Patrice Sarath's Blog, page 24

The Girl Crusoes by Mrs. Herbert Strang

My score of The Right Saint John‘s included a bonus; Several pages of other titles that the publisher puts out for young readers.  These books are separated by Books for Boys, Books for Girls, and Books for Children. It’s a treasure trove of research material. Of course the books for boys are adventures, and the books for girls are domestic stories, but here is this gem, proving that we’ve always known that girls also love a good adventure book.

The Girl Crusoes, by Mrs. Herbert Strang

It is a common experience that young girls prefer stories written for their brothers to those written for themselves. They have the same love of adventure, the same admiration for brave and heroic deeds, as boys; and in these days of women travellers and explorers there are countless instances of women displaying courage and endurance in all respects equal to that of the other sex.  Recognizing this, Mrs. Herbert Strang has written a story of adventure in which three English girls of the present day are the central figures, and in which the girl reader will find as much excitement and amusement as any boy’s book could furnish.

And lo — Project Gutenberg has it. Onto the Kindle it goes! I am looking forward to reading this one, especially after reading Emilie and the Hollow World. We need more adventure books for girls!

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The Right Saint John’s

I bought this old children’s book at an antique mall last weekend and was thoroughly enchanted.

The Right Saint John’s by Christine Chaundler was first published in 1921 by Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press.

It’s a classic British school story. Jacqueline Brown goes away to boarding school for the first time, when her parents have to go abroad for her father’s health. She finds herself at Saint John’s, a lovely little boarding school that probably made every girl reading it at the time run to their parents and beg to go to school. This school is nice. Girls get their own rooms. They can bring their pets. The teachers don’t make them study very hard, and they don’t really have to do anything very much. Most of the girls are just marking time until they come out and marry well.

I had just read Bright Young People, about London during the Jazz Age of the 1920s — the girls in this book are the younger sisters of those hard-partying 20-somethings who drank themselves to death between the wars.

But things are changing at Saint John’s. For one thing, the new headmistress is determined to raise the standards of the school. All the girls are appalled, and so are some of the teachers. The headmistress knows she is facing a tough headwind, so she is ecstatic that Jacqueline is a new student there. Because Jacqueline, like Harry Potter after her, is no ordinary kid.

She’s smart and determined to do well in school. She’s not wealthy so she knows she will have to earn a living, and she’s quite matter-of-fact about it. She does well in sports and loves hockey (a girl after my daughter’s heart!). She participates in the high jump against the nemesis girls’ school, and she wins, getting the grudging admiration of the rival school. Since the headmistress has been raising the standards for the girls, the girls have all been cheating. Someone has stolen the answer books from the teacher’s cupboard. Jacqueline sets an example and makes them stop.

In short, she could probably have taken on Voldemort too, just by being plucky and no nonsense.

The crisis of the book is not well set up and not well resolved — as it turns out, Jacqueline was supposed to go to the “other” Saint John’s but got on the wrong train. Oops. But because she’s so plucky and well liked, her grumpy and disgruntled uncle, who’s footing the bill, decides to let her stay. Crisis resolved in no time at all. But the book is so relentlessly good natured and instructional, I can’t say I minded.

I love these kinds of books. They are just so blatant about teaching children how to behave, and so cheerfully old-fashioned, it’s kind of awesome. Jacqueline is relentlessly good and so  very competent at what she does. And there are all sorts of nods to the classics — Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, etc. — in fact, Jacqueline even has to walk a plank just as Anne had to walk the ridgeline of the barn.

I know that this kind of book doesn’t work for girls nowadays. It isn’t particularly interesting, it’s episodic at best, and even Jacqueline’s uber-competence was making me roll my eyes (although I admire the author for just laying it on with a trowel). I wish the plot reversal had been better explored, and it was certainly resolved too easily.

But one thing this book doesn’t have is that modern heightened sense of a girl’s role which is somewhat narrower than we think. She doesn’t have to be sexy or have a boyfriend; the business of her life is specifically to be a good student, a jolly pal (in the vernacular of the book), good at sport (again, British!), and in short, a fairly asexual being. Contrast this with the overwrought romantic attachment that is portrayed in the YA book that shall not be named. Surely there is a middle ground somewhere. A girl’s sexuality should not be ignored, but there’s more to life than that particular aspect of a person’s life.

Granted, I’m surely being a curmudgeon about this, but I also think there’s room for all kinds of YA out there.

What do y’all think?

 

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Emilie and the Hollow World

The YA steampunk novel from Martha Wells (Books of the Raksura), published by Strange Chemistry, does something that nowadays is absolutely extraordinary: its main character, a teenage girl, does not have a love interest.

I repeat: This is a YA fantasy without a romance.

Where’s the confetti? This deserves confetti!

And I for one welcome this brave new foray into YA for young adults.

What happened? When did it become the norm for YA to have a love story, or more specifically a love triangle with the girl at the apex? Now, some are actually good — the Hunger Games and the Iron Fey series come to mind (you-know-what will not be mentioned by name in this post) — so it’s not that. It’s just that it has become so formulaic. It was as if a girl couldn’t have an adventure unless she had a boyfriend.

See, I think girls in real life are smarter and more adventurous than that. I know girls who are athletes and scholars and rock climbers  and volunteer in their community and play in bands and make art. So why are girls in fantasy literature unable to go off on an adventure without having a crush on a boy to guide their choices? And that’s the crux — the romance is the chief conflict, rather than the story, and it drives the girl’s action. Why can’t she make decisions based on other factors?

As it happens, romantic relationships are just one kind of relationship. Fantasy of all genres should be willing to explore all sorts of connections that people have. One of the biggest failures of the book that shall not be named is the way friendship between girls is portrayed. It’s false, competitive, and ugly and so completely unlike any real friendships real teens actually have.

Now, this is not to say that fantasy YA should absolutely portray normal girls in normal conflicts having normal lives — for one thing, even mainstream YA shouldn’t do that, and fantasy YA by definition is going to have more excitement and boldness, in which personal relationships are not going to be portrayed in muted color, in which magic and adventure and passion are all going to be present and accounted for.

And maybe there is romance. Maybe the fun and excitement of first love and new love should be part of a new world where magic is part of everyday. But it shouldn’t have to be.

So here’s to more Emilies. They harken back to an earlier time of girls lit, when books for girls were about relationships but they were also about honor, family, duty, goodness — you know, the stuff we don’t mention anymore. Anne Shirley, Jo March, so many fantastic girls who have lived on for a hundred years or more. Maybe there’s a new age of YA fantasy dawning, in which girls could have adventures and find their talents and make steadfast friends and save the world — and they wouldn’t have to have a wedding at the end of it.

That would be pretty magical, wouldn’t it?

Emilie and the Hollow World, by Martha Wells

Published by Strange Chemistry

 

 

 

 

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Meet Jalana and Tesara Mederos — Bandit Girls

Meet the Bandit Girls, aka the Mederos sisters, side by side, ready to take on the world of Port Saint Frey.

 

“Can you help me with my buttons?” Tesara said, her voice plaintive. Jalana abandoned her stockings and buttoned up the back of her little sister’s dress, and then took her brush and began to work on her tangled hair. As always, they both received a little staticky shock.

“Did you get up the stairs all right?” Jalana said in a low voice.

Tesara nodded, squeaking a little as the brush caught on a snarl at the nape of her neck. “Not a peep from anyone. I had to put my wet clothes under my bed. I hope Jenny doesn’t look under there when she cleans. What about you?”

Jalana pretended to concentrate on a tight snarl.

“All right for me too. Now listen. If –when Mama finds out, I’ll come clean and tell her I wrote the letters. That way the servants won’t get in trouble.”

“What? Ow!” Tesara squeaked again.

“Sorry… no, we have to.” She turned her sister around by the shoulders and faced her. Tesara was so pretty; it wasn’t fair. She had Brevart’s dark hair and deep blue eyes and her skin was pale and with rosy cheeks. Her lips, too, were not straight and thin like Jalana’s but curved like a little bow. And she was curved, too; she looked like a pretty girl, and she was only going to get prettier. Whereas Jalana was straight as an arrow, Brevart said. We don’t have to worry about the boys around you, he told her once with pride. That had gratified her when she was younger. Now…she flushed and tried to put the thought behind her. “The servants can’t suffer,” she said. “It’s not fair. I’ll take the blame and say I dragged you into it.”

Tesara looked skeptical. “All right, but you know they are going to be mad.”

“Well,” Jalana said, and made a twirling motion with her finger. Tesara turned back around, and she began brushing again. “Mama shouldn’t have decided such a stupid thing.”

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Worldbuilding, story structure, and here’s a saddle

Just add a horse.

The Houston Writers Guild conference was a great experience. I taught the workshop on worldbuilding that I taught in Austin in February and I think it went well. I felt more disorganized than the first time, but the attendees asked good pertinent questions and I think they got good stuff out of it. If you took either worldbuilding course, let me know if it was helpful for you.

Hung out with the writer John Oehler in the bar (PS. John, I started Aphrodesia and I’m really liking it), sold a few books, ate dinner with the other attendees, and then took a walk around the Sugar Land town square enjoying the beautiful weather and people watching.

Saturday morning I went to half of Tom Vaughan’s workshop on screenplays and story structure and I was taking notes like mad. I couldn’t stay for the whole thing because I had to be back, but it was so worth it. If you have a chance to ever take one of his workshops, do so. The structure stuff is STORY, not screenplay-specific, although he approached it from the screenplay vantage point.

I was riveted.

I was so glad to be home, not just to see the family but because the huge box in the living room indicated that my saddle arrived! I found this on saddlesonline.com and bought it on a whim. The offer was too good to be true — saddle, bridle, stirrup leathers, girth, reins — seriously, what? All for $150?

Turns out the saddle is made in India (as Ben said, of what? I know, right? But I guess that Muslims would be able to work in cow leather?) and the workmanship looks good, but what do I know? I’ll bring it in to the stable tomorrow and have the experts look at it.

Oh, and it was a day for horse stuff, because I stopped off in South Texas Tack near Brenham and I bought a halter.

All I need now is a horse to fill all of these things.

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Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

I just started Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, and it more than resonates — this bell has been ringing loudly and wildly for some time. I wanted to share some of the notes that I made. Note: I linked to Sandberg’s organization, leanin.org. It’s an excellent resource for women and men who want to improve women’s chances of success. We need to get more women in leadership roles and part of that is to give them tools to move their careers forward.

First of all, Lean In exemplifies what it means for a woman to be in the workforce today. I’m not in management and haven’t been for years, but when I was, I bungled it badly. Part of that was not having any training, but a good deal of it was due to thinking there was no way I could do this job, that I was a fraud, and therefore if I tried I would only fail miserably, so why even do my best?

As a result, I failed. Miserably.

I’m still only in Chapter 4 and Sandberg has already touched on the social conditioning that prevents girls and women from excelling in the workplace. Some of it is the glass ceiling, but a good deal of it is training. The attributes women are socialized for in school and in life — take your turn, be nice, be humble, play fair, raise your hand, and share — are exactly what they are dinged for in the office.

Now, Sandberg points out that women are also penalized for not “being nice” in the office and so it’s a barbed-wire catch-22. But she does talk about methods to circumvent the cultural conditioning that rewards men for asking for a raise but penalizes women for the same. And let me tell you, even women who know they have been hurt by this same social conditioning will turn around and do it to other women in turn, it’s that pernicious.

Pop quiz: Do you do this?

Ask a man to explain his success and he will typically credit his own innate qualities and skills. Ask a woman the same question and she will attribute her success to external factors, insisting she did well because she “worked really hard” or “got lucky” or “had help from others.” … When a man fails he points to factors like “didn’t study enough” or “not interested in the subject matter.” When a woman fails, she is more likely to believe it is due to an inherent lack of ability.

I believe that Sandberg’s Lean In also has relevance to women in all their careers, including writing or other arts. I think we step back a little too much and defer just a little too much than is good for us. It takes great hubris to write or paint or play. I think women should lean in to their art just as much as Sandberg is hoping to urge women to lean in to a lucrative career.

Every time I’ve stepped up for my writing my work has improved and I’ve succeeded. Just the simple fact of scheduling writing into my day, rather than letting it languish in between chores, was a tremendous step forward. Commitment works just as much for our lives and avocations as they do for paying work.

How have you leaned in to your writing or art?

 

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When things get like this

When things get like this. I don’t want to even come near my blog.

What things, you ask?

Well, big things, like taking assault weapons out of the Democrat’s gun safety bill. This makes me despair for our country. Everyone is being held hostage to a single lobbying group’s crazed paranoia. The leadership of the NRA is certifiably insane and should not be allowed to have guns, except that in this country, of course crazy people are allowed to have guns. That’s what happens when you don’t control access to guns. Crazy people get their hands on them.

From Time:

(WASHINGTON) — An assault weapons ban won’t be in the gun-control legislation that Democrats bring to the Senate floor next month, a decision that means the ban’s chances of survival now are all but hopeless.

And the media’s reaction to the Steubenville rape case. This one makes me despair and weep.

From Slate:

“The Steubenville Rapists are not tragic heroes.”

No, they are not, but you couldn’t tell that by the media reaction. I have yet to hear a mea culpa from the newscasters either, who should all be ashamed of themselves. Not just the broadcasting companies. The newscasters themselves.

I can’t even write any more about these two topics because I’ll either cry or scream obscenities, or both, and I’ve being doing enough of that already (see below).

On a personal level, we’re knee deep in college applications for my youngest son. And when I say everything that could go wrong did, it is not an exaggeration. Okay, a little bit of an exaggeration. Like, the house didn’t catch on fire. And nobody died. But other than that, yeah. It has been a constant cluster of amazing proportions. And if you have teens coming up on this, let me give you a hint: Even though you are probably a normal parent who does not hover over your child’s every move, even though you laugh at the whole concept of helicopter parenting, now is the time to micromanage the hell out of everything, double and triple check the work, and start making phone calls in 12 hours (okay, eight hours) if you haven’t heard back from the school.

Because if I had done that I would have pissed off every admissions office at the schools where my son applied but we sure as shit wouldn’t be in this situation right now.

I have so much stuff to do that I can’t even enjoy the fact that I finished the first draft of Bandit Girls. That’s right. Done. But did I celebrate? I sent out a single tweet and that’s it. Usually writing The End is one of the most fulfilling parts of writing a novel. But no. Right now, writing is taking a back seat to real life.

I know that my son will get into college, and I know it will all work out.

I don’t know if my country is entering into a spiral of dysfunction so deep that we are living in the decline of the American era. Everything we have always prided ourselves on has been overturned. We torture. We send unmanned drones to assassinate enemies in other countries, and we just might start doing that within our borders. We have a shrinking middle class and a growing oligarchy to rival that of Putin’s Russia.

So. Yeah. Maybe now you get why the blog has been silent for a while.

After all that doom and despair, I just need to look at something pretty.

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Bandit Girls and writing progress

I’m at about 75,000 words of Bandit Girls, the first installment in my Tales of Port Saint Frey. The world is coming together in a cohesive way in this project that I can only attribute to experience. I’m getting better at this gig with every book.

75,000 words means I’m at the end game for a roughly 100,000-word novel, which is where I’m hoping to end up. The manuscript is littered with ALL CAPS notes to myself, everything from RESEARCH BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ERA PRINTING TECHNOLOGY to REMEMBER TO PUT IN THE PART ABOUT THE DUMBWAITER IN CHAPTER ONE.

Because if there’s a dumbwaiter in Chapter One, you know someone has to hide in it in Chapter Twenty-One. Anyone remember Harriet the Spy? This is definitely a(n) homage to Harriet the Spy.

I’m having a blast, you guys.

From Bandit Girls:

Jalana held onto her hat with one gloved hand and tight to her shawl with the other as the wind caught both the instant she stepped outside the kitchen door. Goodness knew what promises she would have to make to the manager of the housing agency about not letting Uncle harass the girls. They would have to keep this one, because Mother as cook would only end badly.

And then she would go on her other errand.

Mastrini’s Household Staffing Agency was on the second floor of a crooked row of shops that was one street up from the harbor. The traffic bustled here and Jalana had to step lively over the cobblestones. Carts rumbled up and down the steep street, for though this wasn’t the Crescent it still rose up the hills overlooking the harbor. She stepped aside for a beer wagon laden with casks and pulled by a team of huge sorrel horses with flaxen manes.

Six years ago she would never have come here — well, of course, she told herself, because she had been a child. But if House Mederos had retained its status she would never have come here at age twenty unescorted. Suddenly she saw that despite everything, their loss had given her something unexpected — her freedom.

Here the people were surly and busy, but they looked her in the eye as equals. No one tugged his forelock or curtseyed, and one young man even took her elbow and pulled her aside to make room for two men coming up the hill with their sailor trunks hoisted high on their shoulders. He was off before she could do more than stare at him with an open mouth.

She could hear the strange calling shouts of the hawkers on the street below, their singsong notes a kind of language that she could almost understand. People threaded themselves all around her, and soon she fell into the same rhythm. She lengthened her stride, her skirts swishing, and walked purposefully like everyone else. She did have somewhere to go. She had business to attend to.

There was Mastrini’s. Its sign with its white glove signifying household staff pointed upwards, a clever direction. She hastened up the narrow stairs and came to a single door at the landing. The same white glove, this time in a come in position, beckoned to her. Jalana knocked, and then let herself in.

The clerk looked up at Jalana’s entrance and then made a face in distaste.

“Miss Mederos,” she said starchily, for all that she was Jalana’s age or even younger. “Really, we can’t continue on like this.”

Jalana was dimly aware of a personage in plain rough clothing and a deep poke bonnet sitting on the bench by the door.

“It won’t happen again, I promise,” she said. “He will listen this time.”

“Heather Moon said that he was lewd and unbecoming.”

Yes. That was Uncle. She looked the clerk straight in the eye.

“I will make him stop,” she said. Her declaration was met with the clerk’s skeptical demeanor. “Please,” she added, desperate. Otherwise my mother will try to cook.

 

 

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Worldbuilding workshop recap

Busy weekend. The worldbuilding course went well, and if you attended I would love to get feedback on how it worked for you.

We covered my main points: Every author, even mainstream authors, must do worldbuilding.

Avoid the infodump and pages of backstory. Watch out for the dreaded phrase, “As you know,…” as that often signals a clumsy halt to the story while you explain the essential elements.

Find your telling detail, the one that captures your characters, setting, background, and plot. Here we had a discussion of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (by the way, the link is to Pottermore), chapters 5 and 6, in which Chapter 6, where Harry catches the train to Hogwarts, is a beautiful example of telling detail.

I compared it to Chapter 5, Diagon Alley, which is an example of well-done accretive detail, in which information is piled up until the world is built by almost brute force. Great fun, but it doesn’t have the same power as Chapter 6.

Use a telling detail wisely. It’s possible to know a “fact” and throw it into your work in progress, but if it doesn’t impact the story or the characters, it doesn’t do the necessary heavy lifting. I used a different example in the workshop, but here’s a better one; in one of the best Star Trek novels of the 1980s (and of course I’m blanking on the title and author), Klingons are described as having the ability to see in the ultraviolet range. Awesome cool, right? Except that it wasn’t used for anything. It could have been such a cool plot detail, and instead, it was a missed opportunity. It was a fun novel though.

I didn’t go into research that much, and that’s because I feel that we focus too much on research when we think about worldbuilding. Research is imperative but I think we forget that the point of worldbuilding is to create something so cool that we want to share it with readers. I think too many writers approach research with a sort of grim death march approach. “I better get this right or readers will complain.” Yes, getting it right is all well and good, but approach it from joy, not fear.

We did talk about pre-research, in which you read everything you can before starting your work, situational research (I need to know this right now, might as well do a quick lookup), and fill in later research, in which your first draft is rife with notes to yourself about how such and such needs to work.

 

 

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Worldbuilding with the Writers League

The Writers’ League of Texas has invited me to lead a class on worldbuilding this Saturday. For more information about the class, please click the link below.

I Want to Go There: Creating Believable Worlds

My philosophy of worldbuilding can be compared to the famous opening of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: “Relax. You know more than you think you do.”

What we will cover includes: Types of research, avoiding the infodump, and the use of the telling detail.

There will be exercises and examples of really good worldbuilding. I expect a lively discussion and lots of questions.

Here’s my guest post for the Writers’ League blog on worldbuilding, my influences, and creating setting, As for what I am hoping students get out of the class, here it is in a nutshell:

What would you like writers to take away from your class?

PS: The point of research for writers is to give their readers the experience of deep diving into a well-created world. It’s not to scare authors away from setting down words for fear of “getting it wrong.” Research is like a treasure hunt, and you get to decide when X marks the spot.

 

 

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