Deby Fredericks's Blog, page 104

Wherein I Continue Rambling

My next thought on dystopian/apocalyptic fiction may seem a bit cynical, but here it is: many readers enjoy such material simply because we are bored and these scenarios are the opposite of our real lives. Yes, there are people in the world who live in crime-ridden areas, even in war zones, and I would never dismiss the anguish of that, but those aren’t the people I’m talking about. Actual refugees and crime victims don’t buy apocalyptic novels. They don’t have to.

The people buying apocalyptic and dystopian novels are comfortable residents of developed nations. We read about struggle and starvation while surrounded by peace and plenty. We shudder at some horde of filthy zombies while ensconced in our tidy gated communities. Essentially, we want to read/watch dangerous and challenging conditions because there is so little real challenge or danger around us.

When our lives frustrate and disappoint us, we can invent conspiracies to explain it away. Failing school? It couldn’t be because you stayed up all night playing video games and slept through classes. No, it’s the teachers conspiring against you. (I’ve had this conversation with one of my kids, can you tell?)

Or maybe you took over an isolated wildlife refuge and expected the whole U. S. population to rise up in revolt against the evil government, but then nobody showed. It can’t be because your conspiracy was all in your heads! No, the American public have become sheeple.

This is just mental masturbation. It’s manufacturing an adrenaline rush because our daily lives are so totally without adrenaline. Remember how I said the teen heroes in dystopian novels act to change their worlds? You don’t see that so much in apocalyptic and conspiracy stories. Once there’s an apocalypse, it’s too late to change anything, so why try? And a great conspiracy can never be put to rest. There will always be some new factor to weave into the scheme.

Tons of people enjoy these stories, and I’m sure you all think I’m just a cranky old broad who’s panning what she doesn’t understand. But I do wish that some of those who dwell in apocalyptic dreams would occasionally wake up and spend a little time in the actual, physical world. It’s a pretty cool place, too.

Now, am I done rambling? Heck no! See you on Tuesday.

Wherein I Ramble

Prepare yourself, for I shall ramble a bit over the next few posts. I’ve been thinking about zombies and dragons and post-apocalyptic dystopias. This all started with a post by Charles Yallowitz, so you can blame him. And do check out his blog, Legends of Windemere.

Charles asked for thoughts on dystopian fiction, and this was my reply to him. “I would observe that in some ways dystopian storytelling is a developmental phase for youth. Calling it a phase makes it sound trivial, but really I think the process is important. As kids, most of us view our families and the world as safe places with benevolent rulers in the form of our parents. A utopia, if you will. However, as we move into our teens, we begin to see flaws in our parents and the world. Beloved parents now are seen as despots. We question, demand, bicker, depending on family dynamics.

“Dystopian fiction reflects this process of questioning as children move toward adulthood. Although the dystopian story setting is often bleak, in fact the youth usually ‘solve’ many issues. So, though questioning the values of their world, they also accept responsibility for changing what they don’t like.”

Charles replied, in part, “I keep thinking about Brave New World and 1984. Those are more adult, so do you think the genre has shifted to a younger demographic?”

And I said, in part, “In the era of the books you mention, there was little or no writing specifically directed to children. But I do think young readers have really claimed dystopian fiction as their own. Although there’s some overlap, more overtly horrific material, such as zombies and conspiracy theories, are more the domain of adults because those reflect adult fears.”

But what does this have to do with dragons? Come back Wednesday and I shall ramble farther on.

Fantasy Scroll Magazine

Fantasy Scroll Magazine is an electronic magazine of speculative short fiction, interviews and reviews, edited by Iulian Ionescu. Operating since 2014, they have just released their eleventh issue. This is another Kickstarter I’m really glad I backed, because the stories have been wonderful.

First up in this issue is “Sundark and Winterling,” an elegaic fantasy from Suzanne J. Willis. The title characters are lovers, a fay woman and a dragon man, torn apart by jealousy and death. Winterling was murdered by a despot who hates all dragons, but Sundark maintains his memory in a remarkable home constructed from his carefully preserved bones and skin. A year of mourning has passed; as Sundark prepares to avenge her lost love, it appears he may not be entirely dead.

I’m still in the midst of reading the issue, but I simply have to recommend this story and the publication. Fantasy Scroll Magazine. Check it out.

Dragon Fruit

These are an oddity that occasionally show up in my local grocery store. They have an interesting appearance — hard magenta peel with thorny green flaps sticking up like scales. The white interior is speckled with tiny black seeds. There are also red varieties with bright pink insides, and yellow varieties with white insides.

Most often, dragon fruits are peeled and sliced to eat. The general flavor is often compared to kiwi fruit, because of the mild sweetness and the texture including so many seeds. Sometimes they are crushed for their juice.

Dragon fruits are imported from Asia, where they are known by several evocative names depending on the country. In Vietnam they are called thanh long (green dragon,) in Cambodia as sror kaa neak (dragon scale), and in China as long zhu guo (dragon pearl fruit). Indeed, if you look at a cross-section, they do resemble the flaming pearl so often pursued by dragons in Chinese art.

I was surprised to learn that that dragon fruits were originally native to Mexico. They grow on a group of cacti and were known to Native Americans as pitaya or pitahaya. The fruit were fairly sour in those days. Later, Spanish colonial ships carried them to Southeast Asia, where they thrived and became popular. A few centuries of selective breeding have no doubt led to the sweeter flavor we now know. Modern medicine recognizes dragon fruit as a so-called superfood that is low in fat and supposedly helps ward off cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.

So next time you’re feeling adventurous, why not try a dragon fruit? I think that I will!

Curse of the Dragon Slayer

Ready to relax with a very cheesy fantasy  movie? Curse of the Dragon Slayer should be just the thing. My husband stumbled on this one while browsing Netflix. The film, released in 2014, attempts to ride on the coat-tails of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, with a very standard fantasy cast and trappings.

The title character is an elven woman, Nemyt, who indeed kills a dragon but then is struck with a curse. Unfortunately for me, I missed the first few minutes and didn’t even see the dragon. Since it’s on Netflix, I suppose I could go back if I really want to.

Anyhow, the evil Shadow cult has been recruiting an army of undead warriors to destroy the world after they release their dreaded god, Goth Azul. They plan to add Nemyt to their ranks via the curse, but she is diverted by an itinerant human cleric, Keltus the Wanderer. These two are barely on speaking terms when they stumble upon an orc warrior, Kullimon the Black, who has his own reasons for hunting the cultists.

It’s all very D & D. The trio traverses a fantasy landscape, has some adventures, and so on. There are a few twists, including Keltus being cursed and his goddess immediately abandoning him. Kullimon is revealed as a noble warrior who talks a lot like Lt. Worf of Star Trek fame. Much to my annoyance, Nemyt suffers the fate of all female characters and gets captured, then rescued by her comrades. There’s also a handful of women in white dresses who show up only long enough to be sacrificed.

Production values are not all that bad, actually. The costuming is pretty good, except for some notable stiffness in Kullimon’s facial appliances. They had a lot of fun with digital effects, such as saturating the color in Nemyt’s eyes. (Although, why they occasionally turned the entire world orange escaped me.) And there are the requisite helicopter shots above magnificent vistas.

If only the script writers had found even a smidgen of originality. But they didn’t. So, like I said, this is a very cheesy fantasy movie with not nearly enough dragon going on. It can still be a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Dragon, the Kickstarter, Part 2

To follow up on my recent post, the Kickstarter for Dragon: the Game has reached its goal. Sometime next week, I will be roaming the virtual landscape in the form of a mighty dragon! Or maybe as a fledgling. I haven’t actually seen the setup yet.

If you were sitting back to wait, not wanting to back it and be disappointed, you still have until February 15th to experience the draconic awesomeness. That’s Monday, in other words.

As for me, I’ll be making a list of names, because every dragon needs a magnificent name.

Here Be Dragons

While searching about for interesting dragon lore, I stumbled upon a fascinating article from 2013. Everyone has heard of that warning from Medieval maps, “Here be dragons.” (Or, in Latin, “hic sunt dracones.”) It’s a thing, right? We all know it. Especially fantasy writers. We know those superstitious Medievals were always putting dragons and stuff on their maps.

Well, according to Robinson Meyer’s article in The Atlantic, we might all know it wrong. The author searched authentic maps from the period and… You know, I think I’ll let Meyer explain.

Click here to read and enjoy.

 

Ponderings

I find myself at one of those points we writers all reach, where I’m considering my work to date and pondering which direction to take. This particularly involves my short fiction, which I always struggle to find markets for.

Okay, yes, it is substantially my own responsibility that I continue to write stories that don’t have ready markets. I know that adult magazines consider stories with a fairy-tale flavor too juvenile for their readership, and I know that a 2,000-word short story is too long for juvenile magazines. But, bless me, that’s what I keep coming up with!

So I send submissions to 1 or 2 magazines with a remote chance of publishing me, because that’s all the markets there are. After that, I just have these stories without anywhere else to submit them. And so it goes.

I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that if I want my stories to be read, I will have to create a market for myself. It wouldn’t be the first time I set out to make something happen because I needed it to. I started volunteering with SCBWI in the early 2000s, because I couldn’t afford to travel for my career. I’m happy to say the local chapter is still going strong, too.

So I could go whole-hog and start a magazine for the readers I imagine when I write my own work. An actual magazine! The idea scares me to death, because it’s such an investment and there’s so much I don’t know. Also, it’s pretty cheesy to publish your own work and call that a magazine. Thus, in all likelihood, my stories still wouldn’t be published.

A more realistic goal might be to self-publish my stories in a series of collections. Perhaps 3 or 4 at a time, with a modest price tag. Since there are about 16 of them, depending which I choose, I could stretch that out for as much as two years depending on frequency.  Since I’ve finally got another microphone, I could podcast concurrently and have these available in e-book or audio.

To be even more modest, I could just do another podcast. Spring Break is in two months, and I’m sure I could get another novelette ready to record by then. However, I suspect that would not be enough. To build audience and achieve some recognition, I think I’ll need to push myself toward the second option.

This is what I’m currently pondering. The options, the expenses, the time away from my novel in progress. Those of you who have done this before, I would welcome your insights and advice. Thanks in advance, and stay tuned for further announcements.

 

Dragon, the Kickstarter

Dragon, the video game, is running a Kickstarter campaign right now. Grant Williams of Red Level Games is raising money to produce the game, in which players move through an open landscape having adventures. It sounds pretty familiar, except that in this game you play the dragon.

Your actions will lead to either a savage or an enlightened society. So although it’s being hyped as Grand Theft Auto meets Skyrim, I think you could equally say Black and White meets Skyrim. Much as I enjoy Skyrim, I hope the mechanics for controlling a dragon in flight are more fluid here.

Still, I can hardly resist any game where I get to play a dragon! The Kickstarter is about half way to its goal, so I hope a few of you will consider supporting it and/or passing the word along to your friends who love dragons. There are roughly two weeks left in the campaign.

Click here if you want to find out more.

The Dinosaur Court, Part 3

The Dinosaur Court was a wonder of Victorian England, but by the 1950s the site had fallen into obscurity. People knew the sculptures were still there, though it was hard to see them with all the brush that had grown up. However, people everywhere adore their dinosaurs, and the people of London didn’t forget them forever.

The first major restoration began in 1952, under the direction of Victor H. C. Martin. This involved removing vegetation and cleaning the concrete sculptures. Unfortunately, in some ways, Martin did more harm than good. Many of the sculptures, mainly of the mammals, were moved to a location where they would be more visible. This location was also more exposed, so that the figures began to deteriorate more quickly. Some of them were painted, which had not originally been done. Finally, in the 1960s, a limestone cliff that formed the backdrop was destroyed by explosives.

A second, even more extensive renovation began in 2002. This included building a new cliff and changing the paint to better reflect current science. Alas, some of the sculptures had been badly damaged, especially in the tails and toes. Most of them were patched or repaired with new cast pieces. A few could not even be located. Fiberglass replicas were created for these.

Today, the Dinosaur Court is once again a London landmark. Families and tourists flock to see these amazing heritage sculptures.