The Royal Academy at Osyth Blog

When my agent was marketing ‘Advice From Pigeons’ around, he sent me all the rejection e-mails.  I wasn’t sure whether I was grateful or not, but one of them stuck in my mind and has popped up every now and then.   ”Whenever I thought it was going to turn into real fantasy, it went back to everyday life again,” the editor wrote, or words to that effect.

Of course, that’s what satire does.  If the book diverges too far from real life, it ceases to be a commentary on it.  I was thinking of this today as I was over at Goodreads, organizing my book collection there and looking at how I had rated the many, many Terry Pratchett novels.  It’s pretty obvious when you look for it; the less of a traditional fantasy setting they have, the better I like them.  The more they deal with things like golem rights or printing postage stamps, the better I like them.  I want fantasy that steers me back toward the real world more than I want fantasy that takes me into another world.

Well, people might say, then why write or read fantasy at all? I find a lot of good reasons, most of them based in what fantasy does to our attitudes about the real world.

Fantasy raises the stakes.  Someone who’s studying incubi or dragons is just plain doing something more exciting than studying mice.  Someone who treats incubi the way a real scientist would treat mice is doing something interesting on several levels.  And by introducing fantasy, I give my world a supernatural component.  That means I can write about people who are in danger of losing their souls – something that I could not do in a straight academic satire without overcoming a lot of skepticism.

Fantasy makes us take less for granted, as well. Writers tell all kinds of jokes about how literal fantasy readers can be.  In one of my early stories, I wrote about someone’s laboratory rejoicing at his success; my readers asked whether the whole building was dancing around, or just his set of rooms.  Readers don’t assume they know what’s likely to happen, or what a setting will look like, and are often more interested in the details — at least, my beta readers are.

If I wrote straight academic satire, I might get to describe a museum’s layout and some of its artifacts.  But I’d never describe a sub-basement in this kind of detail:

Taking a deep breath, he turned the door-handle and stepped forward into sunlight and a gentle breeze.

Astonished, Linus tried to stop in mid-step and stumbled. He stood at one side of a cavernous room, the long wall in front of him lined with hay-strewn stalls over whose swinging doors came sunlight, breezes hot, cool or damp, birdsong and rustling leaves.

“Idiot!” said Linus. Had he really thought Zoomancy’s pegasi and hippogriffs lived in the basement? Everybody knew they were paddocked on the ley-line; but from the different times of day showing through these doors, Zoomancy must have paddocks all along it. Was that a Southern breeze from the nearest gate, the scent of eucalyptus rising through a balmy afternoon? Slants of evening sunlight poured through the next stall almost to his feet, spangling a spiderweb in the corner of the frame. A cat-flap in one of the stalls stirred and a long nose, pink and quivering, poked through. The eye following it gave Linus a panicked stare, the nose pulled back and the flap clacked shut.

Linus stepped forward, charmed, until his foot struck something – a coffin! He jerked back into unpleasant reality and bent over, after a little struggle with himself, to see if he had broken a line or scuffed any warding symbols. Seeing none, he stood and backed toward the center of the room. He was loath to look away from the thing, but what else did he have his back to when he faced the vampire? The thought made him whirl around.

To his left, aquaria overflowed in a constant trickle. The dark forms of sleeping birds half filled the nearest, stacked upon each other like cordwood with wings folded and their short beaks open in the water. Beyond them stood circular vats in an unfortunate shade of aqua, ceaseless motion whirling around the base of one and scrabbling at the chest-high waterline of another.

The right held tables with small terraria, then larger pens and tall aviaries against the wall, their backs as bright and open as the stall doors. One flickered with swallow-sized birds in constant motion, flashing between shade and sunlight. Birds in other enclosures turned their heads away, as if disgusted with these swallows. Linus, too, was glad to look away from their constant surge and survey lower pens, until he saw the warning sign on the wyvern’s enclosure.

That’s the museum Linus Ukadnian finds himself curating against his will in Kindling, and the wyvern and vampire are only the least of his problems.

In the new novel, Swept and Garnished, my characters leave Osyth for the tourist wonderland of the Vinchifer peninsula.  I get to write about country scenes, mountain streams, goblin tunnels and the obligatory enchanted valley. But I also get to bounce them off the preoccupations of an academic administrator and a junior faculty member trying to land a summer adjunct position for which he really isn’t qualified.  I wouldn’t be doing that in straight fantasy.

An interest in real-life academies and an interest in fantasy, then, don’t contradict one another.  I can say more of the things I want to say about academic life when I use fantasy as a frame in which to display it, make its routines into something unexpected, and highlight its rewards and dangers.

Editing and marketing have made me dive back into my Royal Academy Trilogy after almost a year since I finished the third book.  In the interim, I’ve been working on a single point-of-view novel with a YA protagonist.  So going back to the trilogy, which is determinedly multiple-POV and all of whose protagonists are experienced adults, is both a shock and an opportunity to compare the ‘feels’ of the two kinds of writing.

To start with, it’s obvious that in the single-POV story, events are more of a focus than perceptions and ruminations.  My protagonist is experiencing amazing things for the first time.  In the trilogy, my POV characters are quite inured to the amazing.  They’ve been summoning demons every morning for 25 years, and are established researchers in their areas, so they take this sort of stuff for granted.  That’s what allows the books to work as academic satire; the characters treat their problems as if they were normal.  Instead of dealing with an incompetent Department Chair, my faculty in ‘Advice From Pigeons’ have to deal with one who’s lost his soul.  In ‘A Lovesome Thing,’ instead of training a puppy, Teddy Whin needs to house-train a newly animated woodstove.  Instead of the normal difficulties with adjunct positions in ‘Swept and Garnished,’ Rho discovers that his supervisor is — well, that would be telling, and that book isn’t out yet.

This might just be a difference between having a young protagonist and older ones.  But the bigger difference I see is that of multiple interpretations of the same events.  I most enjoyed writing the parts of my trilogy where different people dealt with the same situation from different starting-points.  When Warren Oldham loses his soul in ‘Advice From Pigeons,’ almost everyone has their own way of approaching it based on their own areas of expertise; summoning, seances, appointment books, health-insurance details.  In ‘A Lovesome Thing’ demons and exorcists, lovers and archbishops, a walking stove, the media,  and an airline employees’ union all converge at the end.  I like seeing this mixture of events come together into a solution, and I couldn’t show it unless multiple people were given their chance to direct the action for a little while.

I also enjoy the fact that few of these people really understand or care about the others’ concerns.  They pursue their own paths, bumping against one another with interactions pleasant or unpleasant, but with few exceptions they aren’t truly intersecting.  This is my opinion of real life as well, and I believe that even given this kind of self-absorbtion, it’s possible for things to turn out well for most everyone in the end.  I’m interested in the point at which these separate pieces jostle themselves into a mosaic, and even more in the fact that they never know it has happened.  Only the author and the reader see the whole picture.

Given all this interest in complexity, how am I dealing with the current single-POV work in progress? It’s a completely different kind of challenge, because in this case the only way to show multiple points of view is through things my protagonist notices, but does not understand.  I find myself more dependent on what I hope the reader will bring to the book, because I can’t just switch to a different POV character to state whatever I want to make clear.  In a way, it’s a greater challenge.  And I find myself wondering what will constitute a satisfactory resolution.  What will it look like, and feel like, to see just one person shake herself into the proper place in the mosaic?  How will readers see the overall picture, when its one POV character doesn’t get to stand above the table, putting the pieces together?  I look forward to finding out.

… I’ve just been doing more urgent things than blogging, morally supported by the disappearance of many of the other writers I follow from the blogosphere.  A big ‘wow!’ to people who can keep up with writing, and real life, and blogging!  And a big ‘whew!’ to those who quit doing it and thereby demonstrated that writers don’t have to blog when they don’t feel like it.

So why am I back?  To announce that I just got the editor’s comments on the third Osyth novel, Swept and Garnished.  Once again, Double Dragon is way ahead of schedule — so next week, after my current nonfiction project is off to the publishers, I’ll be diving back into SAG after not thinking about it for months.

Already, I have a different perspective on it.  The title, for instance; when I named this novel, I have to admit I was thinking of the bible.  You may remember the Matthew 12 quote about a man who drives an evil spirit out of himself:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

(Yeah, I’m a KJV girl)

That meaning still applies to the novel, and to all three of them for that matter. My characters get in trouble when they try to discard parts of themselves; the demon Antimora  is only the most extreme example so far.  Someone in this novel will go even further in that direction.

But as I look back at SAG, I see another meaning to the title.  Sweeping and garnishing rooms is traditional women’s work, and traditional women play a huge role in this novel.  Old women, women whose motivation stems not from ambition but from love, women for whom family comes first.  I had no idea I was going to write about traditional women; I identify more with women like Teddy Whin, the striving academic types who don’t recognize love until it gets in their faces.  But here traditional women are in SAG, doing their thing without caring whether it’s my thing or not.  Arranging vacations, making scrapbooks, canning pickled cauliflower, taking magic back from trees, and challenging demons.

I look forward to spending time with them again as I edit the manuscript.

I just re-issued Beginner’s Luck on Kindle.  It’s the story of a mild-mannered botanist who finds himself involved with plant pornography, dryad rights, and the theology of conference door-prizes. Plus, it has illustrations by Georgie Schnobrich!

I tried to copy her style on the cover, but you’ll see how much better her illustrations are. Don’t miss them.

And in other novella news, Want’s Master has a new cover and a new price — FREE during Worldcon (Aug 30-Sept 3rd) — assuming I have successfully negotiated the mysteries of Kindle Select. Spread the news!

Here I sit drinking coffee, minding my own business, when the man across the street erupts into pagan invocations. “ZEUS! Dammit!”

In my back yard, hanging out the laundry, it comes again. “Zeus! Apollo!”

No, I don’t live down the street from a neo-hellenist. I live across the street from a perfectly normal city park, in which people walk their dogs; and an increasing number of these dogs are named after Greek gods.

separated at birth?

Dogs named ‘Zeus’ appear to be the most ill-behaved. Probably they have delusions of grandeur. Personally, I do not see how someone as subordinate as a domestic dog could possibly live up to the name of Zeus, no matter how many inappropriate things he eats or rolls in during his daily walkies. These men have set their dogs up for failure.

Apollo is a lovely doberman, who lives up to his name in energy, radiance, and chasing things. Unlike his namesake, if a woman he was chasing turned into a tree, this Apollo would have some use for it.

Nobody seems to name their dog after Hermes — perhaps it sounds too much like an STD — though ‘Mercury’ would be perfect for a weimeraner. Hephaestus is also a sleeper, probably because who can pronounce it? And though the female dogs in the park may all be named Athena, Hera and Artemis, they don’t seem to do things that require owners to invoke them in tones loud enough to reach my porch.

All this makes me think about naming things, though.  Naming things is a perennial problem in fantasy literature, especially when you’re trying to create a new culture.  Readers have gotten sophisticated and you can no longer simply insert random apostrophes (Fr’ed, R’andolph) and be done with it.

In the Osyth stories, I felt myself on pretty stable ground.  I have a feel for the range of names in your modern University.  Plus, I had secret weapons: a background in marine biology, and not one but two copies of Nelson’s Fishes of the World.  Armed with these, I was ready to create names for Demonology professors and their study subjects. Not only did I know these names, I had opinions about them.  I knew which ones were good guys and bad, and how much I liked their faces.

My method was not foolproof.  I named one character after the triggerfish Balistes, and then had second thoughts.  Too obvious!  Why, the whole family was named after that genus — anybody would recognize that!  I might as well have named him ‘Zeus!’  So I changed it to Baristes, under the impression that I had invented a completely new word.  I didn’t find out about baristas until after the story was published.

As I kept writing, I branched out from fish.  Some of my favorite characters can be found at sites like seaslugforum.  And some names I made up out of whole cloth, or picked at random out of the phone book.  Having learned my lesson with ‘Baristes,’ I now google most names to see if they happen to mean ‘jock itch’ in a foreign language.

I’m now writing a prequel, set in a 15th-century University with students from all over the world.  The University is actually the easy part; when stumped, I can always go back to my marine biology books.  But I’ve realized I have no idea how names are structured in homogenous traditional societies.  How alike are they?  In one village, for instance, I have siblings named Paio and Minter.  Is this ridiculous or not? I’ve no idea.  Other people in the village are named Crowe, Carabelle, Orn, Szince, Shennen, and Mag.  I haven’t a clue whether these names fit together, or how to find out.

I can only hope that the completed book will have enough rabid fans that they’ll put me on the spot about this.  The way I might put a dog-owner on the spot for naming his grovelling dependent ‘Zeus’, were I so inclined.

I have not read 50 Shades of Gray, so I won’t comment on its content.
Two of my friends have read it; one (male) said “it hardly has any sex in it!” The other (female) said “Wow, there’s lots of hot sex in it!”
“How much hot sex?” I asked. Being a quantitatively-inclined person.
“Oh, about 30%,” she said.
That’s quite a bit, I thought, but my unregenerate self was on the man’s side in this debate. Of course, it said, I just wouldn’t read the padding.

But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that people are paying money to read pornographic fanfic. People I know are paying money to read pornographic fanfic.

Who could ever have come up with the idea of selling pornographic fanfic? Amazing. At one time in my life I would have paid for non-pornographic fanfic. On one of my old computers I have a collection of the good, non-porny Harry Potter fanfics I’d managed to dig up at the time, and I think it has six files in it. I used to shudder when friends told me they were letting their children look up new Harry Potter stories on the internet.

I’ve always been amazed, totally amazed, that fanfiction.net didn’t make the bottom drop out of the porn industry. Well, you might say, some people like their porn to not have Harry Potter in it. But for them, there were the House, MD fanfics. Or the Fruits Basket fanfics. Or Hunger Games, or whatever … I have to admit that my interest in fanfic waned when Snape died in the last Harry Potter book. But even back in the day, it was obvious to me that people could get most of their koffrecreationalkoff reading needs met without ever venturing outside the Potterverse, or putting down a penny of their hard-earned cash.

But here’s the really interesting twist: just a few months after a mainstream publisher’s ‘rescuing’ 50 Shades from fanfiction.net obscurity, thereby not only demonstrating that there is Money To Be Made but making the existence of this treasure trove of free porn visible to a mainstream audience, the site has started deleting anything with explicit sex in it. The rule being invoked has existed since 2002, but apparently nobody bothered enforcing it until this summer. Coincidence? Inquiring minds want to know.

Not that it makes a big difference, as the porn fanfics have just migrated to other sites. I still can’t see why anybody would pay for it, when they can just download the files and do a search-and-replace to remove Harry’s name!

How many times have I tried to comment on a blog this week, and been unable to? When I wasn’t looking, the major bloggeries seem to have decided to limit participation only to people who can be vouched for, in writing, by Civil War veterans.

Livejournal? Don’t even get me started. I actually have an account with them, and it still took me twelve tries and changing my password to post a two-sentence comment. That’s not mentioning the three captchas and the paragraph I had to copy and paste into a box.

Blogger won’t let me post unless I sign in to some other account. Am I going to go dig the booklet of d**n useless passwords out of its drawer, search through it and re-sign into google, wordpress, etc — which I am already automatically signed into on the same computer at the same time — to post a ‘nice post’ comment?

I’m told that my own WordPress blog has become just as big a nuisance to post on, even though I only authorized it to present a captcha.

Professional weblogs don’t bother with this cr*p. If I want to post one of the thousand comments on a Chronicle of Higher Ed blog, do I have to jump through hoops? No. But if I want to post the sole comment on some lonely author’s blog, I practically have to drive to Silicon valley and present it to the blog platform’s HQ written on vellum, in my own blood.

Do we blog in order to have conversations, or not? And if so, would somebody tell Livejournal, Blogger, and WordPress?

The rules:

1. Go to page 7 or 77 of your WIP
2. Count down 7 lines
3. Post the next 7 lines.

Here’s what I got:

“Oh, little finches with your sharp beaks,” said Bana Orn, “Cut through this cord that holds me fast, for night is coming on!”

The finches flew down and clung to the cord, all three together, and they cut it through like that, snik-snak!  Then they flew back up to Bana Orn, where she floated below the dragon-kite with its red wings.

“Little finches, I will ever repay you,” said Bana Orn, raising her hand.  But the little finches had been trained to eat from their mistress’ lips, and to sit on her hands.  All three together, they lighted on Bana Orn’s finger, and down her powder floated, gold and silver in the setting sunlight.

You can see Sue’s entry and any others that show up here.