Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 48

Writing Wednesday: Writing For Yourself

For a long time, I would listen to my agent talk about writing "the book of your heart" or "following your dreams" and I would think, it isn't like that. Realistically, a writer is a professional. You write to an audience. You write to their expectations. There are rules in your genre. You can break some of them, but not all of them. You have to work to deadlines. You sell proposals to contracts. You work with an editor to prepare a specific product for market. And then you have an obligation to promote it to the best of your ability. This is a job, not a touchy-feely moment about who you are and what you were meant to do with your life in some spiritual sense.

And then--a series of crappy things happened to me over the last several years. I won't go into them in great detail. Looking back, I suspect a lot of writers went through the same thing because the publishing industry has been crazy in the last couple of years, purposely canceling contracts and trying more and more to aim at "best sellers" rather than the bread and butter of the mid-list. I get it. The world changes. You have to get through it and move on.

But even if logically I could understand this, emotionally, I began to believe that my career was over, that it was possible I had written the last published book I would ever write. I tried to assure myself that I was happy with the books that I had written, that if that was all the chance I got, I had done what I could with it. I didn't regret my life as a writer. But at the same time, I began to make a list of other jobs that I felt it was time for me to consider. For years, I had been working writing in around a busy family life, but with my children all in school and one out of the house, I felt like it might be time for me to do something that actually brought in money.

But--not quite yet.

Before I started writing up resumes and sending them out, I ended up writing a list of books that I still wanted to write, that I felt that only I could write. I was pretty sure that they weren't going to sell. They weren't going to save my career. And that wasn't why they were on my list. They weren't on my list because they were courageous books or deeply literary, either. They were just books that I didn't want to die without writing, a bucket list of sorts. When I was finished with them, I told myself, I would go about getting a "real" job, and become a more useful member of society.

The strange thing that happened as I did this was that I finally felt the way I had felt about writing before I was published. I know it will sound condescending to the unpublished writers out there, but there is something about being unpublished that published writers envy. Not the anxiety of never being published, but the freedom with which unpublished writers may choose what their next book will be about, who the audience will be, and what it will say. The freedom of writing without a contract, without critical or reader expectations--that is a beautiful thing and it's hard to get back.

I think I have it back. I'm not sure that I would recommend other writers getting it back in the particular way that I did, because it has been hell. On the other hand, if you gave me the choice of not having all the crap in the publishing world descend on me, I wouldn't choose the easier path. Because I now have my bucket list of novels finished. These are my books. They don't belong to anyone else. Not to my agent or editor or publisher. They're mine and I love them in a way that I suppose you don't love things that come easily. (Not that writing any novel is easy.)

And you know what happened? At the end of my finishing writing the books on my list, I found out something. I still wasn't ready to take the real job yet. I wasn't ready to become "useful." Because I had a new list, a really short list, but it was still there, more books that only I could write, that I had to write. My books, the books of my heart or my gizzard or whatever deep part of me demands that I get up every morning and sit down and work toward the thing that I was made to do. Write.

Closing the Door

Here is an expanded version of the short essay I wrote a couple weeks ago about closing the door and writing:

http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=mette_ivie_harrison&article=054

Monday Book Recs--Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas

To me this was a retelling of Dial M for Murder but with the genders reversed. Instead of the woman being the one who has the affair and is ultimately vindicated, it is the man who has the affair and the woman who is behind the scenes, manipulating everything. Reading it that way, I found myself watching my own emotions and trying to decide if I liked what the author was doing or not.

We begin by thinking that the wife is a little spoiled, but very sympathetic protagonist who has been stalked several times before because of her status. We even read her journal and her husband seems—odd. When he admits that he has had an affair, I was mad at him. But the gender relationship was fairly typical. The man marries the woman with money and then he has all the power. She simply lies back and watches him abuse her, up to and including her own murder.

Until the twist when we realize that the journal is faked and the woman isn’t dead. She’s the psychopath here, and she is also the one who has control over everything. That’s scary, and she isn’t likeable for a while. Except that I kept asking myself why I was finding her so unlikeable. Was it because she had the power? Was it because she wasn’t Grace Kelly?

I honestly don’t know if I like this book a lot or hate it, but it was a ride and it made me think, not just about the book but about my own expectations as a reader. And that’s a good thing.

This is Wallflowers Book #1, and it’s a Regency romance, which I have a kind of love/hate relationship with. I am allergic to cliches in romances because I’ve read so many and I can see cliches from a mile away. This isn’t a book that has no cliches. On the other hand, I so love the idea of Wallflowers forming a club and making a pact to help each other get married. Love!

Also, there is a scene in this book which is hysterically funny and so very perfect. The girls go out to the meadow and then strip to their drawers so they can play Rounders (some older version of baseball). I love their enthusiasm. I love that they get caught. And I love the consequences. I’m going to be reading the rest of the books in this series!

Friday Feminism: Beautiful

My local Cross-Fit gym has a sign up that says “Strong is beautiful.” The idea here is, I know, to make women feel more enthusiastic about working out, despite the fact that they are sweating buckets and perhaps not in the most delicate positions for photographing. And to remind women who may feel as if they are ugly that it doesn’t matter, because they are making their bodies more beautiful by toning them.

One problem: beautiful is a word for objects that are meant to be viewed. And women are not objects. The idea that women need to be told they are beautiful all the time to have good self-esteem just plays into the patriarchal system that makes women into objects and men into the subjects that view them and deem them “beautiful” or “not beautiful.”

I’ve actually heard women at the gym talking about how excited their husbands are for them to workout because their husbands think that they look so great and—yes—that they are more flexible and more enthusiastic in bed. Which is all fine to a point, unless you’re only working out because you want to please your man.

I’d really prefer that women learn to become subjects of their own gazes and not better objects for men. I really do not like the idea that women go to the gym and workout and build muscles simply because that makes them a better ideal of beauty for someone else’s gaze.

Shouldn’t working out be about empowering women? Shouldn’t it be about them learning to glory in their own bodies? I think it should be. I think it should be about pursuing excellence or perhaps about mentoring and group empowerment. Or about doing things you never thought you could do.

If working out is about becoming more beautiful, then we’ve just exchanged one set of beauty standards for another one, and I don’t think that brings us very far. We’ve traded having to spend hours with a blow dryer and curling iron, with makeup and shopping for fashionable clothes, or looking through magazines that tell us what beauty is for—spending hours at the gym sculpting ourselves so that we can look like Ms. Universe. I’m not sure that’s really a step forward.

So, strong isn’t beautiful. Strong is strong.

(And can I add here that I'd prefer if women weren't told that they needed to get black belts in Karate or learn to run really fast or have big muscles in order to protect themselves against the threat of rape, either?)

Longing in Romance

I think modern romance writers sometimes focus so much on the hot sex scenes that they forget the power of longing in making the audience root for the hero and heroine to get together. Twilight does this very well. How much of that series is about Edward and Bella being apart rather than together? Or think of Gone With the Wind. Or Buffy and Angel.

In The Rose Throne, both Issa and Ailsbet have to deal with longing, though in very different ways.

Writing Wednesday: Being a Writer

There is something that happens between the time when you want to be a writer and when you want to write a specific book that I think is very important.

I remember wanting to be a writer for a long time, in elementary school, in high school, and then in garduate school. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up as a kid, I would always tell them I wanted to be a writer. It seemed like it fit my personality and my interests. I loved books and I wanted to write books—like that. I knew that writers actually wrote things, and so I wrote a lot of different things. Mostly, I wrote things that were like the books that I read that I liked, though this was sometimes conscious and sometimes not.

I have various pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, and Star Trek, as well as a painful YA problem novel that I pounded my way through. It probably wasn't until I wrote the first novel I submitted to a publisher in high school that I think I began to change from wanting to be a writer to wanting to write a specific book.

Probably half the people in the United States think they want to write a book someday. Few of them will actually sit down and do it, but for those who do, congratulations! It's quite an accomplishment to finish a novel, just as it is to finish a marathon or an Ironman. You don't have to set a world record time to finish. But it's also true that finishing a book is only the beginning of writing it. Saying you want to be a writer is a lot like saying you'd like to play the piano, which is to say it doesn't mean very much unless you're putting in the actual time to make it happen, practicing. But finishing a book also doesn't mean that much. Let me explain why.

By the time I went to college, I had written about ten novels, and one of them might have been remotely sellable. But they were all first drafts, and I never tried to rewrite any of them. Why? Because I kept having a new, shiny idea and I wanted to work on the new idea rather than the old one. There's nothing really wrong with this. I still find myself distracted by shiny new ideas all the time these days. But it's also true that a first draft isn't going to go very far. And if you never want to fix a first draft, if you never care enough about the idea to keep working on it, you may never actually move from the “I finished a book” stage to the “published author” stage.

It's one thing to enjoy the process of writing (or not to). It's another thing completely to love one particular book so much that you keep throwing yourself at it. It's one thing to read a novel in a genre and think—I could do this. It's another thing to write a book that you are pretty sure will never sell because it doesn't fit into any categories, and write it anyway. Because it's the book that speaks to you, that demands that you tell it, because only you have the skills and the word view to write that particular book.

I'm not saying that there isn't a time to let a manuscript go. I've been around long enough that I have seen people who hang onto the same book for twenty years and refuse to try a new one, just keep tinkering with that one, changing paragraphs here and there, or maybe changing a little more than that. But never able to reinvent it enough that what they've learned over the years makes a difference. I suspect that this is a kind of mental illness, the inability to move on and try something new.

But there are also people who write something so different that everyone tells them it will never work. And they do it anyway. And they keep sending it out, and maybe it never does get published. But maybe it does, because they were right. And then they write something else completely different and get rejected some more.

Being a writer is more than having a knack for words. It's more than loving books and wanting to write “one of those.” It's more than sitting down and hammering out a first novel. Being a writer means giving yourself over to a book idea that is absolutely crazy, that is bigger than you are. Being a writer means doing something impossible. Being a writer means sticking with a book after umpteen revisions, and even hating it for a little while, and then falling in love with it all over again. Being a writer means trying ideas and then realizing that this time, it didn't work and that you “wasted” all that time. And that's OK, because you're going to try something else and it's going to work at some point, or it won't.

Being a writer means taking chances and letting go and taking new chances, constantly taking new chances. Being a writer is sitting on a high wire and being sure that you're going to fall, and then standing up and acting as if you know how to do this, and you're going to be just fine.

Romance Tuesday: 2 Things I Find Utterly Unromantic and Why

1. Jealousy

Hello, why is it always supposed to be SO romantic when a hero (especially, though it can happen in the reverse) is jealous? Particularly when he is violently jealous? I suppose the simple answer might be rape culture. Or another simple answer is that it's an easy out for the writer. It's the default.

Why do I hate it? A man who is jealous isn't a man who is strong and confident. And yes, I understand that romance is often about bringing a strong, confident man to his knees in front of a woman, because of his love for her. Nonetheless, I prefer my heroes to remain strong in certain ways, and this is one of them. If a man doesn't trust his woman to remain faithful to him even after she has declared her love for him, I think there is something wrong with him. Deeply wrong. And if he hasn't heard a declaration of love, well, then he can feel jealous all he wants, but he doesn't get to act on it. Because he has no right. The only time I think this works is if the woman has been actually offended and the man is acting because of a real (not an imagined) hurt.

2. Love without Control

Yeah, so if you want to write about REAL ROMANCE, then it has to be the special, everlasting, never-felt-before kind, right, like Romeo and Juliet and Bella and Edward? Only, wait. Romeo and Juliet are idiots. Shakespeare makes it pretty clear what he thinks of a fourteen year old girl who falls in love in one night and then agrees to potentially kill herself for love. Um, hello? These two are not meant to be examples of healthy love. And Edward is actually one of the most controlled heroes in the history of romance, which is one of the reason some people don't like him at all. It's Jacob who tends to be less controlled. Edward is all power controlled tightly.

I don't feel any need for a romance to be high-stakes, eternal love kind of romance. But even if it is, losing control of yourself when in love, so that you can't stop yourself from acting out sexually--this is just gross. Rape culture again. This isn't real. Neither men nor women lose control of themselves when they are in love. Teenagers may feel like it is especially hard to control their hormones with their brains because, well, their brains haven't developed fully and won't until they are in their twenties. But even there, it is POSSIBLE for them to control themselves. They just let passion take over, and is that an admirable trait? No, it is a juvenile trait.

I don't think that losing control is admirable in a hero or a heroine of a romance. If they love each other so much, that love should cause them to have greater control, greater restraint, greater capacity to sacrifice. Otherwise, they are just fourteen year-olds who have no idea what they are doing and are likely to fall in love with someone else with just as much lack of control tomorrow.

Reviews of The Rose Throne

The Rose Throne won't be out until May 14, but there are ways to get a copy early. Go here to enter to win a chance to get one of two free ARCs:

http://characterized.blogspot.com/2013/03/arc-review-arc-giveaway-rose-throne-by.html

You can also see an ARC on http://www.netgalley.com

I have heard that ARCs will be given away in some quantity at RT Booklovers Convention in Kansas City in early May.

Also, there are ARC giveaways on

http://www.goodreads.com

AND

http://www.librarything.com

Here are some early reviews:

"A story of two young women born to dangerous, powerful families...But they each have powers of their own, and terrible choices. Another great story from one of my favorite authors." --Orson Scott Card

"Not your standard-issue princess tale!... A tale of two princesses who come from very different courts and have very different powers. Both must navigate hazardous royal politics as they learn what it feels like to fall in love--and what they must sacrifice to stay alive." --Sharon Shinn, author of The Safe Keeper's Secret

"YA readers will love these strong, but very different princesses." --Jennifer Nielsen, author of The False Prince 

"What I loved? Hmm... Let's start with the loads of originality Ivie Harrison dumped into this book. Kudos! I mean; whenever I read a book with a princess it ends one of two ways, a marriage or some happily ever after where the prince and the princess ride into the sunset, kissing. This didn't apply to The Rose Throne , and frankly, I was happy about it. The plot twists were soo crazy! I wish I could further explain my thoughts, but I'm working on keeping this review spoiler-free. Which, as of now, is proving to be the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. All I will say is to: "Think of the most unexpected event that could possibly occur, then square it, multiply it by infinity and square it again. " That unpredictable. What else was there? Sorry, the correct question is "What wasn't there?" Insta-love! I just wanted to hug the book to my chest, and skip happily around my house. The princesses in the book, didn't meet a guy, glance at him, and fall in love. NO - not Ailsbet and Issa. The traditional way was used, you know, the whole getting to know each other, and oh, I don't know - HAVING AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION. The imagery, and enormous amount of detail put into the descriptions given by both princesses gave me an insight into Rurik and Weirland. From the green, lush landscapes right down to the ancient castle in Rurik. Before I forget, I should mention that The Rose Throne was overall, a fast-paced novel, that had suspense building up to the climax from the very first page!"

Monday Book Recs--Jenn Reese's Above World

Jenn Reese's Above World's sequel Mirage is out this week, but I hadn't read the first one yet, so I went back and did that. This is a really fun book with plenty of action, a hint of some love interests, and great characters. I loved the world building here, something I struggle with myself, but it feels so seamless and yet there are really several different worlds here. The world of the sea, where the Kampii live is one place, and I loved the rituals of hitting puberty that are described here with the pill that turns your legs into a tail over a long period of time in great pain, but I also loved the other worlds. There is the world of the Avians, and then the worlds that have been mostly destroyed, and the backstory of the evil villain. I love it when an evil villain is given even just a hint of a softer side, some explanation of how he became what he became, and why it made sense to him--why it was even right to him.

What I loved best about this book, though, was the ideas in it. I won't say the message because like the best books, this one isn't hitting the reader over the head with a certain political point of view. Instead, it's an exploration of what will happen to our world in the future if things continue going on the course on which we have embarked. If we continue to destroy the environment, and if we continue to think of ourselves as above the natural world, this is what might happen. And yet, if it does happen, the idea that there will still be characters like Aluna and Hoku gives some comfort. If humanity still has people at its best, then there is always hope for us, no matter how dark it seems.

Friday Feminism: Buffy and Pink

As a kid, I identified strongly with male characters and with male aspirations in general. For at least a full year, I sort of masqueraded as a boy. This was less intentional than it was a result of my mother being too poor (with 11 kids) to get me a real haircut, so she did it herself, and very badly. And then, I insisted for my 8th birthday that she take me to the store and let me buy clothes in the boys' department at Sears. You can see below what I looked like in 5th grade:


I was frequently mistaken for a boy, and I loved it. My name is so unique that it can be genderless and when the "M" got dropped off, it was easy to tell people to call me "Eddie" instead. I remember my 5th grade math teacher thinking I was a boy and I was delighted, especially since he was my math teacher and he seemed one of the first people who thought I was good at math and he let me go ahead of everyone else in the book and then do "special" math projects.

I hated pink at this age. I wore dresses to church because my parents insisted, but I usually went for denim skirts, T-shirts and sneakers underneath. I would not wear nylons even when I was old enough. I wasn't interested in makeup. That was for girls. Ew! I read James Bond, Isaac Asimov, Sherlock Holmes, and Perry Mason. But I also read romance novels voraciously. Dozens a week. I tended to keep them hidden because I was aware of the fact that people considered them "trashy" literature.

It took a long time for me to realize that what I was doing was internalizing the cultural prejudice against women and girls and girlish things because those things "didn't matter," were "superficial," and "vain." I think I have to remind myself of this frequently, that the whole area of things that are "feminine" are just things. Some people like them and some people don't. But rejecting them because they're "girlish" is rejecting a part of myself as "girlish," as well. It was like cutting off some part of me and not allowing me to even mourn it.


I think when I started watching Buffy that it first occurred to me that here was a character who had no problem dressing in pink and doing plenty of "feminine" things and also doing everything that else that mattered. For her, this was not a contradiction. And as fun as the show was, as quotable as the dialog, as silly as some of the early episodes, the idea that a girl in pink was born to fight vampires was just so revolutionary to my mind that it took me years to process it. In some ways, I think I am still processing the idea that pink does not have to mean "Ew! Girly."

I still don't wear makeup. I still don't wear high heels or nylons. I still don't do my hair. But I find myself buying pink sometimes as a reminder that I can wear pink, that I can be a girl and be strong, too. I can be who I am. And I have struggled as a mother and as a woman interacting with other women not reject the temptation to stigmatize paying attention to "superficial" details like personal appearance, home decoration, or beauty in general. After all, I am a writer and one of the purposes of writing is to create beauty, isn't it? Do I think that kind of beauty is superficial? Then why do I call other people's art (read: women's art) superficial?

It has taken me a long time to come around to it, but I have finally learned to be more self-conscious about telling other women with some sense of superiority that I don't care about the things they care about. Doing that doesn't make me any less sexist. It just means that I'm the one pushing them down, and I don't want to be that part of the dynamic. Real freedom from sexism (if such a thing exists) isn't found in putting yourself in the power position in the dichotomy. It's trying to find ways around the dichotomy in the first place.