Sarah Rees Brennan's Blog, page 8

The Art of Unspoken

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

So, I think you all know I love the Unspoken cover. And the thing is that before I received it, I didn’t know what ‘cut paper art’ even was, I just kept yapping about shadows and silhouettes and wanting my heroine to be DOING SOMETHING on the cover, and then my editor found Beth White and had a brainwave.

Cut paper art had to be explained to me, is what I’m saying.

LOVELY EDITOR MALLORY: So cut paper is when you do a sketch…

SARAH: Like tracing… yes…

LEM: Sort of, okay, but using black paper beneath.

SARAH: Yes! I understand.

SARAH: … Nope, just kidding, run that by me again.

So I thought it would be fun if Beth White, my cover artist, talked a bit about what she did for you guys!

BETH WHITE, ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE!

I begin by asking as many questions as possible as to what the art director is envisioning for the cover. Then I begin researching parts such as the iron gate and and the estate house to get the feel of what I want to draw. With just black and white, it is important to balance intricate detail with more solid black and to position everything just so …especially on the figure. Her face and hands especially need to fall in the negative space but not look contrived. I also tried to give her a sense of urgency and hesitation….wonder and a little fear….by the way she is standing and how her hands are positioned. I hoped that it gives the feeling of that. (SARAH: Yes it super does! Mallory and I had many a conversation about how we wanted Kami of Unspoken on her feet, bent on a mission, because we’d seen a lot of covers with girls who were not *acting*… often who were dead, and we wanted something different.)

I did probably 5 gates before I got the gate to look imposing because the cover space for the gate is actually a little narrow. I loved the idea of woman’s head with the flowing hair in the gate (SARAH: Yup, the ladies with flowing hair are in the book and are indeed a plot point, so I stuffed my hand in my mouth and giggled with girlish glee to see them so beauteously rendered) and ran with it….again the hair needed to work with the negative space…and there is a fine line between just enough and too many strands. The falling leaves were an overlay but added so much to the cover.

I sketch all the art on tracing paper because I can move things around and see the spacing etc. When the art is approved I reverse trace the image onto black paper. Then I cut the black paper in reverse which keeps me true to my line (because it is in reverse and not as I have been looking at it for weeks). Keeps me on my toes for the final cut …then I clean up hairs and cuts on the right side and attach it to mat board.

You can see more art at

Beth White’s agent’s website.

Holy God, y’all, I implore you to click on this link. There is some BEAUTIFUL STUFF here. So many beautiful things!

I have told you all of the trials of getting Unspoken cover art at all, and how my first cover artist ran away from me!

When I first saw that sketch, I practically burst into tears in an airport. I was quite overcome.

It was like a miracle to get such a beautiful cover: as I’ve said, I know it’s a super risky and different cover for YA, and I am scared stiff about that, but the stores who are behind Unspoken are super behind it (I already bragged about Unspoken being on display in Powell’s), it is AMAZING ART and I feel privileged to have received it.

And I got permission to show you Beth White’s first sketch, and then the cover that resulted!

My editor said ‘Kami wears kitten heels!’ and I said ‘That dude silhouette. More buff. Add jacket.’ (I didn’t think I’d ever sit around objectifying a silhouette, but there you go.) And we both said, BOTH SIDES OF THE GATE ALL LADIES ALL THE TIME.

And that is how the cover of Unspoken, out right now at this time, was made!

I hoped you guys would find it interessante.

Also a couple more reviews of Unspoken! And some dreamcasting

In summary, Beth White is a genius!

APPEARANCES IN AMERICA FOR UNSPOKEN!

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 16

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia Dartmouth Chapters Canada

Time: 2:00pm.

Kelley Armstrong, Melissa Marr, Melissa de la Cruz, Charles de Lint, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Jeri Smith-Ready

This is my first ever Canadian appearance, and I am super excited!

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 18

Philadelphia, PA Barnes & Noble, 210 Commerce Blvd, Fairless Hills, PA 19030, 215-269-0442

Time: 7:00pm.

Address: Oxford Valley.

Kelley Armstrong, Melissa Marr, Rachel Caine, Rosemary Clement-Moore, Melissa de la Cruz, Kami Garcia, and Sarah Rees Brennan

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 21

Time: 7: 00 pm

B&N # 2966

98 Middlesex Turnpike

Burlington, MA 01803

Phone: (781) 273-3871

Libba Bray, Holly Black and Sarah Rees Brennan

SATURDAY 29 SEPTEMBER

Austin Teen Book Festival

http://austinteenbookfestival.com/

Free admission!

10:55 panel which I am MODERATING (oh those poor damned though talented souls) called We’re Not In Kansas Anymore, featuring Libba Bray, Rae Carson, Leigh Bardugo, Kami Garcia and Margi Stohl. Afterwards we sign things! (Books provided by http://www.bookpeople.com/)

My first time in Austin! I want a ‘Keep Austin Weird’ T-shirt.

OCTOBER, 11-14

Sirens Conference, http://www.sirensconference.org/

And as well as the conference an appearance and signing:

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14

2 PM, Powell’s, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd Beaverton, OR 97005, (503) 228-4651

Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Janni Lee Simner, Mette Ivie Harrison, and Sarah Rees Brennan

Very excited to be going to Powell’s as Unspoken has been picked for one of their Few Favourites for the fall, and will be on display in the bookshops! Not just in them but on display! <3 <3 <3

NOVEMBER 10

Charleston, YALLfest, at Blue Bicycle Books & The American Theatre, King Street, Charleston, SC http://yallfest.org/

… And I believe that is all. For THIS YEAR. So, you know, if anyone would like to come to any of these that would be awesome, and if anyone would like books from any of these bookshops, call the bookshops and I promise to sign the books, writing strange messages or drawing strange pictures on request.

I mean, if they’re my books. I won’t draw strange pictures in Nora Roberts books.

… I mean, I WOULD, but I doubt the bookshops would let me.

The Post-Unspoken World

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

My Big Idea, kindly hosted by John Scalzi

An interview in which I talk about the other worlds our imagination creates…

And a cool contest here with posters!

I decided to copy Seanan McGuire and compile a list of reviews. This is not comprehensive, but I tried to pick out reviews that mentioned different stuff!

A note to Sarah Rees Brennan: because you wrote this book I love so very, very much I will love you forever. HOWEVER…

There is nothing better than a smart, funny heroine who likes to solve mysteries.

Brennan does a truly wonderful job of exploring this unrealistic situation in a very real and frank way – presenting the pros and cons, the day-to-day realities, of being psychically connected to another human being

I love the plots, I love the slightly creepy style and the interwoven folklore. And most of all I love the characters. It’s so refreshing to read a story where the relationships are not all about boy meets girl, but female friendships and family as well..

Kami’s not all bold pronouncements and daring plans, however. Brennan uses her to explore beauty, and how it impacts women’s relationships with each other

‘Longtime SRB fans are setup to like her newest offering, and I’m not surprised that I fell into that camp’, plus links to other reviews

No matter how hard I tried to predict the direction this book would take, I couldn’t.

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Unspoken is unequivocally one of the best young adult novels I’ve ever read.

I am also, as you can see, doing a blog tour you can follow along with. I wrote lots of essays!

Creating A Fictional Town

Well, this one is embarrassing, but hey, I wrote a huge romantic essay and always valuable to have different POVs!

Inspirations and Influences on the Book Smugglers

I thought this would be a NICE SELECTION to start with! I am of course, always attentively waiting for your thinkings.

THE LAST GOTHIC TUESDAY

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

Gothic Tuesday List

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

REBECCA

JANE EYRE

THE WOMAN IN WHITE

GREYGALLOWS

THE MISTRESS OF MELLYN

HOUSES OF STONE

TRELAWNY

MERLIN’S KEEP

NINE COACHES WAITING

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

And there’s the Sleuth Thursday list too…

NANCY DREW

THE WOMAN IN WHITE

KATE DANIELS

ROBIN SCHERBATSKY

MISS MARPLE

ROXANNE RITCHI

GEORGIA MASON

LOIS LANE

LYNDA DAY

VERONICA MARS

REAL LADY SLEUTHS

This is the last Gothic Tuesday, written for the day of Unspoken’s release, and the last Sleuth Thursday was last week. Behold them all are in LIST FORM for your delectation, kindly readers.

But what is our final Gothic Tuesday?

Most Gothic books are not meant to be hilarious. Unless Charlotte Bronte was playing an elaborate practical joke writing JANE EYRE. ‘Ahahaha, the hero gets a fake girlfriend and he has a secret wife! Hee hee hee! Time to dress up like an old lady! Eddie you kill me!’

… In which case, I have to say: Well played, Bronte, well played.

Jane Austen, however, definitely intended NORTHANGER ABBEY to be funny, which makes everything MUCH trickier. Who guards the guards? Who parodies the parodies?

Apparently the answer to that second question is… me. Lucky, lucky me. I knew the curse would fall upon me. I resisted it! I thought maybe I could do THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, or THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, or Jenny Crusie’s MAYBE THIS TIME, or Susan Howatch’s THE DEVIL ON LAMMAS NIGHT (Satan gets a kitty cat to steal a letter in its tiny kitten teeth!), but… come on. I love Jane Austen. This is my last Gothic Tuesday: my funny Gothic book comes out TODAY.

In vain I have struggled. It will not do. You must allow me to parody NORTHANGER ABBEY.

JANE AUSTEN: Catherine Morland, not really heroine material. She was kind of plain and not that bright.

BELLA SWAN: She was just before her time, yo.

CATHERINE: If I could sum up my homeland of Wiltshire with one phrase that phrase would be: who let the dogs out?

FAMILY FRIEND MRS ALLEN: Want to go on a trip to Bath to hook up with hotties? Bath, the Ibiza of its time!

CATHERINE: … Let me go pack my SEXY bonnet.

CATHERINE: Dear Mum and Dad, Not waylayed by dangerously attractive highwaymen on way to Bath. Disappointed but planning to rock out tonight! Love, C.

MRS ALLEN: I’d like to make it clear that I only care about one thing.

CATHERINE: That I have a good time as your guest?

MRS ALLEN: I was going to say ‘awesome designer frocks’ but, I mean, go nuts, Camille.

CATHERINE: Catherine.

MRS ALLEN: Whatever, Celine. Does this bustle make my ass look big?

CATHERINE: I imagined this more as ‘dancing in my best dress, fearless!’ and less as ‘awkward standing around.’

MRS ALLEN: I dunno, I’m having a pretty good time. I was looking around and I thought, who is that honey in the fabulous satin? Then I realised I was looking in a mirror. Boo yeah!

MASTER OF HOOKING UP: Hey you, young lady! You wanna hook up? Here’s Henry Tilney. The first rule of Bath: what happens in Bath, stays in Bath. The second rule of Bath: don’t drink the water. Seriously, don’t do it.

HENRY TILNEY: Hey girl. I have an ironic sense of humour and several observations to make about the inherent absurdity of society!

CATHERINE: That’s cool. I’m seventeen, so I’m working my way up to irony, but what’s cookin’, good-lookin’?

HENRY TILNEY: Hey do you keep a journal? I think dudes and ladies are about equal in writing talent, really!

CATHERINE: I bet you get a lot of carriage-parking tickets, because boy you are fine.

HENRY TILNEY: Also I’m super into fashion.

MRS ALLEN: I like him. He can stay.

JANE AUSTEN: I hear from the newspapers and dude novelists that ladies are physically incapable of fancying dudes unless the dudes are into them first. Newspapers and dude novelists, you are full of it. Catherine Morland wanted to rock Henry Tilney a) like a hurricane, b) like a wagon wheel and c) all night long. Jane out!

MRS THORPE: Hey Mrs Allen, old schoolfriend, I don’t know if you’ve met my daughter Isabella and my son John and my other daught-

MRS ALLEN: Lady I don’t know why you’re so self-centred. Can we talk about me for a minute? More importantly, can we talk about my jaunty hat?

ISABELLA THORPE: I know your brother James. He’s hot, don’t you think?

CATHERINE: No.

ISABELLA: Come on, we’re in a Gothic novel.

CATHERINE: No.

ISABELLA: Little bit?

CATHERINE: Let me show you the world. The world of no.

JANE AUSTEN: Isabella and Catherine became friends through reading novels together. I am not going to slam on novels like other people do because, damn, I am WRITING A NOVEL here, why would I do that? Also I work really hard on my books and I bet other people do too. Also, sorry books are more fun to read than the news, y’all. It’s hard out here for a literary genius.

JANE AUSTEN: Uh, I mean, ‘there seems an almost general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them.’

JANE AUSTEN: Because I’m pithy like that.

CATHERINE: Girl this Gothic mystery is so compelling! I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a skeleton in a minute. What’s that you have there?

ISABELLA: I may have made us a list of AWESOMELY CREEPY books.

CATHERINE: Hit me.

ISABELLA: Brace yourself because there are necromancers!

CATHERINE: Necromancers are better than cake!

ISABELLA: Hey check out those two foxy dudes.

CATHERINE: Wait, but I want to talk about the book some more…

ISABELLA: To the Flirtmobile, away!

CATHERINE: I think books are equally exciting as dudes.

ISABELLA: All the single ladies, put your hands up! All the single ladies, make noise!

CATHERINE’S BROTHER JAMES: Hey Isabella hey.

ISABELLA’S BROTHER JOHN: Hi Cathy check out my sweet ride.

CATHERINE: Yeah, it’s nice.

ISABELLA’S BROTHER JOHN: All the honeys describe it as pretty fly.

CATHERINE: … Do you read at all?

ISABELLA’S BROTHER JOHN: I would but the thing is books are dumb?

CATHERINE: … I think we’re done here.

CATHERINE: Omigod here comes Henry Tilney with a hot girl! I assume it’s his sister because he was totally flirting with me earlier.

ISABELLA: You are throwing away an opportunity for a dramatic misunderstanding!

ELEANOR: Hi I’m Henry’s sister Eleanor?

ISABELLA: Prime swooning opportunity lost! You missed your chance, Morland! YOU MISSED YOUR CHANCE.

CATHERINE: Nice to meet you. Forgive Isabella, she’s been at the rum punch.

ISABELLA’S BROTHER JOHN: My hobbies include drinking, swearing, and horse racing.

CATHERINE: Awesome. Here’s my number.

ISABELLA’S BROTHER JOHN: Um, Catherine, you just gave me the number for Mario’s Pizza Place.

CATHERINE: Oh, shoot.

ISABELLA: I’m going to be flirting with your brother all day every day, later.

CATHERINE: Isabella! Ovaries before brovaries!

ISABELLA: You’ll have fun with my brother, ’K?

CATHERINE: In the same way I have fun with carriage accidents, large vicious animals, and the Black Death, sure.

HENRY’S SISTER ELEANOR: Hey girl, how’s it going?

CATHERINE: I spend my days mostly writing ‘Mrs Catherine Tilney’ in my trapper keeper, and climbing out of windows to avoid John Thorpe. If you see John, tell him I’m washing my hair and I’ll keep washing my hair until L’Oreal is invented, because I’m worth it.

ELEANOR: Got it.

CATHERINE: If you see your brother, tell him I’m free. Tell him I’m single. Tell him I’m totally unattached, low maintenance, and interested. Don’t you think he’s hot?

ELEANOR: A world of no.

CATHERINE: Uh, I mean, totally objectively. Can you give him this note?

ELEANOR: ‘Wanna hook up check Y or N?’

CATHERINE: I’m objectively interested in his opinion on this matter.

HENRY TILNEY: Wanna dance? Hey, isn’t it weird how dudes have to ask, and ladies have to wait to be asked? Would you ask dudes to dance if you could?

CATHERINE: If I could rearrange the letters of the alphabet I’d put U and I together.

CATHERINE: Who’s that silver fox staring at me?

HENRY TILNEY: Um, it’s my dad…?

CATHERINE: Awk.

HENRY TILNEY: Ward.

JOHN THORPE: Hey there sexy lady, wanna ride?

CATHERINE: No thanks, I’m meeting Henry Dreamboat Tilney today!

JOHN: Uh, no, I saw them go that way. Guess you got stood up and can come with me.

CATHERINE: Oh. Fantastic. Wait stop the carriage, that’s Henry!

JOHN: Oh yeah, I remember now. I was totally lying.

CATHERINE: STOP THE CARRIAGE.

JOHN: I would, but I don’t feel like it.

HENRY TILNEY: Being stood up for another dude is hurtful. Being stood up for John Thorpe is both hurtful and deeply puzzling.

HENRY TILNEY: Is she really going out with him? Is she really gonna take him home tonight?

CATHERINE: Help! Help! I’ve been kidnapped! BY AN UNATTRACTIVE GUY. Will nobody help me?

CATHERINE: I did not stand you up yesterday! Come on, think about it for a second. That guy? Really, you think I’d stand you up for that guy?

HENRY TILNEY: Compelling point.

CATHERINE: I suppose you don’t read novels?

HENRY ‘ACTUAL QUOTE, HE’S SO FINE’ TILNEY: The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.

CATHERINE: I am going to hit it like the fist of God.

HENRY: Beg pardon?

CATHERINE: Nothing! Please continue to talk about books!

HENRY: Do you like history?

CATHERINE: Um, no. How do I put this? Too many misters, not enough sisters.

HENRY: Point. Do you like art?

CATHERINE: I don’t know anything about art. Tell me about it!

JANE AUSTEN: Even dudes as cool as Henry really, really like it when ladies don’t know stuff and they can hold forth at great length.

JANE AUSTEN: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of some knowledge from wikipedia must be in want of a girl to patronisingly explain it to.

JANE AUSTEN: Why such dudes are single is not a Gothic mystery. But I digress!

ISABELLA: Great news Catherine! But you probably already guessed… you’re so sly and quick!

CATHERINE: Wut?

ISABELLA: Your brother likes it and he’s gonna put a ring on it!

CATHERINE: Sorry, on what?

ISABELLA: Your brother popped the question.

CATHERINE: And the question was…?

ISABELLA: Your brother James asked me to marry him, by which I mean be his wife, and I said yes. To that question. That he asked me.

CATHERINE: Oh wow, that’s so great! Congratulations! I can’t believe it!

ISABELLA: And I no longer believe in feminine intuition.

GENERAL TILNEY, HENRY’S HOT DAD: Hello Catherine. You’re really pretty.

CATHERINE: Thank you.

GENERAL TILNEY: So you agree with me, you think you’re really pretty?

CATHERINE: If this dude wasn’t Henry the Hotass’s dad, I would say he gives me the creeps. But I am one hundred per cent positive it’s all OK and I should ignore any warning signs going off in my head!

HENRY AND ELEANOR: Wait till you meet our brother Captain Tilney. He inherited the evil gene.

CATHERINE: The what?

HENRY AND ELEANOR: Nothing! Did you say something? I didn’t hear anything.

CATHERINE’S BROTHER JAMES: Oh sweet Isabella, we will be so happy togethee in our humble cot!

ISABELLA: I truly disliked two of those words you just said. Sounds like ‘jumble spot.’

CATHERINE: Aw, you and James are going to be so happy!

ISABELLA: Excuse me, I have to go dance with Captain Evil But Chiseled & Rich Tilney!

CATHERINE: Captain Evil But Chiseled Tilney is pretty chiseled, but I have to say I’m not feeling it. Maybe it’s the evil. No love triangles in this book!

ISABELLA’S BROTHER JOHN: Well, I…

CATHERINE: No.

JOHN: Love is in the air…

CATHERINE: Just no.

JOHN: If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy-

CATHERINE: I would strangle myself with my own bonnet strings. I knew a man once and his name was Hell, No.

ELEANOR: Oh Catherine, great to see you. Look, I was wondering if you might come pay me a visit at my home in Northanger Abbey. I know my dad’s a little weird and the house is a little Gothic and creepy, but–

CATHERINE: Did you say Gothic and creepy? I’m there. I’m there with eldritch bells on.

ELEANOR: Oh, fantastic! You may be interested in our antique furniture–

CATHERINE: Ghastly skeletons!

ELEANOR: –we have a very nice shrubbery…

CATHERINE: I hope there’s a nun who got buried alive!

ELEANOR: –also our roses always get first prize at the flower show—

CATHERINE: Can’t wait!

ELEANOR: Sometimes I worry we’re having conversations in two different dimensions.

CATHERINE: Maybe there’s an interdimensional portal to a demon realm at your place!

GENERAL ‘EVIL’ TILNEY: Maybe Catherine would like to ride with Henry in his carriage!

CATHERINE: Boy would I!

HENRY: It’s awesome you’re coming to stay.

CATHERINE: I’m totally stoked about it. And the best part is—

HENRY: Yeeeees?

CATHERINE: It’s going to be a Gothic manor! I so hope there will be a ghost seeking vengeance!

HENRY: Well. Imagine that you go in and you find a secret passageway! And then a golden and jet casket, in which lies papers containing a dread secret, and then in the dank breeze of the passageway your single candle gutters and goes out, leaving you in utter darkness—

CATHERINE: Ahhh! Right. Right. You don’t have any smelling salts on you, do you? Okay, never mind.

HENRY: I’ll stop.

CATHERINE: DON’T YOU DARE STOP.

HENRY: This your first time telling horror stories with a guy?

CATHERINE: Yeah, but I’m a fast learner.

CATHERINE: I wish I had you to tell me bedtime stories eeeeeevery night.

HENRY: Uh, well, maybe something could be arranged.

CATHERINE: I won’t get into the other bedtime stuff because I know you’re a bashful clergyman and all.

HENRY (faintly): Right. Right. You don’t have any smelling salts on you, do you? … Okay, never mind.

CATHERINE: Uh, what kind of abbey do you call this? Nothing is mouldering!

GENERAL TILNEY: I’d have serious words with housekeeping if something was.

CATHERINE: Night-time at the abbey. Hey, this chest in my room looks sort of gold and black-y, just like the chest from Henry’s story.

CATHERINE: Not that I’m going to tamper with someone else’s private property. Nope. Not me.

CATHERINE: Catherine Morland, lawabiding citizen.

CATHERINE: I can resist everything except temptation! Let me at it! Let me at it! Omigod papers, just like in Henry’s story, no doubt containing some dread tale, let me just snuff my candle…

CANDLE: goes out

DARKNESS: is absolute

CATHERINE: Let me just huddle in bed with my papers and wait for daylight I know I shall never zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

CATHERINE: It’s daytime! Finally I can pursue this dark and midnight tale of…

CATHERINE: This dark and midnight tale of a drycleaning bill.

CATHERINE: I’m just going to go have breakfast. Let’s keep this between you and me, Sweet and Fresh Linens!

GENERAL TILNEY: Hey you want to see Northanger Abbey?

CATHERINE: Boy do I! Take me to your crypt!

GENERAL TILNEY: Or we could take a walk outside and see the gardens. It’s a lovely day!

CATHERINE: This fixation on sunshine and fresh air is very suspicious.

GENERAL TILNEY: I love gardening!

CATHERINE: WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?

ELEANOR: Let’s take this gloomy walk down a chestnut avenue, it was my dead mother’s favourite walk.

CATHERINE: Gloomy? Possibly haunted? Say no more. I’m in!

GENERAL TILNEY: I’m out, Goth girls.

CATHERINE: Has it ever occurred to you that your father might have brutally murdered your mother?

ELEANOR: Sorry, what?

CATHERINE: Just thinking out loud, good buddy. Just thinking out loud.

GENERAL TILNEY: Let me show you around the Abbey! Wait till you see my kitchens, they are divine.

CATHERINE: Vile monster, I scorn your gleaming countertops!

GENERAL TILNEY: Best not go in the old deserted wing.

ELEANOR: My mother died there. Bad memories.

CATHERINE: Oh, poor gullible Eleanor. It’s obvious that General Tilney either murdered his wife or is keeping her locked up in there and feeding her only gruel!

GENERAL TILNEY: Time for dinner!

CATHERINE: You will not glory in your ill-gotten kitchens much longer, fiend!

CATHERINE: Oh uh hi Henry, good to see you. I was just… wandering through the locked part of the abbey… checking out your dead mother’s belongings… for like, evidence, bloodstained clothing, ropes and chains. Normal stuff. Normal stuff.

HENRY: I think ‘Maybe your dad murdered your mom’ is the least sexy thing anyone has ever said to me.

CATHERINE: Or maybe imprisoned her!

HENRY: Catherine, what can you be thinking? RICH BRITISH DUDES NEVER COMMIT CRIMES!

CATHERINE: I have learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes a douchebag is just a douchebag and doesn’t murder anybody. Also sometimes an abbey is just a big old house.

CATHERINE: Omigod I am so embarrassed the boy I like must think I’m an idiot because I acted like an idiot!

HENRY: Hey girl. I find naivete about human nature charming.

CATHERINE: Well lucky for you I am ten pounds of naïve in a five pound sack.

CATHERINE: Awesome I got a letter! ‘Dear Catherine, In a totally unforeseen and narratively unforeshadowed turn of events, Isabella has left me for Captain Evil Tilney. Listening to Evanescence, nothing matters anymore. Love Your Brother James, The Dude Formerly Known As Isabella’s Fiance’

CATHERINE: This was not at all the letter I was hoping for.

ELEANOR: Cathy you OK?

GENERAL TILNEY: This comic strip in the newspaper is very droll!

CATHERINE: *crying openly*

HENRY: Catherine speak to us!

ELEANOR: Cathy honey!

GENERAL TILNEY: And my cocoa is deeeeeelicious! … Wait is something going on?

HENRY: I guess it could be true: my brother always had a low opinion of women, so he’s enough of a dumbass to get snared by Isabella.

ELEANOR: Uh, our father is not going to let our brother marry some broke girl.

CATHERINE: Why not?

HENRY: Well. I ain’t saying he’s a gold digger…

CATHERINE: Sucks about Isabella, but it’s nice to hang out with Henry and Eleanor, and now I get to visit Henry’s house. Oh what a great house, not Gothicky or manory at all!

GENERAL TILNEY: Yeah, it’s an OK house. Needs a lady’s touch. If only Henry had a wife to pick out wallpaper for him? koff koff.

HENRY: DAD OMG.

GENERAL TILNEY: Hush lad, I’m being SUBTLE.

CATHERINE: Oh cool another letter. ‘Dear Catherine, Uh your brother seems to have misunderstood something, like, he ran out yelling something about ‘bleating on me!’ Please write and reassure him there are no sheep in Bath and I totally love him 4 eva. If you happen to see Captain Evil Tilney tell him I hate his stupid hot face and his amazing ass in a military uniform, Love Isabella.’

CATHERINE: … Huh. I guess Isabella thinks I’m the stupidest person in the world.

ELEANOR: It’s cool that you’re growing up. It’s also cool I won’t have to deal with Isabella as a sister-in-law. I got problems enough already, half my family is evil.

ELEANOR: Okay Catherine, I hate to break in on your bedroom in the dead of night, but uh… I don’t really know how to put this…

CATHERINE: Oh Eleanor, it can’t be that bad.

ELEANOR: My dad is throwing you out of the house first thing in the morning and you will be unaccompanied and have to travel all alone and young and unprotected and—and maybe get murdered by bandits and he won’t care!

CATHERINE: … Okay that’s pretty bad.

STRANGE STORM: *howls through the noise*

CATHERINE: Shut up atmospheric weather, I have a lot on my mind!

ELEANOR: I am so so so sorry, I hate my dad and I hate myself!

CATHERINE: Oh Eleanor, don’t hate yourself!… I also hate your dad.

ELEANOR: Please take this cash.

CATHERINE: Oh yes I forgot your dad was turning me penniless out of the house and I am unable to get home without money. Maybe the bandits will take me in!

ELEANOR: When you leave I’m going upstairs to listen to the Smiths.

CATHERINE: Thinking dark thoughts on a long lonely journey, totally unprotected…

CATHERINE: I could really use a distraction. Where are those bandits at?

CATHERINE: Lazy good-for-nothing bandits…

CATHERINE: Totally safe if depressed journey home. What kind of Gothic novel is this?

CATHERINE’S MOM: And then General Tilney sent Catherine home. It was a long way in the dark with nobody to protect her! She’s sixteen! I’m outrage.

MRS ALLEN: It IS an outrage. But you know what else is an outrage? That you’ve been in my house five minutes and you haven’t admired my gloves yet. Check out the fine stitches on these babies!

CATHERINE’S MOM: You seem depressed.

CATHERINE: I don’t know why you would say that.

CATHERINE’S MOM: Your sister Sarah says you want to paint your bedroom black.

CATHERINE: Black like my black bleak future, black like the colour of my dead dreams!

CATHERINE: … I’m totally fine. God, Mom.

CATHERINE’S MOM: We’re well rid of those awful Tilneys!

HENRY: Hi I’m Henry Tilney, and I just came by to say I was so sor-

CATHERINE’S MOM: Say no more! Casa Morland is always open to the handsome!

HENRY: You’re very kind. Uh, could I maybe take a walk?

CATHERINE’S MOM: You just got here?

HENRY: I better visit the Allens, maybe someone could show me the way…?

CATHERINE’S MOM: You can see that house from our window.

HENRY: Can I go outside with your daughter so I can propose to her?!

CATHERINE’S MOM: Oh! Oh totally. Oh, we have like ten children, which daughter do you want?

HENRY: Catherine.

CATHERINE’S MOM: Good choice. Good choice. Sarah’s kind of a pill.

HENRY: See the thing is… you remember Isabella’s brother John?

CATHERINE: John ‘Busy Hands’ Thorpe? Sadly yes.

HENRY: He told my dad you were rich because he wanted to boast about courting a rich girl. When Dad found out you weren’t rich he threw you out of the house. Uh. See the thing is… Dad is a huge jerk…

CATHERINE: Ten four. Fully understood.

HENRY: So will you marry me?

CATHERINE: Oh Henry. I’m going to love you like nothing you’ve ever known, I’m gonna love you and you all alone. When can we get to the macking?

HENRY: Well, I mean, we could do it now or we could wait until we’re married, which would obviously be fine, either way, really…

CATHERINE: REGENCY LADY MACK ATTACK!

JANE AUSTEN: Let’s face it, there are like two pages of the book to go, you know the Evil General said OK. Eleanor married a rich dude and the General was in a good mood, the General figured Mrs Allen might leave Catherine her dress collection and they’d be rich, baby, rich.

JANE AUSTEN: In conclusion, distrusting your parents, really wanting to bang a dude, and reading lots of sensational novels always works out awesome. Jane out!

There are a lot of things to like about Northanger Abbey. Of course there are. Jane Austen is a freaking genius.

One of the best things is that Jane Austen is in conversation with the Gothic genre, saying, look, I like things to be grounded in realism, for heaven’s sake, why would you run upstairs when the masked killer was after you, call the cops!

But she wasn’t making fun of her heroine the whole time: she is on her heroine’s side, and it isn’t all funny. Catherine may be wrong about dire murders and veiled skeletons, but her belief in those things come from her belief, her instinct, that she is not safe in Northanger Abbey. Even a sympathetic, understanding guy like Henry Tilney will try to tell her that she is wrong: that she is safe.

But Catherine is right. Catherine is not safe.

Gothic novels are a way of talking about feeling endangered, and feeling trapped, and having all those feelings validated. Jane Austen, I think, understood that. She talks about Gothic novels and the women who read them with love as well as amusement: she knew that you do not have to be serious all the time to make points that should be taken seriously.

A book shouldn’t be just funny or just serious: a book should be both, and the serious moments should help the funny ones. Just like a book shouldn’t tell one story but dozens of stories, entwined with and illuminating each other.

That’s what I tried to do with Unspoken, anyway.

This is my very last Gothic Tuesday, and Unspoken is OUT TODAY! Gothic Tuesdays and Sleuth Thursdays have been a big project for me, but also a lot of fun, and I hope they’ve been fun for you guys too.

I would be most happy if you guys wanted to read Unspoken–(which, shamelessly linking, one can buy online or in a store: support your local indie. If the book is not in your local store you would be doing me a solid if you asked for it, though of course you do not have to). I would feel I had not blogged in vain! It is the book of my heart, and by talking about Gothic novels and lady sleuths, the jokes I made and the thinky thoughts I had, I hope you guys see what drew me to the idea and the kind of humour and danger I was going for.

I hope you enjoyed this: I hope you enjoy the book. Happy Unspoken day to us all!

UNSPOKEN RELEASE DAY

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

Unspoken is out today, and I am so excited for people to read it! I have a Gothic Tuesday for you all, but first I have this short story present, MOST FANCILY on amazon!

Holly Black wrote an introduction for The Spring Before I Met You, mainly because she saw all my attempts at writing my own introduction, along the lines of ‘This story is written by a lunatic about another lunatic’ and took pity on me…

I had the privilege of reading this story many months ago and swooning over it almost as much as I swooned over Unspoken, the first book of Sarah Rees Brennan’s gorgeously crafted modern gothic trilogy. Sarah’s writing is incredible in that she is able to write these witty, lush scenes that have you smiling along until suddenly, in a single sentence, she reaches out to break your heart.

This story introduces us to one of the main characters of Unspoken, Jared Lynburn. Seeing him as the broken, dangerous, closed-off teenager that he appears to be from the outside allows us to anticipate all of the insight we’ll have into his character when we get inside his head–which we will, since he’s the heroine’s “imaginary friend.”

I enjoy the contrast of Jared’s loneliness in the rough streets of Hunters Point/Bayview in San Francisco and the small, strange English town Jared is headed toward, and the girl he is about to meet. But most of all, in this story, I enjoy Jared himself, a character who is a study in contrasts–pushed to such extremes of despair and fury that he’s truly capable of anything and yet capable of vast kindness, gentleness and humor.

Scroll down to find and read The Spring Before I Met You!

REAL LADY SLEUTHS

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

For my very last Sleuth Thursday, I thought I would talk about Real Life Lady Sleuths, because the times I have discussed real life ladies before–with Nellie Bly and Mildred Wirt Benson–they have been so awesome, and I have found it awesome to do.

So… with no further ado, I now unleash upon you a TORRENT OF AWESOME.

ELIZABETH BANKS

Elizabeth Banks started off as a typewriter girl in a grocery store window, got an article published in the Daily Hustler, and then walked into the owner of the paper’s office and demanded a job. ‘I’m determined to be a newspaper reporter. If you won’t give me a place in your paper, I will go to Chicago and get a place. There are lots of papers there, you know.‘ She became a society journalist. then got her big break working as a secretary to the American ambassador in Peru. She used that to jump off to being a stunt journalist.

She lived in London for forty years, sometimes wrote under the pen name ‘Enid and pretended to be British, was pals with George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, and worked for the Allies during World War I.

In ‘Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt’ it says ‘women entered journalism mainly to debate and to claim a public voice.’ It was the motivation for a lot of women, and as you can see was certainly true of Egyptian women:

MOUNIRA SABET

In 1928, age 24, Mounira Sabet directed a Cairo newspaper and was described as ‘the Amazon in journalism.’ She attended parliament in Egypt and everyone were like ‘WHAT IS A LADY DOING HERE?’ but then she got them all arguing about a cotton proposal because she was aces at politics.

DURIYAH SHAFIQ

–Duriyah Shafiq published The White Paper on the Rights of the Egyptian Woman. She also organised sit-ins in parliament and hunger strikes, and in 1956 partly because of her efforts, women were given the right to vote and to be elected. The women of France were given this right less than ten years before the women of Egypt, and there was collaboration between the groups.

LADIES OF EGYPT: Can you believe this ****?

LADIES OF FRANCE: Alors and also mon Dieu, we cannot.

LADIES OF EGPYPT: We got your back.

LADIES OF FRANCE: Vive la revolution!

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

Founding feminist philosopher who wrote Thoughts on the Education of our Daughters (1787) and most famously, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which changed the conversation about feminism. Kept writing and refused to be distracted by little things like ‘pregnant with illegitimate baby’ and ‘the French Revolution. Her husband wrote a book called ‘Why My Wife Was Awesome and Sexually Liberated’ which unfortunately led to England being like ‘your wife was a scandalous hussy’ for two hundred years until they realised they were being idiots and were very embarrassed and she was famous for being awesome instead.

Her daughter, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein in her teens and thus invented science fiction. You’re welcome, science fiction! Be awesome to a teenage girl today.

AMELIA JENKS BLOOMER

–Amelia Jenks Bloomer was the editor of the Lily, which is believed to be the first newspaper edited entirely by a woman. She was also involved in dress reform through her defense of pantaloons, which came to be called “bloomers” in her honour.

I think when you have articles of clothing named after you, you have officially arrived. I hope for the day when someone says in horror ‘you’re not leaving the house without your Reesbrennans on!’

JANE ADDAMS

FAMILY: You are ugly and your spine is all curved!

JANE: I see you hatin’. I rollin’.

JANE: *establishes America’s most famous settlement house, a base for training social workers, becomes famous speaker, helps gets Roosevelt elected, writes THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS, effects massive social change.

JANE: BUT IT’S NOT ENOUGH.

JANE: Honestly not sure about World War I. Guess I better get world leaders together to discuss peace.

NEW YORK TIMES IN 1915: This woman’s behaviour is unacceptable and unpatriotic!

AMERICA IN 1931: This woman’s behaviour is like the coolest most American thing ever!

EVERYONE: Plz be the first woman ever to accept the Nobel Peace Prize!

JANE: Guess I changed the world.

GLORIA STEINEM

–Glora Steinem was born in 1934: during the 1960s she appeared as a leader in the women’s movement in the United States and was the writer and editor of many articles, culminating in 1970 when she co-founded Ms. magazine, which grew to be a leading feminist magazine.

—BARBARA LEIGH SMITH AND THE REAL SPEW

Barbara Leigh Smith was the illegitimate daughter of a radical dude who left her an independent fortune. She became a bohemian artist who was friends with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot (two of my favourite writers, both quoted from in epigraphs in the Lynburn Legacy). George Eliot apparently modeled the heroine of her novel Romola on her.

She also became a suffragette. In 1854 Barbara wrote her first nation-wide publication, A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws concerning Women, which document listed for the first time the legal disabilities and restrictions under which women lived. It inspired women all over England and led to Barbara buying the Englishwomen’s Journal so she could have a newspaper to spread her ideas and, oh you know, found the women’s rights movement in Britain.

No big.

She married a French doctor and would spend half the year with him in Algeria, and half the year in England writing and campaigning.

BARBARA: If dudes have all the interesting jobs and women can’t have them and women have to marry to get access to the money that comes from careers… I mean, England, you’re just making us all have sex with dudes for money, and what do we call that?

ENGLAND: …. Please fetch the smelling salts…

BARBARA: I’m just saying.

The organisation which Barbara founded was called either the Association or the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Harry Potter fans will recognise the initials SPEW as the name for the organisation Hermione Granger set up to promote the rights of house elves.

Well played, J.K. Rowling.

Awesomely played, Barbara Leigh Smith.

BARBARA GITTINGS

While organising picket lines to protest the ban on employment of gay people and setting up gay civil rights associations, she also edited the magazine The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the US, and worked with the American Library Association to promote literature with positive homosexual content. Because fiction is important.

The American Library Association named an annual award for the best gay or lesbian novel the Barbara Gittings Award.

MARY MAPES DODGE

—She was an internationally bestselling children’s author who used her power to, in 1874, establish St Nicholas, which would become one of the most famous and longest enduring children’s magazines in America. She published short stories by Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and most importantly (one of my most favourite poets, Unspoken begins with an epigram from her) Christina Rossetti.

This magazine inspired, and gave a big break to, some really talented ladies.

‘In the June 1919 issue of her beloved St Nicholas magazine… appeared a short story by Mildred Augustine (later Mildred Wirt Benson).’ (Girl Sleuth, Melanie Rehak.)

A decade before that, St Nicholas published the first poem of a child Edna St Vincent Millay. (Another of my most favourite poets and, of course you see where I’m going here, an Edna St Vincent Millay epigram is in the Lynburn Legacy, too.)

ALICE DUER MILLER

–Alice Duer Miller was listed in the first ever edition of the New Yorker as an editor, and she wrote satirical political commentary (in poem form!) in the New York Tribune.

On Not Believing All You Hear (“Women are angels, they are jewels, they are queens and princesses of our hearts.”—Anti-suffrage speech of Mr. Carter of Oklahoma.)

“Angel, or jewel, or princess, or queen,

Tell me immediately, where have you been?”

“I’ve been to ask all my slaves so devoted

Why they against my enfranchisement voted.”

“Angel and princess, that action was wrong.

Back to the kitchen, where angels belong.”

Our Idea of Nothing at All (“I am opposed to woman suffrage, but I am not opposed to woman.”—Anti-suffrage speech of Mr. Webb of North Carolina.)

O women, have you heard the news

Of charity and grace?

Look, look, how joy and gratitude

Are beaming in my face!

For Mr. Webb is not opposed

To woman in her place!

O Mr. Webb, how kind you are

To let us live at all,

To let us light the kitchen range

And tidy up the hall;

To tolerate the female sex

In spite of Adam’s fall.

O girls, suppose that Mr. Webb

Should alter his decree!

Suppose he were opposed to us—

Opposed to you and me.

What would be left for us to do—

Except to cease to be?

Her columns were all published in a novel called ‘Are Women People?’ in 1915. I have been known to read aloud Alice Duer Miller’s poems and say ‘BOOM!’ at the end.

… Honestly, if I was a dude in the early 1900s about to make a speech against women having the vote and I saw Alice Duer Miller in the crowd holding her pen, I would weep, hide in the bushes and crawl away home. If I managed to give a speech, I would request to be pre-emptively put in a freezer so I would have enough ice to deal with her upcoming burn.

CORA STRAYER

“Ladies, when in need of legal or confidential advice, why not confer with one of your own sex?”

Cora Strayer got married at sixteen in 1885, and disappeared into the mists of history for a little bit until she emerged in Chicago aged thirty-three, single, advertising her detective agency and a professional badass. She may have been lying about having a law degree and establishing her detective firm at the age of twenty-one. She may not have been, because whoa, Cora got a lot of stuff done.

She got people drunk and stole the letters they were blackmailing with from them. She was the subject of an article in the Sunday Tribune entitled ‘Business Women Who Have Made A Success of Bossing Men.’

Her lover was murdered by another man desperate for her affections: a year later Cora married a third dude (by the way, she was 42 and he was 24. Get it, Cora).

She formed the First Volunteer Women’s Calvary Regiment. She also, while investigating a cheating husband, got involved in a high-speed police car chase. What can you do? Cora had to get her man!

DOROTHY PARKER

Sure, she wrote poems and short stories and was a screenwriter until she got blacklisted by Hollywood because of McCarthyism, but she started as a theatre critic for Vanity Fair and later edited both Vogue and Vanity Fair.

VANITY FAIR: You are fired for being too witty and upsetting powerful dudes.

DOROTHY PARKER: ‘Scool, bro. Me and all my friends resigning in protest will just go found this little thing we’re going to call… the New Yorker. Think it’ll catch on?

She also reported on the Spanish Civil war for a Communist magazine, wrote book reviews for Esquire and radio shows for the Columbia Workshop.

And lady was hilarious.

‘Brevity is the soul of lingerie.’

‘The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.’

‘What fresh hell is this?’ –actually coined the phrase

‘Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.’

‘Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Romania.’

KATE WARNE

She was America’s first female private eye.

The year was 1856. Kate Warne walked into the Pinkerton Detective Agency to ask for a secretarial position.

ALLAN PINKERTON: Actually we’re all full up on secretaries. But you are just too amazing to let out of my office! Also foxy but also amazing!

KATE WARNE: I’m listening.

ALLAN PINKERTON: Do you think you might like to be a detective? I mean, maybe not, it’s a dangerous game.

KATE WARNE: Becomes master of disguise, crossdresses during Civil War, captures jewel thieves by pretending to be a society belle, discovers and foils plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln and smuggles Abraham Lincoln to Washington DC pretending he is her sickly brother while never sleeping and carrying a gun under her shawl!

ALLAN PINKERTON: … So on the whole, I’d say that went well.

LEE MILLER

Model, journalist, celebrated photographer, renowned hottie, general Renaissance badass.

MILLER: Am tired of being scandalous supermodel. Think will be major figure in Surrealist art movement? Let me go learn from Man Ray and hang with Picasso.

Lee Miller on meeting Man Ray, surrealist photographer and artist, in 1929: “I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students, and anyway he was leaving Paris on a holiday. I said I know, I’m going with you … and I did. We lived together for three years, and I learned a lot about photography.”

After the three years were up, Lee Miller moved back to New York and invented some new photography techniques like it wasn’t no thing. Man Ray apparently wandered the streets of Paris screaming her name. As you do.

After she became bored with being married to an Egyptian nobleman, she moved to Europe. When World War II started, her friends begged her to come home.

Lee Miller instead became a photojournalist and correspondent for Vogue, and thus one of the first female war correspondents of World War II. Her pictures of the concentration camps are famous.

In 1945, just after Hitler died and after a long day photographing Dachau, Lee Miller was photographed by the Life magazine correspondent, naked in Hitler’s bathtub, with her combat boots and army uniform beside her.

The New York Times described her very aptly: “A woman caught between horror and beauty, between being seen and being the seer.”

NANCY WAKE

Codename: The White Mouse

Nancy Wake was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, and was living in Europe, married to a French businessman, and working as a journalist (as Hearst newspaper’s European consultant) when the Nazis invaded France.

She got her job as a journalist by pretending to be fluent in Egyptian to a newspaper executive who was an Egypt buff.

NANCY: *writes random squiggles* Enjoy these hieroglyphics!

EXECUTIVE: Young lady you are so gifted.

NANCY: Oh you have no idea.

Nancy had interviewed Hitler in the past and knew what was up.

So obviously Nancy became a spy for the Resistance. She’s quoted as saying ‘God almighty, it’s a bit much and I’ve got to do something about it.’

Her husband was murdered for not giving up information about her whereabouts. Nancy on that subject: ‘I was broken-hearted, but I would have done it again.’ She trained to be a soldier and parachuted right back into France after escaping it: when she landed in a tree a Resistance fighter greeted her with ‘I hope all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.’ She replied ‘Don’t give me that French shit.’

She flirted with anyone she had to to get across the country passing codes, at one point lost all her codes, could not get in touch with anyone and conducted a marathon escape on a bicycle. She led armed forces in attacks on the Gestapo headquarters and at one point killed a dude with a judo chop. She could drink most dudes under the table, smoked cigars and always carried her Chanel red lipstick.

Several More Actual Quotes from Nancy Wake.

‘I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.’

‘I’d pass their (German) posts and wink and say, “Do you want to search me?” ‘

On a TV show of her exploits: ‘For goodness sake, did the allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men? There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money, and even if there had been, why would I be frying it when I had men to do that sort of thing?’ (When women are SUPER AWESOME in real life, why should fiction lie to make them less awesome?)

‘I was never afraid. I was too busy to be afraid.’

GESTAPO: BRING US NANCY WAKE! THE WHITE MOUSE IS OUR MOST WANTED CRIMINAL! WE WILL GIVE YOU FIVE MILLION FRANCS!

FRANCE: That is like twice as much as you’d pay for any of the dudes.

GESTAPO: Seems about right.

Nancy Wake died last year, at the age of ninety-eight.

These are all fierce and fascinating women: I thought they were interesting for so many reasons, but one of the reasons was how many of them gravitated towards words as well as actions.

Sometimes it feels like just talking about or writing about something can’t make any difference. Other times women are just crushed under the weight of a ton of voices saying: shut up, women talk too much, women don’t have important things to say, she wrote it but she shouldn’t have written it: but these stories, of these women, say: ‘Don’t listen.’ They say ‘Keep on living and keep on talking.’

These women are remarkable because they refused to be silenced: they changed the world with words.

I wanted to create a heroine inspired by women like this, and talk about changing the world with words, in Unspoken… out in five days now!

Writing up these Sleuth Thursdays about amazing crime-solving fast-talking ladies has been so much fun, but this one was perhaps the most fun: discovering all these women, and all these words, and all these wonders.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich says ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’… neither do well-behaved women write it. Here’s to the pack of badly behaved ‘damned scribbling women’ (TM Nathaniel Jerkface Hawthorne) : let’s never stop.

The Summer Before I Met You

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

The Summer Before I Met You

“Take care of your spirit, Kami,” said Megumi. “And don’t burn the place down.”

Kami grabbed both the suitcases and headed for the cabin she was sharing with Liz and Angela. Liz walked with her, and on their way Kami stopped.

“My Sobo was exaggerating,” she said earnestly. “There have been very few fires.”

Six days until UNSPOKEN comes out, and let me present to you… this present, as hosted by a wonderful indie bookstore! And look it has a COVER. My short story has a cover of its OWN. Isn’t that fancy and beauteous?

I hope you guys enjoy. It is one of two, so expect the other, The Spring Before I Met You, and the first look at Jared Lynburn, very soon…

VERONICA MARS (Is Smarter Than Everybody)

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

Season 1 of Veronica Mars is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a perfect season of television. Seasons 2 and 3, while they had their good points, also had many messy issues, but season 1 was what stole my heart. I own the box set, I watched it with groups of my friends in little Veronica Mars parties when it was first airing and I lived in America. I think it’s fabulous.

I love Veronica Mars, not only the show but the girl, and one of the chief reasons is the many masks both show and girl wear.

I knew as soon as I started these Sleuth Thursdays that I’d want to do Veronica Mars, and I decided the way I wanted to do it was to talk about the story and those masks.

Veronica Mars is a classic noir story (disgraced hero, murdered femme fatale, corrupt society, what’s to be done!) flipped on its head—it stars a small beautiful blonde in a fancy high school as our noir hero.

Hey baby. Hey, you so noir, baby.

Veronica’s best friend Lilly was killed and she doesn’t believe the man arrested was guilty. She works for her father, a PI who used to be sheriff before he accused the most powerful man in town, Lilly’s father, of killing his own daughter. Her mother ran out on them, Veronica’s boyfriend (and Lilly’s brother) Duncan dumped her, and Veronica is an outcast. She’s got noir written all over her: she’s relatively poor in privileged surroundings, she has had epic wrong done to her, and she covers her torment with her rapier wit.

‘The best way to dull the pain of your best friend’s murder is to have your mother abandon you as soon as possible’ says Veronica, blackly comic. (This deadpan approach to pain is classic noir!)

She is very composed when other kids her age are freaking out—because the noir hero has flawless cool, but also because she’s been through things the other kids her age have not. She’s hard-bitten as well as vulnerable, and she is indomitable. Veronica, in her own words, ‘keeps chasing the storm’ even when she is worn down.

Not only do we get an untraditional noir hero, but through her eyes we can see a different side to other noir characters. Lilly, the murdered femme fatale, was Veronica’s beloved best friend who was always loyal to her. She may have been typically mad, bad and dangerous to know, but she was a good friend. ‘You’re red satin’ she says to a more prim Veronica of days gone by, and after her death Veronica wears red satin and goes skinny-dipping: she’s empowered by Lilly’s memory. Lilly did some sketchy things while she was alive, but it’s never implied she deserved her death and it is always clear adults have done wrong by her.

Note: those who have not heard Seanan McGuire’s ‘The Ballad of Lilly Kane’ have not lived.

‘I can’t help it, God made me fabulous,’ says Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried, in the role of her life). Lilly is vibrant and lovable: Lilly is much missed: Lilly is killed but never condemned.

Veronica plays roles that are not offered or possible for most noir heroes because of who she is—a young, blonde, pretty girl. She’s able to learn from the femme fatale, which a noir hero certainly cannot, and adopt whatever femme fatale practises will help her solve mysteries… and the most important trick is not her undoubted sexiness, but how much people underestimate her.

‘Whoever said it’s a man’s world has no idea how easy it is to be a girl,’ she says, playing dumb and letting people play into her hands. ‘Must be the hair—blonde!’ she says, while playing ditzy blonde as she does many a time over the course of the show. She doesn’t usually woo people with her wiles (the one time she really does, with police officer Leo, he’s clearly hurt by her deception, she feels terrible, and it becomes a real relationship—real life consequences! Check those out!) but she often makes people think she’s pretty but dumb, and those who underestimate her do so at their own risk.

There’s no pity to be found for those assuming a girl is dumb… and why should there be?

She’s looking super tough and noir, but she’s in pink. This is not an accident. There are no accidents! /Matrix.

Veronica’s very, metatextually aware of mystery conventions: ‘All right then Velma’–‘It’s Daphne thank you so very much.’ ‘All right, Philip Marlow’ she says to her father at one point, and at one point she plays the noir hero and speaks of how she spent her money, ‘I blew it on dames and horses.’ It works on every level because she’s a smooth-talkin’, smart-mouthed girl who would talk that way. (And I always get annoyed when people criticise funny, smart dialogue as unrealistic… I would like to state for the record that I am in favour of it! I enjoy watching and reading about smart, funny people.)

The show always gleefully glories in how clever Veronica is. She does well in school, foils plots neatly, and sasses people about her smarts all the livelong. She gets the corrupt new sheriff to read out ‘Veronica Mars is smarter than me’–‘Oh, you stop it’ she laughs–and when her locker is raided for planted drugs and found clean she says ‘I’ve got a couple of suckers… in my bag’ to the principal and police officer.

Another noir element is that Veronica is allowed to be darker and more ruthless than most TV heroines: ‘I’m not programmed to forgive and forget.’ Her friends and family know she has a heart—her friend Wallace calls her a marshmallow—but that does not mean she’s going to let anyone get away with anything.

Economic necessity is one motive for her mystery-solving ways–‘I perform favours for friends’ ‘I can pay’ ‘Sit down, friend.’—but of course her real motive is love, for her friend and for truth and justice.

Which again, doesn’t mean she’s all sunshine. She is cagey and wary and cynical, but while sometimes that cuts her off from others the show also displays that she is right to be so in many cases. A suitor built up over several episodes as the nice reliable guy who may be shipped off to Catholic school, is exposed as a double-crosser and a cheater. Recipe for heartbreak—except that Veronica is many miles ahead, and doublecrosses him with ease when he shows her his true colours.

She’s a damsel. She’s in distress. She’s going to mess you UP.

Veronica the noir hero and Lilly the femme fatale aren’t the only conventions of noir followed. There’s Wallace, her new best friend, who plays her sidekick, a role examined as a pretty thankless one. And there’s Weevil, the biker with the heart of gold as the Criminal Element somewhat on Veronica’s side. Weevil’s also very smart and, like Veronica herself, allowed to be both ruthless and kind. I always wondered why Veronica and Weevil never gave it a shot. But speaking of l‘amour…

Veronica can do anything, and that of course includes having a romantic life: especially with two significant men. Sadly, one is the Bland Love Interest who comes with many a shining and fascinating protagonist. Duncan, the square-headed garden where the weed of self-righteousness thrives and the flower of charisma goes to die, was the usual result of the Good Person Our Morally Corrupt Star Yearns For: i.e. very dull. Very very dull. Also, as the golden boy among the corrupt, passively letting the corruption happen or not noticing the corruption made Duncan look like the kid was born with the dimmer switch waaaaaay down.

DUNCAN: I’ve decided to take a stand against corruption.

DUNCAN’S FRIENDS AND FAMILY: It’s cute you think that matters.

DUNCAN: I will not be taking any actions but I may make a tortured face at the wall, and that’ll show you.

DUNCAN’S FRIENDS AND FAMILY: The rich love a hypocrite!

Occasionally he would do something terrible and interesting and everyone would perk up, but not often. He was also not super well cast: for a while we thought his empty eyes and strange zombie shuffle was a Brilliant Acting Decision based on the fact Duncan is taking drugs to dull the painful memories. Turned out, not so much!

But for a heroine as cool as Veronica I would suffer through a lot worse than Duncan. And it wasn’t like there weren’t other options for our beautiful lady.

… Yeah, I had a ship.

Logan is introduced as a petty antagonist for Veronica, someone spitefully hassling her and trying to get her in trouble, who Veronica can take down with ease. (I was outraged when I saw the pilot and realised that this was the guy a friend of mine thought I would like… but she was right.)

It’s soon clear it’s more complicated than that: he is Lilly’s ex-boyfriend and Duncan’s best friend. He used to be Veronica’s good friend, and he’s acting like this partly because he’s troubled and terrible and commits crimes, but also out of grief and a feeling of genuine betrayal. He and Veronica have a bond because of their love for Lilly, who they create a slightly scandalous memorial video for, but they also have an instinct to shield each other: Logan comes running to fight someone he thinks is hurting Veronica, and Veronica will offer emotional support and detective work if Logan needs it. Their relationship is often a mess, but as Logan says ‘they don’t write songs about the ones that come easy’ (Logan is actually the romantic of a relationship.)

Plus, le banter and chemistry. I started to want them to get together when Veronica revved her engine as Logan went past in front of her car, and he posed and smacked the hood of her car with his jacket. Things only got worse when he told her to ‘annoy, tiny blonde one. Annoy like the wind!’ Like many a love interest of a noir hero, he was bad news, but he was a lot of fun, and the sexiest thing about this particular tortured bad boy was that he could verbally keep up with our brilliant heroine.

Banter compatibility is what I look for in a relationship. That and crime-fighting. (Or crime-committing. CRIME.)

Oh, you crazy media-referencing genre-conscious kids…

We also have a very cool cast of bit players:

GLEE’S SUE SYLVESTER: I love corrupt schools.

VERONICA: I refuse to either sing or cheerlead. I REFUSE.

Joss Whedon is also in Veronica Mars in a guest role, which is excellent because Veronica is really very much Buffy’s heir: Veronica’s perfect blend of noir/high school drama blend is the perfect successor to Buffy’s blend of urban fantasy/high school drama. Other familiar faces are thick on the ground, both at school and during Veronica’s job. At one point early on Paris Hilton hilariously shows up.

Both the high school drama and the noir mysteries are super-supported: there is no preferential treatment of one over the other, and the blend makes both work better.

Veronica works on the student newspaper—she mostly takes photographs but she also covers a school election and in another episode defends her right to write a story on a school bomb threat and have freedom of student press, so I’m calling it—GIRL REPORTER!–TOTALLY COUNTS.

Veronica can cope with her many roles with ease: ‘A girl must prioritize—wallow in guilt over an ex-boyfriend or follow the guy most likely to blow up Neptune High? Hell, give me a stick of gum to chew and I’ll do all three at once.’

But above all, Veronica, wheeler dealer, cynic, easy liar, bender of all rules, maverick, is in quest of truth and justice. She wants to find her friend’s murderer. She wants to rescue stolen dogs and stolen parrots: she wants to protect people and bring families together. ‘This is the face of truth,’ she says at one point and, in the end, I believe her. Veronica, her drive and her brilliance and her love of friends, family and truth, was what brought all the elements of the show together and made it work.

I wrote this series about brothers and demons and always got annoyed because people would compare it to the TV show Supernatural, which I don’t watch: I’d always say ‘If I was ever going to model my books on a TV show, THAT TV SHOW WOULD BE VERONICA MARS.’ Not just like it, of course, but a combination of genres, something that tried to be as funny and as thoughtful.

Here’s the Horn Book review of UNSPOKEN, out in TWELVE DAYS:

‘For as long as seventeen-year-old Kami Glass can remember, two things have been true of her life in small-town Sorry-in-the-Vale: the townsfolk have whispered about the powerful Lynburn family, and Kami has talked to a boy named Jared in her head. When the Lynburns return to Sorry-in-the-Vale after (coincidentally?) a seventeen-year absence, the townsfolk are spooked, but Kami is intrigued. Her initial professional curiosity as lead investigative reporter for the school newspaper takes a wrenchingly personal turn when she learns that one of the newly arrived teenage Lynburns is Jared—the boy Kami has always believed to be a figment of her imagination. As the pair works to find the cause of their telepathic bond, they stumble upon the larger, related mystery of Sorry-in-the-Vale’s magical (and bloody) history. Witty, take-charge Kami reads a bit like a British Veronica Mars, and troubled Jared, uncovering his own dark legacy alongside her, is compelling. Brennan thoughtfully and thoroughly explores the implications of sharing a psychic connection; for Kami and Jared, it’s by turns comforting, romantic, and agonizing. After this first installment—full of mystery, magic, and nods to both the girl detective genre and gothic romance—readers will be impatiently awaiting the next.’

You get me, Horn Book. You really get me.

House of Ladies Intrepid, In Danger & Into Good Books

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

Apologies for a Gothic Tuesday at this late hour, ma petite belles! I am in France, and today I was trapped in a manor, the power off, our electric gates not working, and my friends trying to scale the walls.

Gothic problems, man. Gothic problems.

Don’t worry, I kept a cool head.

SARAH: I know what to do! We’ve got to eat all the ice-cream IMMEDIATELY!

So, the time has come to reveal my favourite modern Gothic novel by Barbara Michaels! (Your who in the what now? … Shh, just come.)

And it is… HOUSES OF STONE.

I’d like to open this particular Gothic Tuesday with some quotations.

‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.’ Jane Freaking Austen, talking about the world as she experienced it, as a writer.

And whenever the pen is, in fact, in ladies’ hands…

‘Literature is not the business of a woman’s life, and it cannot be.’ – Southey (who? Okay, I do know who, but dude is considerably less well known than the lady he was offering this awesome advice to, namely…) Charlotte ‘Oh No You Didn’t Mofo’ Bronte

‘America is given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed’– Nathaniel ‘Cry More You Big Baby’ ‘Sour Grapes’ ‘Actually Is Still Quite Famous Despite Those Dreadful Ladies’ Hawthorne

‘All women, as authors, are feeble and tiresome. I wish they were forbidden to write.’ – Nathaniel ‘Didn’t Deserve To Have Emma Stone In His Movie Adaptation’ Hawthorne again!

‘Female writers should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex’ – Sir Egerton Brydges, 1928

‘They (women writers) lack that blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style’ – The New York ‘Very Subtle, Guys’ Times, 1976

‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me… their (women’s) sentimentality, the narrow view of the world’ V.S. ‘Sorry, Whose Narrow View of the World?’ Naipaul, 2011, discussing his infinite superiority to Jane Austen.

All of it adds up pretty well to…

“She didn’t write it. She wrote it but she shouldn’t have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist and it isn’t really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. She wrote it BUT…” – Joanna Russ, How To Suppress Women’s Writing.

Same Joanna Russ who wrote the essay on Gothic fiction, ‘Someone’s Trying To Kill Me And I Think It’s My Husband.’ How things go round and round! And she is summarising all the dudes’ quotes in style, isn’t she?

All the quotes above, except for Joanna Russ’s and V.S. Naipaul’s, are taken from Barbara Michaels’s HOUSES OF STONE. The quotes are either chapter epigraphs

or quoted by the heroine, Karen, who is a professor of literature.

Karen’s big discovery was a book of poems by a previously unknown nineteenth-century woman writer who went by the name Ismene. Now a Gothic novel by Ismene, from around the same time as JANE EYRE, has been found.

Karen has to protect her treasure from two academic rivals, a dude and a lady, who may be willing to kill her for it (academic life: go big or go home!) and also investigate a Gothic manor where Ismene once lived to find out her true identity and how much of the Gothic novel she was writing was based on Ismene’s real life.

And the whole novel is hugely influenced by the position Karen’s in, as a woman in her field who has less access to cash and less standing, and the position Ismene was in, competing with other women and dependent on a guy who might marry her, betray her or even murder her.

And it is, as you may have noticed, full of quotes.

SIMON, KAREN’S SEXIST BUT KINDLY (BUT SEXIST) BOOKSELLER FRIEND: Boy do I have the academic discovery of your career for you!

KAREN: Name your price. Which my college will be unlikely to pay but somehow I will find a way!

SIMON: I’d better let your academic rivals in your field, Bill at Yale and Dorothea at Berkeley, know about this discovery so we can determine a price.

KAREN: One of them might drug you and steal it!

SIMON: Don’t be silly, Karen. You’re the Gothic heroine: I’m sure you’re the one everyone will try to rob and mistreat.

KAREN’S FRIEND, HISTORY PROFESSOR PEGGY FINNEYFROCK (NO THAT’S REALLY HER NAME ISN’T IT AWESOME): I am a secret millionaire who will loan you the cash because ladies should help each other! Also I am a historian totally prepared to help investigate the mysterious author!

KAREN: This is a lucky break for me!

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: It will be your last.

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: Let’s wear disguises and sneak around watching your rivals! What’s Bill at Yale’s last name?

KAREN: Well, he sort of goes by a nickname.

KAREN: Well, I sort of gave him the nickname.


KAREN: Well, to be totally honest, he patted me on the head in public, I had a tiny aneurysm, and he’s been known as Bill the Bastard in academic circles ever since.

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: I like your moxie.

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: So how bad would it be if Bill the Bastard got hold of this book?

KAREN: Let’s examine how critics ignoring books by women, about women, popular with women, affects the survival of said books. CHARLOTTE TEMPLE was the first ever American bestseller, published in two hundred editions, popular from 1791 to 1912. Have you heard of it?

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: Point taken.

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: So you’re saying this book is like a damsel in distress?

KAREN: I will not let Bill the Bastard tie this book to the railroad tracks!

ISMENE’S GOTHIC NOVEL: Two sisters, let’s call the oldest and the hottest something like… say… Ismene, stagger through a storm toward a Gothic manor to a mysterious relative’s house. They collapse on the doorstep only to find it opened by a guy fine like a July day, hot like molten lava, and dreamy like opium.

KAREN: I think this is a literary work to be enjoyed on many levels.

CAMERON: Hi I’m sorry I didn’t make an appointment, I’m the owner of the Gothic manor where Ismene’s Gothic novel was found?

KAREN: I can tell at a glance that you have the very thing I find most irresistible in a guy… sexy, sexy academic information.

CAMERON: My Gothic manor is falling down and the electricity is dodgy.

KAREN: Baby can I come over some time and… see your family papers?

CAMERON: Um… yes…

KAREN: Oh sugar, I wanna explore your attics. Like, thoroughly.

KAREN: Creeping around Gothic manor in the dead of night seemed like such a good idea before it was the dead of night.

KAREN: Whoops, I have fallen into a window well. Uh, a little help here?

BILL THE BASTARD: Certainly, let me assist you, fair maiden!

KAREN: … Changed mind. Please put me back in well.

CAMERON: Hope you like the place.

KAREN: It’s awesome! Except that you have mice in the attic.

KAREN: Also I believe you have the eldritch spirits of the damned in the attic.

KAREN: What I’m trying to say is GET AN EXTERMINATOR.

PEGGY FINNEYFROCK: Amazing, the manuscript is ours for only fifty grand! Yay for colleges undervaluing the work of women!

PEGGY FINNEYFROCK: Karen I hope this book does not get you into any trouble.

BILL THE BASTARD: I’m not saying I’d be willing to murder you for the manuscript. Dorothea at Berkeley probably would, though.

KAREN: …

PEGGY FINNEYFROCK: …

SIMON: !!!

BILL THE BASTARD: Canape?

DOROTHEA FROM BERKELEY: Could I offer you some threats? They’re going to be very mysterious and ambiguous.

KAREN: I like me a genre-appropriate threat!

KAREN’S LADY FRIEND: I like me some summoning the police.

CAMERON: Uh, so you and Bill the Bastard, did you use to date?

KAREN: I guess I could spin a story about how he tossed me aside like a soiled glove, but fluttery lashes and quivery lips only work on dudes who underestimate ladies.

CAMERON: Aw, you trust me!

KAREN: Also the idea of me and Bill the Bastard is double plus yuk.

ISMENE’S GOTHIC NOVEL: You know what’s wrong? Slavery. Sexism. Incest. Murdering beautiful innocent damsels in nightdresses. Just some examples.

KAREN: I’m with you, book.

KAREN: Hey Cameron! I just dropped by to see your dank cellars.

CAMERON: Chicks love cellars.

KAREN: Oooh creepy carvings just like in the Gothic novel! This is so awesome!

CAMERON: Karen there are snakes down here…

CAMERON: Just once couldn’t we go for coffee?

KAREN: Time to make friends with a sweet elderly lady librarian who will help me research… who is that foxy lady in the skin-tight jeans?

TANYA THE SUPER FOXY LIBRARIAN: Business on top, skin-tight party in the back. I love big books and I cannot lie. What can I do you for?

KAREN: My rented apartment was searched for my precious manuscript by someone! It is both scary and very Gothically thematic not even to feel safe where you live!

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: Do you have any suspects?

KAREN: They left hardly any trace!

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: So we suspect an academically inclined ninja.

KAREN: Augh it is so hard to find out Ismene’s true identity! Historical ladies were either not married and so not economically independent enough to write or married and had four basquillion children! It’s very hard to write when you have four basquillion children!

KAREN: Augh now I have to give a speech about Jane Austen to a literary society that expects me to wear pink and puffed sleeves! PEOPLE I AM BEING ATTACKED BY BOOK-LOVING NINJAS. THERE’S NO TIME.

KAREN: Okay there’s time to make a few dirty jokes.

TANYA THE SUPER FOXY LIBRARIAN: You go, girl.

BILL THE BASTARD: Take it off!

BOOK-LOVING NINJA: attacks in the night

KAREN: All I can say is that my attacker was wearing heavy floral perfume… and I suspect Bill the Bastard.

BILL THE BASTARD: I always patronise you/and this is crazy/but your Jane Austen speech was so hot/academically collaborate with me maybe?

KAREN: Go home, Bill.

BILL THE BASTARD: What if I save you from this SPEEDING VAN INTENT ON YOUR DESTRUCTION?

KAREN: … Guess I owe you a thank-you.

BILL THE BASTARD: Yay!

KAREN: … I’m working up to it.

KAREN: … I may be some time.

BILL THE BASTARD: I like a girl with academic spirit! Kiss me you madwoman in the attic!

KAREN: Uh, this is very flattering, but…

BILL THE BASTARD: I don’t know what I’d do if a perfumed ninja killed you! Please let me protect you! I promise to guard you with my life!

KAREN: Bill, I’m good. But if a perfumed ninja kills me, I promise to regret this decision.

ISMENE’S GOTHIC NOVEL: A madwoman appears, who murmurs of a dread family secret! My handsome cousin tells me it’s totally nothing and she’s totally crazy, and locked up for her own good. Well, dudes who lock up ladies are obviously trustworthy…

KAREN: I wake in the night from dreams of an eldritch figure who… HOLY CRAP NINJAS SET MY BED ON FIRE.

KAREN: Well, time to save myself and my horrible landlady.

KAREN: Hey landlady, I hope you have ninja insurance…

KAREN: And now on the grounds of the Gothic manor, we have discovered a tiny house of stone where one might have total privacy.

CAMERON: Now you’re talking!

KAREN: And write a novel!

CAMERON: …. Oh.

ISMENE’S GOTHIC NOVEL: And then the beautiful heroine, let’s call her Ismene, discovered that the Gothic hero was in fact… her unfortunately foxy secret brother.

KAREN: Sweet flowering madwomen in the attic, say WHAT?

ISMENE’S GOTHIC NOVEL: Let’s sure hope this novel isn’t based on real life, because if Mr Super Sexy But Super Related married the heroine’s younger, less hot sister, suddenly there’d be a really compelling reason for someone to shut Ismene up and stop her writing her tell-all Gothic novel…

KAREN: It’s funny how ‘shut up’ both means making someone be quiet, and trapping them somewhere.

ISMENE’S GOTHIC NOVEL: This isn’t linguistic byplay o’clock, Karen.

KAREN: Excuse you, it’s always linguistic byplay o’clock.

CAMERON: I have something to tell you, Karen. I’m afraid of enclosed spaces.

KAREN: Aw, Cameron, that’s nothing to be asham-

CAMERON: Specifically, I’m afraid of being chased through the Gothic woods by a gang of ruffians and trapped with you in a tiny stone house.

KAREN: … Oh Cameron. Who could have guessed your incredibly specific nightmare would come true?

RUFFIANS: By the way we were paid to drive a van at you, Karen. The guy who paid us was about this tall, and he went by something like Will the Wastard…?

CAMERON: How could this night get any worse?

KAREN: I’m glad you asked, because I just found a tunnel.

CAMERON: That’s great news, Karen!

KAREN: It’s a dead-end tunnel full of the bones of a lady who I believe may have been a great literary talent buried alive before her time.

CAMERON: That’s terrible news, Karen!

KAREN: Ismene was literally buried alive! Weird how women get buried alive in THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and Victoria Holt’s novels like three times and in Barbara Michael’s novels at least twice and Bertha Rochester in JANE EYRE also totally counts because I say so! It’s the ultimate symbol of being trapped!

KAREN: Well, isn’t this a turn-up for the books.

KAREN: Also a literary archetype being thoughtfully explored.

KAREN: Also a skeleton in a scary hole at night auuuugggggghhhh.

KAREN: I hate literary archetypes.

LITERARY ARCHETYPES: Come on, baby. You’re upset. You know you don’t mean that.

KAREN: I’ve discovered Ismene’s real name and her weirdo family secret and also her bones from when she was buried alive!

KAREN: What’s next? Oh yes, defeat my enemies. Dorothea from Berkeley, would you like to join forces to ruin Bill the Bastard’s life? Also would you like some more champagne?

DOROTHEA FROM BERKELEY: The answer to both your questions is ‘hell yes.’

KAREN: Mwhahaha!

SIMON THE SEXIST BOOKSELLER: But maybe Bill the Bastard truly loved you and is sorry for his misdeeds.

KAREN: Mwhahahaha!

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: So are you going to marry Cameron?

KAREN: I’m not ready for marriage. I’m prepared to make out with him a lot!

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: Okay, fine, I’ll get married so we can live happily ever after! I’ll marry Simon the Sexist Bookseller.

KAREN: Oh man, but Simon the Sexist Bookseller is so sexist.

PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: Yeah, but a girl will put up with a lot from a dude who reads.

CAMERON AND SIMON THE SEXIST BOOKSELLER: Should we put ‘Rest In Peace’ on Ismene’s gravestone?

KAREN AND PROFESSOR FINNEYFROCK: … She wasn’t really peaceful or restful, so no. Quick, someone come up with some sort of paraphrase for ‘Badly behaved women make history!’

And what goes on Ismene’s gravestone is…

As you can see, people quote a lot in HOUSES OF STONE, but the final and most memorable quote is uttered by Professor Peggy Finneyfrock about our Gothic heroine: ‘Dying for a cause is just one of those silly notions men come up with. It has always seemed to me more sensible to go on living and keep on talking.’

Keep on talking. The reason I love HOUSES OF STONE best of all is because it really thinks about the issues in Gothic novels, for women, for women writers, and says: yes, here are all the problems that come with this, now keep on talking.

I love it because I love language, because I love books that engage in conversation with other books in the genre (keep on talking) and because a heroine who prefers baths to showers because she can read in the bath? I know that feel. Get outta my head, Barbara Michaels! I love this Gothic books because it examines the Gothic novel, ‘most of these books are about women who just can’t seem to get out of the house’ (E.C. DeLaMotte, Perils of the Night), and thinks about why, and what women can do in that house.

Talking—or writing—is something you can do even when you’re trapped, like the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, stuck in a tiny room writing out her frustration and growing madness. The recurring theme of people being buried alive in Gothic novels is the ultimate being trapped: but the heroine of this Gothic novel wrote her way out of being silenced. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘damned pack of scribbling women’ kept scribbling, no matter what he thought about it.

I quoted from V.S. Naipaul above to show people still think these kind of things now. If you are a girl, if you write about a girl, if you write about things that are perceived as ‘girly’, if you have a cover that looks girly—you’re seen as less worthy, you’re going to get less critical attention, less support as ‘worthy,’ you’re less likely to succeed and if you do succeed your success will be sneered at. There are more women writers than men. Yet the Forbes richest authors’ (meaning authors who are read by a LOT of people and pretty well regarded…) list: nine men, six women. Dudes sell better: dudes win more awards. People still think dudes write better, and ladies should hush up.

What’s to be done?

‘Keep on talking’ is the epitaph of the Gothic heroine and writer in HOUSES OF STONE. It’s not a bad motto for anyone.

A Gothic novel seemed to me, when writing Unspoken… which, BRAG ALERT, is out in fourteen days and which you can get a signed copy from HERE, as it seemed to Barbara Michaels, a pretty cool medium for a heroine who loves and believes in and works with words.

The Great Unspoken Contest

Originally published at Sarah Rees Brennan. You can comment here or there.

So, I always like to give away an advance reader’s copy.

But it seemed unfair to ask people to do stuff for a series they hadn’t read (yet, I’m hoping yet!) and time Draws Close: it is only a month now until Unspoken is out!

Thus I am going to make things super easy. As some of you may have already noted, I have a brand new fancy website! I am going to be crossposting from a wordpress blog from now on, and there are many other things of fanciness on it!

Including…

A Short Story That’s Been Down For Awhile

Old Movie Parody Favourites That Haven’t Been Seen In A While

And much Unspoken stuff, including Pictures of the Cast and The World of the Lynburn Legacy.

Here pictured, My Heroine, Kami Glass. Isn’t she gorgeous? This is just her dress sense, and also, I like the way she is intrepidly equipped with pen and paper.

So for a chance at early signed introduction to this lady, in a contest that will last until Monday night, go visit the website and look at it, and tell me (it takes a few visits to spot) the thing you notice about time.

/mysterious

Comments will be screened on the livejournal entry (sadly comments are turned off on the wordpress blog bit as I am still learning it!) and I will Randomly Select one of the correct guessers.

And to all a happy Hunger Games…