Theodora Goss's Blog, page 39

The Kit Cornell Coat

Every writing workshop should begin with a clothing swap.

Well, I don't lay that down as a general rule, but our writing workshop began that way. With clothes on the floor, and all of us except Lev (who had not arrived yet) passing them around and trying them on. My favorite item from the clothing swap was a Kit Cornell coat that Terri Windling originally tried on but did not want. It fit me very well, so I brought it home with me. Here's what it looks like, but you can't really get a sense of it from a photograph. It's a subtle brocade of stripes and flowers, with a paisley cotton lining. And the sleeves are just above wrist length.

I miss the days when there were April Cornell stores everywhere. Back then, one could simply go in and browse. Now one has to go to the website instead, and the selection is much smaller.

But what I thought I would write about today, just a bit, is my writing group. It's a fantastic writing group. (I think I listed all the participants yesterday.) Sometimes things happen that change how you think about life, the universe, and everything. The writing group meeting was one of those things. So much happened that weekend, in just two days. Not all of it was the writing group: some of it was just socializing, talking to Terri and Delia and Ellen and Claire on the evening before the meeting. Or that morning, and swapping clothes, and getting a sense for who I am and what I want out of life.

One thing I know, post-meeting, is that I want to take my writing even more seriously than I have. I want the sort of life that professional writers have. I want to write every day, to have novels always going. That's like water to me, it's what I need to drink, and without it I start hallucinating. As though I had gone days in the desert, seeing only sand.

The question, of course, is how to get there, and I don't quite know the answer yet. But I do know that when you can't see far ahead of you, you can usually nevertheless see one or two steps ahead. What I can see is that the next step is writing the novel. So that's what I'll be doing over the next few months, getting a first draft together. How will I find the time? I'm not sure, but I'll have to, won't I?

Yesterday, I finally made time to get my hair cut. Here's what it looks like, nice and short.

I know, it doesn't seem that short! But it's five inches shorter than it was before I got it cut, so that's something. There's more cutting, sorting, organizing in my future, because I really do need to get my life into some semblance of order. I know the life I want to create for myself. It's just a question of whether I have the courage to do it, the will to work hard enough. I think I do. Anyway, when I lack courage or will, I can put on my Kit Cornell coat. And that will help.

More Writing News

It's probably time for me to post some writing news, isn't it?

First, as I'm sure you know, The Thorn and the Blossom has been out for more than a month now. It's gotten some lovely reviews from Publisher's Weekly and School Library Journal, as well as other publications and blogs. If you've read it and haven't written a review, please consider writing one on either Amazon or Goodreads!

Also, I have two new stories coming out. "Beautiful Boys" will be in Asimov's Science Fiction, and "Estella Saves the Village" will be in an anthology called Queen Victoria's Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Here is the Table of Contents:

Preface Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Introduction Terri Windling

"The Fairy Enterprise" by Jeffrey Ford

"From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvelous, Scheduled for Premiere at the "Great Exhibition (Before the Fire)" by Genevieve Valentine

"The Memory Book" by Maureen McHugh

"Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" by Delia Sherman

"La Reine D'Enfer" by Kathe Koja

"For the Briar Rose" by Elizabeth Wein

"The Governess" by Elizabeth Bear

"Smithfield" by James P. Blaylock

"The Unwanted Women of Surrey" by Kaaron Warren

"Charged" by Leanna Renee Hieber

"Mr. Splitfoot" by Dale Bailey

"Phosphorus" by Veronica Schanoes

"We Without Us Were Shadows" by Catherynne M. Valente

"The Vital Importance of the Superficial" by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer

"The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown" by Jane Yolen

"A Few Twigs He Left Behind" by Gregory Maguire

"Their Monstrous Minds" by Tanith Lee

"Estella Saves the Village" by Theodora Goss

I think this is going to be a wonderful book, and can't wait for it to come out!

Also, "Pug," originally published in Asimov's, will be reprinted in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2012 Edition. As always, it's an honor to be included in Rich's anthology.

I've already told you about my other recent publications and upcoming reprints, so I won't tell you here, although I do have to update the About page, don't I? But what I do want to say here is that I had the most wonderful time in New York with my writing group, and I'm still processing the trip. By which I mean, seeing all those wonderful people writing, and hearing them talk about writing, has made me even more committed to my own writing. And I have to figure out how to spend more time doing it. I haven't written anything for a month, and it's driving me mildly crazy. I'm trying to plan a lot of writing time this summer, but I think it's time to get working on the novel I didn't finish last summer. I've finished my dissertation, so really, I ought to have time for it. (Although lately, I've felt as though I have no time to breathe.)

I want a writing career. And at this point, the only think standing in the way is my own commitment to other work. But the writing should be primary.

Spring Flowers

There's still snow on the ground. I know I haven't been very good about updating, but I've been very tired. There's been so much to do.

I spent last weekend in New York, where I met with my writing group for the first time. It's called The Injustice League and includes Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Catherynne Valente, Lev Grossman, Kathleen Howard, and Claire Cooney. I had the most wonderful time. And even more importantly, I learned so much from listening to the perspectives of such wonderful writers.

I'm going to write about it at some point, but tonight I'm so tired that I want to think about something completely different: spring flowers. There's still snow on the ground, and I'm tired of winter, so I'm going to talk about some of my favorite spring flowers. If I had the house I wanted, that witch's cottage, these are the flowers I would plant.

First, the species crocuses come up, poking through the snow. I used to scatter them all over the lawn.

And then come the snowdrops, so delicate, and the sturdy grape hyacinths. There's nothing quite so cheerful as a bunch of grape hyacinths in a vase.

At the same time, you can see the daffodils start to come up. My favorite of them is Thalia.

And them come the tulips, all the flowers taking their turns. I love the pink Angelique, like a small peony, and the dark burgundy Queen of the Night.

I'm doing this from memory, because it's been so long since I've planted a garden. (Too long.) I may be getting some of the blooming times wrong. And then there's my favorite spring flower of all, the strange and wonderful snake's head fritillary.

It looks so exotic, but it will grow almost anywhere.

Today, as I was driving along, I saw a witch hazel with yellow flowers all over it. That means spring is coming (the plants always know). It can't come soon enough for me.

(I almost forgot: all these flowers can be bought from, and the pictures are found in, the John Scheepers catalog, which is my favorite catalog for bulbs.)

Silence and Solitude

Last night, the snow began to fall. This morning, it looked like Narnia before Aslan, as winters tend to do around here. You expect to see the White Witch driving by on her sleigh.

Here is what it looked like last night, when the snow had begun falling:

Today, there were three inches of snow on the ground. (At least, I scraped three inches off the car.) I had originally planned to drive to the university, but the roads were covered with snow, so I thought it would be better to stay home. The bushes looked like this:

A day alone in a quiet house: that's heaven, for an introvert. It was lovely, just sitting and working. I haven't done that for a while. I've had so many errands to run, so many things to do. I feel as though I'm always going somewhere, always rushing around. But I need peace and silence and solitude to do my best work. That's what I got today.

Here I am, working on this snowy day:

Tomorrow, I have to take a bus to New York, and it will be a busy weekend. I'm glad I got to spend at least one day like this. When I get back, I have to look at my life, try to figure how to have more days like today. Because these are the sorts of days I need to write. I haven't been writing at all for a while now, partly because I haven't had the time, but partly because I haven't had the peace of mind I need to write the sort of thing I write, the way I write it. You seen, I need to hear the story. And I hear it best in silence, or when there's some sort of noise I don't need to pay much attention to. Some classical music, the sound of driving. (I have a story coming out in Asimov's Science Fiction that I wrote on a bus on the way back from New York.) I'm not the sort of person who can write in a public place.

And my life is a very busy, public life. I teach seventy students, I receive between fifty and a hundred emails a day. Sometimes, I can barely keep up.

I need to incorporate solitude and silence into my life . . .

Mything Things

I'm mything things in my life. That has such a double meaning, doesn't it? On the one hand, I do feel as though I'm missing things mythic, and on the other I'm in the process of creating things mythic: I am mything.

I think I need to do more of it. I get so caught up in the mundane, and sometimes I forget to look beyond it. I was thinking about that as I read a blog post by Grace Nuth on Domythic Bliss about why we should decorate in a way that includes story, that is individual. It was a lovely post, as always. I think that's why I've been going to antiques stores and thrift stores, lately. I think I need more story in my life. That's why I've been buying things with stories of their own. The birdcage, for example. Or the wicker chair. Or the sewing cabinet. I don't know what those stories are, but they are written into every scratch in the paint, every scraped leg.

I'm not writing at the moment, which is difficult for me: I have so much else to do, and writing always seems to get pushed off somehow. I know that's wrong. I know the writing should take priority. So I'm going to have to rearrange my life somehow, to prioritize writing again. I'm just not quite sure how yet. But I'll get there.

I thought you might need some myth in your life as well, so I'm including two beautiful things in this post. The first is a song written by Amal El-Mohtar. I've posted it before, but that was a long time ago, and I have no doubt that you need to hear it again. Right?

The second is a video by Rima Staines. I may have posted it before as well. But again, repetition of a good thing is a good thing in and of itself.

So there you are, two beautiful things for your day.

In the Domythic Bliss blog post, Grace Nuth writes,

"The amazing artist (and incredible writer) Rima Staines recently wrote a post on the first day of 2012. I could summarize it here, but then you might not go over there and read it, so instead I'll just link it here so you have to! But in the post, she discusses the idea of a subtle revolution against the bland, homogenous and commercial aspect of modern society. I was definitely roused and inspired by the idea of this revolution or movement. It got me thinking about how we all are participating in a subtle revolution by trying to carry on and revive the folklore and fairy tales from our mythic history. We are like the green eco-movement, only our goal is to save folklore instead of nature (although of course the two go hand in hand!) We want to save the stories of the past, and create new ones."

I like the idea of a subtle revolution. I think I could be a subtle revolutionary. Viva la Revolución!

Being Overwhelmed

My index finger is sticky with spray-paint.

I know that I haven't been posting regularly. Here's what happened. First, the book came out and I had the publicity to do. And then I was given an important project that I had to finish by last week. And in the midst of all that, I had my regular schedule of teaching.

As a result? I was overwhelmed. It was too much: stress, worry, late nights. Too much sensory input, both external and internal. I'm not sure I can describe what that's like, for anyone who doesn't already know. What you end up feeling is a sense of complete exhaustion, and yet you can't settle down to anything. I recognized it in a blog started recently by a friend of mine: Girl Unlocked. It's not exactly what I experience, because we're different people, but it's similar. And it leads to a similar impulse to clean up one's life, to make things better.

This was the first weekend for two months that I have not been drowning in deadlines, so although I have plenty of work to do, I knew that I had to get out and do something. Oscar Wilde (I think through Lord Henry) says that "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul," and I have always taken that as sound medical advice. When your problems are existential, you have to act. So I acted.

I started by vacuuming the rug, which needed it rather badly, then sorting through all the clean clothes and deciding where they went. (Some in the closet, some into storage, some to be mended.) And then I worked on some things I had bought at my favorite thrift and antiques stores but had not had a chance to repair, repaint, whatever they needed. Would you like to see?

The first thing I did was spray-paint a wicker chair I had bought some time ago, as well as a birdcage I bought last week. What will I do with a birdcage? I haven't the faintest idea, although certainly not put birds in it, since I don't believe in keeping things with wings in cages. Or as pets.  But there was something magical about the birdcage.  It has fine lines, good proportions.  I'm sure I can find a use for it.

That's why I have spray-paint on my index finger. The spray-paint color is Blossom White, in case you were wondering. I hate the standard gloss white people seem to use on furniture, particularly wicker.

I also washed and dried an embroidered linen runner I had found.

It needs ironing, but it's quite pretty, and I thought it belonged with me rather than in a thrift store. And one can never have too much linen. (Although I have a closet full of antique linen and silver. But that's what happens when you inherit quite a lot of it.)

There were some things that didn't need fixing, like the wicker basket I found. Here you can see it on a sewing cabinet I picked up several weeks ago, in front of an engraving I bought at Boskone. The engraving needs to be reframed. (A green engraving in a green mat in a green frame? Seriously? If anything in your house looks "decorative," you're doing it wrong.)

The sewing cabinet is not going to be a sewing cabinet, of course. It's going to be a place to keep jewelry. A jewelry cabinet. The legs are a little water-damaged. I'm not sure what I'll do about that yet.

If you open the top drawer, you can see places where spools used to be kept. I think I'll leave that as is, although it does need cleaning, and fixing because there are stray wires and the like.  And the stubs of old broken dowels that need to be removed. (The small painted box comes from Poland, and it's where I keep my rings.)

So I spray-painted and washed, and then I went out and visited my favorite antiques store to see if something I had seen last time was still there. And it was. I'll write about that another time. It's just a small thing, a wire basket for holding letters, but I haven't decided yet whether to paint it or leave it as is.

This was the sort of day on which I wore my oldest jeans, a black t-shirt and cardigan, and beat-up Keds with no shoelaces. And pearls. Why the pearls? I have no idea, they just seemed appropriate. It looked something like this, although this is an old picture I never posted and does not include the pearls:

I have a lot of work ahead of me this week, and I'm very tired. But I'm going to start trying to post again regularly. It's better for me to do so, I think. It allows me to talk through things, even when they're simply what I did that day, like spray-painting birdcages and wicker chairs.

The Boskone Reading

This weekend was Boskone. Have I mentioned that? I don't remember what I've said here anymore. I've been so very, very busy, and at this point I'm completely exhausted. I can barely type. But I did want to post two things today, and then in the next week I'll start trying to catch up.

First, The Thorn and the Blossom received a wonderful review from Publishers Weekly:

The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story

Theodora Goss. Quirk, $16.95 (82p) ISBN 978-1-59474-551-5

Evelyn Morgan is a university student struggling to lead her own life despite others' expectations; Brendan Thorne's troubles begin when he loses his wife to heart failure and subsequently quits his job. A chance meeting leads to their falling in love around the centerpiece of a medieval Cornish version of the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and from then on their lives and relationship seem to be a modern-day parallel of the frustrated romance between Gawan and his beloved, Elowen. But Goss (In the Forest of Forgetting) presents no ordinary linear tale: the reader is treated to both characters' stories in parallel on alternate sides of an accordion-style book, letting the reader decide which story to begin with. The fantasy elements are light, revolving mostly around Gawan's story and Evelyn's visions of fairies and trolls. Overall this makes the tale align more with old-fashioned romance than pure speculative fiction, but Goss' appealing characters and modern magic atmosphere will continue to attract a following. Illus.

And second, the reading I did from The Thorn and the Blossom at Boskone was taped! The videos are available on YouTube, but you can see them below. Reading with me is my wonderful editor, Stephen Segal, who actually came up with the idea for the physical format of the book. (I came up with the idea for the story, of course.) The first video is the reading itself, and the second video is a Q&A session we had afterward. I hope you like!

I'll get back to blogging regularly soon. Probably some time next week, once I've recovered a bit. It's been exhausting, but there's a good reading why I'm doing all the work I'm doing. I'll talk about it, eventually . . .

Fantasy Love Stories

Honestly, I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through the next two weeks. I've been given a project to complete, on top of everything else I'm doing right now, and in order to complete it on time, I'm working whenever I can – until late into the night. I'm getting four or five hours of sleep a night, which is not good for me.

So for the next two weeks I'm going to be posting sporadically, and my posts may not be all that interesting. I apologize in advance . . .

Today, I'm going to post about something that came out online just today: my slideshow on the top ten fantasy love stories for Huffington Post. Here's the introduction:

When you're in love, it feels as though you're living in a fairy tale. The prince or princess of your dreams has chosen you, and you're going to spend the rest of your lives together, happily ever after, in a castle on a hill with singing furniture and animals that do all the cleaning. Right?

Of course, real life never works out that way (show me a mouse that does dishes, for example). But fantasy does tell us some important underlying truths about the experience of being in love. There's a reason that romance has always had a fantasy element. (Think of Odysseus falling in love with the sorceress Circe, who turned his men into swine, or Oberon and Titania deciding the fates of lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Mr. Rochester asking Jane Eyre if she is one of the fairies). Romance is a sort of magic: it changes our perception of the world, making us believe that we've found the person we are meant to be with, that the two of us are truly one. It can fill us with an ecstatic sense of joy and make us feel as though the furniture could sing – if we just listened closely enough. But fantasy also shows us some darker truths about love. The modern popularity of paranormal romance has its roots in fairy tales about women marrying bears, and bulls, and other beasts, which reveal that the one we love is not, in fact, a version of ourselves, but another being – one we can never know completely. Love can overcome those differences, but they are still differences. Fairy tales also reveal that love is difficult: sometimes you have to climb a glass mountain in iron shoes or confront a bloodthirsty ogress. I think some of the truest and most important stories about love are fantasy stories, which show us both love's power and its complexity.

Here are my choices for the top 10 fantasy love stories, both ancient and modern. Fair warning: none of them involves sparkly vampires!

I'm going to give you my top ten here, but in order to read why I've selected them, you'll have to go over to the Huffington Post slideshow! So, without further ado, the top ten! (In my mind, I ranked them 10 to 1, but the slideshow allows you to rank them yourself.)

10. The Myth of Eros and Psyche

9. Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire in The Time Traveler's Wife

8. Richard St. Vier and Alec Campion in Swordspoint

7. The Ballad of Tam Lin and Janet

6. Tristran and Yvaine in Stardust

5. Morgon and Raederle in The Riddle-Master Trilogy

4. The Legend of Tristan and Iseult

3. Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings

2. The Fairy Tale of Beauty and the Beast

1. Westley and Buttercup in The Princess Bride

Do you agree with my choices? Disagree? I'm interested in finding out . . .

Happy Valentine's Day!

Ratings and Reviews

I know, this is the way I always start nowadays: I'm very tired! But this has been a particularly tiring week.

I had a wonderful time at the reading on Tuesday night, and then a wonderful time meeting people at the Concord Bookshop today, and I'm going to post pictures. I'm also going to link to some of my favorite reviews of The Thorn and the Blossom.

But maybe tomorrow night. Tonight I'm too tired, and so I'm going to write about an issue that was raised on Tuesday night. An audience member asked me, how do you handle reviews? Because whenever you write a book, there will be positive reviews, and there will be negative ones. And as I told him, I don't think writers ever develop thicker skins. We can't. We have thinner skins than most people, and I think we need to be that way: it's what gives us the sensitivity to write, to create art.

So how do you handle reviews? Well, I read mine. Even the negative ones, partly because I find that I learn from them. When they're done well, they're like getting feedback from a critique partner. The good negative ones, I appreciate. And then there are the ones that say "This just wasn't my sort of thing" or "The book was stupid." Those I can't really learn from. (Make my next book not stupid. Got it.) Those are also the ones you need to put into perspective.

How, you ask. (Even if you didn't just ask that, you did. Trust me.) Here's what I do.

1. Go to Goodreads.

2. Look up James Joyce.

3. Read his one-star reviews.

Did you know that Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has (as of today) 2423 one-star reviews? This is JAMES FREAKING JOYCE. If he's going to get that many one-star reviews, I don't think I'm going to worry about mine.

Here's what some of those one-star reviews say:

This book is a very dry, written version of the Dead Poet's Society without Robin Williams.

I almost felt as though I was reading something written by someone with a severe case of ADHD, with an inability to focus on any central point for more than a moment.

The only reason I am giving it 1 star is because I didn't want anyone to think that I just forgot to rate it.

This review is based on a partial reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because I really couldn't force myself to read more than the first 25 pages (and page 99, to see if it had improved).

He may be the master of moderist lit and stream of conscious narration, but every time I try to have a Joyce appreciation moment, I flash back to an ex boyfriend who would call me at 4 a.m. to sigh into the phone for an hour before finally offering, "I feel abstract."

This was much more enjoyable than Ulysses, which is saying almost nothing.

There was no climax and that also bothered me.

I found it extremely difficult to get through (and this is coming from someone who read Atlas Shrugged in a week) and filled with the sort of run-on sentences that make children grow up to hate reading.

I read the beginning and chose to stop. I would rather read Vogon poetry, or stab myself repeatedly with a fork, than read Joyce.

That's probably enough, right? (I actually cleaned up some of the punctuation.) After all, you can go read them yourself. I should be clear and say that while I don't like everything James Joyce wrote equally, I do consider him a genius and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. And a man capable of exquisite prose. For example, here is the final paragraph of "The Dead":

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

The final sentence makes me shiver.

I'm not going to comment on those comments (and my opinion of Atlas Shrugged is unprintable), but I think they'll help you put reviews into perspective. Because we're talking about JAMES FREAKING JOYCE and some people aren't going to like him because they're looking for a climax.

As for ratings, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a 3.54, which is lower than Twilight, which has a 3.67. I'm not even going to comment on that one. But this is possibly worse: it's rated lower then Stephen Hero, which has a 3.64. Now that's just stupid, but it's also predictable because the people who read Stephen Hero are already Joyce fans, while Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is read by most high school students. If only your fans read you, your ratings will be higher.

Lev Grossman wrote an interesting article on ratings and reviews that I will discuss tomorrow. But I hope today's brief discussion of ratings and reviews has been helpful. Remember, I read my reviews, even the negative ones, and try to learn from them. But you can't take them entirely seriously.

Reading and Signing

I'm so tired! Honestly, if I didn't have a reading tomorrow, I'm not sure I would even try to write a blog post tonight. But I do have a reading, and then a signing later this week. (You can imagine that for an introvert, it's these public events that are so difficult. They make me want to find a cabin in the woods and just write. But when I do them, I do end up enjoying them, partly because I genuinely like meeting people. And I think it's good for me to do things that are difficult.)

So, here are the events.

The reading is tomorrow night, Tuesday the 7th at 7:00 p.m., at the Boston University Barnes and Noble in Kenmore Square. There is more information on the event on the Quirk Books website, as well as a Facebook page for the event.

And then, on Thursday, I'm going to be at the Concord Bookshop in Concord, Massachusetts, from 2:00-3:00. I'll be signing books and just generally hanging out, so come talk to me! The Concord Bookshop has an event page for the signing.

So there you have it, my two events for the week.

It's late and I don't have time to write more tonight, so I'll leave you with a sanctuary. (Sanctuaries are places you can go when the world seems too much with you. Some sanctuaries are physical, some are mental. This one is mental.)

It's the song "The Bonny Swans" by Loreena McKennitt:

I'm looking forward to both the reading and signing, but this is going to be a long week. And to be honest, I'll be glad when it's over.