Zoë Marriott's Blog, page 45
November 16, 2011
RANDOM WEDNESDAY
Hi everyone! Welcome to a random blogpost of randomness, in which I will share a few things that have made me smile this week, in the hopes that they might make YOU smile, too.
First, this music video for the song A Thousand Years. Yes, it comes from the Breaking Dawn soundtrack and yes, the video does contain some clips from the film. And yes, you know I'm not really a fan of this whole Twilight thing. But this song is gorgeous and it works just as well for the lead characters of The Katana Trilogy (aka Big Secret Project) as for Bella and Edward. So I'm reclaiming it. As of now, it belongs to Shinobu and Mio.
Next, this picture (courtesy of YA Highway) which goes a long way to explaining why I have turned out the way I am.
How about this trailer for the new Snow White and the Huntsman film? I'll tell you the truth, this gives me shivers down the spine - it feels like it came right out of my imagination. Can anyone say 'Zella'? Can't wait to see this!
And this picture, which I found on Pinterest and absolutely adore: I'll be using this as inspiration for Barefoot on the Wind (the Other Novel that I'm going to be working on, and which I'll tell you more about some other time):
And finally, yesterday I realised that one of my absolute favourite musical artists, Two Steps From Hell, had released a new album and I'd somehow missed it! The thrill of this is almost impossible to describe. Nineteen new epic tracks! Love! Joy! Happiness! So here I offer you the first track from the album Archangel, which I can tell is going to be inspiring the heck out of me for many years to come.
First, this music video for the song A Thousand Years. Yes, it comes from the Breaking Dawn soundtrack and yes, the video does contain some clips from the film. And yes, you know I'm not really a fan of this whole Twilight thing. But this song is gorgeous and it works just as well for the lead characters of The Katana Trilogy (aka Big Secret Project) as for Bella and Edward. So I'm reclaiming it. As of now, it belongs to Shinobu and Mio.
Next, this picture (courtesy of YA Highway) which goes a long way to explaining why I have turned out the way I am.
How about this trailer for the new Snow White and the Huntsman film? I'll tell you the truth, this gives me shivers down the spine - it feels like it came right out of my imagination. Can anyone say 'Zella'? Can't wait to see this!
And this picture, which I found on Pinterest and absolutely adore: I'll be using this as inspiration for Barefoot on the Wind (the Other Novel that I'm going to be working on, and which I'll tell you more about some other time):
And finally, yesterday I realised that one of my absolute favourite musical artists, Two Steps From Hell, had released a new album and I'd somehow missed it! The thrill of this is almost impossible to describe. Nineteen new epic tracks! Love! Joy! Happiness! So here I offer you the first track from the album Archangel, which I can tell is going to be inspiring the heck out of me for many years to come.
November 14, 2011
FORGIVE ME...
Hello, Dear Readers. Happy Monday - I hope you've had a great weekend.
Over here in Zolahland I'm still mostly lying flat on my back and getting a teensy weensy bit sick and tired of it. Typing in this position is uncomfortable in the extreme, and so is trying to write with a pen and paper, which means that the book - Big Secret Project Book Two, aka The Katana Trilogy Book Two - which is practically BURNING inside me (ohmygodyouguysit'ssoawesomecoolandheartbreakingandbeautifulillluuurrrvvveit) is not getting written.
And that makes me cranky, Dear Readers. Very cranky. Who'd have thought that a writer with a perfect excuse to do nothing but lie around procrastinating for days on end would feel so cross about it? Not me! Turns out I'm not ready for my silver procrastinating medal quite yet.
Signs are that I'm probably on the mend now. I've made the decision to stop taking the powerful muscle relaxants that made me feel drunk and groggy all the time, so my back is hurting again, though it's not nearly the blinding agony that it was last Tuesday when it first happened. All the lying flat on my back does seem to be helping. I'm hopeful that I might be able to sit upright like a normal person within a week or so.
However, I know that I promised the lovely Liz and the lovely Megha to do a post for them today tackling planning and worldbuilding, and this has been weighing on my mind. I just can't do it. Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to get at least *some* writing in, but I just can't stay in this position long enough to do it. In fact, it looks like all my posts for the next week at least will be short and sweet. It's so frustrating for me, and I know it must be for you.
Please bear with me while I heal up, Dear Readers! I will try to keep to my normal posting schedule during all this, even if all I do is offer you a pretty picture or a YouTube video that I like. And forgive me for not writing the planning/world-building post that I promised. I will get to it, honestly, once I'm back on my feet!
Over here in Zolahland I'm still mostly lying flat on my back and getting a teensy weensy bit sick and tired of it. Typing in this position is uncomfortable in the extreme, and so is trying to write with a pen and paper, which means that the book - Big Secret Project Book Two, aka The Katana Trilogy Book Two - which is practically BURNING inside me (ohmygodyouguysit'ssoawesomecoolandheartbreakingandbeautifulillluuurrrvvveit) is not getting written.
And that makes me cranky, Dear Readers. Very cranky. Who'd have thought that a writer with a perfect excuse to do nothing but lie around procrastinating for days on end would feel so cross about it? Not me! Turns out I'm not ready for my silver procrastinating medal quite yet.
Signs are that I'm probably on the mend now. I've made the decision to stop taking the powerful muscle relaxants that made me feel drunk and groggy all the time, so my back is hurting again, though it's not nearly the blinding agony that it was last Tuesday when it first happened. All the lying flat on my back does seem to be helping. I'm hopeful that I might be able to sit upright like a normal person within a week or so.
However, I know that I promised the lovely Liz and the lovely Megha to do a post for them today tackling planning and worldbuilding, and this has been weighing on my mind. I just can't do it. Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to get at least *some* writing in, but I just can't stay in this position long enough to do it. In fact, it looks like all my posts for the next week at least will be short and sweet. It's so frustrating for me, and I know it must be for you.
Please bear with me while I heal up, Dear Readers! I will try to keep to my normal posting schedule during all this, even if all I do is offer you a pretty picture or a YouTube video that I like. And forgive me for not writing the planning/world-building post that I promised. I will get to it, honestly, once I'm back on my feet!
November 11, 2011
A NANO CONFESSION
Hi everyone - and Happy Friday!
Today, I have a confession to make. A confession which will already be fairly obvious to anyone who's checked my NaNoWriMo profile and seen my current wordcount.
I fell off the Nano wagon. *Sob*
No, I'm not really that upset, to be honest. After the catalogue of woe I've endured the past week I feel lucky just to be alive. Getting stressed out over Nano would be a bit silly.
As you know, I did try to push on despite the Nanovirus (with the pounding head, achy joints and sore throat) that struck me on November the first. In fact I did so well that I was ahead of target and gave myself Saturday off. But on Sunday I started to feel really ill again, and not the kind of illness that you can write through. I draw the line at taking a notebook into the toilet with me. Ew.
Despite feeling like death warmed over until Tuesday evening, I was still prepared to press on with Nano, adding words to my daily target to try and catch up. I was determined to start bright and early on Wednesday morning, motivated by getting to announce my news about The Katana Trilogy (aka Big Secret Project).
Then, as I was about to get into bed on Tuesday night, I crouched down to pat my dog, caught my foot in his bed, slipped, and felt an explosion of burning pain - like a red hot wire being ripped out of my spine and dragged down my leg. I couldn't sleep all night because of the pain in my back, which kept throbbing no matter how I arranged myself. I was on the phone to the doctor first thing the next morning. Those close to me know this is a last resort; I really hate going to the doctors. But I couldn't sit up, and was in pain even when I was walking. I was scared I'd done something really serious.
Turned out I'd done something medium serious - a prolapsed disc, which is when one of the discs of soft, cushioning tissue between the bones of your vertebrae bulge out and press into the nerves of the spine in a not-good sort of way. Not permanent but definitely very painful until it subsides.
Trying to sit upright in a normal position is agony. I'm typing this lying flat with my knees propped up by a pillow so that I can lean my laptop against them, and that's the position I'm more or less stuck in for a while. The only breaks are to eat (standing up) and take my dog for his walks. The pain is starting to ease off a little, although I'm not sure how much of that is actual progress and how much is due to the strong anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxant and painkilling drugs my doctor prescribed (these drugs make me feel a tiny bit drunk aaaaall the time, so please excuse any mistakes in this post based on that and the fact that it's hard to type in a horizontal position).
Given all that, I was forced to accept that I'm going to have to give up on hitting any kind of meaningful Nano target this year. It's a little frustrating. I'm SO keen to work on the second book of the Katana Trilogy. Everytime I think about all the cool stuff I get to write I want to clap like a seal. But I can't risk making my back worse, because that's just going to add to the delays. So for the moment I'm mainly watching American TV programmes on iTunes (I <3 Castle) and napping, and daydreaming about the feel of a pen in my hand and a notebook on my knees (yes, it's sad, I know).
Anyone who's been following this blog for a while will know that this is only the most recent in a serious of hilarious comedy pratfalls that I've been through (dislocating my toe while walking down the stairs was a good one) and might wonder if I have some heavy Karmic debt that I'm paying off or something. I can only wonder that myself, since I haven't managed to get through a year without some form of injury since I was about twelve. But never mind! My motto is that it could always be worse, so make the best of what you have.
With that in mind, I hope everyone has a great weekend - and I'll read you on Monday when, barring mishaps, I'll hopefully be answering some reader questions about planning and world-building :)
Today, I have a confession to make. A confession which will already be fairly obvious to anyone who's checked my NaNoWriMo profile and seen my current wordcount.
I fell off the Nano wagon. *Sob*
No, I'm not really that upset, to be honest. After the catalogue of woe I've endured the past week I feel lucky just to be alive. Getting stressed out over Nano would be a bit silly.
As you know, I did try to push on despite the Nanovirus (with the pounding head, achy joints and sore throat) that struck me on November the first. In fact I did so well that I was ahead of target and gave myself Saturday off. But on Sunday I started to feel really ill again, and not the kind of illness that you can write through. I draw the line at taking a notebook into the toilet with me. Ew.
Despite feeling like death warmed over until Tuesday evening, I was still prepared to press on with Nano, adding words to my daily target to try and catch up. I was determined to start bright and early on Wednesday morning, motivated by getting to announce my news about The Katana Trilogy (aka Big Secret Project).
Then, as I was about to get into bed on Tuesday night, I crouched down to pat my dog, caught my foot in his bed, slipped, and felt an explosion of burning pain - like a red hot wire being ripped out of my spine and dragged down my leg. I couldn't sleep all night because of the pain in my back, which kept throbbing no matter how I arranged myself. I was on the phone to the doctor first thing the next morning. Those close to me know this is a last resort; I really hate going to the doctors. But I couldn't sit up, and was in pain even when I was walking. I was scared I'd done something really serious.
Turned out I'd done something medium serious - a prolapsed disc, which is when one of the discs of soft, cushioning tissue between the bones of your vertebrae bulge out and press into the nerves of the spine in a not-good sort of way. Not permanent but definitely very painful until it subsides.
Trying to sit upright in a normal position is agony. I'm typing this lying flat with my knees propped up by a pillow so that I can lean my laptop against them, and that's the position I'm more or less stuck in for a while. The only breaks are to eat (standing up) and take my dog for his walks. The pain is starting to ease off a little, although I'm not sure how much of that is actual progress and how much is due to the strong anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxant and painkilling drugs my doctor prescribed (these drugs make me feel a tiny bit drunk aaaaall the time, so please excuse any mistakes in this post based on that and the fact that it's hard to type in a horizontal position).
Given all that, I was forced to accept that I'm going to have to give up on hitting any kind of meaningful Nano target this year. It's a little frustrating. I'm SO keen to work on the second book of the Katana Trilogy. Everytime I think about all the cool stuff I get to write I want to clap like a seal. But I can't risk making my back worse, because that's just going to add to the delays. So for the moment I'm mainly watching American TV programmes on iTunes (I <3 Castle) and napping, and daydreaming about the feel of a pen in my hand and a notebook on my knees (yes, it's sad, I know).
Anyone who's been following this blog for a while will know that this is only the most recent in a serious of hilarious comedy pratfalls that I've been through (dislocating my toe while walking down the stairs was a good one) and might wonder if I have some heavy Karmic debt that I'm paying off or something. I can only wonder that myself, since I haven't managed to get through a year without some form of injury since I was about twelve. But never mind! My motto is that it could always be worse, so make the best of what you have.
With that in mind, I hope everyone has a great weekend - and I'll read you on Monday when, barring mishaps, I'll hopefully be answering some reader questions about planning and world-building :)
November 9, 2011
BIG SECRET PROJECT DEAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Yes, you read that right!
At long last, after a YEAR of teasing you, and writing and revising furiously, and crossing my fingers, and long phonecalls with Super Agent and exciting emails with my editor... I can FINALLY tell you all about Big Secret Project.
*Deep breaths, deep breaths*
OK - first, some theme music. Well, I mean, clearly I'd love to provide a drumroll at this point, but not only is it hard to find one that lasts more than five seconds, but it would get really annoying after a minute (a bit like all this waffling I'm doing right now) so instead, the song which I've been listening to most throughout the writing of Big Secret Project:
For the full experience, click now, wait for the music to play, and then scroll down to read.
Right.
What is all this fuss about?
What is Big Secret Project?
Read on!
****
At long last, after a YEAR of teasing you, and writing and revising furiously, and crossing my fingers, and long phonecalls with Super Agent and exciting emails with my editor... I can FINALLY tell you all about Big Secret Project.
*Deep breaths, deep breaths*
OK - first, some theme music. Well, I mean, clearly I'd love to provide a drumroll at this point, but not only is it hard to find one that lasts more than five seconds, but it would get really annoying after a minute (a bit like all this waffling I'm doing right now) so instead, the song which I've been listening to most throughout the writing of Big Secret Project:
For the full experience, click now, wait for the music to play, and then scroll down to read.
Right.
What is all this fuss about?
What is Big Secret Project?
Read on!
****
THE KATANA TRILOGY. A breathtaking new urban fantasy trilogy from the critically acclaimed, award winning author of The Swan Kingdom and Shadows on the Moon.Squeeee!
When fifteen year old Mio Yamato furtively sneaks the katana - an ancestral Japanese sword - out of its hiding place in her parent's attic to help liven up her Christmas party costume, she has no idea of the darkness she is about to unleash on modern day London, or the family secrets that she is going to uncover.
The paralysing paranoia that descends on her before she gets to her friend's party is her first clue. The vivid and terrifying visions that nearly get her killed are a pretty good warning too.
The giant nine-tailed cat demon that comes after the sword and tries to rip her throat out? Overkill.
Seconds away from becoming kitty-food, Mio accidentally releases Shinobu, a warrior boy who has been trapped within the sword for centuries. He saves her life and sends the demon running. But it's already too late. Mio has ruptured the veil between the mortal realm and the Underworld, and now the gods and monsters of ancient Japan stalk the streets of London, searching for her and the sword.
With the help of her best friend Jack, a fox spirit named Hikaru - and the devoted protection of the betwitchingly familiar Shinobu - Mio attempts to discover the true nature of the sword and its connection to the Yamato family. Because if she doesn't learn how to control the katana's incredible powers, she's in danger of being overwhelmed by them. And if she can't keep the sword safe from the terrible creatures who want it for their own, she'll lose not only her own life... but the love of a lifetime.
The Night Itself, Book One of THE KATANA TRILOGY, is due for publication in summer 2013 from Walker Books, publishers of Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments Series and Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking Trilogy.
November 7, 2011
BOOK MEMOIRS INTERVIEW!
Hello, Dear Readers - and Happy Monday! This weekend I realised that I had never posted the wonderful interview which Elle and Kate from The Book Memoirs did with me for their Writer's Workshop. I'm not even sure I posted a link, since I'd kind of forgotten about it (bad Zolah! No cookie!).
And so, I present it now, for your consideration. Some great questions here, which I've never been asked in quite this way before.
Hej, Memoirites! Hvordan har du det? It feels appropriate to say hello and ask you how you are in Danish because today's author is young-adult novelist Zoë Marriott! No, Zoë herself is not Danish but her wildly popular first book, The Swan Kingdom, is an ingenious retelling of the fairytale 'The Wild Swans' by Hans Christian Andersen… (See what I did there?) Zoë is also the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel Daughter of the Flames and the highly acclaimed Shadows on the Moon, currently available in a bookstore near you. We love Zo and we're always delighted to have her on the site.
Elle: Hi, Zoë! Thanks so much for agreeing to be here. In prepping for the interview, I spent some time working through your treasure trove of a website and all of your tips for aspiring writers. If you had to pick one single piece of all-important advice to give to budding novelists, what do you think it would be?
Zoë: Thanks so much for inviting me, girls! Now, this first question… Oh, heck – where's Yoda when you need him? The thing is, the One All-Important Piece of Advice probably changes from writer to writer, from day to day, even from minute to minute. It all depends where you are in your book, your life and your career. If I'm going for a one-size-fits-all type of thing I'll probably plump for a reminder that the only difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is that the published one never gave up. So don't ever give up. Persistence is three times as valuable as luck.
Kate: As a big fan of fairy tales and folk stories, I'm curious: what made you decide to use an Andersen story as the backbone for your novel? Was this a conscious decision at the get-go, or an evolution as you worked through ideas?
Zoë: I've always been fascinated by fairytales, and The Wild Swans was my favourite fairytale growing up. Looking back, I can see that what really captured my attention about the story – and all folkloric works – is the wide gaps left for the imagination within the narrative. Fairytales always tell you who did what and where, but somehow that essential WHY is never provided. Just why is the wicked stepmother so wicked? Why is the father or King always so willing to banish and forget his own children? How do the children themselves feel about it? What kind of courage does it take to go on when your fairytale world has fallen apart like this? I promised myself that I would explore these questions when I got older. And then I forgot about it. But when – several years later! – I realised that I wanted to write young adult novels, The Wild Swans immediately presented itself as a story that I needed to re-tell. It was as if it had been waiting patiently at the back of my mind all that time for me to grow up and notice it.
Elle: I've noticed that in my search for information, I haven't seen anything which speaks to your writing process. Do you story-board? Are there lots of pieces of paper stuck haphazardly on your walls or do you have nice, neat index cards full of plans?
Zoë: Here's where I bust out my camera! As you can see here, I'm a devotee of notebooks. Generally when I get a little spark of an idea I'll pick out a notebook that seems right – I have nearly a hundred neatly stored in my Writing Cave – and I'll start shoving Post-It notes into it with all my random thoughts. Later on, when the idea has matured or collided with another idea to make something that seems juicy enough for a book, I'll get the notebook out again, pop a working title and a date in the front and start scribbling like mad – everything from fully formed scenes to one-line snatches of dialogue, to character sketches.
I do almost all of my rough drafting with a pencil in a notebook, which means that about 75% of my notebook is full of messy stuff which bears no resemblance to anything in the finished book at all. I've tried typing directly into a computer but I find it adds a lot of hard work to the revising later on – things look so official once you've got them in a Word Doc., it's much harder to be flexible, play with ideas, change your mind. When I feel like I've rooted the story firmly in my brain I start trying to write a synopsis to contain all the craziness. Oy vey, synopses! I'm terrible at them! Plotting is definitely my week spot. I've developed all kinds of elaborate graphs and diagrams to try and keep control of my plots (as you can see!).
I'm not sure any of them really work – they're more like a comfort blanket that I need in order to keep going when really I have no idea how things are going to fall out. For instance, after finishing the first draft of my current book I was forced to go back and change the gender OF EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER except two, and completely re-write it to make that work. I feel as if I'm a 50/50 mix between a planner and a pantser, and I hope one day to find a combination that works for me a bit more smoothly.
Kate: As someone who's fairly private with her own writing, I always wonder this about published authors: when do you share your writing with other people? Do you have a sounding board you bounce ideas off of from inception or do you wait until you have some or all of a first draft done?
Zoë: Oh, you're not alone, Kate! Lately I've been feeling like a bit of an anomaly in this regard, because Twitter and other writers blogs show me that everyone – but everyone! – seems to have teams of alpha readers, beta readers and critique partners. But I don't. I never have. The only people who even get to glimpse what I'm working on before I've completed the first draft are my agent and editor – and when I say 'first draft' I actually mean 'third or fourth draft that I call a first draft because I don't want to admit how awful the actual first draft was'.
When I was first writing this was because I couldn't find any person in my real life who was a) interested enough to comb through a first draft on my behalf and b) capable of doing
so in a meaningful or helpful way. Seriously, you can't exactly ask your mother, can you? By the time I became aware of the huge online YA community and the critiquing boards on places like AW I found that I didn't really want feedback from anyone who wasn't going to be directly involved in getting the book published, because so often the comments I saw online were contradictory and unhelpful.
But even though I don't have any beta readers, I do belong to an informal writing group which was founded by an online friend of mine several years ago. We call ourselves The Furtive Scribblers and you'll find them mentioned in the acknowledgments of everything I write. We have enormous, no-pressure fun, brain-storming, bouncing ideas, testing plots for holes, and pushing each other through writer's block. I adore them, and without them my books would be HALF as good, if that.
Elle: I'm really interested in your experience of planning a fantasy novel and the alternative rules of that world. For high-fantasy, everyone's advice is to start with a map, urban-fantasy seems to carry the recommendation of working out the mythology first. What did you do first whilst plotting your brand of fantasy novel?
Zoë: Panic, normally. As soon as I start to get an idea of what my fantasy world is going to be, I freak out and become convinced I JUST DON'T KNOW ENOUGH OMG. I wear out my library card, spend all my cash on reference works, documentaries and world music CDs and Google until my fingers bleed. Because my fantasy worlds so far have all had a historical basis (Daughter of the Flames was a mixture of India, Africa and Tibet, Shadows on the Moon is Japan and a sprinkling of China) it would have been all too easy to get things wrong.
Which may sound crazy when I'm making up my own world – but if you're creating a pre-industrial country with no mass production and you have your characters pull out a 'tarp' or carry water in a metal bucket, you've already messed up. If you're going to create fairytale Japan you need to know about real Japan or instead of an homage you'll create a stereotypical parody, and not only insult the real culture you're using but embarrass yourself. I do not like to embarrass myself!
Only when I've stuffed my brain to bursting point with every real life fact I can find do I feel as if I have the right to start messing around and actually making stuff up. This is the fun part. I used to draw incredibly
detailed maps, but my publisher doesn't like them and won't actually put them in the book, so now I mostly sketch out relative areas so that I don't get mixed up later on. I have a mental check list of vital facts I must know before I start work in earnest, like – what is the primary religion or religion of this country or countries? How strongly does this affect the day-to-day lives of the people? What does the general populace look like? What is the climate like, what are the major geographical features and natural hazards? What are is the wildlife like? The list goes on for quite a long while. But once I've filled those boxes I'll give myself freedom to make other things up as I go along and as the plot or characters require. Some of my favourite bits of world building have come from impulse invention – like the facial tattoos in DotF.
Kate: Do you have any writing "rituals"? Do you have to cut yourself off from the outside world? Do you start rereading what you last wrote? Is there anything that has to be done for the juices to get flowing?
Zoë: I try not to let myself get into too many rituals, because I have an addictive personality and I feel as if I would just end up strangling myself. So, generally, I try to be in my Writing Cave by 9:00, I usually have a large mug of tea or coffee with me, and I generally try to re-read and revise what I wrote the day before, and then go onto new material. But if I blocked the doorway of the Writing Cave with three baskets of un-ironed laundry and I have to write downstairs instead? I try to be OK with that. If the dog rolled in something awful and needs a bath and I can't start until 10:00? Golly, I really, really try to be OK with that. I think the only things I absolutely must have are my notebook/pencil and my iPod. Music is one thing I can't do without. I mean, I can write without it, but I find it so hard to get started, it's just easier to give in.
Elle: You've mentioned in one of your Q&A answers on your website that the ending to The Swan Kingdom changed drastically halfway through as you got to know your characters. Do you tend to find you start a novel with a fully-formed character in mind, or do you often begin with a handful of details and surprise yourself as you go?
Zoë: Actually, the ending itself stayed exactly the same. What changed was where the ending took place, how it took place, and all the characters involved!
I always start with a character. Stories come to me through the filter of a character's eyes. I get that little whispering voice in the back of my head, and their life begins to unreel itself before my eyes. And because of this I fool myself that I know who they are and what's going to happen. But of course, I'm not actually receiving messages from an alternate reality – it's all coming from the little Writer Plugin in my hindbrain. And so what seems to come to me as incontrovertible 'fact', like this character's actions, or that character's traits, are all negotiable.
It's only when I actually put the characters in the world, set them against each other and and let them get to work, that I truly start to understand them, and see how their histories, personalities, and conflicting desires, work together to create what I hope are fully realised people. And as soon as this starts, the story – what it means to them and what it means to me, and hence what actually happens – begins to warp and change.
This is a good thing. Even if it does cause the occasional panic attack…
Kate: At what point do you abandon an idea – be it for a plot twist, a character, or part of your fantasy world – as unworkable? Is there some threshold that lets you know "this won't work"?
Zoë: Nope. I've not yet figured out how to be well adjusted about this stuff. There's things that I love, and things I don't. The things I love stay no matter what, and the things I don't go out the window in a constant stream. Then I send it to my editor and she cuts half the things I love, brings half the things I don't love back from the flowerbed under the window, and tells me to make it work. And I groan and clutch my head, and try to sneak as many of the 'love' bits back in as I can, but it's never as many as I wanted. If anyone else has any tips on how to handle this? I'd be extremely grateful!
Elle: I've taken great pleasure in putting this question to everyone else but I especially can't wait to see what you say! Writers are often asked who their biggest influences are but I would instead like to know which novels most influenced you as an individual and as writer, barring the most obvious answer (cough, cough)!
Zoë: The Holy Trinity for me as a young person was – The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce, and Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith. If you've read these, you'll sense a common theme – resourceful, brave, compassionate heroines, with bag-ass swords. These books taught me who I wanted to be and I like to think I've lived up to that, at least in a small way. Even though my sword is only a wooden one.
When it comes to writers who influence me and my work as an adult, though – writers that I'm still striving to emulate, writers whose books have expanded my horizons and continue to make me a better writer myself – the picture changes a little. Suddenly I'm looking at a new top three:
Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold and The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin.
These books have a lot less in common on the surface, but each of them has a core of… something, some indefinable thing, that I'm constantly trying to breach and understand. I've re-read each of these so many times you'd think I'd know them by heart. Instead, I find myself reading a new book each time. THAT is greatness. I bow down before them.
Thanks again for having me Elle and Kate, and for coming up with such different, intriguing questions!
And so, I present it now, for your consideration. Some great questions here, which I've never been asked in quite this way before.
Hej, Memoirites! Hvordan har du det? It feels appropriate to say hello and ask you how you are in Danish because today's author is young-adult novelist Zoë Marriott! No, Zoë herself is not Danish but her wildly popular first book, The Swan Kingdom, is an ingenious retelling of the fairytale 'The Wild Swans' by Hans Christian Andersen… (See what I did there?) Zoë is also the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel Daughter of the Flames and the highly acclaimed Shadows on the Moon, currently available in a bookstore near you. We love Zo and we're always delighted to have her on the site.
Elle: Hi, Zoë! Thanks so much for agreeing to be here. In prepping for the interview, I spent some time working through your treasure trove of a website and all of your tips for aspiring writers. If you had to pick one single piece of all-important advice to give to budding novelists, what do you think it would be?
Zoë: Thanks so much for inviting me, girls! Now, this first question… Oh, heck – where's Yoda when you need him? The thing is, the One All-Important Piece of Advice probably changes from writer to writer, from day to day, even from minute to minute. It all depends where you are in your book, your life and your career. If I'm going for a one-size-fits-all type of thing I'll probably plump for a reminder that the only difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is that the published one never gave up. So don't ever give up. Persistence is three times as valuable as luck.
Kate: As a big fan of fairy tales and folk stories, I'm curious: what made you decide to use an Andersen story as the backbone for your novel? Was this a conscious decision at the get-go, or an evolution as you worked through ideas?
Zoë: I've always been fascinated by fairytales, and The Wild Swans was my favourite fairytale growing up. Looking back, I can see that what really captured my attention about the story – and all folkloric works – is the wide gaps left for the imagination within the narrative. Fairytales always tell you who did what and where, but somehow that essential WHY is never provided. Just why is the wicked stepmother so wicked? Why is the father or King always so willing to banish and forget his own children? How do the children themselves feel about it? What kind of courage does it take to go on when your fairytale world has fallen apart like this? I promised myself that I would explore these questions when I got older. And then I forgot about it. But when – several years later! – I realised that I wanted to write young adult novels, The Wild Swans immediately presented itself as a story that I needed to re-tell. It was as if it had been waiting patiently at the back of my mind all that time for me to grow up and notice it.
Elle: I've noticed that in my search for information, I haven't seen anything which speaks to your writing process. Do you story-board? Are there lots of pieces of paper stuck haphazardly on your walls or do you have nice, neat index cards full of plans?
Zoë: Here's where I bust out my camera! As you can see here, I'm a devotee of notebooks. Generally when I get a little spark of an idea I'll pick out a notebook that seems right – I have nearly a hundred neatly stored in my Writing Cave – and I'll start shoving Post-It notes into it with all my random thoughts. Later on, when the idea has matured or collided with another idea to make something that seems juicy enough for a book, I'll get the notebook out again, pop a working title and a date in the front and start scribbling like mad – everything from fully formed scenes to one-line snatches of dialogue, to character sketches.I do almost all of my rough drafting with a pencil in a notebook, which means that about 75% of my notebook is full of messy stuff which bears no resemblance to anything in the finished book at all. I've tried typing directly into a computer but I find it adds a lot of hard work to the revising later on – things look so official once you've got them in a Word Doc., it's much harder to be flexible, play with ideas, change your mind. When I feel like I've rooted the story firmly in my brain I start trying to write a synopsis to contain all the craziness. Oy vey, synopses! I'm terrible at them! Plotting is definitely my week spot. I've developed all kinds of elaborate graphs and diagrams to try and keep control of my plots (as you can see!).
I'm not sure any of them really work – they're more like a comfort blanket that I need in order to keep going when really I have no idea how things are going to fall out. For instance, after finishing the first draft of my current book I was forced to go back and change the gender OF EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER except two, and completely re-write it to make that work. I feel as if I'm a 50/50 mix between a planner and a pantser, and I hope one day to find a combination that works for me a bit more smoothly.
Kate: As someone who's fairly private with her own writing, I always wonder this about published authors: when do you share your writing with other people? Do you have a sounding board you bounce ideas off of from inception or do you wait until you have some or all of a first draft done?
Zoë: Oh, you're not alone, Kate! Lately I've been feeling like a bit of an anomaly in this regard, because Twitter and other writers blogs show me that everyone – but everyone! – seems to have teams of alpha readers, beta readers and critique partners. But I don't. I never have. The only people who even get to glimpse what I'm working on before I've completed the first draft are my agent and editor – and when I say 'first draft' I actually mean 'third or fourth draft that I call a first draft because I don't want to admit how awful the actual first draft was'.
When I was first writing this was because I couldn't find any person in my real life who was a) interested enough to comb through a first draft on my behalf and b) capable of doing
so in a meaningful or helpful way. Seriously, you can't exactly ask your mother, can you? By the time I became aware of the huge online YA community and the critiquing boards on places like AW I found that I didn't really want feedback from anyone who wasn't going to be directly involved in getting the book published, because so often the comments I saw online were contradictory and unhelpful.But even though I don't have any beta readers, I do belong to an informal writing group which was founded by an online friend of mine several years ago. We call ourselves The Furtive Scribblers and you'll find them mentioned in the acknowledgments of everything I write. We have enormous, no-pressure fun, brain-storming, bouncing ideas, testing plots for holes, and pushing each other through writer's block. I adore them, and without them my books would be HALF as good, if that.
Elle: I'm really interested in your experience of planning a fantasy novel and the alternative rules of that world. For high-fantasy, everyone's advice is to start with a map, urban-fantasy seems to carry the recommendation of working out the mythology first. What did you do first whilst plotting your brand of fantasy novel?
Zoë: Panic, normally. As soon as I start to get an idea of what my fantasy world is going to be, I freak out and become convinced I JUST DON'T KNOW ENOUGH OMG. I wear out my library card, spend all my cash on reference works, documentaries and world music CDs and Google until my fingers bleed. Because my fantasy worlds so far have all had a historical basis (Daughter of the Flames was a mixture of India, Africa and Tibet, Shadows on the Moon is Japan and a sprinkling of China) it would have been all too easy to get things wrong.
Which may sound crazy when I'm making up my own world – but if you're creating a pre-industrial country with no mass production and you have your characters pull out a 'tarp' or carry water in a metal bucket, you've already messed up. If you're going to create fairytale Japan you need to know about real Japan or instead of an homage you'll create a stereotypical parody, and not only insult the real culture you're using but embarrass yourself. I do not like to embarrass myself!
Only when I've stuffed my brain to bursting point with every real life fact I can find do I feel as if I have the right to start messing around and actually making stuff up. This is the fun part. I used to draw incredibly
detailed maps, but my publisher doesn't like them and won't actually put them in the book, so now I mostly sketch out relative areas so that I don't get mixed up later on. I have a mental check list of vital facts I must know before I start work in earnest, like – what is the primary religion or religion of this country or countries? How strongly does this affect the day-to-day lives of the people? What does the general populace look like? What is the climate like, what are the major geographical features and natural hazards? What are is the wildlife like? The list goes on for quite a long while. But once I've filled those boxes I'll give myself freedom to make other things up as I go along and as the plot or characters require. Some of my favourite bits of world building have come from impulse invention – like the facial tattoos in DotF.Kate: Do you have any writing "rituals"? Do you have to cut yourself off from the outside world? Do you start rereading what you last wrote? Is there anything that has to be done for the juices to get flowing?
Zoë: I try not to let myself get into too many rituals, because I have an addictive personality and I feel as if I would just end up strangling myself. So, generally, I try to be in my Writing Cave by 9:00, I usually have a large mug of tea or coffee with me, and I generally try to re-read and revise what I wrote the day before, and then go onto new material. But if I blocked the doorway of the Writing Cave with three baskets of un-ironed laundry and I have to write downstairs instead? I try to be OK with that. If the dog rolled in something awful and needs a bath and I can't start until 10:00? Golly, I really, really try to be OK with that. I think the only things I absolutely must have are my notebook/pencil and my iPod. Music is one thing I can't do without. I mean, I can write without it, but I find it so hard to get started, it's just easier to give in.
Elle: You've mentioned in one of your Q&A answers on your website that the ending to The Swan Kingdom changed drastically halfway through as you got to know your characters. Do you tend to find you start a novel with a fully-formed character in mind, or do you often begin with a handful of details and surprise yourself as you go?
Zoë: Actually, the ending itself stayed exactly the same. What changed was where the ending took place, how it took place, and all the characters involved!
I always start with a character. Stories come to me through the filter of a character's eyes. I get that little whispering voice in the back of my head, and their life begins to unreel itself before my eyes. And because of this I fool myself that I know who they are and what's going to happen. But of course, I'm not actually receiving messages from an alternate reality – it's all coming from the little Writer Plugin in my hindbrain. And so what seems to come to me as incontrovertible 'fact', like this character's actions, or that character's traits, are all negotiable.
It's only when I actually put the characters in the world, set them against each other and and let them get to work, that I truly start to understand them, and see how their histories, personalities, and conflicting desires, work together to create what I hope are fully realised people. And as soon as this starts, the story – what it means to them and what it means to me, and hence what actually happens – begins to warp and change.
This is a good thing. Even if it does cause the occasional panic attack…
Kate: At what point do you abandon an idea – be it for a plot twist, a character, or part of your fantasy world – as unworkable? Is there some threshold that lets you know "this won't work"?
Zoë: Nope. I've not yet figured out how to be well adjusted about this stuff. There's things that I love, and things I don't. The things I love stay no matter what, and the things I don't go out the window in a constant stream. Then I send it to my editor and she cuts half the things I love, brings half the things I don't love back from the flowerbed under the window, and tells me to make it work. And I groan and clutch my head, and try to sneak as many of the 'love' bits back in as I can, but it's never as many as I wanted. If anyone else has any tips on how to handle this? I'd be extremely grateful!
Elle: I've taken great pleasure in putting this question to everyone else but I especially can't wait to see what you say! Writers are often asked who their biggest influences are but I would instead like to know which novels most influenced you as an individual and as writer, barring the most obvious answer (cough, cough)!
Zoë: The Holy Trinity for me as a young person was – The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce, and Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith. If you've read these, you'll sense a common theme – resourceful, brave, compassionate heroines, with bag-ass swords. These books taught me who I wanted to be and I like to think I've lived up to that, at least in a small way. Even though my sword is only a wooden one.
When it comes to writers who influence me and my work as an adult, though – writers that I'm still striving to emulate, writers whose books have expanded my horizons and continue to make me a better writer myself – the picture changes a little. Suddenly I'm looking at a new top three:
Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold and The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin.
These books have a lot less in common on the surface, but each of them has a core of… something, some indefinable thing, that I'm constantly trying to breach and understand. I've re-read each of these so many times you'd think I'd know them by heart. Instead, I find myself reading a new book each time. THAT is greatness. I bow down before them.
Thanks again for having me Elle and Kate, and for coming up with such different, intriguing questions!
November 4, 2011
RETROFRIDAY - SUGAR & SPICE...
Hello everyone! Happy Friday to you all!
I'm a bit dazed and confused that it *is* Friday already, but despite the attack of the Nanovirus (and the pouring rain) I'm pretty cheerful. I'm slightly ahead of my NaNoWriMo target, I'm starting to feel a little better, and most importantly Super Agent LOVES Big Secret Project Book One. Yippee!
So it's time to bust out the RetroFriday goodness, and drag a post from the archives which you may not have seen before or may find interesting to re-read. Given last week's ranting about the problems of Mary Sue in our sexist society, it felt about time to pull out some of my earlier thoughts on the topic. And so I give you:
RetroFriday: SUGAR AND SPICE
Today, as part of my random, FF-is-eating-my-brain programme of entertainment, I present a post on what I think is wrong with the way our society perceives and enforces gender roles. To read the article that inspired this blog post you can click on this link .
In summary: This very clever lady used Zoë-Trope favourite Wordle to create these.
The first one is a Wordle made up of the terms used in advertising boy's toys. The second is made up of terms used in advertising girl's toys.
These toys were marketed at boys and girls between the ages of six and eight - very young. But not too young to already be assessing and questioning their place in the world and who they should be. In fact, this is exactly the period when children are assigning themselves the gender roles that they may carry for the rest of their lives.
By this age I was already rejecting my mother's desire to dress me in sensible jeans and dungarees and begging for pink, flowery dresses. By this age the boys I knew were already wearing mostly blue and bright red and camoflage colours, and saying things like 'Ew, giiiirls!'
These behaviours all seem perfectly natural - until you realise they're not.
Until the age of around eight or nine, boys and girls have precisely the same hormones running through their veins. If you took a group of boys and girls under ten and dressed them in the same grey sack and cut all their hair to the same length, you would be unable to tell boy from girl, even if they spoke or hugged you or danced around the room.
There is no pink gene on the X-chromosone that automatically makes little girls crave flowery dresses and ribbons and baby dolls. There's no blue gene on the y-chromosone that automatically makes boys crave fast cars, swords and buzz cuts. There's definitely no 'Euw, giiirls!' gene that requires boys to treat girls and anything that girls might be interested in with disdain and contempt.
And yet these are all behaviours which are so common, so normal, so 'natural' to us that we not only don't QUESTION them? We get all het up and bothered if kids *don't* conform to them. Like, for instance, when this American blogger helped her little boy's wish come true by allowing him to dress as Daphne from Scooby Do at Halloween, and dozens of people descended on her to say that she was a bad mother.
It's not that either of these Wordles presents any bad words. There's nothing wrong with a child of either sex liking dresses and babies or dragons and heroes. The problem is that the companies creating these toys, and the people marketing them, are making an assumption that girls - and only girls - are vitally interested in fashion, perfect nails, babies, love and hair. And that boys - and only boys - are interested in battle, power, heroes, stealth and beating people.
Which is only true if we make it so, by pushing a narrow, reductive take on what male and female mean onto children and telling them 'this is what you are'. There is simply no reason for young children to be treated or act differently based on their sex, other than the fact that we, as a society, want them to be different.
What a terrible thing to do to a child, right? How awful to bombard them with films, TV shows, music videos, books and toys and toy catalogues (not to mention unconscious assumptions on the way that children should develop and behave) and try to force them to conform to unnatural, artificial ideals of gender, without any good reason.
What are kids, especially kids who don't enjoy the roles arbitrarily assigned to them based on their reproductive organs, absorbing from this?
Looking at these Wordles makes me think of all kinds of other things that worry me. Like the commonly held idea that boys don't read because not enough 'boy books' are on the shelves, and that the dominance of women editors and writers in Young Adult and Children's publishing is somehow hurting boys and preventing them from becoming readers. The arguments about this are summed up beautifully in this article by YA author Maureen Johnson - and the comment trail is particularly interesting.
Why is it so impossible for us to expect a boy to read a book that has a girl main character? Why is the idea of reading about a girl so disgusting to boys that, apparently, they won't even go into the bookstore because they have to pass by books with girls in them? What are we teaching boys - and girls - about the value of their role in society by encouraging this, and by placing the blame on female authors and editors intead of a society that raises boys to look at girls (and anything that may be considered to be 'girly') with contempt? Especially since we're also raising the girls to believe that they must conform to 'girly' behaviour and interests in order to be 'normal' and 'natural'?
It's not normal and natural.
Babies, love, perfect nails and romance are awesome. So are battles, dragons, flames and heroes. What I want to know is, why can't both sexes be interested in both without being shunned by our society? Why, 500,000 years after modern man first emerged as a species on earth, are we still trying to play by the strict rules of a hunter-gatherer society that died out with flint axes and stone circles?
And will people like me still be asking this question in another hundred year's time - or a thousand?
I'm a bit dazed and confused that it *is* Friday already, but despite the attack of the Nanovirus (and the pouring rain) I'm pretty cheerful. I'm slightly ahead of my NaNoWriMo target, I'm starting to feel a little better, and most importantly Super Agent LOVES Big Secret Project Book One. Yippee!
So it's time to bust out the RetroFriday goodness, and drag a post from the archives which you may not have seen before or may find interesting to re-read. Given last week's ranting about the problems of Mary Sue in our sexist society, it felt about time to pull out some of my earlier thoughts on the topic. And so I give you:
RetroFriday: SUGAR AND SPICE
Today, as part of my random, FF-is-eating-my-brain programme of entertainment, I present a post on what I think is wrong with the way our society perceives and enforces gender roles. To read the article that inspired this blog post you can click on this link .
In summary: This very clever lady used Zoë-Trope favourite Wordle to create these.
The first one is a Wordle made up of the terms used in advertising boy's toys. The second is made up of terms used in advertising girl's toys.
These toys were marketed at boys and girls between the ages of six and eight - very young. But not too young to already be assessing and questioning their place in the world and who they should be. In fact, this is exactly the period when children are assigning themselves the gender roles that they may carry for the rest of their lives.
By this age I was already rejecting my mother's desire to dress me in sensible jeans and dungarees and begging for pink, flowery dresses. By this age the boys I knew were already wearing mostly blue and bright red and camoflage colours, and saying things like 'Ew, giiiirls!'
These behaviours all seem perfectly natural - until you realise they're not.
Until the age of around eight or nine, boys and girls have precisely the same hormones running through their veins. If you took a group of boys and girls under ten and dressed them in the same grey sack and cut all their hair to the same length, you would be unable to tell boy from girl, even if they spoke or hugged you or danced around the room.
There is no pink gene on the X-chromosone that automatically makes little girls crave flowery dresses and ribbons and baby dolls. There's no blue gene on the y-chromosone that automatically makes boys crave fast cars, swords and buzz cuts. There's definitely no 'Euw, giiirls!' gene that requires boys to treat girls and anything that girls might be interested in with disdain and contempt.
And yet these are all behaviours which are so common, so normal, so 'natural' to us that we not only don't QUESTION them? We get all het up and bothered if kids *don't* conform to them. Like, for instance, when this American blogger helped her little boy's wish come true by allowing him to dress as Daphne from Scooby Do at Halloween, and dozens of people descended on her to say that she was a bad mother.
It's not that either of these Wordles presents any bad words. There's nothing wrong with a child of either sex liking dresses and babies or dragons and heroes. The problem is that the companies creating these toys, and the people marketing them, are making an assumption that girls - and only girls - are vitally interested in fashion, perfect nails, babies, love and hair. And that boys - and only boys - are interested in battle, power, heroes, stealth and beating people.
Which is only true if we make it so, by pushing a narrow, reductive take on what male and female mean onto children and telling them 'this is what you are'. There is simply no reason for young children to be treated or act differently based on their sex, other than the fact that we, as a society, want them to be different.
What a terrible thing to do to a child, right? How awful to bombard them with films, TV shows, music videos, books and toys and toy catalogues (not to mention unconscious assumptions on the way that children should develop and behave) and try to force them to conform to unnatural, artificial ideals of gender, without any good reason.
What are kids, especially kids who don't enjoy the roles arbitrarily assigned to them based on their reproductive organs, absorbing from this?
Looking at these Wordles makes me think of all kinds of other things that worry me. Like the commonly held idea that boys don't read because not enough 'boy books' are on the shelves, and that the dominance of women editors and writers in Young Adult and Children's publishing is somehow hurting boys and preventing them from becoming readers. The arguments about this are summed up beautifully in this article by YA author Maureen Johnson - and the comment trail is particularly interesting.
Why is it so impossible for us to expect a boy to read a book that has a girl main character? Why is the idea of reading about a girl so disgusting to boys that, apparently, they won't even go into the bookstore because they have to pass by books with girls in them? What are we teaching boys - and girls - about the value of their role in society by encouraging this, and by placing the blame on female authors and editors intead of a society that raises boys to look at girls (and anything that may be considered to be 'girly') with contempt? Especially since we're also raising the girls to believe that they must conform to 'girly' behaviour and interests in order to be 'normal' and 'natural'?
It's not normal and natural.
Babies, love, perfect nails and romance are awesome. So are battles, dragons, flames and heroes. What I want to know is, why can't both sexes be interested in both without being shunned by our society? Why, 500,000 years after modern man first emerged as a species on earth, are we still trying to play by the strict rules of a hunter-gatherer society that died out with flint axes and stone circles?
And will people like me still be asking this question in another hundred year's time - or a thousand?
November 2, 2011
BLLLLEUUURRRGHHHHLLL...
...as I said to someone on Twitter. No, seriously. That was about the height of my wit at 7:30 this morning, and I'm afraid I've not moved on much since.
Yesterday was the first day of Nano, and it brought with it just over 2,000 words of Big Secret Project Book Two (YAY!). It also brought with it a strange bug which has given me a fuzzy head, achy joints, an extremely sore throat, and this creeping red rash on my face and neck (BOOO!).
And I need to try and hit my Nano target again today. Folding after just one day would be too pathetic for words. But since I'm still feeling like the grey slimy thing that one of my cats left on the doormat, those are about the only good words I'm going to be capable of, I think.
See you on Friday - when hopefully I'll look and feel and WRITE less like a grey slimy thing and more like, you know, a person.
*Waves feebly*
*Totters away to wWriting Cave*
Yesterday was the first day of Nano, and it brought with it just over 2,000 words of Big Secret Project Book Two (YAY!). It also brought with it a strange bug which has given me a fuzzy head, achy joints, an extremely sore throat, and this creeping red rash on my face and neck (BOOO!).
And I need to try and hit my Nano target again today. Folding after just one day would be too pathetic for words. But since I'm still feeling like the grey slimy thing that one of my cats left on the doormat, those are about the only good words I'm going to be capable of, I think.
See you on Friday - when hopefully I'll look and feel and WRITE less like a grey slimy thing and more like, you know, a person.
*Waves feebly*
*Totters away to wWriting Cave*
October 31, 2011
BIG SECRET PROJECT TEASER #4
Hello, Dear Readers! I wish you Happy Monday - as it's a very happy Monday for me. The Scalpel is working again, and tomorrow NaNoWriMo starts and I can get to work on Big Secret Project Book Two. Yippee! I've got so many ideas I've been a little worried my brain might pop.
And so it seems only fitting that I should post a Big Secret Project Book One teaser today. This will probably be the very last one, since I don't want to give all the plot away (it is a Secret Project still, after all). As always, when a book is not officially sold yet, this snippet is subject to change major or minor, or even deletion. So enjoy it while you can - and tell me what you think in the comments!
Click the cut to read more.
"Ideas?" I asked softly.
"Try talking to her," Shinobu said in whisper. "She might not understand what you're saying, but maybe she will recognise your voice."
"Just don't make any sudden movements," Hikaru advised. "Because one slip, and – "
"I get it, thank you." I cut him off before he could terrify me more than I already was and crept slowly towards the fox Jack.
She was beautiful – slender, compact and muscular. Her pelt was dark red, with no white at all, and her paws, the tip of her tail and her ears shaded to chocolate brown. I thought she was a bit bigger than a regular fox, but I wasn't an expert on the species.
"Hey," I said quietly. "You're kind of cute as a fox, did you know? You'd get such a kick if you could see yourself."
One of Jack's large ears quivered a little, but she didn't turn her head. I left the shelter of the last free and froze, unable to force myself to walk any further. It was just too scary out there in the open. I got down on my hands and knees – I was already as filthy as a human could get, so who cared? – and crawled up to the edge of the cliff.
"This is definitely an experience, right? Maybe not one to share with the grandkids, though, unless we want them to think we've lost our marbles and ship us off to the old folks home."
I clamped my hands on the triangle shaped peak of stone and slowly eased myself down so that I was lying flat. Jack tilted her head slightly, as if she was paying attention to my movements. She lifted one paw, and I tensed.
Don't, don't, please, please don't...
She put the paw back down.
I sighed. "Jack, you know what would be really awesome? If you'd make this easy on me and just come over here. Because, I've got to tell you, I think I'm developing a bit of a thing about heights, and you aren't helping."
I inched my leg up and over the peak, sucked in a deep, calming breath, and sat upright.
For the first time, I could see what Jack was gazing at.
London spread out in front of us, every bit of it green and shining and growing. Where home had skyscrapers, I now saw verdant green mountains cloaked in mist and topped by gargantuan trees that must have been taller than this house. Where home had roads, there were white, winding paths, glinting rivers and waterfalls. And forests - forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. A gust of that warm, scented wind made me teeter in place, but I was too spellbound to care.
And so it seems only fitting that I should post a Big Secret Project Book One teaser today. This will probably be the very last one, since I don't want to give all the plot away (it is a Secret Project still, after all). As always, when a book is not officially sold yet, this snippet is subject to change major or minor, or even deletion. So enjoy it while you can - and tell me what you think in the comments!
Click the cut to read more.
"Ideas?" I asked softly.
"Try talking to her," Shinobu said in whisper. "She might not understand what you're saying, but maybe she will recognise your voice."
"Just don't make any sudden movements," Hikaru advised. "Because one slip, and – "
"I get it, thank you." I cut him off before he could terrify me more than I already was and crept slowly towards the fox Jack.
She was beautiful – slender, compact and muscular. Her pelt was dark red, with no white at all, and her paws, the tip of her tail and her ears shaded to chocolate brown. I thought she was a bit bigger than a regular fox, but I wasn't an expert on the species.
"Hey," I said quietly. "You're kind of cute as a fox, did you know? You'd get such a kick if you could see yourself."
One of Jack's large ears quivered a little, but she didn't turn her head. I left the shelter of the last free and froze, unable to force myself to walk any further. It was just too scary out there in the open. I got down on my hands and knees – I was already as filthy as a human could get, so who cared? – and crawled up to the edge of the cliff.
"This is definitely an experience, right? Maybe not one to share with the grandkids, though, unless we want them to think we've lost our marbles and ship us off to the old folks home."
I clamped my hands on the triangle shaped peak of stone and slowly eased myself down so that I was lying flat. Jack tilted her head slightly, as if she was paying attention to my movements. She lifted one paw, and I tensed.
Don't, don't, please, please don't...
She put the paw back down.
I sighed. "Jack, you know what would be really awesome? If you'd make this easy on me and just come over here. Because, I've got to tell you, I think I'm developing a bit of a thing about heights, and you aren't helping."
I inched my leg up and over the peak, sucked in a deep, calming breath, and sat upright.
For the first time, I could see what Jack was gazing at.
London spread out in front of us, every bit of it green and shining and growing. Where home had skyscrapers, I now saw verdant green mountains cloaked in mist and topped by gargantuan trees that must have been taller than this house. Where home had roads, there were white, winding paths, glinting rivers and waterfalls. And forests - forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. A gust of that warm, scented wind made me teeter in place, but I was too spellbound to care.
October 28, 2011
GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS
Hello all - I'd love to say 'Happy Friday' but it's more a mixed Friday, really. There is, as the title suggests, good news and bad news.
The good news is that I finished my revision of Big Secret Project Book One late on Wednesday and sent it off to Super Agent. So...the die is cast, as Shakespeare would say. Now I just have to cross my fingers that she loves it as much as I do. And that I'll be able to share information with you about it soon because IT. IS. KILLING. MEEEEEE.
Ahem.
The bad news is that this morning I had a wee accident with The Scalpel, my laptop. And now it's not working at all. I'm typing this on my ancient back-up model and trying to figure out what I'm going to do about that, as the Scalpel is just under a year old and is *is* insured, but then again there's my no claims bonus...ach, boring adult stuff like that.
Anyhow, thanks to everyone for their positive contributions to the Mary Sue discussion following Wednesday's post. I was dreading the comments a little bit, but so far it's all been polite and friendly, which is a relief.
Now I leave you, to brood over my courageous laptop comrade, who has fallen in battle.
The good news is that I finished my revision of Big Secret Project Book One late on Wednesday and sent it off to Super Agent. So...the die is cast, as Shakespeare would say. Now I just have to cross my fingers that she loves it as much as I do. And that I'll be able to share information with you about it soon because IT. IS. KILLING. MEEEEEE.
Ahem.
The bad news is that this morning I had a wee accident with The Scalpel, my laptop. And now it's not working at all. I'm typing this on my ancient back-up model and trying to figure out what I'm going to do about that, as the Scalpel is just under a year old and is *is* insured, but then again there's my no claims bonus...ach, boring adult stuff like that.
Anyhow, thanks to everyone for their positive contributions to the Mary Sue discussion following Wednesday's post. I was dreading the comments a little bit, but so far it's all been polite and friendly, which is a relief.
Now I leave you, to brood over my courageous laptop comrade, who has fallen in battle.
October 25, 2011
WHAT WOULD MARY SUE DO?
Hello, Dear Readers! Happy Wednesday to you all. I've decided that it's finally time to follow up on my most-read post ever. I have girded my loins, donned my flack jacket, and cautiously boarded the train back to Crazy Town (carrying some sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a spare pair of socks, in case of emergency, as all travellers to Crazy Town should).
Yes, Dear Readers. That's right.
Today, we're going to talk about Mary Sue. Again.
Many of you will be aware of the internet firestorm that descended on this blog after I made a post asking reviewers and critics to reconsider their use (and misuse) of the term Mary Sue - but if not, you can find the post, and read the extremely interesting comment trail, here.
In the wake of that post and the response to it, several other authors weighed in on the discussion, with their particular takes on why seeing 'Mary Sue' scattered all over the place like an unwise fashion epidemic (neon leg warmers? Puffball skirts? Mullets?) made their souls die a little. I'm isolating here the responses that particularly struck a chord for me and made me look at this whole debate from a different perspective.
Firstly we had the wonderful Sarah Rees Brennan (who-I-kind-of-want-to-marry-Omg) telling ladies that they are ALLOWED to be both flawed and awesome: in fact, flawsome.
Next Holly Black (Saint-Paul-on-a-pogo-stick-HOLLY-BLACK!) very thoughtfully pointed out that a Mary Sue is only a Mary Sue in fanfic because she's stealing the narrative from the true leading characters. In original fiction, where she IS the leading character, she's just doing what a hero or heroine does.
Then not long ago adult urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire (whose-October-Daye-books-are-literally-on-my-TBR-pile-right-now-holy-crap) made possibly the most telling post of all for me, wherein she teased out an aspect of the situation which I hadn't consciously analysed before: that reviewers are calling Mary Sue on any female character who is sufficiently heroic to actually carry her own story.
When I wrote that original Mary Sue post, obviously I had no idea how much of a landmine I was stepping on in terms of anger and defensiveness from certain readers (which is why I eventually stopped responding to comments and emails on the topic). But at the same time, I also had no idea how much of a groundswell of support there would be from other authors, authors who'd been witnessing this phenomenon themselves and feeling just as disturbed by it as I was. I had no idea, basically, how bloody right I was.
I rant a lot, about a lot of subjects, and I always believe in what I say. But as I saw the response to my Mary Sue post gaining momentum, as I saw more and more women writers admitting how sad and disheartened and hopeless this term made them feel, it began to dawn on me that this wasn't just me ranting about a pet peeve anymore. It wasn't just that Mary Sue was an inaccurate way to criticise female characters, that it was badly defined and contradictory and annoying.
It was that the overuse of Mary Sue was damaging the quality of critical response to original fiction AND encouraging anti-woman sentiment hidden under a thin veneer of concern for Strong Female Characters.
Mary Sue is a lot more important than she first appeared, Dear Readers. Not just in herself, but because she is symptomatic of a much wider problem: how women are treated and represented in our society.
And how is that? Well, to sum it up, let's take a look at this lovely little poster (which I know you've all probably seen before) which puts a series of male comic book characters in the same pose that artists chose for Wonder Woman (with WW herself at the bottom for comparison):
This has been doing the rounds on the internet for months, and we've all had a good laugh about it. Because that's what we socially aware Feminists DO when we're confronted with evidence of the over-sexualisation of women in the media. We laugh about it.
The problem is that it's not really funny.
If any male hero was really drawn posed like that on any page in any mainstream graphic novel, the words 'Ridiculous!' 'Inappropriate!', 'Demeaning!', 'Disgusting!' and most probably 'Gay!' (cringe) would get thrown at it so fast that you'd hear a wave of sonic booms. But female characters continue to be drawn this way. And female actors continue to be posed this way in films and on TV. And female models do the same pose in ads and on the catwalk.
Why? Because its OK for women to look ridiculous and inappropriate, for them to be demeaned and disgusting (and most definitely gay, so long as they're happy to let hetero blokes watch them at it).
In fact, it's more than OK. It's expected. It is REQUIRED. So much so that no one even sees it as demeaning or inappropriate or any of those other emotive words. They just see it as normal. *I* see it as normal. So what if I spend around a quarter of a film averting my eyes from lingering shots of a female actor's rear end, bust, legs and lips, and walk away without being able to remember the character's name? I probably don't even notice because That's Just How Films Are (this is called the Male Gaze and is a topic to be fully explored in another post, Dear Readers).
Basically: Male heroes get to save the world. Female ones get to stand there and look sexy, dammit.
Considering that we're constantly - but constantly - exposed to this worldview, is it any wonder that most of us have trouble clearing enough space in our heads to tackle female characters fairly?
I don't believe all reviewers (especially the female ones!) want to see women characters over-sexualised and treated as nothing more than unthreatening eye candy. But what I do believe is that this bombardment of EmptySexyHotObject images has made it hard for us to see women AS ANYTHING ELSE.
Which is why when female writers produce female characters with depth and agency, they get accused of wish fulfilment.
There's an unconscious assumption that any female protagonist or any important female secondary character written by a woman must necessarily be an idealised author insert/wish fulfilment character. Otherwise no female character would get to tell her own story in her own voice, and have her experiences treated as interesting and worthwhile. That's the real flaw with the term Mary Sue and the way that reviewers are applying it to original fiction. Female characters are not parasites sucking away the limelight that rightfully belongs to their male counterparts. Women do deserve their own stories. Their own voices. Their experiences are interesting and worthwhile.
Female protagonists are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own stories.
And the more successful they become, the more female writers are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own industry.
Look at this. And some of the comments in this (brilliant) post by Maureen Johnson. Examples of people stating that they want women to stop all this silly writing of theirs, and let men do the job instead. Examples of people stating, without irony, that women need to stop producing these girly books full of girl characters for girls to read because that is somehow stopping BOYS from reading! Let the men write manly books for men because...well, just because! Boys are important! Stuff girls! Who cares if THEY read or not? They're just there to look sexy, dammit!
These are the attitudes and assumptions that all women, and all readers, are fighting against.
I'm not saying that the misuse of the term Mary Sue is responsible for All The Sexism. But it is a really worrying symptom. It's an internet term, mostly used by internet savvy folks - and the Internet is the place where, for my money, a lot of the really smart booktalk happens. This is the place where readers find like-minded networks of friends, where a lot of promising young writers get nurtured. And where you find courageous, honest reviewers who really know the YA category - reviewers whose reviews we NEED because they are willing to put their heads above the parapet and call out misogyny and racism and homophobia and bad writing and abusive fictional boyfriends (all stuff that worries me too)!
Let me make it clear that I love readers. I love reviewers. I love bloggers. I WANT you guys to keep doing your thing. I want to keep on reading reviews of my own work (positive and negative) which teach me useful lessons and help me to develop and improve as writer BECAUSE they are not written for my benefit. I want to be able to click on Amazon or Goodreads or Book Depo and see fifty different reviews of the books I'm thinking about buying from all different perspectives. If you think a character is badly written or developed or unrealistic? I 100% support your right to scream that from the rooftops.
But the unconscious cuckoo-in-the-nest assumption betrayed by the use of Mary Sue as a term to denigrate female characters (and authors!) in original fiction is stealthily poisoning a lot of that healthy, necessary debate about YA books. It's harmful to the young readers we should be encouraging, the young reviewers we should be embracing, and the developing writers we should be supporting online.
Why does it have to be this way, Dear Readers? What do you think?
What would Mary Sue (by which I mean a complex, fully realised, awesome female character) do?
(With thanks to the lovely writers who double-checked this post for me and stopped me from commiting pure Feminist Rage Smash. They know who they are!)
Yes, Dear Readers. That's right.
Today, we're going to talk about Mary Sue. Again.
Many of you will be aware of the internet firestorm that descended on this blog after I made a post asking reviewers and critics to reconsider their use (and misuse) of the term Mary Sue - but if not, you can find the post, and read the extremely interesting comment trail, here.
In the wake of that post and the response to it, several other authors weighed in on the discussion, with their particular takes on why seeing 'Mary Sue' scattered all over the place like an unwise fashion epidemic (neon leg warmers? Puffball skirts? Mullets?) made their souls die a little. I'm isolating here the responses that particularly struck a chord for me and made me look at this whole debate from a different perspective.
Firstly we had the wonderful Sarah Rees Brennan (who-I-kind-of-want-to-marry-Omg) telling ladies that they are ALLOWED to be both flawed and awesome: in fact, flawsome.
Next Holly Black (Saint-Paul-on-a-pogo-stick-HOLLY-BLACK!) very thoughtfully pointed out that a Mary Sue is only a Mary Sue in fanfic because she's stealing the narrative from the true leading characters. In original fiction, where she IS the leading character, she's just doing what a hero or heroine does.
Then not long ago adult urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire (whose-October-Daye-books-are-literally-on-my-TBR-pile-right-now-holy-crap) made possibly the most telling post of all for me, wherein she teased out an aspect of the situation which I hadn't consciously analysed before: that reviewers are calling Mary Sue on any female character who is sufficiently heroic to actually carry her own story.
When I wrote that original Mary Sue post, obviously I had no idea how much of a landmine I was stepping on in terms of anger and defensiveness from certain readers (which is why I eventually stopped responding to comments and emails on the topic). But at the same time, I also had no idea how much of a groundswell of support there would be from other authors, authors who'd been witnessing this phenomenon themselves and feeling just as disturbed by it as I was. I had no idea, basically, how bloody right I was.
I rant a lot, about a lot of subjects, and I always believe in what I say. But as I saw the response to my Mary Sue post gaining momentum, as I saw more and more women writers admitting how sad and disheartened and hopeless this term made them feel, it began to dawn on me that this wasn't just me ranting about a pet peeve anymore. It wasn't just that Mary Sue was an inaccurate way to criticise female characters, that it was badly defined and contradictory and annoying.
It was that the overuse of Mary Sue was damaging the quality of critical response to original fiction AND encouraging anti-woman sentiment hidden under a thin veneer of concern for Strong Female Characters.
Mary Sue is a lot more important than she first appeared, Dear Readers. Not just in herself, but because she is symptomatic of a much wider problem: how women are treated and represented in our society.
And how is that? Well, to sum it up, let's take a look at this lovely little poster (which I know you've all probably seen before) which puts a series of male comic book characters in the same pose that artists chose for Wonder Woman (with WW herself at the bottom for comparison):
This has been doing the rounds on the internet for months, and we've all had a good laugh about it. Because that's what we socially aware Feminists DO when we're confronted with evidence of the over-sexualisation of women in the media. We laugh about it.
The problem is that it's not really funny.
If any male hero was really drawn posed like that on any page in any mainstream graphic novel, the words 'Ridiculous!' 'Inappropriate!', 'Demeaning!', 'Disgusting!' and most probably 'Gay!' (cringe) would get thrown at it so fast that you'd hear a wave of sonic booms. But female characters continue to be drawn this way. And female actors continue to be posed this way in films and on TV. And female models do the same pose in ads and on the catwalk.
Why? Because its OK for women to look ridiculous and inappropriate, for them to be demeaned and disgusting (and most definitely gay, so long as they're happy to let hetero blokes watch them at it).
In fact, it's more than OK. It's expected. It is REQUIRED. So much so that no one even sees it as demeaning or inappropriate or any of those other emotive words. They just see it as normal. *I* see it as normal. So what if I spend around a quarter of a film averting my eyes from lingering shots of a female actor's rear end, bust, legs and lips, and walk away without being able to remember the character's name? I probably don't even notice because That's Just How Films Are (this is called the Male Gaze and is a topic to be fully explored in another post, Dear Readers).
Basically: Male heroes get to save the world. Female ones get to stand there and look sexy, dammit.
Considering that we're constantly - but constantly - exposed to this worldview, is it any wonder that most of us have trouble clearing enough space in our heads to tackle female characters fairly?
I don't believe all reviewers (especially the female ones!) want to see women characters over-sexualised and treated as nothing more than unthreatening eye candy. But what I do believe is that this bombardment of EmptySexyHotObject images has made it hard for us to see women AS ANYTHING ELSE.
Which is why when female writers produce female characters with depth and agency, they get accused of wish fulfilment.
There's an unconscious assumption that any female protagonist or any important female secondary character written by a woman must necessarily be an idealised author insert/wish fulfilment character. Otherwise no female character would get to tell her own story in her own voice, and have her experiences treated as interesting and worthwhile. That's the real flaw with the term Mary Sue and the way that reviewers are applying it to original fiction. Female characters are not parasites sucking away the limelight that rightfully belongs to their male counterparts. Women do deserve their own stories. Their own voices. Their experiences are interesting and worthwhile.
Female protagonists are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own stories.
And the more successful they become, the more female writers are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own industry.
Look at this. And some of the comments in this (brilliant) post by Maureen Johnson. Examples of people stating that they want women to stop all this silly writing of theirs, and let men do the job instead. Examples of people stating, without irony, that women need to stop producing these girly books full of girl characters for girls to read because that is somehow stopping BOYS from reading! Let the men write manly books for men because...well, just because! Boys are important! Stuff girls! Who cares if THEY read or not? They're just there to look sexy, dammit!
These are the attitudes and assumptions that all women, and all readers, are fighting against.
I'm not saying that the misuse of the term Mary Sue is responsible for All The Sexism. But it is a really worrying symptom. It's an internet term, mostly used by internet savvy folks - and the Internet is the place where, for my money, a lot of the really smart booktalk happens. This is the place where readers find like-minded networks of friends, where a lot of promising young writers get nurtured. And where you find courageous, honest reviewers who really know the YA category - reviewers whose reviews we NEED because they are willing to put their heads above the parapet and call out misogyny and racism and homophobia and bad writing and abusive fictional boyfriends (all stuff that worries me too)!
Let me make it clear that I love readers. I love reviewers. I love bloggers. I WANT you guys to keep doing your thing. I want to keep on reading reviews of my own work (positive and negative) which teach me useful lessons and help me to develop and improve as writer BECAUSE they are not written for my benefit. I want to be able to click on Amazon or Goodreads or Book Depo and see fifty different reviews of the books I'm thinking about buying from all different perspectives. If you think a character is badly written or developed or unrealistic? I 100% support your right to scream that from the rooftops.
But the unconscious cuckoo-in-the-nest assumption betrayed by the use of Mary Sue as a term to denigrate female characters (and authors!) in original fiction is stealthily poisoning a lot of that healthy, necessary debate about YA books. It's harmful to the young readers we should be encouraging, the young reviewers we should be embracing, and the developing writers we should be supporting online.
Why does it have to be this way, Dear Readers? What do you think?
What would Mary Sue (by which I mean a complex, fully realised, awesome female character) do?
(With thanks to the lovely writers who double-checked this post for me and stopped me from commiting pure Feminist Rage Smash. They know who they are!)
