Ursula Vernon's Blog, page 5
October 24, 2016
Escapism & Representation
So I spent the weekend at the TweensRead book festival in Houston, which was wonderful and amazing, and I found myself having some thoughts.
First of all, if you were still of a mind to question the need for many kids to have books about people like them, this would dropkick it from anyone with an ounce of sense. Over and over and over I heard stories from authors going “I am writing these books because they’re what I needed when I was a kid.” Our keynote speaker, the utterly amazing Jason Reynolds, talked about how he quit reading at the age of nine because the books he was given in school were no one he’d ever met, in a world nothing like his, and had nothing to say to a nine-year-old from D.C.
I sat on panels multiple times with amazing authors, gazing at the back of my fun little book about hamsters, and thought “This is a great truth. We are all writing the books we wanted or needed when we were kids.”
Then I stared at my hamsters and thought “Jesus, what am I doing?”
I thought of all the books I read when I was young. Star Trek. Narnia. Roald Dahl. Robin McKinley. Andre Norton. Harper Hall. Earthsea. My struggles to get through The Hobbit. Watership Down. Books of fairy tales. Books about dinosaurs. And then a tween asked about the books we liked to read as kids and why we liked them, and I found myself saying “I didn’t want books about my life. I knew all about my life. I was an expert on it, and books had nothing to tell me about it. I wanted books about dragons and aliens and talking animals. I wanted something else.” And then, because that seemed rather curt, I added “Escapism rocks!” (I try to be very enthusiastic, even when I’m babbling.)
I was the kid who never read a Sweet Valley High book, or the Babysitter’s Club. I liked Honestly, Katie John, which I think my mother picked up at a garage sale or something, but her attempts to get me to read Jacob Have I Loved and Jane Eyre were met with moaning and/or sulking nine-year-old resistance. I was only really willing to read about kids my age if they had horses or if they were stranded alone on a desert island (my copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins and Call It Courage fell apart from re-reads.) I read Little House in the Big Woods because it was frontier competence porn, not because of any great attachment to any of the characters. I had a massive collection of those weird books that were written from the point of view of a non-sentient animal–Yellow Eyes, about cougars and Red Ben about foxes. (I think there were a bunch about foxes, actually. And one about a lynx. And enough Jack London to build a fire with.)
I didn’t want a boyfriend. I wanted a fire lizard.
(As there is no world where a middle-school boy lives up to Tor or Luthe or Ged or Bigwig, I stuck to a rich fantasy life.)
This does not mean, for the record, that I was Not Like Other Girls or any such foolishness. I fit quite nicely into the female nerd archetype, which many of you are likely familiar with. I am certainly not recommending this as a Better Way of Being. (Actually, in some ways it’s probably worse. My understanding of relationships with other people mostly involved Vulcans, survival on desert islands, and a lot of Edgar Allen Poe, which prepares one nicely for being buried alive and not much else. As some of y’all might have noticed, my social skills are finely honed in extremely narrow channels and if you get out of my particular area of emotional expertise, I will go skipping across a minefield whistling and then wonder why things are exploding behind me.)
Now, obviously it is infinitely easier to have the option to read books about kids like you and to reject them then to not have the option in the first place. I wasn’t being erased, I was being annoyed. There were eleventy million Ramona books and Judy Blume and Paula Danziger and at once point or another, I probably read most of them, although I recall a certain weird cynicism toward many elements. (When Ramona is going to say a bad word and says “GUTS!” I recall thinking “Jeez, that’s the best you can do?” I was extremely sheltered in a great many ways, and even I knew far better swear words than that.) We had to read Skinnybones in fifth grade, and I believe to this day that the book would be improved by a desert island, or possibly having the protagonist trapped in a room with the air running out, trying to dig their way free with a spoon.
My memory of the third grade is a bit hazy, except that Having Your Name Written On The Board was the worst thing that could happen to you in class, and our well-meaning teacher, Mr. Christensen, tried dozens of variations on the writing-your-name-on-the-board thing, including one where everybody’s name was up with a window next to it, and if you misbehaved, you got a crack in your window. I remember, though, that as my parents were divorced, I went to talk to the school counselor once a week. I think I was given pamphlets or something about kids with divorced parents that were supposed to be written from their point of view. I have a vague memory of feeling intense contempt toward these pamphlets. Christ, what a waste of type. Not a dragon to be seen.
(I would spend the rest of my life with an intense dislike of Very Special Episodes and After School Specials. Every time they showed us a video in health class of kids struggling with alcoholism or sucide or teen pregnancy, I would slump in my seat thinking “The real issue here is that these people are too stupid to live.”)
I am the only me that I know, so I cannot give you the report from the other me in another timeline who had no books about kids like them. It seems likely that since I had a thousand options of representation, I was free to reject them all and read about dragons. I had the option to view Ramona as a peculiar anthropological oddity (what the hell was zwieback? Why did people eat it?) and identify with Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web. Having that option is vitally important, even if only so that you can choose not to take it. I could afford the luxury of contempt.
No escapism without representation, maybe?
Do I have a point? Oh, probably not, or I’ve forgotten it already. Maybe just that in any class, you will likely have one beady-eyed little contrarian who wants nothing to do with the books that they are supposed to identify with, and would rather take their life lessons from Spock or Hazel or Bilbo.
Maybe just that at the end of the day, all of us authors on those panels really were writing the books we needed as kids. And some of us desperately needed to be acknowledged, and some of us just wanted to escape. And here I am, today, still trying to write books for that beady-eyed little contrarian who never had enough books about talking animals.
Anyway. Great book festival, great people, great everything. Recommend it highly if you’re anywhere near Houston next year.
(And does anybody else remember getting their name on the board?)
ETA: By the way, this is NOT to say in any way that fantasy/SFF is free from the responsibility of providing representation–far from it! People want to know that people like them are welcome in fantasy worlds, too! More musings on the weird divide between people wanting books about their world and some of our strong desire to kick that world to the curb…
October 13, 2016
October 4, 2016
Summer in Orcus Chapter Five
“Now then, Summer,” said Boarskin, pouring more tea into Summer’s cup. “How did you get here? Did you ride in by fern-fish or step through a door in the hedge? Did you walk into a dragon’s shadow?”
October 3, 2016
September 29, 2016
September 27, 2016
September 22, 2016
Summer in Orcus Chapter Two
Summer’s mother believed that books were safe things that kept you inside, which only shows how little she knew about it, because books are one of the least safe things in the world.
September 20, 2016
Summer in Orcus: Chapter One
“Once upon a time there was a girl named Summer, whose mother loved her very very very much…”
Still trying to work out how to RSS feed it gracefully, but I at least got the website to auto-post it, which was trickier than I expected, given that it’s in a portfolio, not a post. (Now I get to duplicate that…uh…thirty-four times! Woo?)
(Incidentally, I think there will be 34 chapters.)
Each chapter is supposed to run around 2500 words, but there’s a fair amount of fluctuation, just because I didn’t want to break some things off in mid-sentence. So there’s a few short ones and a few reeeeeally long ones. But I suppose we’ll make do.
Once we get rolling and into Orcus proper, if there’s something you’d like to hear more about, the comments at Livejournal or here are an excellent place to suggest them! (Tumblr isn’t always the easiest for discussion!) I’m gonna try to do little supplements on Sundays with background and worldbuilding, (since a lot of people wanted something to read on the weekends!) but it always helps to hear what people want to know more about! That sort of supplements are another thing I can do much more easily with a web-serial, so yay patrons for helping it happen!
I’m excited!
September 19, 2016
Summer in Orcus launches tomorrow!
So, uh…looks like we’re actually doing this thing! Tomorrow! If the CSS is kind, it will auto-populate and if not, I’ll do it manually, but it is going live, come hell or high water!
You can read the introduction (and bookmark the page where more things will appear) right here!
I will be posting links here as they go live, never fear! It will be up Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we’re going to try bonus content on Sundays–little snippets about the world of Orcus and so forth–once we’ve had a few weeks to settle in, and I’ll do my best to get an RSS feed working as well for people who don’t check back here frequently.
Long-time readers will recognize the start of the story–“Hey! It’s the one with Baba Yaga!”–as having been posted here. Yup, that’s the one, and I finally finished it…
I’m all nervous and stuff. This is such a weird little book and I’m still not sure if anyone will like it or if they will throw tomatoes, but by god, I wrote it anyway, and thanks to the awesome people on Patreon, I can offer it free to the world.
September 14, 2016
Journal 9-9-12-16
The emus are very tame. They are also incredibly dumb and think they are being sneaky. They found Kevin very interesting.
The pigs in question are Ossabaw Island Hogs, which are a very rare farm breed. My friends are breeding them as part of the ongoing effort to preserve them on farms. They are incredibly funky and weird and awesome pigs.
Domestic boars have what’s called “shield fat” which is a hefty layer of fat over the shoulders that becomes rock hard. It’s literally armor against the tusks of other males. Fox’s boar is named Giles (her two sows are Buffy & Willow–apparently they had a Spike, but the ladies picked Giles) and this was one of his offspring who was just getting old enough to become troublesome. He was starting to develop the shield fat layer, and you could feel the difference. It is very weird to encounter something that looks like it should be squooshy fat and have it be like tough leather. In an adult boar, that layer would be inches thick!
Also, I now know more about how pig rectums fit into a pig than I knew previously. I shall cherish this knowledge.
I shall, at another time, post the tale of the star-crossed lovers, Napoleon the silky rooster and the Turkey Girl. It is an epic and stupid love for the ages.
I have about a thousand photos of chickens to sort through, and I regret nothing.
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