Marie Brennan's Blog, page 246

Hey, chemists!

How would you describe the smell of acid? Does it have a smell? (Any kind of acid will do; I'm looking for commonalities here.)

This month, on SF Novelists . . . .

I'm done (for the time being, at least) with the series of posts on writing female characters, so instead this month's SF Novelists post is about my first experience as a Guest of Honor.

Comment over there, no registration required, though if you're a first-time commenter I'll have to fish your comment out of the moderation queue. So don't worry if it takes a little while to appear.

I cannot say much about bullying.

My friends-list is full of posts about bullying, or more precisely the experience of being bullied, because I am friends with a lot of geeks and nerds and other such target types. They're heart-wrenching to read, but not because they call up echoes of my own past. You see, I was never bullied. And to all the adults who tell the victims "It's your fault, you must have done something to provoke them," I have this to say:

The sole reason I didn't get bullied is that I was lucky.

It's the only explanation I can find. I was freakishly skinny -- seriously, I look at pictures of myself and wonder how I didn't snap in half -- I wore thick glasses all the way through elementary school, I was an unabashed smart kid and book nerd. I was in the band. I had a weird name. There was an abudance of reasons to pick on me . . . but to the best of my recollection, nobody really did.

See, I went to school in the kind of affluent area where parents generally drove their kids to school (as mine did), so I never experienced the rolling hyena cage that is the school bus. During my early years, the only time I rode one of those was when a group of us were bussed to the once-a-week gifted program, held in another school -- a program that was large enough, and included enough like-minded kids, that I had plenty of friends. We had honors and AP classes as I got to junior high and high school, so that I never even saw a whole subset of the student body, the subset that might have thought being smart was something to mock you for. The band in my high school was roughly 150 students out of 1500 -- ten percent, and a large enough block that we could (and did) just socialize with each other, filling up entire lunch tables, going to practice after school, storing our things in the extra lockers we got by the band hall. Hell, our head drum major was voted homecoming king one year, because the drill team thought he was the cutest thing ever, and that plus the band was enough to lift him above the various football players who were his competitors. Our solidarity protected us.

Not a single piece of that was my own doing. I didn't conform, didn't scare the bullies off, didn't do any of the things adults might advise to prevent the crimes of others. I was lucky.

But even luck may not save you. One of my classmates -- a guy I'd known since elementary school, who'd gone through the same system I had, who was in the band -- committed suicide during high school. I don't know if he was bullied, but I know the football team talked some appallingly ugly shit about him afterward. He left behind a community, though; the entire band was devastated, and a posse very nearly went after the football players who were saying those things. That's a lot more than most bullied kids have. But he didn't have it because he did anything, other than being himself; he had it because the circumstances made it possible.

The kids who get picked on do not have power over their situations. Telling them it's their responsibility to make change happen isn't just unfair, it's adding to the problem. It's like grabbing the kid's hand and smacking him with it while saying, "stop hitting yourself." We need to not blame the victims. We need authority to step in, the same way we ask authority to step in when adults get stalked or assaulted or harassed. And for the love of god, we need to remember that our instincts are animal ones, and that altruism and compassion and so on don't happen because a fairy waves a wand, they're things that need to be fostered -- that children need to be taught how not to act like beasts. We need to improve our math scores and everything else, too, at least here in the U.S., but I think I'd happily trade that for a school system that raises kids to be human beings, rather than hyenas.

I don't know how to do that. But I know it needs to happen, because not everybody is lucky, and even luck can't save everyone.

break's over; back on your heads

I'm starting to buckle down to work again, but interested parties might like to know that Jim Hines is giving away a copy of A Star Shall Fall (and also one of Tanya Huff's The Enchantment Emporium). Details at the link; you have until the 20th to enter.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Fires of Heaven

I've picked up quite a few new blog readers since the last post in this series, so to recap: I'm going back through the Wheel of Time, partly as a reader (so I can read the ending and know what the heck is going on), but partly as a writer, to look at it with a professional eye and see what works and what doesn't. This has particularly meant looking at the structure, to see what really happened to the narrative pacing as the books went along, but there are some content-level bits of analysis going on as well. I stopped reading after Crossroads of Twilight, so please, no spoilers for Knife of Dreams or The Gathering Storm. If you'd like to see and/or comment on previous posts, just follow the Wheel of Time tag.

So, The Fires of Heaven. In which we begin our journey into the swamp.

By that I mean, this is the book where I see the pacing consequences of Jordan's decisions in TDR and TSR coming home to roost. Once TFoH gets going, I enjoy it just fine . . . but it takes a while to get going. We're skirting the fringes of the swamp, bogging down occasionally, and if memory serves that problem will get worse before it gets better.

Let's step in a bit closer than usual, to show what I mean by this.


This is, in my opinion, too many. Or maybe just the wrong ones.

If the eight were Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve, Moiraine and Min, I would probably have no objection. They're all major characters, centrally positioned for the plot. By contrast, of the eight we actually get, fully four (by my count) are new additions, those being Rahvin, Gareth Bryne, Alteima, and Morgase. It creates the impression that by this point in the series, shifting perspective has become the easy solution for Jordan: if he wants to convey a piece of information, he grabs the most convenient pov, rather than finding a way to weave that information into the structure he's already built. Unfortunately, this habit tends to produce one of two results: tissue paper or kudzu.

"Tissue paper" is my shorthand for a scene that isn't substantial enough to justify its own existence. One of the lessons you learn while improving as a writer is that any given scene should, ideally, not just be doing something, but be doing more than one thing. Not just forwarding the plot, but also developing character. Not just communicating exposition, but also elaborating the theme. Whatever. Tissue-paper scenes serve only one purpose, or serve a bunch of little tiny ones that really aren't all that important. Kudzu, on the other hand, is what happens when you try to avoid tissue paper: you want the scene to be pulling actual weight, so you invent some new weight for it to pull. A plot complication, or a bit of character background, or something that wasn't there before -- but now it's in the story, and you've made this pov character important, and suddenly you have a new thread you're weaving into your tapestry, which just got a bit bigger as a result.

Overall, I think the series' issue is a whole crap-ton of kudzu. But in these first hundred pages of TFoH, tissue paper seems to be the more serious problem. Because fundamentally, in all these povs and all these scenes, only one of them accomplishes anything of real significance.

The scene in question is Min's, at the beginning of the first actual chapter. For those who haven't just re-read the book, it picks up with her and Siuan and Leane locked up and awaiting trial for some events Jordan covers in exposition, namely a scuffle in Kore Springs that ended with Logain vanishing. Their judge turns out to be Gareth Bryne, who sentences them to work off the debt of their crimes; they swear oaths to do so, but it turns out Siuan intends to fulfill that oath at a later date, and so the three women rejoin Logain and escape.

Here's how I define that as significant: it changes the direction of the story. Because of this, Gareth Bryne decides to leave Kore Springs and chase after them, which results in him becoming commander of the Salidar forces. It also means he isn't there when Morgase comes looking, later in the book. Siuan et al continue on to Salidar, which they were doing anyway, but their situation there is likewise altered by his presence. Cut these events from the narrative, and you have a markedly different story. Cut the scene out, but leave the events in, and the story falls apart; having him show up randomly in Salidar, talking about some oath we never saw happen, would not be a workable approach.

Contrast that with Gareth Bryne's own scene, following on the women's escape. In this instance, I think you could easily cut the scene but leave the events, and the story would not only survive but be stronger. Jordan spends more than six pages on him, and the only important part of it is that he decides to chase Siuan. The rest is just characterization and recapping of backstory, half of which gets repeated when we next return to his pov in Lugard. Why not just reveal his pursuit then? You could still do your characterization, and get the benefit of surprising the reader just a little bit, when they thought Siuan might get away with her decision for the time being.

Contrast also with Alteima's scene, riding into Caemlyn and meeting Morgase and Gaebril/Rahvin. In this instance, I'm pretty sure you could cut not just the scene but everything it represents, and nobody would miss it. All this does is remind us of the situation in Caemlyn, in ways that could equally well have been covered (and mostly are covered) by Morgase's chapter later on. Alteima's pov never returns in this book -- neither does Rahvin's, nor Elaida's, which I think is a telling point as to their relative necessity -- nor does Alteima do anything; the sum total of her impact on the plot of TFoH is that she tells Rahvin what she knows about Rand (not much), and is one of several women he's sleeping with later. For this, she merits eight pages? I don't recall whether Alteima's presence in Caemlyn ends up being important in later books, but if so, I suspect it's a post facto decision on Jordan's part; there's zero indication in this book that she's being positioned for anything of later significance.

In short -- okay, not so short; I've ranted for several paragraphs -- almost the entirety of this first hundred pages is spent telling us stuff. Recapping plot, or updating us on various situations, or at best outlining what the characters plan to do. The second two hundred pages aren't much better, either. The Darkhound attack is significant mostly because it demonstrates the operation of balefire and gives Moiraine a reason to warn Rand about it -- which, I will grant, is useful, given how vital that is to the finale of the book. But it doesn't accomplish much, in terms of changing the direction of the story. I don't feel like things really get moving until Ronde Macura grabs Elayne and Nynaeve, a little bit after the two-hundred-page mark.

Which is a scene that annoys me just a little. Why, exactly, did Jordan have to set things up such that the women required rescuing by Thom and Juilin? It vaguely sets up some later character stuff, but not in a way I like. It might not bother me so much if the subsequent material with Elayne and Nynaeve didn't annoy me a lot more; their menagerie interlude goes on a good deal longer than I feel it needs to, though at least it has some worthwhile twists along the way (Masema, Galad, and Birgitte, to name three). The rest of it, though . . . well, I got a lot of material for my post about the women in the Wheel of Time, which is mostly outlined now, so expect that before too much longer.

I will say, however, that I do like the development of the Moghedien plot. What she does to Birgitte is suitably epic and horrifying; plus, it brings Birgitte into the story as a proper character, and I like her a great deal. She goes into the "tomboy" column with Min and Faile, without turning into either one of them, or having her teeth pulled like Aviendha. (The later friendship between Mat and Birgitte is one of the few cross-gender relationships in this series I genuinely enjoy.) Moreover, the Moghedien plot actually has stuff happening, and it creates both plot and character dynamics, in the sense of rise and fall. Nynaeve fails, and becomes terrfied of further failure, but then owns up to and overcomes her fear and again kicks ass. But this time, it isn't simply the raw power showdown of TSR; in fact, Jordan engineers a situation (Nynaeve only halfway in Tel'aran'rhiod) that specifically rules out her channeling strength as a deciding factor. Her success hinges on three things: Elayne's research into the a'dam, their experimentation with altering stuff in T'A'R, and her own quick thinking in dreaming the collar into existence around Moghedien's neck. Furthermore, Jordan tosses in an additional twist at the end, that hinges on Nynaeve being smart: she figures out, based on Moghedien's careless words, that the other woman is in Salidar, and she takes steps to neutralize and find her. The consequences of that won't show up until the next book, but being the Nynaeve partisan that I am, it makes me very happy that she wins this fight by being quick-witted, perceptive, and determined.

Speaking of good plots with the women, I like Salidar -- at least so far-- and what Siuan and Leane do there. I was annoyed that Siuan has the usual Robert Jordan Female pride toward Duranda Tharne in Lugard, being all offended that guys are whistling at her and she can't just order people around -- and pleased that Morgase lacked that pride, while escaping the palace in Caemlyn -- but by the time Siuan gets to Salidar, she's started acting smart again. The plan she and Leane execute is good, clever politics, from the initial good cop/bad cop dynamic (or rather, humble minion/angry minion), to the lie about Logain and the Reds, to the pretense of a rift between the two of them. (Which Nynaeve spots for the pretense it is. Again, smart thinking, and in keeping with her experiences as Wisdom.) I could do without the insistence via Min that Siuan has to stick close to Gareth Bryne, but that's largely because I don't recall the foreshadowing having yet paid off as of Crossroads of Twilight. If I'm wrong about that, don't correct me; I'll get to it in due time.

I find myself with less to say about the boys' side of the story, heading from Rhuidean to Cairhien and then over to Caemlyn. There seems to be more of it than the actual events require, but I didn't find it too draggy, except insofar as I know I'm going to get really tired of watching Rand insist that he has to be hard as stone. Also, the strand of narrative about the Maidens is not terribly compelling to me; the notion that Rand can't accept or be responsible for the deaths of women falls into the category of ideas that Jordan probably found to be both powerful and easily sympathetic, but I find to be neither. I believe there are men who think that way, but it isn't how I think, so if you want me to get angst out of it, you've got to sell me on the notion. Jordan doesn't really try, and I suspect it's because he didn't understand the degree to which it needed selling. But my emotional investment is totally with Sulin when she starts breaking her spears, not with Rand.

Jordan does do a good job with battles, though. Mat partisan that I am, I quite like his transformation into a general, particularly the scene where Lan wanders in and casually prods Mat into laying out an entire battle plan. (I am also a Lan partisan.) Props to that being a deliberate scheme of Rand's, too. Then when the battle for Cairhien starts, Mat tripping and falling his way into saving the entire column of horse and pike is quite well-done, with the sort of concrete tactical detail that makes me believe in him as a military commander. And for all I would have liked to see a fully-written scene of the fight between him and Couladin, casually referencing it after the fact does add some bad-ass points.

Oddly, I didn't find the actual climactic fights as exciting. For one thing, I still hate Lanfear, and not in that good "love to hate her" kind of way, so Rand's confrontation with her loses some of its impact. The struggle for him not to walk away as Lews Therin is compelling material, but I would have liked more of it, and then Moiraine's big swan dive just . . . didn't do it for me. I think it was more exciting the first time I read it, but this time around I was all wound up with anticipation, and then felt disappointed. The detonation of the ter'angreal doorway just wasn't as cool as I'd remembered, and I really wanted a bigger moment with Lan when he says she's gone. Maybe the problem is that Moiraine got so thoroughly sidelined in this book and the previous one? (Also, I don't remember what clued me in the first time as to her not being dead -- Amys' heavy-handed "you're a fool" comment to Rand, or just that they never found the body. But I knew it immediately, and that does take some of the punch away from a re-read.) Furthermore, I think the subsequent strike against Rahvin near-fatally loses momentum when Jordan steps away to show us Nynaeve and Siuan, and then Moghedien and Birgitte, in Tel'aran'rhiod. In his shoes, I might have left Siuan out of it, and definitely would have put that scene before the one where Rand Skims the Aiel boot party to Caemlyn. Having Moggy describe Rahvin's trap before we see it get sprung would heighten tension rather than defusing it, I think, and allow the narrative to stay in the excitement of battle after everybody gets nuked by lightning. That isn't a good time for a "meanwhile, back at the ranch" shift.

It's getting to the point, though, where the narrative sprawls far enough that I have trouble talking usefully about plot events as such. So the one other interesting development I want to discuss in the boys' half of this book is more about character -- by which I mean they start having sex.

I was going to put this in the post on women, but I think some of the points I was going to make there belong here, instead. Up until this book, the series has been resoundingly PG, at least where sex is concerned. The primary guys are all twenty years old, and many of the female povs not far removed from that number, but man are they lacking in hormones. Rand and Elayne may have been sneaking off all over the Stone of Tear at the beginning of TSR, but there's no indication they did anything more than kiss. Mat may be painted as a ladies' man, but his behavior comes across as pinching pretty women on the rump rather than actually getting into their skirts, until this book puts him blatantly into bed with Melindhra. Hell, Perrin got married last book and I don't recall any hint of anything happening with Faile. Sure, he was busy killing Trollocs, but still -- you'd expect something.

Except that this series' target demographic is probably teenaged boys, and they don't want to read about the squishy stuff. Or maybe Jordan's just bad at writing the squishy stuff; god knows even his attempts to write something approaching physical attraction come across as oddly bloodless. Galad is "gorgeous" -- but what does that mean? There's little in the way of concrete description as to what about him takes women's breath away. Okay, Jordan was a straight man, we can understand him being vague about Galad . . . but even when he's describing attractive women, he falls short of convincing detail. Mostly the focus ends up on their clothes, specifically the necklines of their dresses, or how closely the fabric drapes their bodies. Occasionally something about a smile. Nothing that carries the slightest bit of visceral power. For the love of god -- Rand gets naked and wraps himself around Aviendha, and the sole physical cue we get is a bit of cliched description about her skin being like satin or silk. I don't expect a gear-shift into erotica, but when Rand mentally admonishes himself to get his mind out of the pigsty, I see little evidence that it's there in the first place. Even small cues, like changes in his breathing or heartbeat, would go a long way toward convincing me he's a flesh-and-blood young man pressed full-length against a naked woman. Absence of such cues goes a surprisingly long way toward undermining my investment in the characters. When Aviendha wakes up and decides to do something with their situation, it feels more like plot machinery in motion, rather than a natural consequence of anyone's feelings.

(Credit where credit is due, though: both Aviendha and Melindhra are proactive in their respective relationships, and I didn't see any sign that the narrative disapproves of their sexual aggressiveness. Which would have been hypocritical, given what we've heard about the Aiel -- but Jordan wouldn't have been the first author to talk out of both sides of his mouth on that front. So at least these are books where women can pull men into bed, without being depicted as sirens or sluts.)

Glancing at Leigh Butler's recaps on Tor.com, I'm reminded of one other thing I wanted to say, which is that I find myself really wishing we didn't get so much villain pov. Almost inevitably, villains are scarier and more interesting if we don't know what they're doing all the time, and letting us eavesdrop on their summit meetings, especially when we don't do so through the device of a protagonist spying on them, takes a lot of the shine off it for me. On the one hand, there's something to be said for reducing them from Scary Monsters to kind of bitchy human beings, but on the other hand, I start rolling my eyes when they show up, and that probably isn't the reaction Jordan was going for. And this applies not just to the Forsaken, but also to people like Liandrin and Elaida -- Elaida most especially. The more I see of her invincible stupidity, the less I care about her as a character. If Jordan had hacked off her entire scene of the Prologue and conveyed the few bits of necessary information through the girls' reading of her papers in T'A'R, I would have been a lot happier.

Oh, and: we should enjoy our last few moments of blissful ignorance, as I believe this is the last book before we discover the only good Forsaken is a balefired Forsaken. It's LoC where Aginor and Balthamel come back, yes? While I see the virtue of creating enemies that are really hard to kill (or rather, to keep dead), that is, again, a decision with consequences for the length and pacing of the series. We've got seven "dead" at this point, right? Aginor, Balthamel, Be'lal, Ishamael, Lanfear, Rahvin, and Asmodean -- but of those, only Be'lal and Rahvin are definitely not coming back, plus presumably Asmodean. (Ah, Asmodean. Focus of the biggest unsolved-as-of-CoT mystery in the entire series, with the possible exception of Verin. I still don't know who killed him, but I'm looking forward to finding out in due course. Don't spoil it for me.)
Aaaaand that's it for now. I've made it through a third of the series -- go me! Pretty soon I'll have to stop looking at Leigh Butler's recaps, because they'll have spoilers for The Gathering Storm. (They already have spoilers for KoD, which I also haven't read, but I try to go through carefully and avoid anything that looks like I don't want to hear about it. I've only gotten burned once, on a relatively small matter.) I'm vaguely tempted to hop ahead and read both of those books, just to simplify my life, but that would defeat the purpose of refreshing my memory before I get to them, so I probably won't. Easier to just avoid reading the Tor.com posts. Anyway, look for my LoC analysis next month, probably, at which point I will have completed a full year of this project.

Why is Faerie ruled by Queens?

By popular request, my keynote from Sirens. The actual speech I delivered was a little different -- for one thing, this version doesn't have the comments about Helen Mirren as Prospera in Julie Taymor's upcoming film of The Tempest -- but the gist of it followed this pretty closely. I'm debating whether to post it to my website as-is, or update it based on the comments and feedback I got at the con; thoughts?

Why Is Faerie Ruled by Queens?

As we all know, we've gathered here this weekend to discuss a race of inhuman, incomprehensible creatures.

Their characteristics are well-known. They're beautiful -- when they're not astoundingly ugly. They're both goddesses for men to worship, and demons for them to flee. They adore children, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession. They have a strong association with nature, from which they're often assumed to draw magical power. Their anger is a terrible thing to behold, and all the more fearsome because anything can spark it; the rules by which these creatures operate are not those of rational men. They are creatures of fanciful whim, and they never, ever, can be understood.

I'm talking, of course, about women.

And faeries, too. The association between women and faeries goes back a long, long way. I didn't think consciously about it, though, until a college professor of mine, Kate Chadbourne, presented a symposium paper titled "Seeking Seed-Wheat I Have Come: Desire Between the Worlds in Early Irish and Welsh Tales." In that paper, she made an eye-opening comparison between Celtic mythology and H. Rider Haggard's novel She. Kate was kind enough to send me a copy of that paper to use as a reference-point for this address, so my next few points, I owe to her.

In Celtic mythology, you have the motif of the Sovereignty Goddess, who, in granting her favor to a mortal man, elevates him to kingship. Pwyll and Rhiannon -- I apologize for my imperfect Welsh pronunciation. Niall of the Nine Hostages and the hag he meets at a well. Becfhola in the Yellow Book of Lecan. This woman is the personification of the land, in an explicitly mystical fashion, and it is by his bond with her that a man claims sovereignty. The fairy-tale motif of the hero marrying the princess and becoming king is similar, though without the mythical underpinning -- and the princess in those stories isn't necessarily an active agent like the Celtic sovereignty figures, bestowing her favor with the intent of creating a king.

Looking to more recent examples, I know at least some of you here today are familiar with the ballads of the Scottish border, specifically "Thomas the Rhymer" and "Tam Lin." These share a common base conceit, which is that a human man encounters the Queen of Elfland, and she carries him away. In the case of Thomas the Rhymer, he returns to the human world after seven years in her company. In the case of Tam Lin, he's rescued from being tithed to Hell by the heroine, Janet; she becomes pregnant by him, and rather than surrendering her man to the Faerie Queen and Hell, she steals him back, in the face of any number of supernatural threats. The mortal-man-faerie-woman pairing possibly achieves its most ridiculous form in the case of Bottom and Titania, from Shakespeare's fairy play A Midsummer Night's Dream; thanks to the scheming of Oberon and Puck, the fairy queen becomes enamored of a man with the head of an ass.

Examples of this motif in modern fiction aren't hard to find, either. Aside from the many wonderful novels based on an existing piece of folklore -- I had a great conversation last night about different "Tam Lin" adaptations -- we have new stories that follow the same pattern. Lord Dunsany's classic novel The King of Elfland's Daughter is a favorite of mine, as the people of the town of Erl decide they want a "magic lord," and send Alveric out to get himself a faerie bride. More recently, we have Neil Gaiman's Stardust, wherein two successive ordinary men, Dunstan and Tristan, fall in love with women from beyond the Wall. One is the captive princess of a fantastical kingdom, and the other is a fallen star: they may not be called faeries, but that's more or less what they are. And, of course, I've already mentioned H. Rider Haggard's She, which is the novel that, via Kate Chadbourne's paper, made me aware of the motif. For those who aren't familiar with it, the story concerns a man named Leo Vincey who journeys to the lost African realm of Kor, which is ruled over by a white sorceress. Her name is Ayesha, but she's more commonly called She Who Must Be Obeyed. Ayesha is immortal, and the very sight of her entrances men, compelling them to worship her out of desire and fear. Haggard may not call her a faerie queen, but we can certainly think of her as one.

Why is Faerie ruled by Queens?

To be fair, "human man meets, or falls in love with, or is stolen away by a faerie woman" isn't the only pattern out there. Sometimes a human woman meets or falls in love with or is stolen away by a faerie man. Turning back to the Scottish border, we can match "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer" with "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight" -- though admittedly, when the elf-knight rides away with Isabel, she doesn't spend seven years in his company; she drowns him in a river. My fellow Guest of Honor Holly Black tells the story of a human girl and her faerie boyfriend in Valiant, the second novel of the Modern Faerie Tale series. I'm sure some of you in the audience could name other examples for me; in fact, when we get to the question-and-answer part of this show, I welcome it. The intersection of two worlds can certainly go the other way.

But an interesting thing happened when I sat down to write this address, and reached for examples of the human female/faerie male pattern. I was first going to reference Melissa Marr's novel Wicked Lovely -- but then I remembered that Aislinn, the heroine, starts off the book already tinged by the supernatural. Her mother was taken by the faeries before she was born, and so Aislinn can see what most people can't: the magical face of the world around her. She has one foot in the Otherworld before she ever meets Keenan, the faerie man who becomes the other half of her story. Then I was going to cite Holly's first Modern Faerie Tale novel, Tithe -- before I remembered that (spoiler alert; my apologies) Kaye is a changeling. Again, not quite properly human. At that point my brain went into a sulk, so I asked a friend who was with me at the time, and her suggestions were illuminating: her first thought was Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose, which is an adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast." Which, admittedly, is a fairy tale -- but a lot of those don't actually have faeries in them. Is a beast the same thing as a faerie? Not really; he's a man -- a wizard, in Lackey's adaptation, but a man nonetheless -- rather than an otherworldly creature. Then my friend offered up Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, where the lover in question is a robot. Her final attempt was Sharon Shinn's Samaria novels, which have a common motif of ordinary women taken away by genetically engineered "angels."

Ordinary women with supernatural men for lovers aren't hard to find; throw a rock at the fantasy shelves these days and your odds of hitting one are good. But the supernatural men usually aren't faeries. Mostly they're vampires -- a trope that goes back at least a far as Dracula; the academics in the audience can probably tell me if its roots are older than that. Sometimes they're werewolves, or demons, or something else that isn't quite a faerie. (Of course, that begs the question of what constitutes a faerie, which was almost my topic for this keynote speech. We'll touch on that a bit later.)

Why is it that most of the faerie fiction has ordinary men and magical women, while most of the vampire stories go the other way?

It might just be the models we have in front of us. As I said before, Celtic mythology made extensive use of mortal men and Otherworldly women, and so it isn't surprising that the fiction we write now often follows the pattern. Vampire fiction, on the other hand, has its roots in Dracula, whose title character seduces the mortal Mina Murray. If the breakout vampire story back in the day had been Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, maybe I'd be up here talking about the recurrence of lesbianism in vampire fiction.

I could try asking myself why I've done it. After all, my own Onyx Court series is a fairly orthodox repetition of the pattern. When I sat down to write Midnight Never Come, I knew I wanted two protagonists, one faerie, one mortal. I made the first one a woman and the second one a man. Why?

The immediate answer is that I was writing historical fiction, set in the late Elizabethan period, and that imposed certain constraints on my story. A mortal gentleman would have more freedom to move about and get things done than his sister would; women back then weren't necessarily mewed up to the extent that became true among, say, the Victorian upper classes, but a well-born woman couldn't just hop on her horse and go somewhere like a man could. Down in the Onyx Hall, on the other hand, I could make the gender roles whatever I pleased -- though I tried not to be too aggressively modern even there.

Plus, there was a certain dynamic already implanted in my head, before I ever thought about writing the book, and that was the relationship of Elizabeth I with her courtiers. She had a whole series of male favorites, and her court was based very much around her: she was the sun, Gloriana, and the rest of them orbited her in a highly stylized kind of relationship. I didn't know until later about the thorny interactions between Elizabeth and her ladies -- she could be profoundly jealous, and flat-out hated it when they tried to meddle in politics, which would have made for difficulties in my plot -- but I did know that a gentleman in Elizabeth's court would automatically be entangled in the myth of the Virgin Queen, in a way that a woman wouldn't.

Which points directly at the less-immediate answer to the question of why the genders fell out as they did. To get at that one, let me step back a moment and explain where this book came from.

As some of you already know, it was inspired by, and at a few select points based on, a role-playing game I ran in 2006. The system we used was Changeling: The Dreaming, one of the World of Darkness games put out by White Wolf, a company best known for Vampire: The Masquerade, the granddaddy of all vampire role-playing. My game was set in London, at different points in the city's history, so when I decided to run it, one of the first things I did was pick up the Changeling sourcebook White Wolf had published for the island of Great Britain.

My apologies to anybody in the audience who may be associated with White Wolf, but Isle of the Mighty is a terrible, terrible book. At least the England section is -- I didn't pay much attention to Wales or Scotland. Maybe it's better if you're running a Mage game; I know the book was published as something of a crossover between the two systems, and God knows the material is weighted toward the latter. As a Changeling book, though, it was a complete disappointment. The fictional history of England contained almost nothing of faeries in it, and what was there made no sense to me. England was ruled for five hundred years by a nocker named Albion? Really? And the only thing of significance during his entire reign was a jumping contest between a boggan and a pooka?

I read through it once -- blinked -- read it a second time, shook my head, and tossed it aside. I would just have to write my own faerie history of England. And the first thing I thought up was Invidiana.

I wanted something iconic, you see, something resonant with English history; my brain went straight to Elizabeth the First and offered up her dark mirror. Invidiana, the shadow cast by Gloriana. She was, quite literally, the first piece of actual content I created for the game -- I think before I even knew for sure what the game's plot would be (though I knew its structure before anything else). And the fact that Invidiana came first -- in a faerie game -- isn't an accident.

Gloriana, the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth was a woman, and unlike her sister and immediate predecessor Mary, she didn't have a husband. To legitimize her rule, she and her advisors deliberately made her out to be something more than human. They mythologized her, created an iconography, built her up through literature and art to be this wondrous symbol of England. And, thanks to her remarkable longevity -- helped along by that lack of a husband; she didn't have to worry about dying in childbirth -- her mythology imprinted itself on history, to the point where even your average American schoolchild may well have heard of her.

Bear in mind, this isn't what they wanted to do. Elizabeth's advisers begged her to marry and beget an heir; the notion of an unmarried woman on the throne was hair-raising enough, but the murkiness of the succession after her was nothing short of terrifying. The mythology was a stopgap, a way to stave off chaos, not a goal in its own right. But it worked. And maybe it breathed new life into an old trope.

Elizabeth was a faerie queen. (Just one who happened to be, y'know, human.) She was beautiful -- well, she had been when she was young, and leveraged everything sixteenth-century clothing and makeup and wigs could do to preserve that image as she grew to be forty, fifty, very nearly sixty years of age. She held men in thrall both with desire and fear; she was witty and a tremendous flirt, but also inherited her father's legendary rages. And she cultivated a degree of unpredictability, because she couldn't afford to let the men around her grow complacent; she knew very well how easy it would be for them to shunt her out of the way. In order to maintain her position, she had to be something other than human. I've heard that Lewis Carroll meant his Queen of Hearts to be a caricature of Victoria, but thanks to the way that later adaptations tend to conflate her with the Red Queen, I've always viewed her more as a caricature of Elizabeth -- where by "always," I mean "ever since I learned Elizabeth frequently threatened to cut people's heads off." Either way, I don't think it's an accident that we have so much faerie fiction set during her reign, featuring faerie queens and mortal men. The pairing suggested itself to William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream; note that Oberon, while present, doesn't get a romance of his own. And, of course, Edmund Spenser wrote a very lengthy allegorical poem called The Faerie Queene, which you may have heard of. Small wonder if modern authors follow in their footsteps.

I could have made a faerie king, I suppose -- somebody like Oberon -- and told a story about how that's why Elizabeth never married, because she'd fallen in love with an Otherworldly man. But the truth is, I didn't even think of that possibility until I was writing this address. No, it had to be a woman: immortal and unaging, as Elizabeth herself was not. A true faerie queen for the age. Before I ever conceived of the novel, I had laid the foundation in my own mind, that the Otherworld -- at least in that period -- belonged to the women. And so when I set out to rework the story, Elizabeth's courtier was a man, and Invidiana's was a woman.

Once you set a pattern, you tend to stick with it. Midnight Never Come was originally intended to be a stand-alone, but I later decided to continue the series through history, and found myself carrying on as I'd begun. By the start of In Ashes Lie, my original mortal was long dead, but Lune was still around; I therefore needed to create a new man -- two men, actually -- to be her counterpart. Structural reasons meant I couldn't keep her as my protagonist forever, so A Star Shall Fall shifts focus to some new characters, but the pattern still holds; Galen, the hero, is mortal, and Irrith, the heroine, is a faerie.

After a while, though, you notice your patterns, and start thinking it might be refreshing to break them. Which is why for the Victorian book of the series, With Fate Conspire, I've turned my own structure on its head: the book centers on a skriker named Dead Rick and a Whitechapel girl named Eliza. A faerie man and a mortal woman; it changes the dynamic. They see different faces of their respective worlds. And I think it affected the way I have the two of them relate, though how much that has to do with gender, and how much to do with this being the fourth book of the series, I don't know. I'm trying to do fresh things with each installment, on more than just one front, to keep both me and my readers interested.

So that's my answer for why I originally followed the common pattern. What about all the other writers out there, though, from the ballad-singers to modern novelists? How come they did it this way? What do you get by associating Faerie with women, and vice versa?

I can only speculate. Which is, I admit, a dangerous thing to do; I know how often reviewers are wrong about my reasons for the choices I make while writing. So I'll play it safe, and speculate about a guy who's been dead for nearly a century. Let's go back to H. Rider Haggard's novel, She.

I don't know enough about Haggard to guess whether he had any notion of Faerie in mind when he created the character of Ayesha, She Who Must Be Obeyed. My guess is that he probably didn't, since his novel is firmly in the pulp adventure tradition, and uses the conceits of that genre. What he had in his mind instead may have been a more fundamental concept, and one that is potentially troubling.

Let's look at the society he set up, the lost African kingdom of Kor. Of course it's African; in Haggard's era -- the book was first published in serialized form from 1886 to 1887 -- if you wanted a lost kingdom, you most likely stuck it in Africa or South America, or maybe on some random Pacific island. Somewhere there's a handy jungle. It's a reflection of European colonialism, as white guys from the cold environs of northwestern Europe went around conquering darker-skinned people from the hot parts of the planet. They had their arctic adventures too, of course -- but those areas are much more sparsely inhabited, so the narratives of cold-weather colonialism are frequently a story of Man vs. Nature, rather than Man vs. Primitive Man. The latter generally had a strong overtone of strangeness, the exotic -- the Other, with a capital O.

You may have guessed by now that I have an academic background. My undergraduate degree is in archaeology and folklore, and I completed the coursework for a Ph.D in cultural anthropology and folklore. This has given me an uncomfortable amount of familiarity with how white intellectuals in Haggard's day conceived of those aforementioned darker-skinned people from the hot parts of the planet. Late Victorian anthropologists wrote extensively about such people, working from sources such as the reports of Christian missionaries, the complaints of exploitative tradesmen, and their own fertile imaginations. Reliable data, all of it, I'm sure.

Late Victorian anthropology is rife with the binary of Us vs. Them. Us, of course, was white male Protestant upper-middle-class England and America -- since I was reading English-language scholarship -- which was, of course, the pinnacle of human physical and cultural evolution. Them was, well, everything else, in varying degrees of inferiority. (In current American politics, Us frequently translates to white evangelical lower-middle-class Midwest, since "Us" generally maps to whoever's busy being afraid of Them.) The finer details can change, but in Western thought at least, there are certain characteristics that tend to be assigned to Them, the Other, who are not like the Self. Dark-skinned. "Savage," wherever that bar is being placed this week. Heathen in religion, which is to say mystical and irrational. And feminine. Edward Said's hugely influential work on Orientalism outlined exactly those characteristics, and it applies to more than just the Middle Eastern regions he was focused on.

Some of you here in the audience may be familiar with, or even have attended, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, more efficiently known as ICFA. It's an academic conference in Florida, with paper presentations and all that good stuff, and each year has a particular theme. A few years ago, when I heard the theme for the next conference was going to be "encountering the Other," I joked that I would write a paper on the drow -- the dark elves from Dungeons & Dragons -- and I would title it "Drow: The Black Hole of Otherness." It wouldn't have been much of a paper; as I said at the time, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel -- dead fish -- because the drow are pretty much every characteristic of Otherness rolled up into one appalling package. What I ended up writing instead was a textual history about how subsequent writers, both of the novel and role-playing game varieties, have tried to rehabilitate the concept of the drow into something more nuanced and less offensive. (Short form of my conclusion: their success has been marginal at best, because their starting point is so very, very terrible.) If you're not sure what I mean by the Other, just go look at the dark elves; they'll show you everything you need to know.

That, I suspect, is what Haggard had in mind -- consciously or unconsciously -- when he wrote She. For a pulp adventure story like his, tension and narrative excitement comes out of the collision between the comfortable, familiar Self of the Englishman and the terrifying Other of the tropics. The Amahagger, the people of Kor, are therefore primitives, cut off from anything an Englishman would recognize as "civilization;" in case the reader harbors any doubts as to their degeneracy, they try to eat Mahomed, the Arab porter hired by the protagonist. So far, so good - - they certainly aren't like Us -- but for that extra touch of Otherness, he puts them under the rule of a woman. And not a nice, domestic, married Queen like Victoria, abundantly productive of children and willing to leave much of the work of government to men, but a beautiful, despotic sorceress, whose very existence is an affront to the civilized order of things.

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society. It's instructive to notice that in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, the three "exotic" cultures on the fringes of the mainland -- the desert Aiel, the seafaring Atha'an Miere, and the conquering Seanchan -- all have noticeably different gender dynamics than the more "central" nations. Most of the warrior societies among the Aiel are male only, but one consists solely of women; in the Seanchan military, women rise to high rank; and all of the Sea Folk ships are captained by women. These things are deeply startling to the mainland-born protagonists, when laid against the more cosmetic differences between, say, Andor and Arad Doman. And, of course -- can't resist taking a few potshots at the dead fish -- the matriarchal arrangements of the drow are one of their most prominent characteristics.

Haggard refrains from making Ayesha, She Who Must Be Obeyed, an African woman; if I had to speculate, I'd say it's because she's powerful, and while the canonical Other of the Victorian age is frightening, it's also no match for the superior intellect and capability of the white man. A white woman, of course, is good enough to subdue the primitives, but still weak enough to be defeated by the superior sex. But she dwells among the Other, and her power is likewise not of Us: she's mystical and irrational, unlike the scientific and rational men who encounter her. Turn Ayesha into a man, and aside from the weird consequences that would have for the plot -- for starters, He Who Must Be Obeyed would also be He Who Is Gay -- the tension of his heroes' encounter with the exotic would be halfway defused. (Gay may also be seen as scary, but it's a different kind of scary.) The ruler of the Amahagger needs to be a woman, for the story to have its full effect.

By its very nature, Faerie stands in opposition to the characteristics we associate with modern society. It's magical, not scientific. It's irrational; why do faeries become confused when a man turns his clothes inside out? Their realm is frequently associated with nature -- forest glens, green meadows, toadstool rings, caverns under the hill -- though modern fiction has been sticking them in cities at least since Wizard of the Pigeons. Heck, we even talk about the Otherworld, with a capital O. No wonder Faerie is ruled by Queens.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up a point that some of you may have already seen for yourselves. I talk about this pattern, mortal men and faerie women -- but how far does it go? Is this universal, or is it very culture-specific?

I don't actually know. My folkloric knowledge hits a great many parts of the world -- Japan, Mesoamerica, India, Scandinavia, Egypt -- but I'm a well-read dilettante, not a specialist. The examples I've been quoting have been largely confined to the British Isles; I've talked about Celtic mythology and Scottish ballads, novels set in Britain or -- in Haggard's case -- written by British authors.

This isn't an accident. I mentioned before that I thought about writing my keynote address on the topic of what constitutes a faerie. It's something I've spent a lot of time pondering these last few years, ever since I started writing the Onyx Court series. You see, when I began planning my own foray into Elizabethan faerie fiction, one of the first questions I asked was myself was how I wanted to handle the fantasy side. I briefly toyed with the notion of filing off more of the Changeling serial numbers by making the Onyx Court pan-supernatural, with vampires and werewolves and the like, but I dropped that idea when I realized sixteenth-century England had very little in the way of stories about vampires and werewolves. Which, aside from being the right choice, got me thinking about the importance of the time period to the fantasy, as well as to the real-world history.

A lot of urban faerie fantasy is syncretic: it grabs mystical things from all around the world and tosses them into the salad bowl together. You have not just elves but also kitsune driving sports cars around L.A. Neighboring houses might have domovoi and brownies keeping things tidy. That's a perfectly valid way of approaching the matter; like comparative studies, syncretism can highlight interesting similarities and differences, so that you find yourself pondering the variations between the Swan Lake story, the swan connections of the Norse valkyries, and the swan transformation of the Children of Lir. But in sixteenth century London, you wouldn't likely see a kitsune running around. So I decided to stick closer to home -- in fact, as close to home as I could. Not just British faeries, but English.

And boy, was that decision eye-opening. Very little of the faerie folklore we have comes from the midlands and southern parts of England, the areas around London. A lot of the folklore is Irish: I cut that away. Lots of Scottish and Welsh, too: okay, we're on the right island now, but still a bit far afield, since those areas are much more heavily Celtic. Cut those away, and you're looking at Cornwall and Yorkshire. Closer, but still pretty far from London, and the things I had left -- galley-beggars, lubberkins, and so on -- aren't nearly so well-known as your brownies and sidhe.

What I got from this process was a real awareness of the extent to which"faeries," as we tend to think of them, are a regional phenomenon. Most of the characteristics and images that leap to mind are Celtic in origin, with a healthy dose of Germanic for leavening. In other words, faeries are basically a north-western European idea.

Without a doubt, other parts of the world have their own supernatural creatures -- but they don't necessarily map to the categories and expectations formed by European folklore. Kitsune are like pookas, in certain respects . . . but treating them as types of the same thing obscures the differences -- usually to the detriment of the non-European example, as its specificity gets erased. Apsaras do not sort themselves into Seelie and Unseelie Courts. Nunnehi do not offer the same kinds of help as dryads. Genies don't fear iron, and some of them are practicing Muslims, totally unafraid of holy things.

So when I say that Faerie is ruled by Queens, I'm talking about a very specific region of it, because I don't really know what's beyond those borders. Is the pattern of mortal men paired with faerie women as common in other parts of the world? I only have scattered bits of data, which might more properly be called "anecdotes." Japan has any number of tales concerning Buddhist monks who run afoul of seductive kitsune; that fits the trope. On the other hand, Zeus pursues more human lovers than all the Greek goddesses combined. Do deities count as faeries? Where's the line between myths and other kinds of folklore? (Don't answer that one, please. Folklorists have been arguing that question for over a hundred years now, and still haven't found an answer everybody likes.) Do Polynesian cultures tell stories about something like selkie brides? Who rules the faerie societies of sub-Saharan Africa, kings or queens? Do they even have rulers of that sort? Do they have faeries, as we would conceive of them?

I don't have a good answer for what a faerie is. I have an answer that works for me -- immortal and magical creatures, not necessarily trustworthy, who were never human -- but that's an Onyx Court answer, crafted so as to help me draw a dividing line between what might show up in the books, and what won't. If I were still in academia, I wouldn't try to use it in a paper; it needs a lot more thinking through. Your own definition may be different, especially if you're familiar with the folklore of a different part of the world.

But when we're talking about things on the northwestern European model, it's frequently a matter of queens and ladies, nymphs and hags, enchantresses and fallen stars. This can be a thing of power -- but it can also be problematic, when the faeries are women because women are unpredictable and incomprehensible. We don't want to Other ourselves all the time, even if the costumes are purty.

(And I say that as somebody who hopes to be wearing a very purty costume tomorrow night.)

Maybe the answer is to follow the Carmilla model -- or, more precisely, the Christina Rossetti model. Give me a faerie woman plus a mortal woman -- with or without lesbianism -- so that femininity doesn't get exiled to either side of the fence. I like imagining myself as a faerie, but I also like being rational, compassionate, and everything else mortals are known for. I don't want to choose between being Self and Other.

Sirens recap

I have a lot to say about Sirens. Con reports aren't something I usually do in detail, but this was my first experience with the con, my first con of that particular sort, and my first time being a Guest of Honor; unsurprisingly, this produces Thoughts. I'll put them behind the cut, but for those who don't want to read the whole shebang, here's the short form:

It was amazing.

If your idea of a good con is one where you can spend pretty much your whole weekend in really good conversations about books, or hang out without feeling there's a divide between the Authors and the Attendees, or get actual face time with the Guests of Honor, you should take a look at Sirens. I'm going to try to go back next year if I can, which should tell you something right there.

Also, Vail is pretty stunning in early October.

For more detail, follow me behind the cuts.

I opted to come out a day early so as to join the staff and some of the attendees for a supper the night before the con. This was a good choice for many reasons, starting with the fact that it gave me an additional day in which to fix the Utter Disaster I discovered upon arriving: when I repacked one of the suitcases that morning, I'd left out a crucial piece of my costume. (The underskirt, which shows through the gap in the overskirt.) A couple of frantic telephone calls later, my sister-in-law went to our place, retrieved the missing bit, and promised to overnight it to us the following day. This boded well for my peace of mind, as it meant I wouldn't have to panic about what would happen if it failed to show up at noon on the day of the masquerade.

Anyway, then there was supper, at which I continued the process (begun on the shuttle out from Denver) of getting to know the attendees, as we bonded over Tam Lin and Dealing with Dragons and other beloved favorites. The staff also began the process of utterly spoiling me for any future GoH gigs. First, they presented me with the GoH Survival Basket: a huge assortment of headache medicine, cough drops, Emergen-C, hand sanitizer, tea, hot cocoa, ginger candies, sunscreen, lip balm, water bottle, pad of paper, pencil, and the most bling-tastic emergy board I've ever laid eyes on. (The entire back is covered in rhinestones.) Plus other things I don't recall; it basically added up to everything I might possibly need to stay healthy and look presentable for my GoH duties. They also gave me a painting, done by the con-chair's mother, of Lune.

!!!!!

No seriously: I got a framed piece of art as a GoH thank-you gift. I seriously doubt this is standard operating procedure for most cons; I certainly didn't expect it here. This was a good omen for things to come.
The rest of the attendees rolled in on the second day. Since the programming didn't begin until evening, with Holly Black's keynote address, those of us already in Vail spent the day lounging around enjoying the absolutely stunning weather. (It was about sixty degrees and sunny; kniedzw and I wandered about two miles outside just because we felt like it.) They are not kidding, by the way, about the altitude; going up one flight of stairs put me out of breath, and I was very glad for the sunscreen in my survival basket. We hung out with attendees, had adventures in trying to find an early dinner, then came back for the reception and keynote.

Holly was very entertaining, talking about how her warped childhood shaped her as a fantasy writer. (Warped = asking your mother, "are the monsters going to get me?" and her answering, "probably not.") She also taught the audience how to con people. I tried, and failed, not to be nervous; my own keynote was scheduled for the next day, and I knew it wouldn't be nearly as funny as Holly's. Plus I didn't have any pretty slides to put up, either. But afterward I lingered in the room chatting with people, finally meeting shvetufae in person, being introduced to Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon, thanking sarahtales for some recent help, and more. Somehow we ended up talking about Chernobyl; don't ask me how these things happen.
Programming finally got going in earnest on Friday. I rolled myself out of bed at what for me constitutes an unholy hour -- 8 a.m. -- and went off to my panel, "Fairies Come to Our Town," where between the two of them Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling utterly schooled me on the history of urban fantasy. (I made notes for corrections to my keynote address based on what they said.) Then I hung around for an enlightening panel composed of Shveta Thakrar ( shvetufae ), Andrea Horbinski ( starlady38 ), Cindy Pon ( cindy_pon ), and Valerie Frankel about non-European fairy folklore, where I made a fabulous discovery: starlady38 is stuffed chock-full of knowledge that will be useful for a certain Sekrit Projekt of mine. And she lives near me, too! I spent about half the weekend picking her brain, for which I thank her. :-)

After that, I wanted to go to the paper on Aboriginal Australian folklore, but instead had adventures with the con staff's printer. As I'd discovered the previous night, the hotel wanted to charge me $1.08 per page for simple black-and-white text printing, which was nothing short of absurd. So the information desk let me use theirs, though convincing it to cooperate took some doing; for a while there, I wondered if I'd have to read my keynote from the computer.

Speaking of keynotes, yes, I was definitely still nervous. I've done readings, and conference papers, and I've taught classes, but a keynote is its own kind of beast, and not one I'd ever wrestled with before. I wrote it like a conference paper, in the sense that I tried to type up something that would sound good when spoken, but ended up ad-libbing a fair bit of it; between the low placement of the podium and Holly's casual example the night before, reading the thing verbatim didn't seem right. I stuck close enough to my points, though, that I can justifiably post my original script for anybody who wants to know what I said.

That was one hurdle down. I went to the roundtable on queerness and fairy tales, which Malinda Lo ably chaired, then parked myself out in the foyer for the afternoon tea and signing, whereupon something happened that I'd never personally experienced before: I had a line. Generally not more than two or three people deep, but for a while there it was constant; every time I finished signing books for someone, another person would be waiting to step into her place. The bookstore that had set up a table in the foyer was doing energetic business, as far as I could tell, as they'd brought books for all the attending authors, not just the Guests of Honor. Several people told me they'd enjoyed the keynote, which was good to hear; I thought it had gone well, but those things can be hard to judge.

After that, I should have gone to Ellen's Thomas the Rhymer presentation, but I felt a bit wrung out, and deeply nervous about what I was doing later that night. So I went back to the room and crashed there for a bit, before heading out to Japanese Food Adventure Take Two (we'd tried and failed the previous night). The Japanese restaurant proved to be the size of a postage stamp, and we hadn't made reservations, so my group of seven squished in with janni , lnhammer , and Artemis Whose LJ I Don't Know, and a good time was had by (hopefully) all. It turned out to be a good thing that I'd offered to swap reading times with Terri Windling, who is as much of a morning person as I am a night owl; clearing our bill took long that I missed most of her reading, which made me sad -- inasmuch as the sadness could get through the panic wibbling in the back of my head, since once she was done I had to step up there and try the Great Accent Experiment. Which went over swimmingly, as documented in that post, and I just about melted in relief.

I stuck around for Holly's reading, then bailed before the spoilers began, and went up to my room to finish prepping for the next day's masquerade. My missing skirt had arrived, and I managed to sew together the two halves of my crown without breaking anything; along with the keynote and the accents, that damned crown was the third major stress in my con prep, since one piece of it had broken during construction, and I was afraid it would do so again. (It survived not only the stitching but me smacking the thing with my hand the next night, so apparently it isn't as fragile as I feared.)
I wanted to sleep in, but also wanted to make full use of my time at the con, and the latter impulse won. Woke up at 8 again and went to the panel on female friendships in fantasy, wherein Holly, Mette Ivie Harrison ( metteharrison ), Janni Lee Simner ( janni ), Rachel Manija Brown ( rachelmanija ), and Sherwood Smith ( sartorias ) said many thought-provoking things. Took a break, then went to hear Mallory Loehr (editor of Tamora Pierce, among others) talk about YA publishing; then it was off to lunch again for Terri's keynote, which apparently had her just about as nervous as I'd been about mine. But she did brilliantly, telling old and unbowdlerized versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Snow White."

Alas, I couldn't go to the panel on the Golden Age of YA, because I had to run my own workshop on writing fight scenes; I think it was generally agreed that we all wanted to go to each other's events, and were vexed that we couldn't. For those who missed mine, though, I do intend to start writing a series of posts on the topic; you'll miss the hilarity of our sample scene (which involved Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fighting right there in the room, with all of us as innocent bystanders/potential casualties), but I'll be able to dig into my points in more depth. Then it was time for more tea, and more falling down in my room, because the Stress Monster was back to bite; the launch party for A Star Shall Fall was coming up, my last professional obligation for the weekend, and I was praying everything would work.

It did. Getting dressed took longer than I wanted, and the unexpected death of my iPod battery required routing the music through my laptop, but my costume looked like I'd hoped it would, my crown didn't fall apart, and there were some freaking stunning outfits in the costume contest. There were at least half a dozen I thought deserved an award, and only the revelation that one of the women I was considering was staff (and therefore ineligible for a prize) saved me from an impossible choice in the end. I was extra pleased when the giveaway for A Star Shall Fall went to one of the other costume front-runners. For my own part, I costumed non-specifically as Lune; by that I mean I was wearing her colors (blue and black and silver) in the form of an Elizabethan dress, but not attempting to recreate anything from the books or make myself look like her. As soon as people get pictures up online, I'll provide visuals for the whole thing.

Party done, we processed to the masquerade, where I learned how odd it feels to dance in a farthingale and spent most of my time sitting in the outer room, taking up about half an acre with my skirts. More good conversations -- they never stopped, really, except when I was having Hermit Time in my room -- until wearing a corset started to get to me and I went upstairs to pack and crash.
I've discovered I'm fond of the Never Quite Ending format for a con: there was a breakfast (with auction of prizes and announcement of next year's theme and Guests of Honor), followed by a shuttle ride back to Denver, followed by hanging out in a restaurant until people's flights rolled around, so that kniedzw and I weren't alone until we headed off through security. It's a gradual transition out of con-space and back into the rest of the world, which feels more pleasant to me. (And god knows it makes waiting on the airport less boring.) Travel went smoothly for once, and then we were back in California, and I flopped down on the couch to read and not talk to anybody. Writers: rampaging introverts who can pretend to be extroverts for a few days, so long as we're allowed to collapse afterward.
If any of this intrigues you, I'm pleased to say that next year's theme is "monsters," and the Guests of Honor will be Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor, and Laini Taylor. Certain friends of mine -- you know who you are -- should really really think about going, as it will be a perfect opportunity to talk about weird bodies, the monstrous feminine, women and the New Weird, etc. Sirens is admittedly expensive, even with the entirety of Vail being discounted for the off-season, but you can present an academic paper there, chair a panel, host a roundtable, etc, all of which would look perfectly respectable on a professional front. And it's really lovely to do that all in the context of a retreat, as the con-chair put it to me: sitting in beautiful and luxurious surroundings, with a crowd of people who care passionately about the same things you do.

A crowd of women, really -- and if I have one complaint about Sirens, that would be it. So far as I could tell, there were literally three men among the attendees. On the one hand, it's nice to have Sirens feel like a safe space for women, but I don't want to feel that "women in fantasy" is a subject of interest only to women. So if the con sounds nifty to you, whether or not you're able to go yourself, then please spread the word, to anyone you think might be interested -- whether they be female, male, or none of the above. It really is a wondeful con, that I would love to see grow and thrive.

another brief missive, from near the end of the con

OH HOLY GOD THE OTHER THING WORKED, TOO.

(The other thing, in this case, being my costume. Pictures will follow. Only the crown bit was the subject of the Boggan Deathmatch a while ago; the rest, I paid someone to make, because sewing it myself while also finishing With Fate Conspire would have required paying a lot more money in psychiatrist bills.)

Early breakfast tomorrow, then shuttle back to Denver, flight back to home. This has been fabulous, and there will be a detailed report.

brief missive from mid-con

OH HOLY GOD IT WORKED.

(The stunt I alluded to before? I read a selection from With Fate Conspire . . . complete with RP and cockney accents. One attendee with a British mother said that if she hadn't heard me speak in my natural voice, she wouldn't have known I was American. This is pretty much the best seal of approval I could hope for.)

(I still don't know that I'll try that stunt in public again, though.)

BCS shout-out

Popping in briefly from Sirens (so far: it's fabulous) to say that it's the second anniversary of Beneath Ceaseless Skies , which they're celebrating with a double issue. (And some really lovely artwork, too.)

Anybody who's read this journal for a while knows my love for BCS. They publish my kind of fantasy, the kind that has richly developed or evocative secondary worlds, ranging in style and content from the American frontier to Mesoamerica to Enlightenment France to India to Japan. And they do podcasts, too. From my personal experience, I can say the editor, Scott Andrews, is great to work with, and I'd go on with the praise but I haven't eaten yet and I should probably fix that before I fall over.

So instead let me just nudge you in the direction of the site, encouraging you to read, and to support BCS if you enjoy what you find. Bringing you this kind of fiction ain't cheap, and while they're a non-profit, they do need money to function. So if you like what they're doing, and want to see it go on for another two years or more, think about helping out.

Back to Sirens I go . . . .