Dawn Metcalf's Blog, page 23

Nothing to See Here

I really was honestly planning on having a blog post today--insightful, funny, a dash of relevance and a pound of cure...or something. But between illness and snow days that have characterized most of New England, I can only say "oops" and beg forgiveness and offer up a Muppet video in recompense:



Oh, and there's ONE MORE DAY left to enter the Revel-ation Contest to win a hardcover copy of REVEL and a beautiful blue sea glass necklace. Click here for details!

REVEL-ation! Interview and Sparkly Sea Glass Contest with Maurissa Guibord

Today, I want to talk about the latest book out by Maurissa Guibord, REVEL. Full disclosure: Maurissa is one of my original critique partners and a better set of eyes you couldn't ask for, but it's her sweeping style combining moving descriptions, engrossing setting, humorous and soulful characters and her very own voice that winks at you right through the page that makes her stories stand out. Her worlds are a weaving together of fantasy, reality, and places that are almost like characters themselves. If I had to use one word to describe REVEL, I'd say: "transportive" (if I get two words, I'd say: "Must Have!")



So to celebrate, I have an interview and *SPARKLY SEA GLASS CONTEST!* Read on for details...

Tell me about Revel in a tweet (140 characters or less):

Lobsters and monsters and sea-gods, Oh my!


If you closed your eyes, what color would the story be?

A luminous green--like the inside of a sea-cave.


What is your favorite scene location in Revel and why?

I made a map of the island on a geeky whim (see picture) and created a place called the Stygian Pool.



This is a ceremonial spot at the highest point of the island with a bubbling, fragrant, hot spring pool. Why is it my favorite place? Well I’ll tell you. This morning the temperature was one degree here in Maine. One degree. There should be more degrees than that! I and all my cold parts want to be soaking in that island hot tub right now!


Did you borrow anything in the book from "real life" experience?

The whole idea for the story came from a visit to a real place called Peaks Island here in Maine. It’s a beautiful place but the people who live there have to make the trip to the mainland (and get supplies, go to school) by ferry. They also have to work together to get through the cold winters and make due, help each other. It’s a very close-knit community and the society there can seem closed off to outsiders.

I began to imagine another place, another island and took these qualities of isolation and independence to an extreme--then imagined a reason for those qualities. Monsters and demi-gods of course!


If Revel was a perfect date, what kind would it be? (eg: moonlight walk across a beach, candlelit dinner in an out-of-the-way cafe, wild rave party in an abandoned field, etc.)

Revel would be a beach picnic on a cool windswept night with a bonfire and smores. The surf is crashing out there in the dark but the ring of warmth and firelight makes a safe circle for you and your sweetheart to sit on a smooth, bleached log and snuggle.


If you could sit down with your characters, who would be thanking you and who would be throttling you with something heavy?

My honest and good Sean Gunn would not thank me for what I put him through. That young lobsterman made sacrifices for the people he loved and he didn’t always make good choices… I made him suffer so much.

P.S. Interviewer's note: Sean Gunn ROCKS!


And, my hallmark question, what's your favorite flavor of Jelly Belly?

Black liquorice!!


*REVEL'S SPARKLY SEA GLASS CONTEST*: This contest is for a hardcover copy of REVEL, bookmark & gorgeous blue sea glass necklace! This isn't just any ordinary jewelry, this is made of sea glass found on the beaches of Maine, the secret, windswept setting of Trespass Island by Leslie Welcome Jewelry. (Honestly, this is a thing of beauty and the lucky winner will be the envy of many a sea maiden this summer.)



1 winner will be chosen at random using Rafflecopter below. This contest is intended to promote REVEL so please share it with your friends and family. Spread the word! Earn contest points! Gain good karma! Share a smile and a chance to win! This contest runs from now until midnight, February 11th to celebrate REVEL's official launch date on February 12th, when a winner will be announced on this website. Be sure to include your links and email in the comments so you can be contacted if you are the winner!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck! Join the REVEL!

Your Overdue Overdose of Steampunk ala Mark Twain

I've been remiss posting about my favorite genre lately, mostly because I'm busy writing it! HOORAY!

Yes, after fangirling the brilliance of folks like Cherie Priest, Scott Westerfeld, Gail Carriger, Phil Foglio and others, I finally had a couple of ideas of my own and one rose to the top to take over my brain. I'm at about the half-way point and having fun and it reminded me of my last trip to be inspired by brass-n-gears at the Mark Twain House.

I'm a *huge* fan of Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain and to have the Mark Twain House & Museum practically in my backyard is something almost sinfully awesome. They have events ranging from readings and collections to masquerade balls and exclusive evenings; Better-Than-Boyfriend and I had a memorable Valentine's one year listening to letters written from Samuel to his wife read aloud by a talented Mark Twain actor. So when I had the chance to see a friend's art there for a steampunk exhibition, well, that's an invitation I couldn't ignore!


I love this place, both inside and out!

First, remember: you're in Connecticut, home of the Huskies, Mark Twain and Lego so I shouldn't've been surprised to be greeted by a life-sized replica of Samuel Clemens made out of Lego blocks. That's how we roll in the Nutmeg State, so already, I'm starting this adventure with a smile!


"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." - Mark Twain

Then it's off into the depths of the exhibit, low-lit and creepy with spotlights on each "artifact" on a podium, under glass or on display. My favorites were the Mark Twain art, the sea creature sample, and the mysterious "talking ghost" machine that had amplifiers hooked up and was blasting rambling-thoughts storytelling from the hooked up brain in a jar.


A great "What If?" portrait of Mark Twain the Steampunk Writer
& Tom Sawyer would have had an even BIGGER line to help whitewash the fence if he'd had one of these set ups!


Okay, I'll admit it--this thing creeped me out. It wouldn't stop staring. MUCH scarier than the Mona Lisa!


Creepy brain talky box and things that fly! Oh, the ideas this planted in my mind...

Then I got to see the stuff I recognized:



These are some examples of Brett Kelley's work. It's dark comic-esque with intense and often disturbingly beautiful overtones makes it stand out from the ordinary (and brands his popular tattoo and skateboard designs)! His work often features masks and skulls and beating hearts along with pumps and gears and futuristic clockwork. He plays with minimalist lines and different colors and textures. I even have one of my own:


My own piece of BK original art, that is. Not a tattoo or a skateboard. I'm lame.

So what am I looking forward to next? The next BK Enterprises art show wouldn't be too bad, but I can't wait for the next series out by Ms. Carriger and her harem of Armenian copyeditors! Etiquette & Espionage coming Feb. 5th! You've seen the trailer, right? Right? Well, just to be sure, here it is:



You're welcome!

Why Last Night's Downton Abbey Makes Me Appreciate Joss Whedon More

If you watched Downton Abbey last night, I bet you know what this post will be about. Or, maybe, you don't.

Without going into out-and-out spoilers, (***but there be spoilery things ahead***), last night's episode was a classic tragedy playing out on the stage of Masterpiece Classic Theater. As the credits rolled, I could already hear the screaming of a thousand tweets long before I logged online. I could imagine fans weeping, feminists ranting, and historians gnashing their teeth. I could hear the whispers of keyboards, the drumroll of debate, the teary grief expressed in 140 characters or less. I felt somehow detached, which is why I waited to start writing this blog post, but my opinion hasn't changed: I'm disappointed.

The reason was because I felt, as a writer and a viewer, that this was coming, that it was built into the character and practically woven into the show. This doesn't mean I have any brilliant insight into screenwriting or storytelling or that I wanted the grim satisfaction of pooh-poohing the show by waving my metaphorical hanky and saying, "I knew it all along." Rather, it was a well-done device on a well-worn path that left me feeling, "Oh well," and that's what disappoints me most. It isn't the undertone of young female victimization, the thin veneer of classist moral heavy-handedness or the very real truth that yes, women still do die in childbirth, (although I am more than willing to tread down any of those discussion topics) but that the writing was so obvious. Of course marrying outside class would do no good, of course the modern, child-like youngest daughter would become victim to something primal, and of course going down any of the perfectly valid feminist and artistic rants that I listed at the beginning of this paragraph would also be perfectly obvious as well. It's the yin to the yang of having your strings pulled in a particular way to elicit a given audience response, its the familiar heartbeat of tragedies on stage, page and screen, but *because* it is so obvious, it hits a false note.

The acting was there, the set-up well paced, the mood of conflict present and building for towards the climax that was altogether well-designed--even the writing itself was solid with its golden moments shared between sisters and then delivered with hammers by mothers, Elizabeth McGovern and Maggie Smith. But, you see, it was obvious storytelling and therefore feels lazy. It hit all the right notes and all the right paces and plucked all the right strings at the right times in a tune that swelled with violins in the background. It took the beloved flower that modern female audiences cared for and male audiences desired and admired and did what we expect storytelling to do.

And I guess that is why I'm a fan of Joss Whedon.


Young, female characters with tragic choices and inner strength, tagged as victims. Whose paths were more obvious?

Joss Whedon's writing, although of a different genre, is the work of a master storyteller. It goes beyond the fact that he knows what's obvious and refuses to give it up, it's that he's so well-versed and aware of the craft of stories that he can step outside the text to give us the experience of what we've come to expect in storytelling, the familiar heartbeat of a story, and then twist it, skewering us with our own expectations in a way that is surprising, yet satisfying and which, despite tragedy and tears, delights us. It was *our* fault for being so programmed as to *think* we know what's coming only to have those assumptions turned against us. It's as if Whedon spreads his hands in mock innocence and says, "I never said it would be like that." (Although he knows that's what we were thinking and we know that he knows it, which is why we applaud.) Whedon walks that tightrope of payoff--sometimes he makes it and sometimes he misses--but he always takes the risk of the road less traveled rather than laying prone to the obvious. That's what makes his writing stand out. It's the rock-n-roll revolution of making something new from the old music, the usual beats and cadences, the run-of-the-mill rhythms and tired refrains, but somehow keeping the melody familiar enough so that we tune-in and start to sing along and before we know it, we've hummed merrily off a cliff into something altogether unexpected. That takes genius--an evolutionary jump--to twist the familiar into the surprising based on the fact that we've become so passive that we expect to be spoon fed the usual and gasp a little on the unexpected, added spice. But we come back smiling. Whedon has upped my palate and obvious writing seems bland.

So while I'll still watch Downton Abbey, I am now more aware than ever of its flaws, but the worst is the letdown of being obvious, which makes me even more grateful of treasuring the extraordinary when I find it.

I'm sure there are other fans who have something to say about this, and to all of them I say: "Have at it!"

I Need A Hero

If you weren't aware already, I have a thing for heroes. Superheroes in particular. I think it stemmed from an early love of comic books, wrapped in plastic and double-taped, borrowed from all my guy friends who had back issues as far as I cared to read. This spread to outer space heroes and paranormal heroines and unlikely heroes, but it started with classic superheroes. I've already talked about my superhero influences and how they've affected my writing, but here is a bit of my theory in a nutshell:

In my mind, there are three basic categories of classic superheroes: the patriotic superhero, who reflects the best in all of us and our ideals (e.g. Superman, Captain America, Wonder Woman); the vigilante superhero, who reflects our frustrations when the "official" system fails us and justice must be taken into their own hands (e.g. Batman, Punisher, Judge Dredd); and the everyman, who is like any one of us but finds they have the courage/power/gift to stand up and Do What Is Right (e.g. Spiderman, Green Lantern, Jubilee). We mix and match these iconic archetypes and add a dash of tragedy or vampirism or southern twang, but it's interesting to see when society feels that the world's problems are too big for ordinary people to take on and win, we invent someone larger-than-life to do it for us, even if it's only in fantasy. The one that inspired me last was Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer of 24, a delightfully modern mix of patriot-vigilante that took over the small screen while Matt Damon as Jason Bourne of Bourne Identity took over the big screen at about the same time. Coincidence? I doubt it.

So I find it particularly fascinating to watch the latest incarnation of Superman take flight. A sort of darker patriot/everyman following in the footsteps of a darker Spiderman, black-clad X-Men, and a bottomless-cave-black Batman. The newest trailer takes a long, hard look in crashing, burning, shattering tones of gunmetal grey:



Honestly, I love this! And it makes me think a lot about human ideals and the nature of character and, of course, a lot about writing. Do you think this reflects a want to be good while acknowledging that we've become too cynical for primary colored costumes and chiseled chins? Is this a want to reach out from a dark place, trying to make ourselves in a better image for a more hopeful future? Or is this just another reboot of a well-worn franchise because we can't think of any new or better champions? Are there better heroes and heroines that we can offer the next generation of readers and viewers?

I wonder as a reader, and a writer, who they are and what I can do about it.

The Next Big Thing in Indie Publishing

You know that I'm always talking about Paying It Forward and how we in the writer community are the best folks anyone could ask for, right? Well, today I'm going to prove it with a post all about amazing people that I've met through various circumstances whose writings and ideas and humor and creativity reached out through the Internets, grabbed me by the shirtfront and bobbled me back and forth until I became a rabid fan. So, like a favorite earworm you can't wait to share with friends, here are three indie authors and their latest "Next Big Things" that you should check out and share with your friends!



Ruthanne Reid's latest novel, NOTTE, is a fantasy described as "the story of a man who became the world’s first biological weapon, through no choice of his own, and took thousands of years to find his way back to being human." I first stumbled onto Ruthanne as a fellow would-be author looking for random feedback on her query letter via Twitter and I, who was avoiding my WIP at the time doing internet clickanery, went and made a helpful comment or twelve. Ruthanne pinged me back and that began a conversation about her query and her story and we worked together until it was good to go and she said if there was anything she could do, etc. and I said no, no, not at all unless she knew something about WordPress because I couldn't get my !#$%^&* site to work. Well, it just so happened that she *did* know something about WordPress, and then she spent days helping me make it good to go with a wave of her magic brains. Take that as a lesson in karmic favors and we've been cheerleading one another ever since. Her first book, THE SUNDERED, was enough to show me that she had a head-twisty flair for out-of-this-world antics and I'm looking forward to what's coming up in NOTTE.

You can check out Ruthanne's latest news (and grab sneak peeks) at ruthannereid.com.



I met Heather Albano over fifteen years ago in circles of creative friends of friends. We never seemed to connect through timing and circumstance, but as we both began wandering down the Road Less Traveled as would-be writers, we found out that we had more than a little in common and more than a little fun talking about books, authors, story ideas, sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk, and our favorite genre creators with fangirlish glee. It was a short hop, skip and a jump to regular coffees and brainstorming bashes. Her gift of prose is only dwarfed by her ability to wield a truly plot-worthy pen. Her first novel, TIMEPIECE, came out last year and its sequel, TIMEKEEPER, is available right now! Heather describes them as such: "Steampunk and/or alternate history. Timepiece is more the former and Timekeeper more the latter. There’s a healthy time travel component to both."

You want to know more? We've got more!

TIMEPIECE: A steampunk time travel adventure about a girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein’s monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London.

TIMEKEEPER: Either "Timekeeper picks up where Timepiece left off, bringing to a conclusion the story of Elizabeth and William" or "An alternate history adventure featuring time travelers, freedom fighters, Frankenstein’s monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and Napoleon invading Britain by dirigible."

You can find out more about Heather and her creative whirlwinds at www.heatheralbano.com.



Grady Hendrix is someone I met through Heather, only after hearing him read aloud from his first novel, SATAN LOVES YOU, at a conference. After I stopped gasping for breath and wiping away tears of hilarity, I pounced, asking to learn more about this story and others he had brewing. As a Clarion graduate and enthusiastic (if perhaps masochistic) collaborator on various and sundry projects, he's released new solo titles such as OCCUPY SPACE and MCMANSIONS OF THE DAMNED, (which is just hitting the query stage now and is briefly described as "a haunted house/horror/comedy about dead mothers and real estate.")

Now you know why I pounced, right?

SATAN LOVES YOU: "No matter how much you hate your job, Satan hates his job more. Hell is full of damned souls, lazy demons, and dead celebrities who whine endlessly about their petty personal problems. After a few thousand years of this, the Lord of Darkness is burnt out, exhausted, and clinically depressed. But in the face of a power grab by the officious and smarmy Heavenly Host, Satan's got to reach deep and find a way to save Hell from a corporate takeover, win a professional wrestling match, deal with an overly-aggressive nun (who may be carrying his child), and cope with a horde of zombie hipsters."

OCCUPY SPACE: "Melville, SC was out of money, it was out of jobs, it was out of hope, and now it was out of astronauts. There'd only been two to begin with, but one of them is stuck up on the International Space Station, abandoned to his fate by both the American and Russian space programs. If you're going to get anything done, you've usually got to do it yourself and so Melville's economically body-slammed residents decide to build their own rocket to bring their boy home. As they attempt to reach low earth orbit they defy insurance regulations, shred international missile launch treaties, step on the toes of the FBI, and ultimately show that everyone's got the right stuff, even if their house is underwater, they love beer way too much, and they never graduated from high school."

Grady is online and at large at www.gradyhendrix.com.

P.S. Check 'em out! You'll be glad you did!

Telling on Myself

I did it again: I made a book about race. This shouldn't be surprising as every book I write has POC and LGBTQI characters and while I don't always go into the story thinking about these topics as being center-stage, they always come up and are always there, possibly because I'm always thinking about them & possibly because these characters are my family and friends. I live in a world of passionate, creative, intelligent, diverse people in every sense of the word and when I tap into my inspirational reservoir, there they are.

I don't know why it surprised me this time, but while writing today's WIP scene about shopping (oddly enough, there's always shopping in my books, too, even though I loathe shopping*), I didn't realize that this would be SCENE as opposed to a bridge between scenes. My MC has been talking about everyone around her being a different race than hers, how they already don't trust her and she doesn't trust them, and when the shop girls are one color and she's another, I realized this might be a Thing for her and that the feelings she might experience might be very different from the feelings I had originally envisioned. Her experience might not be my experience. Or maybe...diving back in my mind to my most squiggy, uncomfortable moments...maybe they were. I went back and confronted it--the racism, the discrimination, and the reverse-discrimination--thinking about how it feels and how it feels to have feelings you're not proud of or realize the pride you had at thinking that you didn't have feelings might not outweigh the shame of discovering you have them. I stumbled into a mirror of my own inherent whiteness, bumping my nose against the glass and getting a splash of cold clue water. I wrote it out and went off on a tangent, but it might be an important one. I don't know what to think of it yet, but I'm rubbing my nose and taking a better, closer look.

The brill Fozmeadows tweeted Saying "I don't see colour" is another way of saying "I don't see racism". And while I like to think of people first by their first names, the sound of their voice on the phone, the things we like to do in common, or their most defining characteristic--artistic, funny, creative, passionate, silly, inventive, crazy--I would be side-stepping reality if I discounted how their race/sex/gender/religion/sexual orientation or socio-economic status shapes who they are. By ignoring color (or any of the other less immediately focused-upon characteristics of their character) I'm conveniently erasing things that "don't matter" to me but matter a heckuva lot to them. And since that person matters a heckuva lot to me, then I guess it *does* matter. Respect is often defined as the Golden Rule, roughly translated as "treat other the people the way you want to be treated," (or the way you want them to treat you) but I believe respect should be more focused on the other person, i.e. "treat other people the way THEY want to be treated." Just because I think getting a Panera gift card is the best gift ever doesn't mean that you do. Maybe you like Starbucks. Or Dunkin Donuts. Or a gas card. Or flowers. I don't know, but if I want to honor YOU, then I might try to know you well enough to find out. Refusing to even acknowledge the elephant in the room is nearly as bad as inviting it to the party.

And then I did the same thing in my WIP.

So here I am telling on myself as a white, Jewish American liberal heterosexual married woman: I might not be able to walk a mile in everyone's moccasins, but I am keeping close the wisdom of SCBWI's Mitali Perkins, Anne Sibley O’Brein, Richard E. Peck and others to concentrate on writing the HUMAN experience** because that is what we share, what resonates as real, and that's, ultimately, what matters.

Do you write characters whose race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or social class is different than your own? Does any of this sound familiar or is it a breeze if you don't over-think it? Have you ever been confronted by your own Muse's thoughts on the matter? It may feel squidgey, but that means I'm pushing my own envelope, to which I think to myself: "Good!"




* Unless it's groceries or baby clothes or having to do with theme parties.
** Unless their elves, gnomes, dwarves, aliens, dragons, etc. but you get the idea.

Inspiration, Perspiration, Desperation, Hallucination

* This came out of a hilarious conversation where divinebird and I decided that if you believe in Book Faeries, you don't clap your hands, you *headdesk* repeatedly and offer up an inkwell full of brandy. (The reason Book Faeries are so scarce is that we've all gone digital.)

Honestly, it made sense at the time!

Muse vs. Siren Smackdown

Now that I've turned in my Final Pass Pages, I'm allowing myself some "me time," which is, to say, time to write whatever I want before I turn my attention to the quivering mess that is the Indelible sequel rough draft that is cowering in the corner awaiting judgement. (Note to self: it won't be pretty.) That said, I've gone and noodled around with an outline that I've been waiting to try and am happy to have cranked out several thousand words yesterday, leaving the keyboard still wanting to write more; an almost guarantee that there will be good sit-down-and-start-writing session in the morning.

I've recently gone through a period where it was hard to write. (See: impossible to write. See also: No writing.) I needed to creatively refuel and during that time I found myself doing what every other not-writing writer does to make themselves feel better when not writing: I played the not-writing game. The game goes something like this: I make outlines, I scribble down bits of dialogue, I do "research" on the Internet, I world-build, I find actors that look like my characters or songs that I want to associate with the story, I sketch little pictures or find maps or snip out architecture pics or whatever else might suit my burgeoning idea. This is all very pretty and interesting and opens worlds I never knew existed such as metallurgy or phonographic recording. Yes, it's all terribly inspirational but it's not, y'know, writing.

I'm not fooled. And neither is Maggie.

I know we want to hear the hard truth and get some tough love when we're well and truly stuck and can't think our way out of the box we've bricked ourselves into, so I'm going to say the words that every writer dreads to hear when they are up against creative brain-block and begin to panic by making playlists and Wiki search catalogs: Writers Write. That's it. And if you're not writing, you're not a writer (not in that moment, anyway). Sorry. I know that's a harsh and horrible thing to say and not at all like the "Yays!" and "Huzzahs!" and Paying It Forward cheerleading I normally try to pump out into the world so we're all karmically a little better off and stop bonking our collective heads against the keyboards, but sometimes it needs saying. Yes, I love maps and cool pictures and Pinterest boards and sweeping music and pretty dresses and obscure science references as much as the next geeky person, but there comes a time when your Muse, your good friend or possibly reality must come in with a rolled-up manuscript and thwack us upside the head with orders to GET WRITING for our own good. Sometimes, we must listen to the Muse instead of the Siren's song. (In this scenario the Muse is Butt In Chair & the Siren is Everything Else!)

Research is not writing. Playlists are not writing. Outlines and note-taking and creating folders about your world history or ideal movie cast are not writing. Good ideas aren't writing. Character sketches aren't writing. Blogging and tweeting and maintaining an "online presence" isn't writing. And even the best conversations that spark off a million thoughts in your head that you can't wait to write down isn't writing unless you, well, write them down. These are all parts of the *process* of writing; the background noise, the warm-up, the tuning of instruments that your brain might need to go through in order to get ready to write. And that's fine! But it's not, y'know, writing.

Frex, if you went out to hear the Chicago Philharmonic play an evening of Mozart and experienced two hours of tuning-up accompanied by Powerpoint displays of nature photography, I imagine you'd leave disappointed thinking, "Well, THAT was a waste of time!" And while this stuff is *not* just a waste of time, it's time taken from your actual writing, which might be better spent *WRITING* and then polishing up the rough bits later. (I am a big believer in brackets such as [insert bit about pan flutes here] or "they traveled past [XYZ] on their way to Montreal" as a major time-savor and staving off the yawning pit of Internet distractions!) Distractions eat time and you have a finite amount of time, ergo DISTRACTIONS ARE KILLING YOU!** If you have one life to live, go write.

So please close that folder of gakked photos, put down that reference book of Baroque home decor, say good-bye to your tweeps for a while at least and give yourself permission to GET WRITING. >thwack!<

With love,

Go. Write. Now.


** How's THAT for motivation? ;-)

Wandering Thoughts During Revisions: The Snow Queen

Today, I am thinking about the Snow Queen.



Get back to your edits. Do I LOOK like I'm kidding?

As I'm doing my edits for the *mumble mumbleth* time, I am concentrating on making certain that not only are all the tenses and punctuation and timelines right, but that each character comes off with that first impression that then grows richer as the story moves on, giving more shadow to serve as relief, confirming or denying that what we experienced in our gut upon first meeting was true or false. Given the high percentage of strong female protagonists already out there with dashing hotties to swoon over and epic-scale badness to avert, I like to be sure to concentrate on the family members, the mentor, the supportive best friend and, of course, my favorite: the antagonist.

Okay, it's not like I "root" for the bad guy, but I like to *understand* what motivates them. While not above enjoying the evil cackle for evilness' sake, the best characters are ones that could be the hero if they were twisted right-side-out (and this is also true for the best heroes who could be the villain if it wasn't for this one pesky bit of honor or ethics inside of them). And so in order to best understand our heroes, it's only right that we understand our villians, too. They are not only a foil, but also a mirror; they are not simply an obstacle, they are the hero of their own story and, in order to have a story (not to mention a character) have real meaning, their struggle must be as sympathetic--albeit twisted, warped, or just plain wrong--as the ones that we *do* root for. In essence, it's all about who's convictions are stronger and who has the best supporting cast. Both sides need their followers, but those who do so out of love or fear can be the ones who ultimately save or doom the world. It was true in Narnia. It was true in Middle Earth. I am hoping that it is also true in the Twixt.

And as I'm re-reading Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, I am reminded that for some readers, sometimes it's all about the witch.

Back to edits!