Ursula Vernon's Blog, page 20

Turtle-Bob

Turtle-Bob the Third, to be precise.

You can read the full saga of Turtle-Bob over at Squash’s Garden, here.

Slice of Life: Father’s Day Edition

ME: Hey, Kevin, I have a photo that will hit you right in the man-feels!

KEVIN: Ok…

ME: *shows photo of the stormtrooper figure with the two little lego stormtroopers*

KEVIN: I’ve seen it. That does not hit me in the man-feels.

ME: What if Sarah McLaughlan was playing in the background?

KEVIN: No. It’d need to be a movie, where the dad stormtrooper calls to say “I’m coming home, honey,” and then the Death Star explodes and the baby stormtroopers are on the beach watching it blow up and then a shuttle lands and the dad stormtrooper gets out and they all hug and AND Sarah McLaughlan is playing. THEN there will be feels.

ME: …

ME: I think you may have just designed geek dad kryptonite.

KEVIN: BRB, filming.

Mourning

So you’ve heard me talk about my nice little town a couple of times, I imagine.

There’s a downtown–basically two streets with a traffic circle–a couple of restaurants, the co-op, the coffee shop I write at, and up the road a mile or two, where the interstate is, a big-box hardware store. It’s NICE. We’re the county seat, so there’s a couple government buildings, but we’re a super rural county so they’re not big.

I live in the woods, surrounded by pastures. The farmer I buy my meat from is about ten miles down the road. My neighbor keeps bees and has a falcon mews in the backyard. (Also trucks on blocks, because the South.) I sit in the backyard at night and there are whippoorwills and chuck-widows-wills calling.

I’ve lived here for six years, and barring occasional desires to head to the desert, I had sorta planned to die here, preferably while lying in the backyard listening to aforementioned whippoorwills.

Council just voted to nuke it from development orbit.

They just cleared the last hurdle to break ground on a planned development to house *60,000* people. This is one of those massive “planned city” developments.

A development of 5000, I could have maybe gritted my teeth, but they are literally dropping an entire CITY seven miles from my house.

Cities do not stay where you put them. Our population is slated to increase by 1900%. If I wanted to live in a gigantic suburban sprawl, I have lots and lots to choose from already, but yay, now it’s coming to me.

To say we don’t have any infrastructure to handle that is laughably understating the case. It’s just…insane. I mean, the primary road into the area is a four lane highway over a lake, and the road into town is two lanes with a traffic circle and a stoplight. And the developers are being super “It’s fiiiiiine, don’t worry your pretty little head about things like water quality, those rules only apply to people on wells, we’re building sewers next to the lake and the Haw River and that means we can cram LOTS OF PEOPLE IN and you should just relaaaaax. We’re professionals.”

(Nevermind HOW the county is somehow supposed to dredge up the money for all the infrastructure that this place wants…)

And they own all the land, so we can’t buy it away. Rezoning stalled them for over a year, but people sang “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” and this was the last ditch and it just ended last night. They break ground in sixty days, and start building houses in eighteen months.

It’s supposed to take thirty years, to hit full capacity, but I am so discouraged. I feel like I’m in mourning for the town. The only bright spot is that our property values are supposed to go up, which is sort of like ‘Your horse is going to die, but good news! Dogmeat’s selling at an all time high!’

Unnngngggghhh.

Strategic Sympathy Reserves

So a few months back, I wrote a blog-post about being tired of Fantasyland.

It’s all still true. I can count the fantasies I have read in the last six months on the fingers of one hand.

That said, ZOMG, The Goblin Emperor is amazing, go read it, I stayed up until three in the morning last night reading it, it is SO GOOD.

The main character, Maia, is just incredibly sympathetic. He is nice. I ached for this character, the way I ached for Aerin back in the day, the yes-I-would-be-this-person ache.

And this made me think that maybe, in my initial post about being jaded to so much fantasy as a setting, I had overlooked something.

Maybe part of my problem is that I am having a hard time finding fantasy characters I like.

It’s not like the old days, when all you needed was a bookish heroine and/or one who was not interested in pretty dresses and you had my immediate unswerving loyalty for the rest of the book. I am now past the point where any given persecuted teenage girl is automatically my soul-sister,* where the fact that your family/village/tribe just doesn’t understand you gives you a free pass to my sympathies.

I have not been willing to read books about awful people for a long time, because their awfulness is not the least bit interesting to me, but I am also starting to lose patience with standard fantasy people. All the interchangeable protagonists with interchangeable names. Yes, you’re scared, yes, your suffering is very important to YOU, but it’s not enough to suffer at me any more. You must be interesting while you are doing it.

Furthermore, god help you, I must like you. If I do not like you–not merely pity you, but like you–you are done.

(There are plenty of people who will argue for unlikeable protagonists, and that is great. I am not decreeing what future writing should be for all. I am saying, I don’t read those books. Because if I don’t like the character, I will not spend time with them. This is not to say that they are not valuable. Phillip K. Dick wrote some valuable stuff that should be appreciated. By people other than me. Because I hate all the characters in his books. A lot.**)

For this, I could be accused of a failure of empathy (and go ahead, feel free, I offer you my admission of my failure of empathy as a gift.) If I were a good person, or at least a sophisticated reader, undoubtedly I could relate to anyone. Any old barbarian warlord would do. I could put myself in the shoes of the entire cast of Game of Thrones instead of “On a good day Tyrion but generally nobody and actually I stopped reading awhile ago because I could not care less what happens to any of these awful, awful people.”*** I would pour myself into the personas of wise-cracking urban fantasy heroines with their hidden faerie underworlds and their nifty super-powers and their on-again off-again relationships with hunky muscled fill-in-the-blanks. I would play Angst Along With Elric. (Follow the bouncing Stormbringer!)

But I can’t, and I don’t. I have dumped out too much of my sympathy on whiny heroes and farmboys with destinies who throw stupid temper tantrums for no apparent reason. The Strategic Sympathy Reserves are running low and I do not consider it worth the environmental damage to start cracking open the Sympathetic Shale. I am just…tired of all these people.

It’s not that characters have to be me. I do not require thirty-seven-year-old divorced and remarried writer protagonists with a gardening bent, and if I did, I would be pretty disappointed by now.

But I would like to read more about people who are kind.

Not…y’know…not the lady-of-the-manor kindness you find in a lot of Regencies, not Tireless Social Reformer archetype, or Look How Selfless I Am, but just…kind.

I know it when I see it, anyhow.

You can do any horrible thing you want to them, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying “Write me a nice book without conflict!”  Just…I look back at all the characters that I loved, really truly loved and who mattered–Aerin and Dr. Evan Wilson and Number Ten Ox and Brutha and Granny Weatherwax and Brother Cadfael and all the rest, and they were all good and most of them were kind (although it was a rather pointy kindness, at least in the case of Weatherwax.)

(Polite is also sadly lacking in many cases, as I may have lamented before.)

I am saying this badly, I think. I read back and there are huge holes where someone could shout things through, if they were so inclined. Perhaps I don’t know what I’m trying to say well enough to say it. I am not trying to shut up any character who is hard or angry, or tell any author that their characters have to be nice. No. If you need to write an angry and defiant character, write her. Someone will need that book, even if it isn’t me, or at least, isn’t me today.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t actually realize, until reading The Goblin Emperor, how much I was still willing to give to a book where the main character was so intensely sympathetic.

And it pointed up, in such sharp relief, how little I’ve been willing to give to a lot of fantasy books I’ve tried to read for a long time.

 

 

*Except at certain times of month for certain forms of comfort reading.

**Someone said to me once “They’re very human.” No, they’re very asshole. I know lots and lots of humans, and none of them behave like that. If they did, I would not hang around with them.

*Fine, I would prefer Arya not die, but given the series, the only way to do that is to stop reading.

Artist Problems

“Yay! I have lots of originals! I have three cons coming up, but that’s fine because I have LOTS OF ORIGINALS! And this is a small con and some of them are expensive, so I will still have lots left over! I’ll just need to do some small quick stuff for the next one and it’ll be great!”

One con later…

“I HAVE NO ORIGINALS LEFT.”

The worst part about this is that you can’t even really complain (note that I am complaining anyway) because obviously your art sold and that’s a wonderful thing, it’s just that…um…was kinda counting on a couple of those to fill out panels at those later cons and now I have to scramble. My diamond shoes are too tight!

The only people who will be sympathetic are other artists and my mother. I accept this.

(A huge thanks to the generous buyers of BayCon. You are awesome and I am delighted so much art found good homes. I just hadn’t scheduled for quite…how…awesome…y’all would be…)

Smug Bird

I spent some recent time in New Orleans in a gallery that had a lot of work by the surrealist artist Daniel Merriam. I stared at it for a long time and thought “I wanna do…complicated…monochromatic…swirl

y…thingies…”

12 x 12 mixed media on board. They don’t make enough shades of sea-green colored pencils, let me tell you.

While I’m not displeased with how it turned out for a first attempt, I keep thinking it should be about eight feet tall and then I could pack all KINDS of weird little thingies into the margins. I should probably stifle this urge. But the color scheme, jarring as it is, does kinda work for me, and I bought more sea green and maybe I should do another one.

For sale, will wind up at Anthrocon if nobody makes me an offer first.

LUNA ATTACK

So I am super-duper jetlagged and back from BayCon (great con, more on that later) and I think “I’ll go photograph some moths! I haven’t done it in days!” and then there’s a neat moth on the porch ceiling so I go get a chair from the house and I’m on the chair and then there is this almighty SMACK and a gigantic luna moth comes careening into the light and begins battering itself wildly against the door and the wall and it’s the size of a bird and every time it hits the wall it’s going SMACK! SMACK! and I’m going “crap! I have to turn off the porch light and save it!” and then the moth is suddenly IN MY FACE and it was like having an angry chartreuse bird go for my eye and I know they don’t have mouths but that kinda doesn’t matter when bigass green wings are slapping you in the head and thank god I had gotten off the chair because I’m flailing and hopping and then it drops to the ground and I’m like “OH NO I CAN’T STEP ON THE LUNA MOTH” and I’m on one foot and my hair is in my face and I don’t dare put the other one down because this bird-sized lunatic green thing is flopping around my ankles and I can’t see well enough and if I stomp on it I will seriously have to do major penance, like going to a moth-god confessional kind of penance, and then thank god the moth takes off before I fall over and it begins hurling itself wildly at the porch light again and I cannot let something as glorious as a luna moth batter itself to death on my porch so I fling the door open, manage to duck as it comes for me, stop the cat from bolting and kill the porch light so that the moth can hopefully settle and recover itself.

I left the chair to fend for itself. There will be spiders on it by dawn, I’m sure.

Not Dead, Just New Orleans

I am headed to the Big Easy for several days! Best way to follow my adventures* up-to-the-minute is Twitter, but don’t fret, if anything truly exciting happens, it’ll make its way here when I get back.

*I am OKAY with not having adventures. If I just sit in cafes eating beignets and working on this book for three days, that will be AWESOME.

Meanwhile, have an axolotl.

Bat of Affirmation

It’s been a craptastic week here, so I think we all need this bat.

More Awesome Than Tacos

Okay, the affirmational monsters are kinda addictive…