E.P. Clark's Blog, page 8
December 2, 2018
Checking up on Chekhov, Part II: Other People's Suffering (Plus free books to cheer you up afterwards!)
Happy December! Yes, it's the last month of 2018 already! How did that even happen?
Somehow it seems like this has been such a long year...and at the same time, such a short one. Have I really accomplished anything in the past year? Have any of us? What are we doing with our lives?!?!! (howl of existential angst).
Well, for myself I can say that as usual I have accomplished much less than I would have liked or that I planned--but I still can take some small comfort in the fact that the first two books in the Dreaming Land trilogy are out, and Part III is now live on Amazon and will have its "official" launch (meaning free giveaway!!!) in just a couple of weeks.
Finishing up this series has been an intensely meaningful experience for me for multiple reasons. It's also been interesting to reread it a couple of years after the initial composition, and see what I was thinking then, and how my thoughts have changed since then. I wrote the TDL book-that-morphed-into-a-trilogy when I first became seriously ill, as opposed to (I now see) just a little bit ill, which is a state I'd already been in for the previous 20 years.
During that scary time in 2014-2015 when my health took a sudden nosedive I *thought* I was sick (hahahah!), but I also thought that this was just a short-term aberration (wild cackles of hollow laughter). So the book deals with themes of suffering and healing, but on a rather superficial level. The heroine is more a healer than a healee, and while she experiences many of the same physical symptoms that I did at the time, they are transient and secondary to the main story.
Nonetheless, it was a good opportunity to meditate on suffering, something I have had plenty of opportunities to meditate on further since then. And not just suffering, but the indifference of others towards our suffering.
Suffering, and the indifference of others to it, as I mentioned in my last post, is one of Chekhov's themes, and one that I am now truly beginning to appreciate. Chekhov was the master of the sad story, something that giddy undergrads such as I once was have trouble appreciating, but that prove their worth once you, too, begin to have real problems. So I consciously worked lots of Chekhov allusions into my own stories.
Perhaps one of the saddest of Chekhov's many sad stories--other than "Kashtanka," of course, in which a dog runs joyously back to her abusive master--is "Gooseberries," in which a man achieves his dream of owning his own estate and eating his own gooseberries. His happiness is shown as a foolish illusion, achieved at the expense of other people's happiness and even lives, but he fails to see that. After watching his brother greedily gobble down sour, underripe gooseberries, bought with the money of the wife he had starved to death, the narrator observes:
"I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously fulfilled, who had attained his object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying. . . . Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.
Chekhov never did hesitate to spell out a harsh reality when the spirit moved him. I was struck by this passage when I first read it, and even more struck by it now that I find myself in the position of being the person with the hammer, reminding everyone that yes, you might, say, develop a debilitating illness while technically in the prime of your life. People literally turn their faces away in horror as I shuffle past, all the while assuring me that I don't "look sick." And I can't say I would act so differently if I encountered someone like me. Our first instinct when we come face-to-face with mortality is to turn and run the other way, even if standing our ground might be the better response.
This unwillingness to grapple with the bad things in life, even to make them better, is something that Valya in The Dreaming Land faces again and again, both in others and in herself. She often finds herself the person who has to carry out unpleasant tasks, the kinds of tasks that other people consider distasteful or beneath them. This gives her a special insight into her own society, one that is much more critical than that of many of her sister princesses, and leads her to question the economic foundations of her world. This conversation she has in The Dreaming Land II: The Journey with Valentina Viktoriyevna, a steppe sorceress who wants to train Valya in her magic, about the nature of freedom, bondage, and social responsibility, deliberately alludes to the above-quoted passage from "Gooseberries," as well as the famous quote about squeezing slave's blood out of one's veins:
“No doubt you’re right. I’m not asking you to solve it. I’m just asking you…what advice do you have for me? What can you tell me, what do you think about the nature of freedom and bondage?”
“In that case, Valeriya Dariyevna, I would tell you…I would tell you that no one is free, not truly. Even if we were run away from all the ties that bind us, we are still bound by our bodies and by the inevitable slow rush of time. The question you must ask yourself is not ‘How can we give everyone freedom?’ but ‘How can we make their bondage something they would choose over all other forms of non-freedom?’”
“I…” I said. “I…” I looked down at Zlata’s neck, feeling my thoughts coming together, feeling some kind of salvation waiting for me and those who depended on me, if I could just get out the words… “If she were free, if she were living in the wild, she would still be part of her herd, she would still have to go where the herd went, live as the herd lived, bear her foals for the herd, just as she would for me. But she would be…the chance of her being cold, or hungry, or attacked by predators—that would be much greater. So she wouldn’t be free from that. By giving up her freedom to live in the wild, she has gained freedom from the likelihood of starving to death, or being eaten. It is a trade she seems content to make.”
“And so?”
“And so,” I said, “I would formulate my rule thusly: do not take from others more than what they would give up by choice, and make sure that you give them something they consider to be of equal value in return. It is true for horses, and it is true for all others too.”
“A good start. Now you—all of you—will have to turn it into something more than just a start.”
“How?”
“You—all of you—will have to squeeze the blood of the slave trader, of the peddler of flesh, from your veins, drop by drop, until your hearts and minds and bodies are purified of it, but especially your hearts. That will be the last thing. It is easy to cleanse your body or your mind, but much more difficult to cleanse your heart, especially from the desire to harm others. That is the wisdom of sorceresses, you know: that you must purify your heart. Nothing of worth can be accomplished until you do that, and if you do not, you will do much harm, even if you do not think you intend it. You must let it all go. Free yourself of that.”
“That seems like a tall task.”
“Oh, it is, Valeriya Dariyevna, it is. One too tall even for you to accomplish in one lifetime, or even many lifetimes. But you must make a start on it.”
“How?”
“You must go knocking on people’s hearts, and on their minds too, so that they cannot close their eyes to what takes place all around them every day, what they themselves, often as not, are doing. You must keep knocking, so that they cannot turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to it. Only not too loud, or else they will become blind and deaf to it.”
Earlier I wrote about how Valya is a reworking of Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings, and how Eowyn's story brings the nature of freedom and responsibility into question. Is our very concept of freedom a zero-sum game, and one that is inherently masculine in nature? For the first both Valya and I would say "yes," and for the second, "maybe."
At the same time, we also think of nature as a zero-sum, killing-in-order-to-live game. And we're fine with that until it's our turn to be the victim. Then it doesn't seem so right and fun.
Are there solutions to the problem of suffering? Probably not completely, but there may be cause for hope. After all, in the very, very long run, the natural tendency is towards symbiosis. This is something I'm currently working over in my own mind in preparation for, I hope, writing about it in my next series.
So, while there just an unimaginable--because we refuse to imagine it--amount of suffering in the world, there is also cause for optimism: maybe, if we turn and face it, we can do something about it.
Plus, there's always literature! For example, you can snap up dozens of free historical fantasy/fiction books in the Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway, running all of December. Maybe--who knows?--the next Chekhov is lurking somewhere in it, just waiting to be discovered? You'll never know unless you check it out!
Links:
The Dreaming Land I: The Challenge mybook.to/TDLI
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey mybook.to/TDLII
The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice mybook.to/TDLIII
The Magical Book of Wands https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/c...
Somehow it seems like this has been such a long year...and at the same time, such a short one. Have I really accomplished anything in the past year? Have any of us? What are we doing with our lives?!?!! (howl of existential angst).
Well, for myself I can say that as usual I have accomplished much less than I would have liked or that I planned--but I still can take some small comfort in the fact that the first two books in the Dreaming Land trilogy are out, and Part III is now live on Amazon and will have its "official" launch (meaning free giveaway!!!) in just a couple of weeks.
Finishing up this series has been an intensely meaningful experience for me for multiple reasons. It's also been interesting to reread it a couple of years after the initial composition, and see what I was thinking then, and how my thoughts have changed since then. I wrote the TDL book-that-morphed-into-a-trilogy when I first became seriously ill, as opposed to (I now see) just a little bit ill, which is a state I'd already been in for the previous 20 years.
During that scary time in 2014-2015 when my health took a sudden nosedive I *thought* I was sick (hahahah!), but I also thought that this was just a short-term aberration (wild cackles of hollow laughter). So the book deals with themes of suffering and healing, but on a rather superficial level. The heroine is more a healer than a healee, and while she experiences many of the same physical symptoms that I did at the time, they are transient and secondary to the main story.
Nonetheless, it was a good opportunity to meditate on suffering, something I have had plenty of opportunities to meditate on further since then. And not just suffering, but the indifference of others towards our suffering.
Suffering, and the indifference of others to it, as I mentioned in my last post, is one of Chekhov's themes, and one that I am now truly beginning to appreciate. Chekhov was the master of the sad story, something that giddy undergrads such as I once was have trouble appreciating, but that prove their worth once you, too, begin to have real problems. So I consciously worked lots of Chekhov allusions into my own stories.
Perhaps one of the saddest of Chekhov's many sad stories--other than "Kashtanka," of course, in which a dog runs joyously back to her abusive master--is "Gooseberries," in which a man achieves his dream of owning his own estate and eating his own gooseberries. His happiness is shown as a foolish illusion, achieved at the expense of other people's happiness and even lives, but he fails to see that. After watching his brother greedily gobble down sour, underripe gooseberries, bought with the money of the wife he had starved to death, the narrator observes:
"I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously fulfilled, who had attained his object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying. . . . Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.
Chekhov never did hesitate to spell out a harsh reality when the spirit moved him. I was struck by this passage when I first read it, and even more struck by it now that I find myself in the position of being the person with the hammer, reminding everyone that yes, you might, say, develop a debilitating illness while technically in the prime of your life. People literally turn their faces away in horror as I shuffle past, all the while assuring me that I don't "look sick." And I can't say I would act so differently if I encountered someone like me. Our first instinct when we come face-to-face with mortality is to turn and run the other way, even if standing our ground might be the better response.
This unwillingness to grapple with the bad things in life, even to make them better, is something that Valya in The Dreaming Land faces again and again, both in others and in herself. She often finds herself the person who has to carry out unpleasant tasks, the kinds of tasks that other people consider distasteful or beneath them. This gives her a special insight into her own society, one that is much more critical than that of many of her sister princesses, and leads her to question the economic foundations of her world. This conversation she has in The Dreaming Land II: The Journey with Valentina Viktoriyevna, a steppe sorceress who wants to train Valya in her magic, about the nature of freedom, bondage, and social responsibility, deliberately alludes to the above-quoted passage from "Gooseberries," as well as the famous quote about squeezing slave's blood out of one's veins:
“No doubt you’re right. I’m not asking you to solve it. I’m just asking you…what advice do you have for me? What can you tell me, what do you think about the nature of freedom and bondage?”
“In that case, Valeriya Dariyevna, I would tell you…I would tell you that no one is free, not truly. Even if we were run away from all the ties that bind us, we are still bound by our bodies and by the inevitable slow rush of time. The question you must ask yourself is not ‘How can we give everyone freedom?’ but ‘How can we make their bondage something they would choose over all other forms of non-freedom?’”
“I…” I said. “I…” I looked down at Zlata’s neck, feeling my thoughts coming together, feeling some kind of salvation waiting for me and those who depended on me, if I could just get out the words… “If she were free, if she were living in the wild, she would still be part of her herd, she would still have to go where the herd went, live as the herd lived, bear her foals for the herd, just as she would for me. But she would be…the chance of her being cold, or hungry, or attacked by predators—that would be much greater. So she wouldn’t be free from that. By giving up her freedom to live in the wild, she has gained freedom from the likelihood of starving to death, or being eaten. It is a trade she seems content to make.”
“And so?”
“And so,” I said, “I would formulate my rule thusly: do not take from others more than what they would give up by choice, and make sure that you give them something they consider to be of equal value in return. It is true for horses, and it is true for all others too.”
“A good start. Now you—all of you—will have to turn it into something more than just a start.”
“How?”
“You—all of you—will have to squeeze the blood of the slave trader, of the peddler of flesh, from your veins, drop by drop, until your hearts and minds and bodies are purified of it, but especially your hearts. That will be the last thing. It is easy to cleanse your body or your mind, but much more difficult to cleanse your heart, especially from the desire to harm others. That is the wisdom of sorceresses, you know: that you must purify your heart. Nothing of worth can be accomplished until you do that, and if you do not, you will do much harm, even if you do not think you intend it. You must let it all go. Free yourself of that.”
“That seems like a tall task.”
“Oh, it is, Valeriya Dariyevna, it is. One too tall even for you to accomplish in one lifetime, or even many lifetimes. But you must make a start on it.”
“How?”
“You must go knocking on people’s hearts, and on their minds too, so that they cannot close their eyes to what takes place all around them every day, what they themselves, often as not, are doing. You must keep knocking, so that they cannot turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to it. Only not too loud, or else they will become blind and deaf to it.”
Earlier I wrote about how Valya is a reworking of Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings, and how Eowyn's story brings the nature of freedom and responsibility into question. Is our very concept of freedom a zero-sum game, and one that is inherently masculine in nature? For the first both Valya and I would say "yes," and for the second, "maybe."
At the same time, we also think of nature as a zero-sum, killing-in-order-to-live game. And we're fine with that until it's our turn to be the victim. Then it doesn't seem so right and fun.
Are there solutions to the problem of suffering? Probably not completely, but there may be cause for hope. After all, in the very, very long run, the natural tendency is towards symbiosis. This is something I'm currently working over in my own mind in preparation for, I hope, writing about it in my next series.
So, while there just an unimaginable--because we refuse to imagine it--amount of suffering in the world, there is also cause for optimism: maybe, if we turn and face it, we can do something about it.
Plus, there's always literature! For example, you can snap up dozens of free historical fantasy/fiction books in the Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway, running all of December. Maybe--who knows?--the next Chekhov is lurking somewhere in it, just waiting to be discovered? You'll never know unless you check it out!
Links:
The Dreaming Land I: The Challenge mybook.to/TDLI
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey mybook.to/TDLII
The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice mybook.to/TDLIII
The Magical Book of Wands https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
Historical Fantasy and Fiction Giveaway https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/c...
November 24, 2018
Checking up on Chekhov, Part I. Plus Sneak Peek and Free Giveaways!
I hope everyone is having a wonderful post-Thanksgiving weekend! Mine has been productive--so productive, in fact, that I'm thrilled to announce that The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice is live, ready for its pre-launch preparations!
Right now I'm torn between joy at the book's arrival in the world, stress over all the little details of the launch (I had to go in and fix a couple of little things in the book this morning after doing another re-read, and then there's the promo set-up), and worry that it might indeed be a toxic mold issue on top of my late-stage Lyme disease that is destroying my ability to walk.
I'm sure I'll have more updates on the is-it-also-mold saga later, but in the meantime, if you're interested in the toxic mold issue (and who wouldn't be, I mean, really?), I suggest you check out Julie Rehmeyer's fascinating memoir Through the Shadowlands, which is what brought the problem to my attention in the first place.
Being seriously ill basically sucks, in case you're wondering, but it does make me appreciate all kinds of things I didn't know to appreciate earlier, Chekhov being one of them. I have to confess--don't stone me, sister Russianists--that I didn't actually like Chekhov when I was first introduced to him. I read "Uncle Vanya" as an undergrad, and thought it was tedious and depressing. And, because I, like my heroine Valya, never could be told what to do, I rebelled against the professor who kept insisting on how great Chekhov was and how we all had to admire him as one of the greats of world literature, etc., etc...to be a honest, a lot of professors turned me off a lot of great works of literature by insisting that they were wonderful without explaining why. Something I've tried to take into consideration now that I--oh irony!--am a professor myself, and get to force hapless undergrads to read things that are good for them, even though they themselves don't always agree.
Anyway, I was re-introduced to Chekhov in grad school, where I did in fact learn a proper appreciation of him, enough to make me work lots of homages to his various stories into my own stories. The Breathing Sea duology is filled with references to "In the Ravine" (more on that later, I'm sure), The Dreaming Land II has a section that riffs on "Gooseberries" (more on that later too), and The Dreaming Land III has a little moment that borrows from "Misery."
Other than that these stories all have striking scenes that caught my imagination, I think the thing that ties them together is that they all speak, in some way or another, to the problem of understanding other people's unhappiness, and empathizing with other people, including people you might not want to empathize with. "Misery" is the story of a cab driver whose son has just died, but when he tries to tell his passengers about it, no one seems to care, compounding his misery:
And Iona turns round to tell them how his son died, but at that point the hunchback gives a faint sigh and announces that, thank God! they have arrived at last. After taking his twenty kopecks, Iona gazes for a long while after the revelers, who disappear into a dark entry. Again he is alone and again there is silence for him.... The misery which has been for a brief space eased comes back again and tears his heart more cruelly than ever. With a look of anxiety and suffering Iona's eyes stray restlessly among the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the street: can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen to him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery.... His misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona's heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....
Finally he finds the sympathetic listener he needs--in his horse.
Chekhov, like Jane Austen, seems to cry out for remakings, reworkings, and reimaginings.
And so I joined in on the Chekhov bandwagon and included my own re-envisioning of the above-quoted scene from "Misery" in TDLIII: The Sacrifice:
“Is she still bleeding?” I asked, without opening my eyes. A sadness that was so enormous it felt like it must be billowing around me in a giant cloud, spreading out over all of the kremlin and all of Krasnograd, had filled me, making it difficult to speak...The sadness floated around us, but I pushed it away, blew it away from me like someone flapping cloth to blow away smoke. With similar success. Eddies kept wafting around my pathetic cloth shield, trying to choke me.
Hmmm, maybe my undergraduate self had a point. Chekhov can be a real downer. But as he would be quick to point out, I'm sure, life isn't all a box of chocolates. Bad things, sad things, happen all the time, and sometimes reading about them can help us deal with them a little better in real life. And if you can't face misery, how can you act with compassion towards your own and others' suffering?
Valya would probably have something bracing to say about that. I, on the other hand, will just point out that along with everything else, both the Magic and Fantasy and the Dark Nights and Book Delights giveaways are still going strong, so why not check them out if you haven't already?
Till next time!
Links:
Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/U...
Magic and Fantasy Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/4...
The Breathing Sea: myBook.to/tbsi
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey: mybook.to/TDLII
The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice: mybook.to/TDLIII
Right now I'm torn between joy at the book's arrival in the world, stress over all the little details of the launch (I had to go in and fix a couple of little things in the book this morning after doing another re-read, and then there's the promo set-up), and worry that it might indeed be a toxic mold issue on top of my late-stage Lyme disease that is destroying my ability to walk.
I'm sure I'll have more updates on the is-it-also-mold saga later, but in the meantime, if you're interested in the toxic mold issue (and who wouldn't be, I mean, really?), I suggest you check out Julie Rehmeyer's fascinating memoir Through the Shadowlands, which is what brought the problem to my attention in the first place.
Being seriously ill basically sucks, in case you're wondering, but it does make me appreciate all kinds of things I didn't know to appreciate earlier, Chekhov being one of them. I have to confess--don't stone me, sister Russianists--that I didn't actually like Chekhov when I was first introduced to him. I read "Uncle Vanya" as an undergrad, and thought it was tedious and depressing. And, because I, like my heroine Valya, never could be told what to do, I rebelled against the professor who kept insisting on how great Chekhov was and how we all had to admire him as one of the greats of world literature, etc., etc...to be a honest, a lot of professors turned me off a lot of great works of literature by insisting that they were wonderful without explaining why. Something I've tried to take into consideration now that I--oh irony!--am a professor myself, and get to force hapless undergrads to read things that are good for them, even though they themselves don't always agree.
Anyway, I was re-introduced to Chekhov in grad school, where I did in fact learn a proper appreciation of him, enough to make me work lots of homages to his various stories into my own stories. The Breathing Sea duology is filled with references to "In the Ravine" (more on that later, I'm sure), The Dreaming Land II has a section that riffs on "Gooseberries" (more on that later too), and The Dreaming Land III has a little moment that borrows from "Misery."
Other than that these stories all have striking scenes that caught my imagination, I think the thing that ties them together is that they all speak, in some way or another, to the problem of understanding other people's unhappiness, and empathizing with other people, including people you might not want to empathize with. "Misery" is the story of a cab driver whose son has just died, but when he tries to tell his passengers about it, no one seems to care, compounding his misery:
And Iona turns round to tell them how his son died, but at that point the hunchback gives a faint sigh and announces that, thank God! they have arrived at last. After taking his twenty kopecks, Iona gazes for a long while after the revelers, who disappear into a dark entry. Again he is alone and again there is silence for him.... The misery which has been for a brief space eased comes back again and tears his heart more cruelly than ever. With a look of anxiety and suffering Iona's eyes stray restlessly among the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the street: can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen to him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery.... His misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona's heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....
Finally he finds the sympathetic listener he needs--in his horse.
Chekhov, like Jane Austen, seems to cry out for remakings, reworkings, and reimaginings.
And so I joined in on the Chekhov bandwagon and included my own re-envisioning of the above-quoted scene from "Misery" in TDLIII: The Sacrifice:
“Is she still bleeding?” I asked, without opening my eyes. A sadness that was so enormous it felt like it must be billowing around me in a giant cloud, spreading out over all of the kremlin and all of Krasnograd, had filled me, making it difficult to speak...The sadness floated around us, but I pushed it away, blew it away from me like someone flapping cloth to blow away smoke. With similar success. Eddies kept wafting around my pathetic cloth shield, trying to choke me.
Hmmm, maybe my undergraduate self had a point. Chekhov can be a real downer. But as he would be quick to point out, I'm sure, life isn't all a box of chocolates. Bad things, sad things, happen all the time, and sometimes reading about them can help us deal with them a little better in real life. And if you can't face misery, how can you act with compassion towards your own and others' suffering?
Valya would probably have something bracing to say about that. I, on the other hand, will just point out that along with everything else, both the Magic and Fantasy and the Dark Nights and Book Delights giveaways are still going strong, so why not check them out if you haven't already?
Till next time!
Links:
Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/U...
Magic and Fantasy Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/4...
The Breathing Sea: myBook.to/tbsi
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey: mybook.to/TDLII
The Dreaming Land III: The Sacrifice: mybook.to/TDLIII
November 17, 2018
What to read, what to read...Recommendations, Giveaways, and Excerpts
The Dreaming Land III is almost here! I'm planning to do the last formatting and prep this weekend, and it should be ready for launch by December. Meanwhile, if you're thirsting for more fantasy, why not check out the Magic and Fantasy Giveaway, with over 100 free fantasy stories available, including, if you don't have a copy of it yet, Winter of the Gods and Other Stories.
Along with fretting over formatting my own books, I've been doing plenty of reading of other people's books, some fantasy, some other genres. A fantasy book I've read recently that I have to recommend is Robin Hobb's Fitz and the Fool trilogy.
As with all the FitzChivalry Farseer books, the Fitz and the Fool trilogy is basically a meandering, sprawling, heartbreaking, impossibly epic mega-story split up into three books (Huh...not that I borrowed anything from that. No indeedy). If you're looking for some taut, tightly-plotted piece of modernist fiction, keep walking. If you want to immerse yourself in one of the most well-realized worlds in contemporary fantasy, and spend a few more years in Fitz's company as he gets dragged out of his country retirement and back into the assassin's business, then run, don't walk, to your nearest book retailer and grab yourself a copy.
Another, very different fantasy book that I've been enjoying very much is The Nest of Nessies, book 6 in the Penny White series. This delightful series features a female vicar with a Doctor Who obsession and the ability to cross into a magical parallel universe.
The author is himself a vicar, and his intimate knowledge of the subject shows: when Penny isn't riding around on invisible dragons and hoping people aren't ogling her bum as it flies, apparently unsupported, through the air, she's dealing with the minutiae of parish council meetings. If you're looking for something humorous and wholesome, with a healthy dollop of British charm, Penny White may be the series for you.
And, of course, I'm reading some "serious" Russian literature as well. I just started making my slow way through Zakhar Prilepin's Obitel' (Monastery), a massive brick of a novel set in the Solovki monastery/prison camp.
It's unfortunate that Prilepin's work is so little translated into English (summer project????), although I highly recommend Sankya, which exists in a creditable English translation. Reading Monastery made me think about the genre of "camp prose," aka, stories about prison camp life, which was a significant 20th-century genre, and which leading Russian authors such as Prilepin and Makanin have continued into the 21st century, despite not being sent to camps themselves.
This ties in my class reading this week, in which we discussed Arkady Babchenko's One Soldier's War, and in particular this passage, from the section "Chechen Penal Battalion":
The army has been living according to prison-camp rules for a long time. A male collective in a confined space inevitably assumes a prison's model of existence. It's a universal truth--the strong always push around the weak, and, anyway, someone has to mop the latrines.
My American students tend to bridle at that statement, and this time they bridled hard. Probably it's because they're used to protecting men from criticism, and maybe also because we've gone down this whole it's-all-training rabbit hole, insisting that there is nothing inherent about men or male-dominated societies that make them cruel and violent...certainly the military and prison are models of kindness and fairness, and everyone knows what good citizens fraternities are...what's that you say? They're not? Funny, isn't it? And yet somehow we allow them to flourish.
Anyway, if other people want to argue with Babchenko, more power to them, but when I included my "prison camp" scenes in The Dreaming Land II, I was working explicitly from the camp/military prose tradition in Russian letters, which does not shy away from depicting the horrors perpetrated by a male collective in a confined space. Valya, who is at heart an idealist and also likes men (in many ways), struggles with everything the prisons and work camps say about her people and her country:
***
“I know,” I said with a sigh, drawing a surprised look from Dmitry Sofiyevich, who had clearly been expecting me to argue against his pessimistic assessment of convict life. And I did want to argue against it, but I knew that his description of the current state of things amongst the convicts was all too accurate. I just couldn’t help but think that perhaps it could be changed. After all, amongst the women, as Dmitry Sofiyevich himself had said, things were slightly more civilized, or at least there was something resembling the rule of law between them, and we could walk into their living quarters without fear for our lives.
Which meant that the convict life did not have to mean the loss of everything, of becoming less civilized than wolves. But amongst the men…amongst the men things were quite different, and I had no doubt that Dmitry Sofiyevich was right and that terrible things would happen to us if we were to walk into their barracks tonight, and even more terrible things would happen if we were to try to prevent them from inflicting all kinds of vile torments on each other, and that the whole system depended on the love of some—well, many, actually—for the right to hurt others, which they held in higher regard than any other liberty or pleasure, and for which they would sacrifice every opportunity at a better life. It was as if…it was as if they were imprisoned by their own manhood, and no matter how much they might pretend to rattle at the bars, they would fight to the death anyone who attempted to free them. To the death of freedom, certainly.
And yet they had all been someone’s precious little boys, conceived in joy, carried in hope, borne in pain, and raised with love, perhaps as beloved by their mothers as Mirochka was by me…I thought of the boys I had healed, the ones who had been gelded. They had seemed so innocent, but would they end up here one day too, driven by some compulsion, stronger than any curse, to do to others what had been done to them? Or was there hope? Was I a fool, a starry-eyed fool, or was there hope, at least for some, maybe even enough to make a difference in the long term? Could things be better, if not in my lifetime, then in Mirochka’s, and the tsarinoviches’, and that of the children we had rescued?
***
The struggle between freedom and bondage, and between compassion and cruelty, as well as what to do about men, who are so beloved and yet do so many bad things, is central to Valya's story. And while she lives in a fantasy world, one that draws heavily from Russian influences, the prison problem is one that is particularly relevant to American culture. After all, one thing we are definitely Number 1 in is imprisoning people. So what does that mean for a culture? What does it mean for a country when so many of its people are exposed to the brutalizing effects of a male collective in a confined space? Is our bloated prison system, standing in stark contrast to the claim to be "the land of the free," not only our Jungian shadow, but part of American hyper-masculinity? As I discussed in an earlier post, is our very concept of freedom and power masculine in nature?
My characters don't really have answers to those questions, and neither do I. I'm more in the business of asking questions than giving answers. But it's good to chew over questions with no easy answers from time to time. It builds the brain muscles, and--who knows?--maybe one of you will come up with a brilliant answer.
Links:
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey: mybook.to/TDLII
Magic and Fantasy Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/4...
The Nest of Nessies: https://www.amazon.com/Nest-Nessies-P...
Fool's Assassin: https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Assassin...
Along with fretting over formatting my own books, I've been doing plenty of reading of other people's books, some fantasy, some other genres. A fantasy book I've read recently that I have to recommend is Robin Hobb's Fitz and the Fool trilogy.
As with all the FitzChivalry Farseer books, the Fitz and the Fool trilogy is basically a meandering, sprawling, heartbreaking, impossibly epic mega-story split up into three books (Huh...not that I borrowed anything from that. No indeedy). If you're looking for some taut, tightly-plotted piece of modernist fiction, keep walking. If you want to immerse yourself in one of the most well-realized worlds in contemporary fantasy, and spend a few more years in Fitz's company as he gets dragged out of his country retirement and back into the assassin's business, then run, don't walk, to your nearest book retailer and grab yourself a copy.
Another, very different fantasy book that I've been enjoying very much is The Nest of Nessies, book 6 in the Penny White series. This delightful series features a female vicar with a Doctor Who obsession and the ability to cross into a magical parallel universe.
The author is himself a vicar, and his intimate knowledge of the subject shows: when Penny isn't riding around on invisible dragons and hoping people aren't ogling her bum as it flies, apparently unsupported, through the air, she's dealing with the minutiae of parish council meetings. If you're looking for something humorous and wholesome, with a healthy dollop of British charm, Penny White may be the series for you.
And, of course, I'm reading some "serious" Russian literature as well. I just started making my slow way through Zakhar Prilepin's Obitel' (Monastery), a massive brick of a novel set in the Solovki monastery/prison camp.
It's unfortunate that Prilepin's work is so little translated into English (summer project????), although I highly recommend Sankya, which exists in a creditable English translation. Reading Monastery made me think about the genre of "camp prose," aka, stories about prison camp life, which was a significant 20th-century genre, and which leading Russian authors such as Prilepin and Makanin have continued into the 21st century, despite not being sent to camps themselves.
This ties in my class reading this week, in which we discussed Arkady Babchenko's One Soldier's War, and in particular this passage, from the section "Chechen Penal Battalion":
The army has been living according to prison-camp rules for a long time. A male collective in a confined space inevitably assumes a prison's model of existence. It's a universal truth--the strong always push around the weak, and, anyway, someone has to mop the latrines.
My American students tend to bridle at that statement, and this time they bridled hard. Probably it's because they're used to protecting men from criticism, and maybe also because we've gone down this whole it's-all-training rabbit hole, insisting that there is nothing inherent about men or male-dominated societies that make them cruel and violent...certainly the military and prison are models of kindness and fairness, and everyone knows what good citizens fraternities are...what's that you say? They're not? Funny, isn't it? And yet somehow we allow them to flourish.
Anyway, if other people want to argue with Babchenko, more power to them, but when I included my "prison camp" scenes in The Dreaming Land II, I was working explicitly from the camp/military prose tradition in Russian letters, which does not shy away from depicting the horrors perpetrated by a male collective in a confined space. Valya, who is at heart an idealist and also likes men (in many ways), struggles with everything the prisons and work camps say about her people and her country:
***
“I know,” I said with a sigh, drawing a surprised look from Dmitry Sofiyevich, who had clearly been expecting me to argue against his pessimistic assessment of convict life. And I did want to argue against it, but I knew that his description of the current state of things amongst the convicts was all too accurate. I just couldn’t help but think that perhaps it could be changed. After all, amongst the women, as Dmitry Sofiyevich himself had said, things were slightly more civilized, or at least there was something resembling the rule of law between them, and we could walk into their living quarters without fear for our lives.
Which meant that the convict life did not have to mean the loss of everything, of becoming less civilized than wolves. But amongst the men…amongst the men things were quite different, and I had no doubt that Dmitry Sofiyevich was right and that terrible things would happen to us if we were to walk into their barracks tonight, and even more terrible things would happen if we were to try to prevent them from inflicting all kinds of vile torments on each other, and that the whole system depended on the love of some—well, many, actually—for the right to hurt others, which they held in higher regard than any other liberty or pleasure, and for which they would sacrifice every opportunity at a better life. It was as if…it was as if they were imprisoned by their own manhood, and no matter how much they might pretend to rattle at the bars, they would fight to the death anyone who attempted to free them. To the death of freedom, certainly.
And yet they had all been someone’s precious little boys, conceived in joy, carried in hope, borne in pain, and raised with love, perhaps as beloved by their mothers as Mirochka was by me…I thought of the boys I had healed, the ones who had been gelded. They had seemed so innocent, but would they end up here one day too, driven by some compulsion, stronger than any curse, to do to others what had been done to them? Or was there hope? Was I a fool, a starry-eyed fool, or was there hope, at least for some, maybe even enough to make a difference in the long term? Could things be better, if not in my lifetime, then in Mirochka’s, and the tsarinoviches’, and that of the children we had rescued?
***
The struggle between freedom and bondage, and between compassion and cruelty, as well as what to do about men, who are so beloved and yet do so many bad things, is central to Valya's story. And while she lives in a fantasy world, one that draws heavily from Russian influences, the prison problem is one that is particularly relevant to American culture. After all, one thing we are definitely Number 1 in is imprisoning people. So what does that mean for a culture? What does it mean for a country when so many of its people are exposed to the brutalizing effects of a male collective in a confined space? Is our bloated prison system, standing in stark contrast to the claim to be "the land of the free," not only our Jungian shadow, but part of American hyper-masculinity? As I discussed in an earlier post, is our very concept of freedom and power masculine in nature?
My characters don't really have answers to those questions, and neither do I. I'm more in the business of asking questions than giving answers. But it's good to chew over questions with no easy answers from time to time. It builds the brain muscles, and--who knows?--maybe one of you will come up with a brilliant answer.
Links:
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey: mybook.to/TDLII
Magic and Fantasy Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/4...
The Nest of Nessies: https://www.amazon.com/Nest-Nessies-P...
Fool's Assassin: https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Assassin...
November 11, 2018
Two Women are Not Enough: A World Out of Balance
Goodness! Is it another weekend already? It is! And the leaves are finally starting to turn here in North Carolina, and it might get down below freezing. Not that fall is late or anything. I mean, it's only November. The world isn't getting out of balance, is it?
Okay, so maybe it is. Scratch that: it definitely is. Which is something I address pretty directly in The Dreaming Land trilogy, although I don't feature climate change directly.
During last week's promo TDLII hit the top of the LGBT, Epic, and Metaphysical & Visionary categories. Which seems like the categories where it needs to be. It's certainly epic in and of itself, and part of a very epic trilogy, which is part of an even more epic uber-trilogy, so I don't think I can ever pass it off as anything other than epic. And there is a bittersweet love triangle going on between the main character, her former (female) lover, and her current (male) lover, so while the bisexual element is not the main point of the story, it certainly features in many scenes, and forms an important subplot.
And as for metaphysical & visionary--definitely. The entire Zemnian Trilogy is meant to be "meta" about lots of things, such as storytelling, culture, perception, life, ethics...pretty much everything that appears in the story is meant to be both the thing in itself, and to be seen from a higher or more abstract perspective. So Valya's interactions with animals and the natural world both further the story, and tell another story, one about struggling to make moral choices against the backdrop of an inherently amoral natural world. The natural world that Valya lives in is animate, but it doesn't care much for what humans want or think they need. Valya thus has a series of visions and supernatural encounters that push her to understand how the "world of women," aka human society, has gotten out of balance with the rest of the world, with dire consequences for all.
One of the main articulations of this problem is this conversation Valya has with a wolf-spirit in a dream:
Well met, sister, she said, and her voice in my head held amusement and authority. I hope you have listened to our sister’s plea.
You consider the elk to be your sisters?
We are all sisters, said the wolf. Every one of us. You think because we prey upon them that we cannot be sisters? Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The elk might disagree.
The wolf drew back her lips in a quick snarl, or maybe a grin. Maybe so. The love between predator and prey tends to be very one-sided. In any case, though, it is only you humans who have broken the bonds of…if not sisterhood, then nature, and become greedy and thieving, taking more than you need, breeding more than you need. You act as if the limitations of the natural world do not apply to you. Of course, we wolves take, we wolves kill, but only in measure. Only as much as the world will allow us. We have our limits and we live within them, harsh and narrow as they are, because we have no other option. But you humans do not. You think that all options are open to you, and you can choose to be all things at once, take all things at once, as much as you want and more. But you cannot. Why do you think we gave your foremother the choice: either to live as wolves, taking and killing as you will but breeding and surviving in very small numbers, or to set aside your wolfishness. She chose the latter, which was perhaps wise, and for that, we have left her kin, and all her people, in peace. But they keep breaking the oath.
We’ve kept our oath! Well…the Tsarina has.
Yes, Valeriya Dariyevna. The Tsarina has. No one else. One woman is not enough, not even the Tsarina.
I’ve joined her!
Two women are not enough, either, said the wolf. It is not about what you do, but what you stop others from doing, how well you stop others from destroying the rest of us.
***
The wolf reminds Valya of three very important things: 1) Predators may feel "love" for their prey, but the prey are unlikely to return the favor. Or in other words, it doesn't matter how good your intentions are or what you think you're feeling about others if you're harming them. 2) Predators are vulnerable and dependent populations, and with strict upper limits to population density in any given region. 3) Humans want to prey on others without accepting the downsides of being a predator, and are thus destroying things for themselves and everyone else. The wolves have taken it upon themselves to remind the humans of the mistake they are making.
Valya is thus tasked with turning around the environmental destruction humans actions have caused. She has already taken it upon herself to change her own action, an important first step. That's hard enough, and without that nothing is possible. But now she has to convince others as well, a task that is exponentially harder.
Valya has a hard task, but we Earthlings have a much harder task, because there are so many more of us and we've done so much more damage. One woman is not enough. Even two women are not enough. But two billion might be, and those two billion would be made up of individuals who gave more than they took.
So how can we give more than we take? I'm not sure that's even possible for modern humans, but maybe we can take a little less by changing our housing and transportation choices and most especially by modifying our diets, which, I'm here to tell you, is by far the easiest of these actions, AND is supposed to be the most far-reaching, so you get twice as much bang for your buck! The good news is that it is possible to undo at least some human-caused harm to the world, as this hopeful report on the hole in the ozone layer shows, not to mention the success in rescuing several wild species from the brink of extinction. We can do it, we just have to not let our own dark side, our own weakness and greed, get in the way.
And speaking of giving things away, I've got TWO giveaways to announce this week! First of all, the Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway is still going strong, with over 100 free fantasy books available. Secondly, I'm giving away signed paperbacks of The Breathing Sea I to the first three people who message me (you can reply to this post or email me directly at elenapedigo@yahoo.com) and request them!
Links:
Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/U...
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JCMBP6K
Okay, so maybe it is. Scratch that: it definitely is. Which is something I address pretty directly in The Dreaming Land trilogy, although I don't feature climate change directly.
During last week's promo TDLII hit the top of the LGBT, Epic, and Metaphysical & Visionary categories. Which seems like the categories where it needs to be. It's certainly epic in and of itself, and part of a very epic trilogy, which is part of an even more epic uber-trilogy, so I don't think I can ever pass it off as anything other than epic. And there is a bittersweet love triangle going on between the main character, her former (female) lover, and her current (male) lover, so while the bisexual element is not the main point of the story, it certainly features in many scenes, and forms an important subplot.
And as for metaphysical & visionary--definitely. The entire Zemnian Trilogy is meant to be "meta" about lots of things, such as storytelling, culture, perception, life, ethics...pretty much everything that appears in the story is meant to be both the thing in itself, and to be seen from a higher or more abstract perspective. So Valya's interactions with animals and the natural world both further the story, and tell another story, one about struggling to make moral choices against the backdrop of an inherently amoral natural world. The natural world that Valya lives in is animate, but it doesn't care much for what humans want or think they need. Valya thus has a series of visions and supernatural encounters that push her to understand how the "world of women," aka human society, has gotten out of balance with the rest of the world, with dire consequences for all.
One of the main articulations of this problem is this conversation Valya has with a wolf-spirit in a dream:
Well met, sister, she said, and her voice in my head held amusement and authority. I hope you have listened to our sister’s plea.
You consider the elk to be your sisters?
We are all sisters, said the wolf. Every one of us. You think because we prey upon them that we cannot be sisters? Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The elk might disagree.
The wolf drew back her lips in a quick snarl, or maybe a grin. Maybe so. The love between predator and prey tends to be very one-sided. In any case, though, it is only you humans who have broken the bonds of…if not sisterhood, then nature, and become greedy and thieving, taking more than you need, breeding more than you need. You act as if the limitations of the natural world do not apply to you. Of course, we wolves take, we wolves kill, but only in measure. Only as much as the world will allow us. We have our limits and we live within them, harsh and narrow as they are, because we have no other option. But you humans do not. You think that all options are open to you, and you can choose to be all things at once, take all things at once, as much as you want and more. But you cannot. Why do you think we gave your foremother the choice: either to live as wolves, taking and killing as you will but breeding and surviving in very small numbers, or to set aside your wolfishness. She chose the latter, which was perhaps wise, and for that, we have left her kin, and all her people, in peace. But they keep breaking the oath.
We’ve kept our oath! Well…the Tsarina has.
Yes, Valeriya Dariyevna. The Tsarina has. No one else. One woman is not enough, not even the Tsarina.
I’ve joined her!
Two women are not enough, either, said the wolf. It is not about what you do, but what you stop others from doing, how well you stop others from destroying the rest of us.
***
The wolf reminds Valya of three very important things: 1) Predators may feel "love" for their prey, but the prey are unlikely to return the favor. Or in other words, it doesn't matter how good your intentions are or what you think you're feeling about others if you're harming them. 2) Predators are vulnerable and dependent populations, and with strict upper limits to population density in any given region. 3) Humans want to prey on others without accepting the downsides of being a predator, and are thus destroying things for themselves and everyone else. The wolves have taken it upon themselves to remind the humans of the mistake they are making.
Valya is thus tasked with turning around the environmental destruction humans actions have caused. She has already taken it upon herself to change her own action, an important first step. That's hard enough, and without that nothing is possible. But now she has to convince others as well, a task that is exponentially harder.
Valya has a hard task, but we Earthlings have a much harder task, because there are so many more of us and we've done so much more damage. One woman is not enough. Even two women are not enough. But two billion might be, and those two billion would be made up of individuals who gave more than they took.
So how can we give more than we take? I'm not sure that's even possible for modern humans, but maybe we can take a little less by changing our housing and transportation choices and most especially by modifying our diets, which, I'm here to tell you, is by far the easiest of these actions, AND is supposed to be the most far-reaching, so you get twice as much bang for your buck! The good news is that it is possible to undo at least some human-caused harm to the world, as this hopeful report on the hole in the ozone layer shows, not to mention the success in rescuing several wild species from the brink of extinction. We can do it, we just have to not let our own dark side, our own weakness and greed, get in the way.
And speaking of giving things away, I've got TWO giveaways to announce this week! First of all, the Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway is still going strong, with over 100 free fantasy books available. Secondly, I'm giving away signed paperbacks of The Breathing Sea I to the first three people who message me (you can reply to this post or email me directly at elenapedigo@yahoo.com) and request them!
Links:
Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/U...
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JCMBP6K
November 3, 2018
Virtual FantasyCon, Free New Releases, Giveaways...What More Could a Fantasy-Lover Want?
Happy weekend, everyone! Today's a very special weekend for me for a whole bunch of reasons, so I'll just jump straight into them.
First of all, I'm doing a free giveaway of The Dreaming Land II: The Journey The Dreaming Land II: The Journey on Kindle this week!
TDLII is a very emotional book for me. In fact, the whole Dreaming Land mini-series is an intensely emotional project for me, but TDLII is special as the central turning-point in Valya's story, where she has to face up to multiple moral quandaries, and choose to become a good person rather than a bad person--and define what being a good person means, which isn't always the obvious answer. Then there's the environmental message, which is very dear to my heart, and Valya's struggles with the enervating effects of her growing magical powers, which are based on my own experiences of becoming sicker and sicker with late-stage neuroborreliosis, AKA chronic Lyme disease. I started TDL shortly after I had my first major episode of something-being-very-wrong, and wrote the latter half of the mini-series over the summer I first became too weak to walk normally, and had to cancel all my summer plans and spend hours every day sleeping or just lying miserably on the couch. And I thought I was sick then...
Anyway, it's been a long road, but you can get TDLII for free this weekend here, and the conclusion to the mini-series and the entire Zemnian Series will be out next month.
But that's not all! Oh no! Where to start, where to start...
Well, maybe now is a good place to mention the Dark Nights and Book Delights giveaway, with over 100 fantasy and paranormal books available for free all November.
And then there's Virtual FantasyCon 2018, starting on Sunday and running all week. Come on by and visit me and a ton of other fantasy authors for chit-chat, games, and, I have no doubt, a ton of books!
Oh, and last but certainly not least, a reminder that The Magical Book of Wands The Magical Book of Wands: A Multi-author Anthology has just been released and is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited for the next 90 days, so if you have a KU subscription, now is a great time to read it for free!
Whatever you do, have a great weekend, and enjoy your reading!
Links:
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey mybook.to/TDLII
The Magical Book of Wands: https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
Virtual FantasyCon: https://www.facebook.com/events/20804...
Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/U...
First of all, I'm doing a free giveaway of The Dreaming Land II: The Journey The Dreaming Land II: The Journey on Kindle this week!
TDLII is a very emotional book for me. In fact, the whole Dreaming Land mini-series is an intensely emotional project for me, but TDLII is special as the central turning-point in Valya's story, where she has to face up to multiple moral quandaries, and choose to become a good person rather than a bad person--and define what being a good person means, which isn't always the obvious answer. Then there's the environmental message, which is very dear to my heart, and Valya's struggles with the enervating effects of her growing magical powers, which are based on my own experiences of becoming sicker and sicker with late-stage neuroborreliosis, AKA chronic Lyme disease. I started TDL shortly after I had my first major episode of something-being-very-wrong, and wrote the latter half of the mini-series over the summer I first became too weak to walk normally, and had to cancel all my summer plans and spend hours every day sleeping or just lying miserably on the couch. And I thought I was sick then...
Anyway, it's been a long road, but you can get TDLII for free this weekend here, and the conclusion to the mini-series and the entire Zemnian Series will be out next month.
But that's not all! Oh no! Where to start, where to start...
Well, maybe now is a good place to mention the Dark Nights and Book Delights giveaway, with over 100 fantasy and paranormal books available for free all November.
And then there's Virtual FantasyCon 2018, starting on Sunday and running all week. Come on by and visit me and a ton of other fantasy authors for chit-chat, games, and, I have no doubt, a ton of books!
Oh, and last but certainly not least, a reminder that The Magical Book of Wands The Magical Book of Wands: A Multi-author Anthology has just been released and is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited for the next 90 days, so if you have a KU subscription, now is a great time to read it for free!
Whatever you do, have a great weekend, and enjoy your reading!
Links:
The Dreaming Land II: The Journey mybook.to/TDLII
The Magical Book of Wands: https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
Virtual FantasyCon: https://www.facebook.com/events/20804...
Dark Nights and Book Delights Giveaway: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/U...
October 27, 2018
Dragon/Vampire Fantasy? Why Not?
While I'm currently gearing up for the big promo for The Dreaming Land II next week (the eBook will be free then on Kindle; it's currently free to read on KU if you're in the mood, or you can grab a copy of the paperback), I also have a joint release coming up on October 31, one with a completely new world and storyline!
A group of us got together and each contributed a story that in some way has something to do with a magic wand. The result is The Magical Book of Wands, The Magical Book of Wands: A Multi-author Anthology which is currently available for preorder. It will be released October 31, and will be on KU, and thus available to read for free to KU subscribers, for 90 days. All proceeds from the book will go to the ALA (American Library Association). For $3.99 you'll not only get an anthology packed to bursting with all kinds of fantasy stories, but you'll be supporting a good cause!
My own story, "The Dragonbone Wand," is a foray into a new fantasy world I've been thinking about for oh, more than 15 years, but which is appearing in print for the first time here. It's changed a lot as I've mulled it over, and I still don't have all the details ironed out--that can only happen in the writing--but getting this first story down on paper, even if virtually, has been very exciting.
An excerpt is below. I'm still in the process of envisioning my world, but as it stands at the moment it's sort of Scandinavia-meets-Asia. Why not? I knew there had to be mountains in this world, so I thought about setting it in someplace Norwegian-ish, and then I thought about making it something like Kamchatka or the Altai region of Siberia, and then I decided to go with both. There are two ethnic groups in this part of the world: a Nordic-esque one, which, since I don't actually know very much Norwegian, is essentially Finnish (e.g., Joki means "River" in Finnish); and a Korean-esque one, to which my heroine belongs. Why Korean-esque? Because I've had various Korean friends over the years, so I thought it would be fun to have a fantasy heroine who looks Korean, although the culture will if anything be more Siberian, with a large dose of my own original fantasy.
The magical system is based around dragon blood. Dragons and humans once intermingled, and certain humans still have an affinity for dragon blood. If they are drained of their own blood and fed dragon blood in a very vampire-y process, they will gain various magical powers, along with the ability to transform into dragons. I'm still refining that too, but it's essentially a mash-up of the vampire transformation process, and the legends surrounding dragons and the magical properties of dragon blood. And of course "Dracula" was considered to be a dragon, wasn't he?
There's a lot more I could say about my inspiration for this and where I think it's going and how my experiences of being severely ill with Lyme disease and undergoing treatment for that have shaped my idea of the story, but I'll save that for later. So without further ado, here's an excerpt:
Excerpt of "The Dragonbone Wand":
It was just a piece of bone.
Dull white, the width of my finger and twice as long as my hand, it lay on a faded piece of velvet. Young men and the occasional young woman gathered around it, laughing nervously and pushing each other with their elbows to be the first to touch it.
“Are you finally going to try this year, Laela?” one of them called out to me.
“No,” I said. But I walked over and joined the crowd anyway.
I was the oldest amongst them by a good ten years. Back in the foolish first flush of youth, when young men run off to war and young women run after young men, I had stayed at home and apprenticed to the village healer, and then to the village scribe. Now I was both. While my age-mates chased after their growing families, shouting at their children and nagging their husbands in order to feel loved and needed, I sat in my quiet cottage, copying out wills and tending to those whom others could not help. Loved I was not, but needed I certainly was. It would be wrong to walk away from that. No one else in our village could so much as set a broken bone, let alone write a letter. I couldn’t leave them to go chasing after adventure, and, I’d always told myself, I’d never really wanted to anyway. The mountains on the edge of the horizon that pulled at others so strongly had never provoked any feeling in me other than a vague but nauseating fear.
Red-haired Arne, whose right arm was still in a sling of my fashioning after yet another ill-advised climb up a tree, stepped forward and stretched out his left hand towards the piece of bone. The others laughed when he stopped, his hand hovering a foot away from the wand, and then cheered when he suddenly made to snatch it off the velvet. The cheers turned to laughter again when he yelped and jumped back, sucking on his fingers.
One by one, the other young men tried to touch the piece of dragonbone. Some got closer than others, but none were able to get within a hand’s breadth of it.
“Come on, girls,” said the man who was running the show. He was puffy-faced and unshaven, in robes that might have once been rich but were now mainly dirty, and he was obviously bored. If I had to imagine a dragon-sorcerer, he would be the opposite of the picture my mind would form. But he had been coming through our village every year ever since I could remember, growing shabbier and shabbier and more and more bored as he exhorted us to test ourselves for the talent and maybe, just maybe, prove ourselves to be the possessors of that most precious prize: dragon magic.
“Come on, girls,” he said again, staring off at the sky as he spoke, as if too bored to even bother looking at his potential future acolytes. “Don’t you want to try? Wealth and health, knowledge and power beyond your wildest dreams, could all be yours. And for you it would come easy. You know we need more women.”
He told us that every year. Dragon magic was more common in men, he told us, and most women who had the talent couldn’t learn to do much with it, but they still needed them.
“Why do you need us?” I had asked, the first time he had told me to test myself. “Why do you need women, if we can’t use the magic?”
“In women the talent always breeds true,” he had told me, and then quickly cut his eyes away, embarrassed. I hadn’t had to ask any more, and I hadn’t tested myself either. I hadn’t wanted to become an ordinary broodmare of ordinary children here at home, and my desire to be dragged off to the mountains and turned into a broodmare for dragon-children was no greater. At least let them court me properly if that was what they wanted from me. But instead I was expected to prove myself to them as worthy of exploitation, and thank them for the privilege. I was glad that most of the other girls seemed to feel the same way, and didn’t even bother to present themselves for testing.
A couple of raindrops fell down from the gray sky, spotting the faded velvet but not touching the bone itself. Giggling, the girls who had come all quickly tried to put their hands on the wand. Two could not get within a foot of it and retreated with sulky faces. The third brought her hand down to hover no more than an inch from the wand, but when she tried to close her fingers around it, she shrieked and jumped back as if burned.
“Hard luck,” said the man, not sounding as if he cared one way or another. “You must have half a drop of the blood, though. When the time comes, be sure to send your children to us for testing.”
The third girl retreated to join the others, who were all shaking their hands and saying in loud voices that they were glad not to be chosen, glad not to have their lives overturned and turned over to others.
“And what about you, Laela?” asked the man. “Is this finally to be the year? Will you finally see if you can come join us at our forge in the mountains?” He waved his hand in the air, vaguely in the direction of the mountains that could be seen on clearer days. There was a rumble, whether of thunder or a fresh eruption of fire, I couldn’t say.
“Why do you know my name?” I asked him. “You don’t remember anyone else’s name.”
He smiled a tired smile. At one point, probably before I was born, he must have been handsome. I imagined him as he would have been when he was the same age as the boys he had just turned away, fresh and eager, catching the eye of every girl who saw him with his good looks and the air of power and good fortune that must have suffused him as soon as he was chosen. Now the air that hovered around him was mainly suffused with disappointment and too much drink. A good advertisement for dragon magic he was not. But maybe he was the best they had. Maybe the bad things they said about the mountain and the forge and the order and the training were all true.
“Every year you come here and stare at the wand, and every year you refuse the test,” he told me. He looked me up and down. “And you’re easy to remember,” he added. “A head taller than everyone else, and hair like a curtain of midnight.” His lips twitched. “You didn’t think I was a poet, did you? Come on, Laela. Let this year be the year. What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid,” I told him.
He looked me up and down again, but this time, for the first time, with the shrewd eyes of someone who did know things that other, ordinary, mortals did not. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You want to be chosen, and you’re afraid you won’t be, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t want to be chosen,” I said.
“Everyone wants to be chosen, Laela. Wealth and health, knowledge and power, remember? Who doesn’t want that?”
“I don’t.”
“So prove it.”
“I already have. By not taking the test.”
“You can’t prove yourself by not taking a test.” I thought he might be trying to hide a smile. Perhaps he was cleverer than I had always thought. “You can only prove yourself by taking it, and seeing whether you pass or fail. Take the test, Laela. And then you can tell me which of the riches we offer don’t appeal to you.”
Somehow I had ended up standing right in front of the rickety folding table he always set up on the edge of the market square, which held the faded square of velvet and the unassuming little piece of bone.
“I don’t need to take the test to know the result,” I told him. “I’ll fail, just like everyone else.”
“And since you don’t want to be chosen, you have nothing to fear,” he said. “Take the test, Laela. Get it over with and stop hovering on the edge of the crowd whenever I come through, looking like a raw recruit at a whorehouse.”
“How charming,” I told him. “You make me want to join you even more.” But my hand reached out of its own accord anyway. He was right: I needed to put an end to this. And maybe, just maybe…
My hand seemed to separate from my body and float downwards on its own. Surely this couldn’t be happening, surely it couldn’t be me who was doing this. I had always said I would never take the test. I had always broken out in a cold sweat of fear at the thought.
My hand continued to float down towards the wand of bone. I had heard from many others what it felt like when the bone rejected you, and sometimes treated their wounds. A slap, a bee sting, a scorching burn…for some it was more painful than for others, but for everyone it was more pain than they cared to withstand. Failing the test was its own rite of passage.
The air felt damp and strangely warm as my hand passed through it, but there was no pain, no sudden sharp attack as the dragon magic repelled those for whom it felt no kinship. My hand came down smoothly to rest on the bone.
“Well,” said the man. “What about that? What does it feel like?”
“It feels warm,” I told him. “Like it’s still alive.”
“Pick it up,” he told me.
My head told me not to, but my fingers closed around the wand on their own, lifting it off the velvet. It was surprisingly light, like the bone of a bird, and as warm as blood.
“That doesn’t hurt?” asked the man.
I shook my head.
“Hand it over.”
I tried to, but my fingers clutched instinctively at the wand, refusing to give it up.
“That’s how it is, is it?” said the man. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “Then hold onto it for the moment. Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?” I whispered, my throat as dry as if I had suddenly awoken in the middle of the night from a bad fever.
“To take the second part of the test,” he told me, still speaking gently. “Come, Laela. You can hold onto the wand for now. But you have to take the second part of the test, and it’s best to do that in private.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because sometimes it makes you vomit,” he told me, and with those heartening words, folding up his rickety table and began walking away from the market square.
I trailed after him, still clutching the piece of bone. I was now holding it in both hands, I noted, and pressing it to my heart, where it felt like the rightest thing that had ever happened to me. Sometimes when I held newborn babes and they fell asleep against my chest I had the same feeling, but this was stronger. This must be what it is like to hold your own child, not someone else’s. Only this was not my own flesh and blood, but the bone of someone else who was not even human, and long dead.
“What do you know of the training?” the man asked abruptly, as we turned down a narrow street and headed towards the one inn in the village. “The training to become a dragon sorcerer? Or sorceress, in your case.”
“I know that it takes place in the mountains,” I said. “I know that it is hard. I know that not everyone who is chosen makes it through.”
He sighed. “All true,” he said. “Everyone thinks it will be wonderful, to become a sorcerer and learn the secrets of magic, but much of it is not wonderful. Much of it is the same as anything else, only harder. They take naïve and foolish youths—well, not so young in your case—and forge them into dragons. Most do not enjoy the process, and many do not enjoy what they become, either. But still none can say no.”
I wanted to stop. I even told myself to stop, to throw the bone down and run away, but I didn’t. Instead I kept walking behind him, still clutching the bone wand to my chest.
“What does the bone do?” I asked, in order to keep myself from thinking of my failure to escape. “Why is it special?”
“All things that are infused with the essence of dragons are filled with power, Laela,” he told me. “Including, it seems, you. We use wands of bone to give us strength and help focus our power.”
“How did you get it?” I asked. “You can’t just hunt down a dragon.”
“No, you can’t. Not that we would. Especially since no one has seen any dragons for generations. But there are many graves in the mountains.”
I looked down at the wand. I didn’t like the thought that it was the result of grave-robbing. But I couldn’t let go of it even so.
We came to the inn. The thunder—or was it the mountains spitting fire?—was getting louder. When we ducked inside, the innkeeper and the half-dozen people who had come in to take shelter from the storm stared at us.
“This way,” said the man. I followed him down the corridor to his room. I realized I had never gone into a strange man’s room, and I suddenly wondered if my unusual act of recklessness was about to be repaid by a very ordinary and banal punishment. The bone wand felt comfortingly warm under my fingers and against my chest. I wondered if it would protect me. If the stories I had heard were true, then no, it would not, for all its comforting, living warmth in my hand.
“Shut the door,” said the man. I did so even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t say why. He bent over a chest on the floor and began rummaging through it.
“Here we are,” he said, pulling something small out of the chest. “Try this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened his hand, revealing a glass vial half-full of a red liquid that glowed even in the gloom of the shuttered room and rainy day. “The second part of the test,” he said.
“What do I do with it?” I asked.
“First of all, take it from me. Give me the wand, and take the vial from me.”
My fingers did not want to release the wand, but they wanted to touch the vial with its strange liquid, that was lit from within like a ruby in full sunlight despite the twilight surrounding us, even more. In a moment the wand was gone, and the vial was in my hands.
“How does it feel?” asked the man.
“Warm,” I told him. “Even warmer than the wand.”
“But it’s not burning you?”
I shook my head.
“Good.” He reached over and, gripping my hands in his own, unstoppered the vial. “Now, I’m going to pour a tiny amount into your mouth. Just a drop, do you understand? Take no more than a drop.”
“I have to drink it? Why?”
“Because that’s the test,” he told me.
“What is it?” I tried to ask, even though some part of me already knew, but before I could get the words out, he had brought the vial up to my mouth and forced the neck between my lips, tilting it so that my head tipped back and a tiny drop of the red liquid rolled out and landed on my tongue.
Fire…I was diving into the fire, but there was no pain…soaring above a snow-capped mountain spine, looking down at all the land and all the settlements, and knowing they were all mine, that I was the mistress of everything I could see from wherever my wings could take me…
“Well, look at that,” whispered the man. My eyes, which must have shut in my ecstasy, came back open and followed his gaze to my hands. In the glow from the vial it appeared for a moment as if my hands, too, were glimmering, with an iridescence like a bird’s feathers or a snake’s scales.
I jerked back, pulling free of his grip. “What was that?” I demanded. “What happened? What does it mean?”
“What does it mean?” he repeated back at me. He smiled crookedly, revealing sharp teeth that in the uncertain light looked almost fang-like. His eyes, though, were wholly human, and sad. “It means you are a dragon, Laela. Just like me.”
Links:
Preorder "The Magical Book of Wands": https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
The Dreaming Land II: mybook.to/TDLI
A group of us got together and each contributed a story that in some way has something to do with a magic wand. The result is The Magical Book of Wands, The Magical Book of Wands: A Multi-author Anthology which is currently available for preorder. It will be released October 31, and will be on KU, and thus available to read for free to KU subscribers, for 90 days. All proceeds from the book will go to the ALA (American Library Association). For $3.99 you'll not only get an anthology packed to bursting with all kinds of fantasy stories, but you'll be supporting a good cause!
My own story, "The Dragonbone Wand," is a foray into a new fantasy world I've been thinking about for oh, more than 15 years, but which is appearing in print for the first time here. It's changed a lot as I've mulled it over, and I still don't have all the details ironed out--that can only happen in the writing--but getting this first story down on paper, even if virtually, has been very exciting.
An excerpt is below. I'm still in the process of envisioning my world, but as it stands at the moment it's sort of Scandinavia-meets-Asia. Why not? I knew there had to be mountains in this world, so I thought about setting it in someplace Norwegian-ish, and then I thought about making it something like Kamchatka or the Altai region of Siberia, and then I decided to go with both. There are two ethnic groups in this part of the world: a Nordic-esque one, which, since I don't actually know very much Norwegian, is essentially Finnish (e.g., Joki means "River" in Finnish); and a Korean-esque one, to which my heroine belongs. Why Korean-esque? Because I've had various Korean friends over the years, so I thought it would be fun to have a fantasy heroine who looks Korean, although the culture will if anything be more Siberian, with a large dose of my own original fantasy.
The magical system is based around dragon blood. Dragons and humans once intermingled, and certain humans still have an affinity for dragon blood. If they are drained of their own blood and fed dragon blood in a very vampire-y process, they will gain various magical powers, along with the ability to transform into dragons. I'm still refining that too, but it's essentially a mash-up of the vampire transformation process, and the legends surrounding dragons and the magical properties of dragon blood. And of course "Dracula" was considered to be a dragon, wasn't he?
There's a lot more I could say about my inspiration for this and where I think it's going and how my experiences of being severely ill with Lyme disease and undergoing treatment for that have shaped my idea of the story, but I'll save that for later. So without further ado, here's an excerpt:
Excerpt of "The Dragonbone Wand":
It was just a piece of bone.
Dull white, the width of my finger and twice as long as my hand, it lay on a faded piece of velvet. Young men and the occasional young woman gathered around it, laughing nervously and pushing each other with their elbows to be the first to touch it.
“Are you finally going to try this year, Laela?” one of them called out to me.
“No,” I said. But I walked over and joined the crowd anyway.
I was the oldest amongst them by a good ten years. Back in the foolish first flush of youth, when young men run off to war and young women run after young men, I had stayed at home and apprenticed to the village healer, and then to the village scribe. Now I was both. While my age-mates chased after their growing families, shouting at their children and nagging their husbands in order to feel loved and needed, I sat in my quiet cottage, copying out wills and tending to those whom others could not help. Loved I was not, but needed I certainly was. It would be wrong to walk away from that. No one else in our village could so much as set a broken bone, let alone write a letter. I couldn’t leave them to go chasing after adventure, and, I’d always told myself, I’d never really wanted to anyway. The mountains on the edge of the horizon that pulled at others so strongly had never provoked any feeling in me other than a vague but nauseating fear.
Red-haired Arne, whose right arm was still in a sling of my fashioning after yet another ill-advised climb up a tree, stepped forward and stretched out his left hand towards the piece of bone. The others laughed when he stopped, his hand hovering a foot away from the wand, and then cheered when he suddenly made to snatch it off the velvet. The cheers turned to laughter again when he yelped and jumped back, sucking on his fingers.
One by one, the other young men tried to touch the piece of dragonbone. Some got closer than others, but none were able to get within a hand’s breadth of it.
“Come on, girls,” said the man who was running the show. He was puffy-faced and unshaven, in robes that might have once been rich but were now mainly dirty, and he was obviously bored. If I had to imagine a dragon-sorcerer, he would be the opposite of the picture my mind would form. But he had been coming through our village every year ever since I could remember, growing shabbier and shabbier and more and more bored as he exhorted us to test ourselves for the talent and maybe, just maybe, prove ourselves to be the possessors of that most precious prize: dragon magic.
“Come on, girls,” he said again, staring off at the sky as he spoke, as if too bored to even bother looking at his potential future acolytes. “Don’t you want to try? Wealth and health, knowledge and power beyond your wildest dreams, could all be yours. And for you it would come easy. You know we need more women.”
He told us that every year. Dragon magic was more common in men, he told us, and most women who had the talent couldn’t learn to do much with it, but they still needed them.
“Why do you need us?” I had asked, the first time he had told me to test myself. “Why do you need women, if we can’t use the magic?”
“In women the talent always breeds true,” he had told me, and then quickly cut his eyes away, embarrassed. I hadn’t had to ask any more, and I hadn’t tested myself either. I hadn’t wanted to become an ordinary broodmare of ordinary children here at home, and my desire to be dragged off to the mountains and turned into a broodmare for dragon-children was no greater. At least let them court me properly if that was what they wanted from me. But instead I was expected to prove myself to them as worthy of exploitation, and thank them for the privilege. I was glad that most of the other girls seemed to feel the same way, and didn’t even bother to present themselves for testing.
A couple of raindrops fell down from the gray sky, spotting the faded velvet but not touching the bone itself. Giggling, the girls who had come all quickly tried to put their hands on the wand. Two could not get within a foot of it and retreated with sulky faces. The third brought her hand down to hover no more than an inch from the wand, but when she tried to close her fingers around it, she shrieked and jumped back as if burned.
“Hard luck,” said the man, not sounding as if he cared one way or another. “You must have half a drop of the blood, though. When the time comes, be sure to send your children to us for testing.”
The third girl retreated to join the others, who were all shaking their hands and saying in loud voices that they were glad not to be chosen, glad not to have their lives overturned and turned over to others.
“And what about you, Laela?” asked the man. “Is this finally to be the year? Will you finally see if you can come join us at our forge in the mountains?” He waved his hand in the air, vaguely in the direction of the mountains that could be seen on clearer days. There was a rumble, whether of thunder or a fresh eruption of fire, I couldn’t say.
“Why do you know my name?” I asked him. “You don’t remember anyone else’s name.”
He smiled a tired smile. At one point, probably before I was born, he must have been handsome. I imagined him as he would have been when he was the same age as the boys he had just turned away, fresh and eager, catching the eye of every girl who saw him with his good looks and the air of power and good fortune that must have suffused him as soon as he was chosen. Now the air that hovered around him was mainly suffused with disappointment and too much drink. A good advertisement for dragon magic he was not. But maybe he was the best they had. Maybe the bad things they said about the mountain and the forge and the order and the training were all true.
“Every year you come here and stare at the wand, and every year you refuse the test,” he told me. He looked me up and down. “And you’re easy to remember,” he added. “A head taller than everyone else, and hair like a curtain of midnight.” His lips twitched. “You didn’t think I was a poet, did you? Come on, Laela. Let this year be the year. What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid,” I told him.
He looked me up and down again, but this time, for the first time, with the shrewd eyes of someone who did know things that other, ordinary, mortals did not. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You want to be chosen, and you’re afraid you won’t be, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t want to be chosen,” I said.
“Everyone wants to be chosen, Laela. Wealth and health, knowledge and power, remember? Who doesn’t want that?”
“I don’t.”
“So prove it.”
“I already have. By not taking the test.”
“You can’t prove yourself by not taking a test.” I thought he might be trying to hide a smile. Perhaps he was cleverer than I had always thought. “You can only prove yourself by taking it, and seeing whether you pass or fail. Take the test, Laela. And then you can tell me which of the riches we offer don’t appeal to you.”
Somehow I had ended up standing right in front of the rickety folding table he always set up on the edge of the market square, which held the faded square of velvet and the unassuming little piece of bone.
“I don’t need to take the test to know the result,” I told him. “I’ll fail, just like everyone else.”
“And since you don’t want to be chosen, you have nothing to fear,” he said. “Take the test, Laela. Get it over with and stop hovering on the edge of the crowd whenever I come through, looking like a raw recruit at a whorehouse.”
“How charming,” I told him. “You make me want to join you even more.” But my hand reached out of its own accord anyway. He was right: I needed to put an end to this. And maybe, just maybe…
My hand seemed to separate from my body and float downwards on its own. Surely this couldn’t be happening, surely it couldn’t be me who was doing this. I had always said I would never take the test. I had always broken out in a cold sweat of fear at the thought.
My hand continued to float down towards the wand of bone. I had heard from many others what it felt like when the bone rejected you, and sometimes treated their wounds. A slap, a bee sting, a scorching burn…for some it was more painful than for others, but for everyone it was more pain than they cared to withstand. Failing the test was its own rite of passage.
The air felt damp and strangely warm as my hand passed through it, but there was no pain, no sudden sharp attack as the dragon magic repelled those for whom it felt no kinship. My hand came down smoothly to rest on the bone.
“Well,” said the man. “What about that? What does it feel like?”
“It feels warm,” I told him. “Like it’s still alive.”
“Pick it up,” he told me.
My head told me not to, but my fingers closed around the wand on their own, lifting it off the velvet. It was surprisingly light, like the bone of a bird, and as warm as blood.
“That doesn’t hurt?” asked the man.
I shook my head.
“Hand it over.”
I tried to, but my fingers clutched instinctively at the wand, refusing to give it up.
“That’s how it is, is it?” said the man. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “Then hold onto it for the moment. Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?” I whispered, my throat as dry as if I had suddenly awoken in the middle of the night from a bad fever.
“To take the second part of the test,” he told me, still speaking gently. “Come, Laela. You can hold onto the wand for now. But you have to take the second part of the test, and it’s best to do that in private.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because sometimes it makes you vomit,” he told me, and with those heartening words, folding up his rickety table and began walking away from the market square.
I trailed after him, still clutching the piece of bone. I was now holding it in both hands, I noted, and pressing it to my heart, where it felt like the rightest thing that had ever happened to me. Sometimes when I held newborn babes and they fell asleep against my chest I had the same feeling, but this was stronger. This must be what it is like to hold your own child, not someone else’s. Only this was not my own flesh and blood, but the bone of someone else who was not even human, and long dead.
“What do you know of the training?” the man asked abruptly, as we turned down a narrow street and headed towards the one inn in the village. “The training to become a dragon sorcerer? Or sorceress, in your case.”
“I know that it takes place in the mountains,” I said. “I know that it is hard. I know that not everyone who is chosen makes it through.”
He sighed. “All true,” he said. “Everyone thinks it will be wonderful, to become a sorcerer and learn the secrets of magic, but much of it is not wonderful. Much of it is the same as anything else, only harder. They take naïve and foolish youths—well, not so young in your case—and forge them into dragons. Most do not enjoy the process, and many do not enjoy what they become, either. But still none can say no.”
I wanted to stop. I even told myself to stop, to throw the bone down and run away, but I didn’t. Instead I kept walking behind him, still clutching the bone wand to my chest.
“What does the bone do?” I asked, in order to keep myself from thinking of my failure to escape. “Why is it special?”
“All things that are infused with the essence of dragons are filled with power, Laela,” he told me. “Including, it seems, you. We use wands of bone to give us strength and help focus our power.”
“How did you get it?” I asked. “You can’t just hunt down a dragon.”
“No, you can’t. Not that we would. Especially since no one has seen any dragons for generations. But there are many graves in the mountains.”
I looked down at the wand. I didn’t like the thought that it was the result of grave-robbing. But I couldn’t let go of it even so.
We came to the inn. The thunder—or was it the mountains spitting fire?—was getting louder. When we ducked inside, the innkeeper and the half-dozen people who had come in to take shelter from the storm stared at us.
“This way,” said the man. I followed him down the corridor to his room. I realized I had never gone into a strange man’s room, and I suddenly wondered if my unusual act of recklessness was about to be repaid by a very ordinary and banal punishment. The bone wand felt comfortingly warm under my fingers and against my chest. I wondered if it would protect me. If the stories I had heard were true, then no, it would not, for all its comforting, living warmth in my hand.
“Shut the door,” said the man. I did so even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t say why. He bent over a chest on the floor and began rummaging through it.
“Here we are,” he said, pulling something small out of the chest. “Try this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened his hand, revealing a glass vial half-full of a red liquid that glowed even in the gloom of the shuttered room and rainy day. “The second part of the test,” he said.
“What do I do with it?” I asked.
“First of all, take it from me. Give me the wand, and take the vial from me.”
My fingers did not want to release the wand, but they wanted to touch the vial with its strange liquid, that was lit from within like a ruby in full sunlight despite the twilight surrounding us, even more. In a moment the wand was gone, and the vial was in my hands.
“How does it feel?” asked the man.
“Warm,” I told him. “Even warmer than the wand.”
“But it’s not burning you?”
I shook my head.
“Good.” He reached over and, gripping my hands in his own, unstoppered the vial. “Now, I’m going to pour a tiny amount into your mouth. Just a drop, do you understand? Take no more than a drop.”
“I have to drink it? Why?”
“Because that’s the test,” he told me.
“What is it?” I tried to ask, even though some part of me already knew, but before I could get the words out, he had brought the vial up to my mouth and forced the neck between my lips, tilting it so that my head tipped back and a tiny drop of the red liquid rolled out and landed on my tongue.
Fire…I was diving into the fire, but there was no pain…soaring above a snow-capped mountain spine, looking down at all the land and all the settlements, and knowing they were all mine, that I was the mistress of everything I could see from wherever my wings could take me…
“Well, look at that,” whispered the man. My eyes, which must have shut in my ecstasy, came back open and followed his gaze to my hands. In the glow from the vial it appeared for a moment as if my hands, too, were glimmering, with an iridescence like a bird’s feathers or a snake’s scales.
I jerked back, pulling free of his grip. “What was that?” I demanded. “What happened? What does it mean?”
“What does it mean?” he repeated back at me. He smiled crookedly, revealing sharp teeth that in the uncertain light looked almost fang-like. His eyes, though, were wholly human, and sad. “It means you are a dragon, Laela. Just like me.”
Links:
Preorder "The Magical Book of Wands": https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
The Dreaming Land II: mybook.to/TDLI
October 13, 2018
Racing Like Wolves: Writing Medieval Russian Epics Into Contemporary Fantasy
Well, it was a close one this week, with the Carolinas getting hit unexpectedly hard by Hurricane Michael. Luckily for me, I was not one of the hundreds of thousands of people to lose power, which means I have been spending my fall break busily working away to get The Dreaming Land IIThe Dreaming Land II: The Journey ready for publication.
I’m still working to make the book’s Amazon page absolutely perfect (the formatting tends to change when you hit “publish”), but in the meantime the paperback is available here in case anyone wants to grab an early copy and/or, if you were an ARC reader, leave a review. Again, have I mentioned how much I appreciate readers who leave reviews? 🙂 You are doing a noble deed!
(That reminds me that I have some reviews I need to write myself. Soon, I promise, soon…)
I’ve mentioned before, and will probably go on at length again, about things like how I incorporated elements of Slavic fairy tales into my novels, and how The Dreaming Land series is also supposed to be a feminist reworking of the story of Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings. Another of the layers of allusions in the text, though, is something that might be a little less familiar to most Western readers: the medieval Russian (Rus’ian) epics Zadonshchina and particularly The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.
Medieval literature is a funny thing. It’s a funny thing because it shows us just how similar we are to people who lived a thousand years or so ago, and yet how different. There’s a fair amount of debate about how much of our current conception of self and experience of reality is culturally specific, and how much it is something we share with humans throughout the ages. Did the proto-humans from we arose have a distinct sense of self that is comparable to what modern Americans experience? What about the ancient Greeks? Medieval Europeans? How did they conceive of history, society, and their place in it? Did they really believe in the magic that fills their writings?
The thing about writing is that it sort of answers those questions, but only sort of. Medieval literature is full of miracles that are reported at face value, but were the writers saying what they believed to be factually true, or what they believed to be “true” on some larger, metaphysical/ideal/cosmic/divine sense? When writing itself was a form of magic, was it seen as right to write about magical things, even if they weren’t actual “real,” or did people experience the world as being inherently magical in a way that modern Westerners, at least, no longer do?
Which brings us, by roundabout paths, to The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.
The Tale is a strange thing. It’s the story of a losing battle from 1185, which is strange in and of itself: bards do not normally commemorate losing battles. But in this case the overall message is not one of the glory and power of Rus’, but of the danger of infighting between the Rus’ian princes when outside enemies are threatening. *Cough cough cough* the more things change, the more they stay the same…
And then there’s the whole authenticity debate. With no extant copies of the original or anything even close to the original, and the clear close relationship between Igor and Zadonshchina, which came first, and which was the copy? Scholarly opinion has settled pretty firmly on Igor being the older of the two texts, but it’s not unequivocal enough for Slavists to talk about it without a quiver in their voices.
In any case, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign is a beautiful and fascinating work. I slogged through it in the original Old Slavic during grad school, which may have been the most painful reading experience I have ever had. Not because it was bad, but because it was so…dang…hard. People kept going on and about how great it was, but all I could think at the time was, “AAAAAAGH! Who is this? What is happening?? What does this word even mean??!!” All the elegant stylization, with the story being told on three different temporal layers (grandfathers, fathers, and sons), can make it rather difficult for the lay reader to follow along. As the entry from The Handbook of Russian Literature tells us: “Only one-tenth of its brief 218 verses…actually describe the attested events of 1185, and even these are presented in such a kaleidoscope of metaphor and metonymy that one must know the real story by heart in order to appreciate the poem. Reality is presented in brief, almost cinematographic flashes, interspersed with lengthy authorial digressions into other times and places. Real time and space are almost entirely ignored in the IT” (425).
Instead of describing the actual events in a linear fashion, The Tale immerses the listener/reader into a deeply interconnected magical and natural world, with natural communicating extensively with itself and with the humans, who may or may not be listening.
So is this how medieval Rus’ians of the time experienced the world? As an interconnected web of signs and symbols, that “spoke” to them if they had the ability to hear? We can’t be sure, but that is certainly how they chose to write about it. And that’s how I chose to create my faux-medieval world for The Dreaming Land mini-series, as well as the entire Zemnian Series of which it forms a part. Valya, the heroine of The Dreaming Land, is particularly close to nature, and is in some ways the most “medieval” of my heroines. Although she has a sense of self that a modern person is likely to recognize, she is closely tied to nature, and has multiple instances of nature speaking to her, either directly in the form of talking animals and spirits, or indirectly in the form of presentiments and omens. Like the characters in the Igor Tale, she often sees animals running in significant ways, or gains information from the sky or the water.
I also, because this is the kind of thing I enjoy, dropped some direct allusions to the Igor Tale into TDL. The most obvious example is this passage from the middle of The Dreaming Land II, when Valya and her former lover Tanya (yes, I have a love story involving two female horse-warriors. Isn’t that something all self-respecting fantasy books should include?), are parting, and use phrases drawn directly from the Igor Tale:
The parting was cheerful, more cheerful than everyone else, who were unfamiliar with the steppe tradition of always saying farewell without tears and lamentations, was expecting; even Tanya and I embraced in apparent high spirits.
“What are you standing around here for?” she demanded, once we had released each other. “Go put your foot in your golden stirrup, sister, and ride off like a falcon, or something.” She punched me lightly in the arm.
“My stirrups aren’t made of gold,” I told her, “and I’m afraid I’m not nearly as fast as a falcon.”
“Well, a wolf, then,” she said. “Race along like a wolf.”
“Only if you’ll do the same,” I told her.
“Oh, very well.” She smiled, half painfully. “What are you waiting for? My horse has long been saddled and waiting.”
“So has mine. Come to the wedding, will you?”
“‘Course,” she said, and, before either of us could think better of it, she vaulted into her saddle and rode off briskly, singing loudly. I tried to imitate her, but Tanya’s singing sounded rather better than mine, as the rest of her warriors joined her, but since no one else of my party knew any steppe songs, my voice sounded very thin and alone, and I was glad when I was able to stop.
The Russian characters in the IT are like falcons, while the Polovetsians they’re fighting race along like wolves; Valya, as a morally ambiguous character in this part of the story, does both or neither. The formula of stepping into your golden stirrup, and of calling others to action because your horse has long been saddled and waiting, is repeated several times throughout the IT, so I borrowed it here.
Of course, I’m hardly the first one to rework The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. If Zadonshchina is indeed the later work, then it took the original wording and refashioned it for a more Christian era. Then there’s Borodin’s 19th-century opera, which turns it into, well, a 19th-century opera, complete with (stunning, although rather disturbing, especially in their treatment of women–sounds like a topic for a later post) ballet divertissements.
Which maybe just goes to show that human nature really is the same all along, or at least that there’s enough continuity for a 21st-century person to see and appreciate this 900-year chain of retelling. Like The Tale of Igor’s Campaign would tell us, we’re all part of an interconnected web of being.
Links:
The Tale of Igor’s Campaign in English: http://www.indiana.edu/~cahist/Readin...
The Dreaming Land I: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
The Dreaming Land II: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999168975
I’m still working to make the book’s Amazon page absolutely perfect (the formatting tends to change when you hit “publish”), but in the meantime the paperback is available here in case anyone wants to grab an early copy and/or, if you were an ARC reader, leave a review. Again, have I mentioned how much I appreciate readers who leave reviews? 🙂 You are doing a noble deed!
(That reminds me that I have some reviews I need to write myself. Soon, I promise, soon…)
I’ve mentioned before, and will probably go on at length again, about things like how I incorporated elements of Slavic fairy tales into my novels, and how The Dreaming Land series is also supposed to be a feminist reworking of the story of Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings. Another of the layers of allusions in the text, though, is something that might be a little less familiar to most Western readers: the medieval Russian (Rus’ian) epics Zadonshchina and particularly The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.
Medieval literature is a funny thing. It’s a funny thing because it shows us just how similar we are to people who lived a thousand years or so ago, and yet how different. There’s a fair amount of debate about how much of our current conception of self and experience of reality is culturally specific, and how much it is something we share with humans throughout the ages. Did the proto-humans from we arose have a distinct sense of self that is comparable to what modern Americans experience? What about the ancient Greeks? Medieval Europeans? How did they conceive of history, society, and their place in it? Did they really believe in the magic that fills their writings?
The thing about writing is that it sort of answers those questions, but only sort of. Medieval literature is full of miracles that are reported at face value, but were the writers saying what they believed to be factually true, or what they believed to be “true” on some larger, metaphysical/ideal/cosmic/divine sense? When writing itself was a form of magic, was it seen as right to write about magical things, even if they weren’t actual “real,” or did people experience the world as being inherently magical in a way that modern Westerners, at least, no longer do?
Which brings us, by roundabout paths, to The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.
The Tale is a strange thing. It’s the story of a losing battle from 1185, which is strange in and of itself: bards do not normally commemorate losing battles. But in this case the overall message is not one of the glory and power of Rus’, but of the danger of infighting between the Rus’ian princes when outside enemies are threatening. *Cough cough cough* the more things change, the more they stay the same…
And then there’s the whole authenticity debate. With no extant copies of the original or anything even close to the original, and the clear close relationship between Igor and Zadonshchina, which came first, and which was the copy? Scholarly opinion has settled pretty firmly on Igor being the older of the two texts, but it’s not unequivocal enough for Slavists to talk about it without a quiver in their voices.
In any case, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign is a beautiful and fascinating work. I slogged through it in the original Old Slavic during grad school, which may have been the most painful reading experience I have ever had. Not because it was bad, but because it was so…dang…hard. People kept going on and about how great it was, but all I could think at the time was, “AAAAAAGH! Who is this? What is happening?? What does this word even mean??!!” All the elegant stylization, with the story being told on three different temporal layers (grandfathers, fathers, and sons), can make it rather difficult for the lay reader to follow along. As the entry from The Handbook of Russian Literature tells us: “Only one-tenth of its brief 218 verses…actually describe the attested events of 1185, and even these are presented in such a kaleidoscope of metaphor and metonymy that one must know the real story by heart in order to appreciate the poem. Reality is presented in brief, almost cinematographic flashes, interspersed with lengthy authorial digressions into other times and places. Real time and space are almost entirely ignored in the IT” (425).
Instead of describing the actual events in a linear fashion, The Tale immerses the listener/reader into a deeply interconnected magical and natural world, with natural communicating extensively with itself and with the humans, who may or may not be listening.
So is this how medieval Rus’ians of the time experienced the world? As an interconnected web of signs and symbols, that “spoke” to them if they had the ability to hear? We can’t be sure, but that is certainly how they chose to write about it. And that’s how I chose to create my faux-medieval world for The Dreaming Land mini-series, as well as the entire Zemnian Series of which it forms a part. Valya, the heroine of The Dreaming Land, is particularly close to nature, and is in some ways the most “medieval” of my heroines. Although she has a sense of self that a modern person is likely to recognize, she is closely tied to nature, and has multiple instances of nature speaking to her, either directly in the form of talking animals and spirits, or indirectly in the form of presentiments and omens. Like the characters in the Igor Tale, she often sees animals running in significant ways, or gains information from the sky or the water.
I also, because this is the kind of thing I enjoy, dropped some direct allusions to the Igor Tale into TDL. The most obvious example is this passage from the middle of The Dreaming Land II, when Valya and her former lover Tanya (yes, I have a love story involving two female horse-warriors. Isn’t that something all self-respecting fantasy books should include?), are parting, and use phrases drawn directly from the Igor Tale:
The parting was cheerful, more cheerful than everyone else, who were unfamiliar with the steppe tradition of always saying farewell without tears and lamentations, was expecting; even Tanya and I embraced in apparent high spirits.
“What are you standing around here for?” she demanded, once we had released each other. “Go put your foot in your golden stirrup, sister, and ride off like a falcon, or something.” She punched me lightly in the arm.
“My stirrups aren’t made of gold,” I told her, “and I’m afraid I’m not nearly as fast as a falcon.”
“Well, a wolf, then,” she said. “Race along like a wolf.”
“Only if you’ll do the same,” I told her.
“Oh, very well.” She smiled, half painfully. “What are you waiting for? My horse has long been saddled and waiting.”
“So has mine. Come to the wedding, will you?”
“‘Course,” she said, and, before either of us could think better of it, she vaulted into her saddle and rode off briskly, singing loudly. I tried to imitate her, but Tanya’s singing sounded rather better than mine, as the rest of her warriors joined her, but since no one else of my party knew any steppe songs, my voice sounded very thin and alone, and I was glad when I was able to stop.
The Russian characters in the IT are like falcons, while the Polovetsians they’re fighting race along like wolves; Valya, as a morally ambiguous character in this part of the story, does both or neither. The formula of stepping into your golden stirrup, and of calling others to action because your horse has long been saddled and waiting, is repeated several times throughout the IT, so I borrowed it here.
Of course, I’m hardly the first one to rework The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. If Zadonshchina is indeed the later work, then it took the original wording and refashioned it for a more Christian era. Then there’s Borodin’s 19th-century opera, which turns it into, well, a 19th-century opera, complete with (stunning, although rather disturbing, especially in their treatment of women–sounds like a topic for a later post) ballet divertissements.
Which maybe just goes to show that human nature really is the same all along, or at least that there’s enough continuity for a 21st-century person to see and appreciate this 900-year chain of retelling. Like The Tale of Igor’s Campaign would tell us, we’re all part of an interconnected web of being.
Links:
The Tale of Igor’s Campaign in English: http://www.indiana.edu/~cahist/Readin...
The Dreaming Land I: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
The Dreaming Land II: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999168975
September 29, 2018
It's Here! The Dreaming Land I Is Launched into Orbit!
Yes indeed! It's finally here! Nearly four years after she first appeared on the page, Valya is finally officially published! The Dreaming Land I The Dreaming Land I: The Challengeis free on Kindle for a limited time here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
There's also a paperback version if your bent runs that way. Last I checked it was already climbing the charts for both Epic Fantasy and Literary Fiction => Romance, which turns out is totally a category, and one where TDLI definitely should be, in my opinion. A huge thank you to all the ARC readers, everyone who's already downloaded or bought or will download or buy a copy, and especially to those of you who have posted reviews! As a reviewer myself, as well as an author, I particularly appreciate those readers who take the time to share their thoughts on a book.
I feel like I should have something profound to say at this moment. Although The Dreaming Land mini-series is the last of the mini-series that makes up the overall Zemnian Series, I wrote it before publishing any of the books, and it was in fact TDL that convinced me that it was time to get serious about putting them out. I had the sense as I was finishing it that things were finally coming together, that the series and my writing abilities were finally turning into what I wanted them to be.
But, to be honest, today I feel like crap, so I don't know how profound I'll be able to be. Which is only fitting. I started writing TDL during winter break of the 2013/2014 academic year. The idea had come to me sometime earlier, for reasons that maybe are best not delved into, but let's just say I started having fantasies about taking revenge for rejection. Sue Grafton apparently wrote A is for Alibi instead of murdering her ex-husband; I guess this was my version of that.
Anywaaaayyyy, after the Terrible Day the first week of November, 2013, something was very very wrong with me, and it was still wrong with me that winter break. Plus my computer crashed and was off having its hard drive wiped. Since I had a series of interviews, both in person and via Skype, already scheduled for the first week of January, I went over to the local mall, and, wandering through it like a lost soul staggering through purgatory and in constant fear of passing out, bought an iPad.
Between bouts of lying on the couch wondering if I were dying, I started composing what would turn out to be the opening chapters of TDLI on my iPad. Note to the wise: the iPad is not the ideal tool for writing a novel. It was also not the ideal tool for submitting conference proposals, and maybe not for conducting interviews either, but while my computer and external hard drive were off being resurrected by the power of prayer by the Notre Dame IT department, the iPad managed to come through for all those things.
As I wrote TDL, which morphed into something longer and longer and longer until the file started crashing and I had to split it into three volumes, I got sicker and sicker, something that is reflected in Valya's journey throughout the series. But even in TDLI there are harbingers: she has frequent dizzy spells and bouts of dehydration, goes through periods where she feels like she's separated from everything around her by thick glass or deep water, and feels "burned to ash from the inside out." The theme of healing, which takes on greater and greater importance as the series continues, is introduced there, and it is the course of Valya's healing journey that the books chart. She is, as I wrote about here, my tribute to the character of Eowyn, but an empowered Eowyn in a female-led world.
I finished writing the whole TDL mini-series during the summer of 2015, when, after a period of comparative improvement, I started a serious downward slide into late-stage neurological Lyme disease following an undiagnosed case of walking pneumonia. Since I couldn't walk for more than a few feet during part of that summer, writing was about all I could do, and I did it with a vengeance. One can, no doubt, quibble about many things in TDL, but one thing I can state for certain is that, fantasy or not, it is very much about real things, and definitely from the heart.
Thanks for reading!
The universal link to TDLI is here: mybook.to/TDLI
And, speaking of healing, my story "The Dragonbone Wand," set in a completely new, dragon-based universe, and featuring a healer, is available in The Magical Book of Wands, available for preorder here: https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
There's also a paperback version if your bent runs that way. Last I checked it was already climbing the charts for both Epic Fantasy and Literary Fiction => Romance, which turns out is totally a category, and one where TDLI definitely should be, in my opinion. A huge thank you to all the ARC readers, everyone who's already downloaded or bought or will download or buy a copy, and especially to those of you who have posted reviews! As a reviewer myself, as well as an author, I particularly appreciate those readers who take the time to share their thoughts on a book.
I feel like I should have something profound to say at this moment. Although The Dreaming Land mini-series is the last of the mini-series that makes up the overall Zemnian Series, I wrote it before publishing any of the books, and it was in fact TDL that convinced me that it was time to get serious about putting them out. I had the sense as I was finishing it that things were finally coming together, that the series and my writing abilities were finally turning into what I wanted them to be.
But, to be honest, today I feel like crap, so I don't know how profound I'll be able to be. Which is only fitting. I started writing TDL during winter break of the 2013/2014 academic year. The idea had come to me sometime earlier, for reasons that maybe are best not delved into, but let's just say I started having fantasies about taking revenge for rejection. Sue Grafton apparently wrote A is for Alibi instead of murdering her ex-husband; I guess this was my version of that.
Anywaaaayyyy, after the Terrible Day the first week of November, 2013, something was very very wrong with me, and it was still wrong with me that winter break. Plus my computer crashed and was off having its hard drive wiped. Since I had a series of interviews, both in person and via Skype, already scheduled for the first week of January, I went over to the local mall, and, wandering through it like a lost soul staggering through purgatory and in constant fear of passing out, bought an iPad.
Between bouts of lying on the couch wondering if I were dying, I started composing what would turn out to be the opening chapters of TDLI on my iPad. Note to the wise: the iPad is not the ideal tool for writing a novel. It was also not the ideal tool for submitting conference proposals, and maybe not for conducting interviews either, but while my computer and external hard drive were off being resurrected by the power of prayer by the Notre Dame IT department, the iPad managed to come through for all those things.
As I wrote TDL, which morphed into something longer and longer and longer until the file started crashing and I had to split it into three volumes, I got sicker and sicker, something that is reflected in Valya's journey throughout the series. But even in TDLI there are harbingers: she has frequent dizzy spells and bouts of dehydration, goes through periods where she feels like she's separated from everything around her by thick glass or deep water, and feels "burned to ash from the inside out." The theme of healing, which takes on greater and greater importance as the series continues, is introduced there, and it is the course of Valya's healing journey that the books chart. She is, as I wrote about here, my tribute to the character of Eowyn, but an empowered Eowyn in a female-led world.
I finished writing the whole TDL mini-series during the summer of 2015, when, after a period of comparative improvement, I started a serious downward slide into late-stage neurological Lyme disease following an undiagnosed case of walking pneumonia. Since I couldn't walk for more than a few feet during part of that summer, writing was about all I could do, and I did it with a vengeance. One can, no doubt, quibble about many things in TDL, but one thing I can state for certain is that, fantasy or not, it is very much about real things, and definitely from the heart.
Thanks for reading!
The universal link to TDLI is here: mybook.to/TDLI
And, speaking of healing, my story "The Dragonbone Wand," set in a completely new, dragon-based universe, and featuring a healer, is available in The Magical Book of Wands, available for preorder here: https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Book-W...
September 14, 2018
Stormy weather: Rusalki, Vodyaniye, and other forms of water magic in modern fantasy
In my last post I talked about how I incorporated the story of Gray Wolf into my books: https://epclarkauthor.net/2018/09/08/...
With Hurricane Florence currently playing will-she-won't-she with my part of North Carolina, today seemed like a good time to talk about how I worked various forms of magical water creatures into my stories, along with some good old-fashioned storm/water imagery.
There's so much storm/water imagery in Russian literature, and so many great myths and fairy tales about vodyaniye (water-spirits) and rusalki (something somewhere between a mermaid and a vengeful spirit). There's also some interesting contemporary Western fantasy that's come out recently featuring them, such as "Deathless" by Catherynne M. Valente Deathless, and "Dark Currents" Dark Currents the first Agent of Hel book, by Jacqueline Carey. But the book that influenced me the most in my own writing is "Rusalka," by C.J. Cherryh. Rusalka
Why is this book out of print? I guess you'll have to enjoy it the right way, by reading a battered old hardback.
I often, and I fully recognize the slippery slope on which I am standing here, have mixed feelings about Western authors who appropriate Russian culture and fairy tales for their fantasy. For many English-language authors, it seems like Russian culture and fairy tales are the one thing that it is still acceptable to use for providing that spice of exoticism that writing superficially about a distant, unknown, and dangerous culture provides. Do most of these authors give a crap about Russia and Russian culture? Not as far as I can tell.
But Cherryh, while not a Russianist, is an anthropologist by training, and she did a credible job of making her "Russians" seem human, as opposed to exotic window-dressing for literary showing-off. Her magical version of Kievan Rus' is dark and scary, with hunger and infection at least as dangerous as the magical creatures who haunt its woods--and swim its waters. One of my favorite characters in "Rusalka" is the vodyanoy, who can change shape from a little eel-thing to a huge water-snake, depending on what suits him. It was that feeling of magic and menace that I had in the back of my mind as I wrote my own water-spirits, and something I specifically reference, as my little offering to Cherryh, in this scene from the beginning of The Breathing Sea II: The Breathing Sea II: Drowning
“Don’t touch me!” Dasha cried. The vodyanaya seemed to be getting bigger, so that she was now higher than Dasha’s waist and growing rapidly. Dasha lashed out, slapping her across the face with her flaming hand.
The vodyanaya stopped and pressed her hand to her cheek. When she took her hand away, there was a burn mark in the shape of five fingers and a palm showing clearly on her face.
“You burned me,” she said in shock.
“And I’ll do it again!” Dasha cried defiantly. “If you come any closer, I’ll do it again!” Power was coursing through her body, the prickles and tingles that normally went with it releasing themselves as flame instead of forcing her into a fit. She could see herself doing anything: standing up to the vodyanaya, to her father, to anyone who dared to oppose her, and forcing them to submit to her will.
The vodyanaya dwindled back to her previous size, and then smaller, until she was no larger than an ordinary frog. She half-hopped, half-slithered down the bank and back into the water without a word.
***
The wind building up around my house as I write this reminds me, in case I had ever forgotten, how much the weather affects us, and how much we are at its mercy. Accordingly, important events in my characters' lives are often marked by important meteorological events. For example, in The Dreaming Land I The Dreaming Land I: The Challenge, a storm breaks over the heroine Valya as she goes to rescue Ivan from his captivity. (Oh, and if you received an ARC of TDLI and feel moved to leave a review, the link is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
Although the official launch won't happen for a couple of weeks, the book is already live so that people can leave reviews. If you already have, my sincere thanks--you are much appreciated!)
This early link between rain and Valya's love for Ivan prefigures events in the later books in the mini-series, culminating in her tears of joy at the end. Like her predecessors, Valya is intimately tied to the natural world, to the point of mirroring it, just as it mirrors her.
But the character in the overall Zemnian Series who is most closely tied to water is Dasha from The Breathing Sea, Valya's great-grandmother. In the latter half of The Breathing Sea I The Breathing Sea I: Burning (get a free preview in the Forgotten Empires Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Da... or read it for free on KU myBook.to/tbsi), after her encounter with a sort of Baba Yaga-like character, Dasha is forced to confront her fear of water.
This starts when she gets lost in the woods and meets a girl who offers to help her:
“Hello,” the girl said. “I’m Vika. What are you doing in my woods?”
Dasha rubbed her eyes again with a trembling hand, but the sparkling spots in her vision remained. Vika herself appeared to shimmer, like sunlight on water or the ground on a hot summer’s day. “I’m…” Dasha cleared her throat. “I’m traveling. I stepped off the road to, well…”
“Were you looking for water?” asked Vika, coming over to stand beside her. Even at only an arm’s length away, she still appeared to Dasha’s eyes to shimmer. A breeze picked up, ruffling Dasha’s hair and bringing with it the scent and coolness of bogs and brooks.
“I didn’t think there was any water nearby,” Dasha said.
“There’s my stream,” Vika told her. “Come: I’ll show you.”
“I need to get back to my companions,” Dasha said. “They must be missing me by now.”
“Don’t you need water?” asked Vika. “It’s a hot day and your waterskin is empty. You must need water. Then you can show your companions where you found it, and they can have some, too.”
“I should go to them first and tell them where I’m going,” Dasha said. She knew that was the right thing to do, but when Vika told her, “My stream’s on the way to them!” she began to follow Vika, even though they headed, not towards the road, but deeper into the woods.
“How far is it to your stream?” Dasha asked, as they pushed through fir boughs. The cool breeze was blowing briskly now, driving away the mosquitoes. Even so, beads of sweat were running down out of the braided crown around Vika’s head, and down the back of her neck.
“Not far!” Vika assured her, turning back to smile at her. Her face was dripping with sweat too, soaking the collar of her shirt, and the chest of her sarafan was so wet Dasha could have wrung it out like laundry. But there was no scent of the sweat of an unwashed human: instead, all Dasha could smell was water.
“Does your family live here too?” Dasha asked. She was surprised at how normal the words sounded. She felt as if her mind were floating far above the rest of her, separated from her mouth by a thousand versts or more. The air was filled with shimmers, and there was a rushing sound in her ears, like falling water.
“Just me and Serenkaya,” Vika told her cheerfully. Serenkaya, who was walking in front, stopped and looked back at the sound of her name. Dasha thought her gaze looked mournful. And also pleading, as if she were begging Dasha for help. But with what? It was probably all in Dasha’s mind.
“Where do you live?” Dasha asked, stumbling along behind them. Vika’s pace had quickened to a half-jog, and Dasha was struggling to keep up, but she was desperate—why was she so desperate?—not to be left behind.
“By my stream, of course,” Vika told her with a smile. “There.” She came to an abrupt stop. Dasha almost plowed into her, and had to grab a tree branch to keep from falling off the streambank on which she found herself, and into the waters below.
“Where’s your house?” Dasha asked, staring down into the shimmering, flowing water that swirled beneath her. The stream was narrow here, no more than a couple of paces across, but deep, with overhanging banks as tall as she was, and water that was deep enough she couldn’t see the bottom.
It would be easy to drown here, she thought. One stumble, and—splash! You couldn’t climb out. She turned to face Vika, who was standing very close to her, so close they were almost touching. “Where’s your house?” Dasha repeated.
“Here, of course,” Vika told her. “Right here.” She was no longer smiling. Dasha thought that tears might be mingling with the sweat on her face.
“Vika,” said Dasha. “How long have you been here?” She reached out and took the other girl’s hand, and was unsurprised when her hand passed right through Vika’s, with no trace of their contact other than a faint tingling dampness.
***
Vika, of course, is a water-maiden, which is what I chose to call the rusalki in my stories. Although I kept the names vodyaniye, domoviye, and leshiye, transforming them in their feminine forms for my matriarchal society, the word "rusalka" is too linked with "Russia" for it to make sense in my world, which is called Zem' and never allows the Rutsi/Ruotsi/Viking Rus to gain much purchase. So water-maidens they are. Although she and the other water-maidens in the story are specifically based off the water-maiden/rusalka in C.J. Cherryh's Rusalka, with their transformation between their steam and solid states. And--spoiler alert!--Dasha takes on a bit of their water-maiden essence, drinking them in just as they drink in the life-force of their victims, and gaining a water-sense in the process.
Dasha already has several disturbing encounters with vodyaniye, who keep wanting to drag her down into their watery realm, which they claim--rightly--is her element. She finally frees herself from them by first running away on land, and then swimming, first in a river, then in the ocean. But of course, no one can free themselves from the elements, no matter how much magic you might possess.
What do you think? Do we have control over the elements, or do they have control over us? And are water-spirits and water-maidens real? If so, in what way?
Links:
The Dreaming Land I, for ARC reviewers (or if you just want to grab an early copy of it): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
The Breathing Sea I (free on KU): myBook.to/tbsi
The Breathing Sea II (free on KU): myBook.to/tbsii
Forgotten Empires Giveaway, for a free preview of TBSI: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Da...
Next Generation Giveaway, another place to get a free preview of TBSI: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/lP...
With Hurricane Florence currently playing will-she-won't-she with my part of North Carolina, today seemed like a good time to talk about how I worked various forms of magical water creatures into my stories, along with some good old-fashioned storm/water imagery.
There's so much storm/water imagery in Russian literature, and so many great myths and fairy tales about vodyaniye (water-spirits) and rusalki (something somewhere between a mermaid and a vengeful spirit). There's also some interesting contemporary Western fantasy that's come out recently featuring them, such as "Deathless" by Catherynne M. Valente Deathless, and "Dark Currents" Dark Currents the first Agent of Hel book, by Jacqueline Carey. But the book that influenced me the most in my own writing is "Rusalka," by C.J. Cherryh. Rusalka
Why is this book out of print? I guess you'll have to enjoy it the right way, by reading a battered old hardback.
I often, and I fully recognize the slippery slope on which I am standing here, have mixed feelings about Western authors who appropriate Russian culture and fairy tales for their fantasy. For many English-language authors, it seems like Russian culture and fairy tales are the one thing that it is still acceptable to use for providing that spice of exoticism that writing superficially about a distant, unknown, and dangerous culture provides. Do most of these authors give a crap about Russia and Russian culture? Not as far as I can tell.
But Cherryh, while not a Russianist, is an anthropologist by training, and she did a credible job of making her "Russians" seem human, as opposed to exotic window-dressing for literary showing-off. Her magical version of Kievan Rus' is dark and scary, with hunger and infection at least as dangerous as the magical creatures who haunt its woods--and swim its waters. One of my favorite characters in "Rusalka" is the vodyanoy, who can change shape from a little eel-thing to a huge water-snake, depending on what suits him. It was that feeling of magic and menace that I had in the back of my mind as I wrote my own water-spirits, and something I specifically reference, as my little offering to Cherryh, in this scene from the beginning of The Breathing Sea II: The Breathing Sea II: Drowning
“Don’t touch me!” Dasha cried. The vodyanaya seemed to be getting bigger, so that she was now higher than Dasha’s waist and growing rapidly. Dasha lashed out, slapping her across the face with her flaming hand.
The vodyanaya stopped and pressed her hand to her cheek. When she took her hand away, there was a burn mark in the shape of five fingers and a palm showing clearly on her face.
“You burned me,” she said in shock.
“And I’ll do it again!” Dasha cried defiantly. “If you come any closer, I’ll do it again!” Power was coursing through her body, the prickles and tingles that normally went with it releasing themselves as flame instead of forcing her into a fit. She could see herself doing anything: standing up to the vodyanaya, to her father, to anyone who dared to oppose her, and forcing them to submit to her will.
The vodyanaya dwindled back to her previous size, and then smaller, until she was no larger than an ordinary frog. She half-hopped, half-slithered down the bank and back into the water without a word.
***
The wind building up around my house as I write this reminds me, in case I had ever forgotten, how much the weather affects us, and how much we are at its mercy. Accordingly, important events in my characters' lives are often marked by important meteorological events. For example, in The Dreaming Land I The Dreaming Land I: The Challenge, a storm breaks over the heroine Valya as she goes to rescue Ivan from his captivity. (Oh, and if you received an ARC of TDLI and feel moved to leave a review, the link is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
Although the official launch won't happen for a couple of weeks, the book is already live so that people can leave reviews. If you already have, my sincere thanks--you are much appreciated!)
This early link between rain and Valya's love for Ivan prefigures events in the later books in the mini-series, culminating in her tears of joy at the end. Like her predecessors, Valya is intimately tied to the natural world, to the point of mirroring it, just as it mirrors her.
But the character in the overall Zemnian Series who is most closely tied to water is Dasha from The Breathing Sea, Valya's great-grandmother. In the latter half of The Breathing Sea I The Breathing Sea I: Burning (get a free preview in the Forgotten Empires Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Da... or read it for free on KU myBook.to/tbsi), after her encounter with a sort of Baba Yaga-like character, Dasha is forced to confront her fear of water.
This starts when she gets lost in the woods and meets a girl who offers to help her:
“Hello,” the girl said. “I’m Vika. What are you doing in my woods?”
Dasha rubbed her eyes again with a trembling hand, but the sparkling spots in her vision remained. Vika herself appeared to shimmer, like sunlight on water or the ground on a hot summer’s day. “I’m…” Dasha cleared her throat. “I’m traveling. I stepped off the road to, well…”
“Were you looking for water?” asked Vika, coming over to stand beside her. Even at only an arm’s length away, she still appeared to Dasha’s eyes to shimmer. A breeze picked up, ruffling Dasha’s hair and bringing with it the scent and coolness of bogs and brooks.
“I didn’t think there was any water nearby,” Dasha said.
“There’s my stream,” Vika told her. “Come: I’ll show you.”
“I need to get back to my companions,” Dasha said. “They must be missing me by now.”
“Don’t you need water?” asked Vika. “It’s a hot day and your waterskin is empty. You must need water. Then you can show your companions where you found it, and they can have some, too.”
“I should go to them first and tell them where I’m going,” Dasha said. She knew that was the right thing to do, but when Vika told her, “My stream’s on the way to them!” she began to follow Vika, even though they headed, not towards the road, but deeper into the woods.
“How far is it to your stream?” Dasha asked, as they pushed through fir boughs. The cool breeze was blowing briskly now, driving away the mosquitoes. Even so, beads of sweat were running down out of the braided crown around Vika’s head, and down the back of her neck.
“Not far!” Vika assured her, turning back to smile at her. Her face was dripping with sweat too, soaking the collar of her shirt, and the chest of her sarafan was so wet Dasha could have wrung it out like laundry. But there was no scent of the sweat of an unwashed human: instead, all Dasha could smell was water.
“Does your family live here too?” Dasha asked. She was surprised at how normal the words sounded. She felt as if her mind were floating far above the rest of her, separated from her mouth by a thousand versts or more. The air was filled with shimmers, and there was a rushing sound in her ears, like falling water.
“Just me and Serenkaya,” Vika told her cheerfully. Serenkaya, who was walking in front, stopped and looked back at the sound of her name. Dasha thought her gaze looked mournful. And also pleading, as if she were begging Dasha for help. But with what? It was probably all in Dasha’s mind.
“Where do you live?” Dasha asked, stumbling along behind them. Vika’s pace had quickened to a half-jog, and Dasha was struggling to keep up, but she was desperate—why was she so desperate?—not to be left behind.
“By my stream, of course,” Vika told her with a smile. “There.” She came to an abrupt stop. Dasha almost plowed into her, and had to grab a tree branch to keep from falling off the streambank on which she found herself, and into the waters below.
“Where’s your house?” Dasha asked, staring down into the shimmering, flowing water that swirled beneath her. The stream was narrow here, no more than a couple of paces across, but deep, with overhanging banks as tall as she was, and water that was deep enough she couldn’t see the bottom.
It would be easy to drown here, she thought. One stumble, and—splash! You couldn’t climb out. She turned to face Vika, who was standing very close to her, so close they were almost touching. “Where’s your house?” Dasha repeated.
“Here, of course,” Vika told her. “Right here.” She was no longer smiling. Dasha thought that tears might be mingling with the sweat on her face.
“Vika,” said Dasha. “How long have you been here?” She reached out and took the other girl’s hand, and was unsurprised when her hand passed right through Vika’s, with no trace of their contact other than a faint tingling dampness.
***
Vika, of course, is a water-maiden, which is what I chose to call the rusalki in my stories. Although I kept the names vodyaniye, domoviye, and leshiye, transforming them in their feminine forms for my matriarchal society, the word "rusalka" is too linked with "Russia" for it to make sense in my world, which is called Zem' and never allows the Rutsi/Ruotsi/Viking Rus to gain much purchase. So water-maidens they are. Although she and the other water-maidens in the story are specifically based off the water-maiden/rusalka in C.J. Cherryh's Rusalka, with their transformation between their steam and solid states. And--spoiler alert!--Dasha takes on a bit of their water-maiden essence, drinking them in just as they drink in the life-force of their victims, and gaining a water-sense in the process.
Dasha already has several disturbing encounters with vodyaniye, who keep wanting to drag her down into their watery realm, which they claim--rightly--is her element. She finally frees herself from them by first running away on land, and then swimming, first in a river, then in the ocean. But of course, no one can free themselves from the elements, no matter how much magic you might possess.
What do you think? Do we have control over the elements, or do they have control over us? And are water-spirits and water-maidens real? If so, in what way?
Links:
The Dreaming Land I, for ARC reviewers (or if you just want to grab an early copy of it): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8VXDHV
The Breathing Sea I (free on KU): myBook.to/tbsi
The Breathing Sea II (free on KU): myBook.to/tbsii
Forgotten Empires Giveaway, for a free preview of TBSI: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Da...
Next Generation Giveaway, another place to get a free preview of TBSI: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/lP...
September 1, 2018
Was Baba Yaga Really So Bad, Anyway?
Before I jump into the meat of this post, I have a request! One that should be pretty simple and easy to fulfill.
The official release date of The Dreaming Land isn't until September 22, AKA the equinox, but I've already published the paperback of Book 1 so that people can start posting reviews. So if you got an ARC and you feel moved to leave a review, the link is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999168967 Reviews don't have to be long--short and sweet is fine :)
And if you haven't gotten an ARC yet, they will still be available for a couple more days here. I'll be pulling them down probably sometime next week in preparation for the release, so this is your last chance to be an advance reviewer!
I am of course super-excited about the upcoming release of The Dreaming Land, and there will certainly be much more about the sources and inspirations behind it in the coming weeks, but for my blog post today I thought I'd concentrate a bit more on the Russian fairy tales that inspired sections of the previous mini-series, The Breathing Sea (grab a free preview of it in the Folklore and Fables Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Lw... or read the whole thing for free on KU here: myBook.to/tbsi).
As I discussed last time, all the books in The Zemnian Series, especially The Breathing Sea, are full of allusions to Russian literature. Expect more posts on this topic in the future! But along with authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I also took inspiration from Russian fairy tales, and for one section in particular, the story of Baba Yaga.
In Russian fairy tales, Baba Yaga is an ambiguous figure, sometimes helping out the hero(ine) and sometimes threatening to eat her/him. In Vasilisa the Beautiful, for example, a sort of Russian Cinderella story, Baba Yaga appears to be a threat--but it is the skull-lantern she provides that burns the wicked stepmother and stepsister to ashes, freeing Vasilisa from their tyranny.
Like any self-respecting witch in a patriarchal society, Baba Yaga is terrifying. But is she secretly a feminist? Here's Baba Yaga's Guide to Feminism, courtesy of the good folks at Ravishly.
In any case, in The Breathing Sea (another place to grab a free preview is in the Next Generation YA Fantasy/Scifi Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/lP...), I wanted my heroine Dasha to encounter a Baba Yaga figure, just like Vasilisa does, while also subverting the story, 'cause you know I can't write about another story about without subverting it. So Baba Sofroniya, the elderly witch living in the woods whom Dasha encounters, is a wholly positive figure--at least to Dasha. In fact, Dasha likes her so much she asks to stay with her, and wishes that Baba Sofroniya could become her grandmother.
But Baba Sofroniya is still linked with multiple images or symbols of death, just like Baba Yaga--and just like Dasha. Skulls decorate the gate to her garden, just as they do for Baba Yaga, and she lives in a hut raised on "chicken legs": stumps with the roots still attached. Her hut, as she explains to Dasha, is in fact a house for dead bodies, and faces West (the direction that Dasha can always sense), the direction of death. It is possible that Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs is in fact inspired by just such huts that the ancient Slavs used for their dead.
Once in the hut Dasha and her father Oleg encounter multiple symbols of both birth and death. Dasha sees a mortar big enough for her climb inside, in a nod to Baba Yaga's mortar that she rides around in, and also to Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron and the Black Cauldron that must be destroyed by a willing human sacrifice. Or one could see the giant mortar as a symbolic womb that Dasha contemplates crawling back inside, as she struggles with her separation from her mother and her desire for a "proper" grandmother. Meanwhile, Oleg, like Vasilisa in the fairy tale, must sort through seeds (semen/life) and is told to sleep on the table, like a corpse being laid out. And, in another little extra-textual allusion, this time to Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, Baba Sofroniya takes Dasha out to her goat barn and tries to teach her about raising goats and the brutal business of life and death that is involved.
In the end--spoiler alert!--Baba Sofroniya refuses to take on Dasha as a pupil, and Dasha refuses to learn the lessons Baba Sofroniya wants to teach her. But they still part on good terms, and Dasha makes good use of the life lessons and the medicinal herbs that Baba Sofroniya gives her as a parting gift. Baba Sofroniya, like many of my female characters, is dangerous. But she mainly uses her powers for good.
Those links again:
The Dreaming Land I paperback (again, reviews are super-appreciated :) ) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999168967
E-ARC of The Dreaming Land I (only available for a couple more days): https://dl.bookfunnel.com/scjp3fo5ks
The Breathing Sea I on KU: myBook.to/tbsi
Next Generation YA Fantasy/Sci Fi Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/lP...
Folklore and Fables Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Lw...
The official release date of The Dreaming Land isn't until September 22, AKA the equinox, but I've already published the paperback of Book 1 so that people can start posting reviews. So if you got an ARC and you feel moved to leave a review, the link is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999168967 Reviews don't have to be long--short and sweet is fine :)
And if you haven't gotten an ARC yet, they will still be available for a couple more days here. I'll be pulling them down probably sometime next week in preparation for the release, so this is your last chance to be an advance reviewer!
I am of course super-excited about the upcoming release of The Dreaming Land, and there will certainly be much more about the sources and inspirations behind it in the coming weeks, but for my blog post today I thought I'd concentrate a bit more on the Russian fairy tales that inspired sections of the previous mini-series, The Breathing Sea (grab a free preview of it in the Folklore and Fables Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Lw... or read the whole thing for free on KU here: myBook.to/tbsi).
As I discussed last time, all the books in The Zemnian Series, especially The Breathing Sea, are full of allusions to Russian literature. Expect more posts on this topic in the future! But along with authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I also took inspiration from Russian fairy tales, and for one section in particular, the story of Baba Yaga.
In Russian fairy tales, Baba Yaga is an ambiguous figure, sometimes helping out the hero(ine) and sometimes threatening to eat her/him. In Vasilisa the Beautiful, for example, a sort of Russian Cinderella story, Baba Yaga appears to be a threat--but it is the skull-lantern she provides that burns the wicked stepmother and stepsister to ashes, freeing Vasilisa from their tyranny.
Like any self-respecting witch in a patriarchal society, Baba Yaga is terrifying. But is she secretly a feminist? Here's Baba Yaga's Guide to Feminism, courtesy of the good folks at Ravishly.
In any case, in The Breathing Sea (another place to grab a free preview is in the Next Generation YA Fantasy/Scifi Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/lP...), I wanted my heroine Dasha to encounter a Baba Yaga figure, just like Vasilisa does, while also subverting the story, 'cause you know I can't write about another story about without subverting it. So Baba Sofroniya, the elderly witch living in the woods whom Dasha encounters, is a wholly positive figure--at least to Dasha. In fact, Dasha likes her so much she asks to stay with her, and wishes that Baba Sofroniya could become her grandmother.
But Baba Sofroniya is still linked with multiple images or symbols of death, just like Baba Yaga--and just like Dasha. Skulls decorate the gate to her garden, just as they do for Baba Yaga, and she lives in a hut raised on "chicken legs": stumps with the roots still attached. Her hut, as she explains to Dasha, is in fact a house for dead bodies, and faces West (the direction that Dasha can always sense), the direction of death. It is possible that Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs is in fact inspired by just such huts that the ancient Slavs used for their dead.
Once in the hut Dasha and her father Oleg encounter multiple symbols of both birth and death. Dasha sees a mortar big enough for her climb inside, in a nod to Baba Yaga's mortar that she rides around in, and also to Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron and the Black Cauldron that must be destroyed by a willing human sacrifice. Or one could see the giant mortar as a symbolic womb that Dasha contemplates crawling back inside, as she struggles with her separation from her mother and her desire for a "proper" grandmother. Meanwhile, Oleg, like Vasilisa in the fairy tale, must sort through seeds (semen/life) and is told to sleep on the table, like a corpse being laid out. And, in another little extra-textual allusion, this time to Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, Baba Sofroniya takes Dasha out to her goat barn and tries to teach her about raising goats and the brutal business of life and death that is involved.
In the end--spoiler alert!--Baba Sofroniya refuses to take on Dasha as a pupil, and Dasha refuses to learn the lessons Baba Sofroniya wants to teach her. But they still part on good terms, and Dasha makes good use of the life lessons and the medicinal herbs that Baba Sofroniya gives her as a parting gift. Baba Sofroniya, like many of my female characters, is dangerous. But she mainly uses her powers for good.
Those links again:
The Dreaming Land I paperback (again, reviews are super-appreciated :) ) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999168967
E-ARC of The Dreaming Land I (only available for a couple more days): https://dl.bookfunnel.com/scjp3fo5ks
The Breathing Sea I on KU: myBook.to/tbsi
Next Generation YA Fantasy/Sci Fi Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/lP...
Folklore and Fables Giveaway: https://claims.instafreebie.com/gg/Lw...
