K.V. Johansen's Blog, page 15
August 31, 2011
Shapeshifters, chest-wax, and fairy-tales . . .
A while ago, I was invited to write a guest blog post for SF Signal. I decided to do something about why so many of my stories have shapeshifters as important characters, where the roots of my fascination with this type of inhuman or edge-of-humanity characters lay, and what sources had influenced this (McKillip, medieval Danish ballads, Ladyhawke, and most of all a picture book version of "Little Brother and Little Sister"), but I couldn't seem to find the right way into the essay at first. Then in the bookstore I saw a bunch of paranormal romance novels featuring shapeshifters. (Ahem, can I say here on my own blog that Holla-Sayan would eat them for breakfast?) The cover art, all these shiny-chested guys posing with their shirts off, made me think, "Do they shave their chests or wax them?" And for some reason that gave me the kick I needed to think about what shapeshifters mean in my own writing, and why I'm most at home with characters like Holla-Sayan, Mikki, Rookfeather, the prince in "The Dragon's Bride" in The Serpent Bride, Silverlad (as I called her, following a peculiar translation of the ballad — she's actually meant to be "Silverlocks") in the same collection, and a really cool character in the new Torrie book that I'm not going to tell you about yet because it's not finished.
August 28, 2011
Torrie and the Snake-Prince – IBBY Outstanding Books for Young People With Disabilities 2011
IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, has included Torrie and the Snake-Prince in its catalogue of "outstanding books for young people with disabilities" for 2011. Snake-Prince is one of twelve books in the sixty page publication that comes in for special mention. They say, "Among the many good books that we received for this project, we would like to make a special mention of twelve. … Torrie & the Snake Prince (cat. no. 47) by K. V. Johansen is a fantasy novel full of magic, trickery and humour, where the young peddler Wren has to take charge when she discovers that heroes are not born – they happen" (pp. 9-13). Quite an honour for Torrie and Wren.
If you're interested in reading the whole catalogue from IBBY, you can find it here, but if you have a slow connection, be warned, it's a big, graphics-heavy pdf, and it only loads one page; you have to wait to get the disc icon and then download it to your own machine to read the whole thing.
Torrie and the Snake-Prince, which came out back in 2007, was on both the Silver Birch and Hackmatack children's choice award shortlists, and has been translated into Macedonian. The Macedonian translation received the first Ana Frank International Award for Children's Literature, an award for children's books published in Macedonian, in 2010. Snake-Prince isn't what I call an "about" book; disability is not the theme. The hero, Wren, who is quite busy, what with being a travelling pedlar in the mountains, fighting off goblin, griffin, and dryad attacks, and going on quests to rescue princes, just happens to have a club foot. This causes her some extra difficulties on her journeys, but she isn't one to feel down about anything for long; even when she's hurt and tired and can't see her way ahead, she gets back up and carries on. Wren is also going to be the hero of the next Torrie book, which I'm not finished writing yet. Other projects (see previous post!) have gotten in the way. I promise to finish it before too long, though.
August 19, 2011
Blackdog … and White Dog
Three rousing cheers, champagne and fireworks … okay, cheese and crackers, not fireworks. Might frighten the neighbours. My author copies of Blackdog have arrived. 
Blackdog and the White Dog
There's nothing quite like that first moment of opening a box and viewing those shiny copies of the New Book, and this new book was particularly grand. You'd think, having done this nineteen times, by the twentieth one might be a bit blasé about it, but it's not like that at all. This was as exciting as viewing a shiny stack of Torrie and the Dragons way back when, except, in some ways, even more thrilling because Blackdog is such a gloriously fat book. Not, perhaps, quite an Empress of Blandings of a book; I think the silver medal in the fat books class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show would be bound to go to Erikson, but still, at 547 pages Blackdog is respectably hefty in the hand. And Raymond Swanland's cover is something I'd love to hang on my wall. I also had a great editor at Pyr in Lou Anders, a pleasure to work with, and that adds to the general air of jubilation — the book is everything I wanted it to be. It's available now in the US, a bit ahead of its originally-scheduled release date, and should be shipping soon up here north of the border.
August 17, 2011
Mr Wicked's teddy bear
Mr Wicked has moved another notch up the evolutionary scale. He now has a teddy bear of his very own. This may seem over-indulgent on our part, but he has claimed it, and now it's his favourite toy to carry around the house. He seems to regard it as not quite the usual sort of toy, meaning that he hasn't meticulously and scientifically taken it apart into small pieces yet. It even has a jingly bell inside, so not only has he been dogfully resisting temptation, he's got a lot of temptation to resist. 
Mr Wicked & Teddy
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August 14, 2011
Star Wars on Babel Clash
Way back last spring, I was invited to contribute a post to the ongoing Sunday Star Wars feature on Babel Clash, the sf blog of the American bookstore Borders. Borders, sadly, is in the process of folding its tents and slipping away, but the blog is hanging on to the last gasp. I'm not going to write now about the perils of a merchant monopoly; up here in Canada we're living it, in the book industry, and some other time I might have opinions. Right now, though, I'm just here to say that this week's Babel Clash Star Wars post is a double feature, with my take on the original trilogy as Space Fantasy, and Terry Brooks telling the story of how he knew when he was really famous.
Incidentally, my one-year-old nephew does an impressive Jedi imitation, complete with air light sabre and sound effects. Real Jedi, my sister tells him, don't fall down on their well-padded little bottoms when they swing at the enemy.
