sadly, the series was canceled before that book came out, because I think that the writer blended well the world of the story—an original fantasy story that drew upon many cultures—and Hopi mythology. But I’m always wary of the line between cultural appropriation and creative inspiration, especially when the culture inspiring the author is not my own or the author’s own.

This is also an argument, though, for encouraging young authors of color and from minority cultures. Right now, most books that are set in “other” cultures (I hate to use the word “other” because it has a specific meaning, the “othering” of people being the opposite of being able to identify with them)—most books set in these cultures tend to be written by white authors. While it’s good that these cultures are getting more light shone on them, I think it’s equally important to keep an eye out for writers shining a light on their own cultures. I’m certainly not one to discourage a white author from connecting with a culture not his or her own and writing in that setting—a lot of great books have come of that, and I think it should continue. But I also think that when we’re aware of that issue, we can, as readers, start seeking out more diverse authors, as well.

The connection between myth, folklore, and modern fantasy

Fairy tales tend to be plot-driven. Rarely do you get a glimpse into the characters. They tend to be pretty flat—it’s just the nature of the storytelling form.

A good retelling explores the motivations that might drive a character to do the sometimes strange things that people do in fairy tales and legends. It becomes more character-driven—the plot hopefully starts to make logical sense within the world of the story. A good retelling should also flesh out a culture, the world that the character lives in. “Worldbuilding” is a term used by many fantasy authors that reflects the amount of investment in a setting that brings those cultural details to life—that allows us to see into the everyday life of the characters we care about.

One fairy tale retelling that stands out to me, that I always recommend to everyone I talk to as my favorite of her titles (which is saying a lot, because she’s one of my favorite authors) is Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale. Shannon takes a pretty thin Grimms’ tale and plops it down in a Mongolia-like fantasy world, then gives us the unique perspective not of the rich girl locked up in the tower, but that of the lady’s maid who got locked in there with her, a girl who in fairy tales is generally overlooked (unless she’s a third daughter off to prove her worth to the world, of course—but those tend to be farm boys, not ladies’ maids). This is one of my favorite kinds of multicultural fantasy—the interstitial and intercultural ways we “mash” worlds like Shannon did in this book.

My most recent read was Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix, which isn’t directly based on a folk tale, but the demons, the other supernatural beings, and the magic system all draw from Chinese mythology in new and interesting ways. Ai Ling goes on a quest to find her father—plenty of people go on quests in fantasy books—but that quest takes Ai Ling on a journey in which she has to navigate a culture very unwelcoming for a girl, and the story fleshes out supernatural beings, demons, and monsters inspired by Chinese mythology that readers might not be as familiar with as they might be with vampires, fairies, or werewolves.

The bottom line: characters and settings come alive in retellings in a way that the fairy tales themselves can’t, by their nature, flesh out.

Fangs-fur-fey: what comes next?

I think the pendulum is swinging more toward science fiction again, honestly, rather than more fairy tale retellings. But there’s always going to be a demand for good fantasy, for exciting quests, for scary monsters and heroic protagonists and bad guys to root against.

Young readers identify with the hero’s journey. They are in the same place in life, figuring out how to set off in the world to make their fortune.

Whether that means setting off from the only village you’ve ever known surrounded by zombies (Forest of Hands and Teeth) or saving your own life and that of your friend in a live TV death match (Hunger Games) or setting off to the capital to find your father, who has disappeared, and battling demons along the way (Silver Phoenix), each of the characters figures herself out along the journey—some better than others, of course.

So what’s the next big thing? I don’t know! My crystal ball often only starts to glow after I’ve read something that sets off my radar. That’s the caprice of being an editor. “I know it when I see it” might be a cop-out in many ways, but hopefully that also opens the door wider for writers, allowing you to be inspired, and allowing us all to take a little chance. If you can tell a good story that readers connect with, you’ll make that next big monster matter to me, even if I never heard of it before the day I read it.

This happened with Hallowmere. I don’t think I’d even heard of Gullah culture—at least, not by name—before the story was pitched to me. But now I find the culture fascinating. What kinds of sparks can you set off with your own story?

I've been busy working on the Tam Lin short story (tentatively titled "Don't Let Go") over here, and so don't have much to blog about (although I did recently visit a bookstore and followed blue_succubus's example of photographing a display for a fellow blogger, whom I will post about when I have a cord that connects my camera phone to my computer). As you may have noticed, there was no guest blog yesterday; next week, if I still don't have a new one (there are several writers out there who have promised me entries, but I'm not sure when they'll come--writers are busy people, after all), I'll post a bit of Campbell or Tolkien, excerpting something about myth from one of their works, so that I don't entirely lose momentum.

In the mean time, there have been some great articles showing up about what makes a Young Adult novel in the YA category, one from Publishers Weekly featuring Sherman Alexie, and the other from Mirrorstone editor Stacy Whitman. Also courtesy slwhitman comes a new John Scalzi Whatever entry on the YA vs. the adult market. These were all interesting to me, so I thought I'd share them.

And now, back to the Isle of Man.