Patricia S. Bowne

cover image: "The Cat Jury" by Chris Hadley

How cool a world is it, when you can put ‘publish novella’ on your to-do list and check it off before you’ve finished your coffee?  Admittedly, it was a large coffee.

Anyway, for those of you wanting another Osyth ‘fix’ at the end of the semester, Unite and Conquer is now available from Smashwords for the princely sum of $0.99.  You should be able to read it over a cup of coffee, if it’s a large coffee.

I’d be editing my novella ‘Unite and Conquer’ into Kindle format. I just got permission to use Chris Hadley’s painting, ‘The Cat Jury’ on its cover!  When I saw these wonderful, eerie cats, I knew they were the ones from Magister Baristes’ house.  They have just the right attitude.  We’re not talking snuggly puffballs here…

'The Cat Jury' is copyright Chris Hadley; used with permission

Things being as they are,  formatting will have to wait a while.  Here’s the teaser, though:

They all suspected he was abusing his graduate student — but only the cats saw what she did about it.

I have a guest blog post up at Toni Sweeney’s ‘My blog.’ Drop over and check it out!

And many thanks, Toni!

My chorus is singing excerpts from Les Miz, so revolution is on my mind for about a half-hour every Tuesday night.  The rest of the time, I do what I usually do — which includes scoping out enough academic news that of course I ran into Rebecca Schuman’s Thesis Hatement and some of the articles discussing it.

My take on the issue would be worse than useless, since I’m an older, tenured science professor who never aspired to anything other than the small-college teaching position I now happily hold. But as I read the article, tunes from Les Miz started floating through my head.  I thought about the meeting I had been in the day before, in which one of my humanities colleagues did what I take for granted from humanities faculty — questioned an institutional sacred cow — and I wondered mightily. ‘How is it safe,’ I wondered, ‘for a country to fill itself with unemployed humanities PhDs?  Aren’t savants and intelligentsia just the sort of people who cause trouble for the ruling classes, whenever they are allowed to plot and mutter in the hidden corners of society?’

Well, I’ve thought this sort of stuff before and been wrong before.  A few years ago I was thinking the same thing about unemployed middle managers. ‘Is it safe for the bosses,’ I thought then, ‘to have a large class of unemployed, angry, educated people who know how to work Excel, use Linked-in, and manage a database?  Won’t unions of the unemployed spring up and overturn the status quo?’  I am always expecting things to overturn the status quo, and they never do.

We’re ineffective that way.  I think it’s something in our water.

But I don’t have to put up with ineffective American academics when I can make up effective ones in my novels.  In the work in progress, my protagonist is just an undergraduate student at the University of Selanto.  She doesn’t know anything about the life of a freelance magician outside those walls, or what kind of trouble the disaffected, underemployed, and overeducated may cause.  Neither do I — yet.  But I’ll find out.

I wish I had any hope that real-life events would overtake me.  I’m not a fast writer, folks; there’s still time!

I’m not a huge fan of the chocolate-chip cookie, but every now and then I want one.  My local drugstore had an amazing sale the other day, with a box of cookies at about half the price of the name brand, so I picked some up.  You know the rest of the story; when I dove into them they were perfectly serviceable cookies, but only had about 2 chips per cookie.  Which was not what I wanted when I purchased chocolate-chip cookies.

What got me comparing cookies to smut?  This week a friend of mine, a writer, announced her intention to write good smut.  None of this ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ stuff, she declared.  She was going to write good stuff, with character development and plot; and immediately my mind flashed back to that box of cookies and my depressing search for chocolate chips in a wide, flat, doughy expanse of … character development and plot?

At one time I read a lot of smut.  I didn’t search it out; I was searching for Harry Potter fan fiction, but I certainly didn’t filter out the NC-17 stuff that popped up on my fan fiction.net screen.  And I developed the chocolate-chip cookie theory of smut.

In this theory, a cookie either is a chocolate-chip cookie or it’s a sugar cookie.  A good sugar cookie is a wonderful thing, and almost all the books on my shelves are sugar cookies.  Not a chip in a carload.  But put one chocolate chip into the cookie, and it becomes a chocolate-chip cookie; either a good one, with lots of chips, or a bad one, with not enough chips.  Every mouthful one takes after finding that first chip will be judged on whether it contains chips or not.

And that’s where I think the traditional concept of ‘good smut’ falls apart.  It’s a holdover from a time when any smut was thought to be a bad thing, and smut could only be justified at all if it was embedded in something that would hold the reader’s interest without the smut.  Does anybody really need to maintain that fiction any more?  Perhaps the people who would are off in the lounge, reading Playboy for its articles.

Now, someone could argue that mine is an immature approach to sex and smut, and they might well be right.  A grown-up, they would say, has integrated a healthy sex life into the rest of his or her activities.  It’s only our culture’s censorious approach to sex that makes us react to it so strongly that everything else pales into insignificance once our propensities are inflamed.

To which I would say, so what?  Today’s readers are today’s readers, for good or ill.  There may be a utopia out there in which sex is just one more healthy avenue of human interrelationship, but it’s in the future.  The most ultraliberal of us still react pretty strongly to any attempt to integrate sexual attraction into our workplaces or hobbies.  We assume that inflaming the propensities is a game-changer.  So why pretend it isn’t, when we pick up a novel?

I’ll stretch my metaphor out further, though, and suggest what might make good smut.  Not a regular sugar cookie of a novel studded with sex scenes; no, a real prime chocolate-chip cookie not only has big juicy chips in abundance, but they’ve melted out into the cookie dough between them.  The entire cookie is permeated with their salacious decadence. They echo in every mouthful, and you never for one bite forget what you’re eating.  So for those of us who aspire to write good smut, shouldn’t the plot, descriptions and characterization be almost as sexy as the sex scenes?

For myself, I’ll stick to the smut-eating asterisks.  Because I know my limits, and the last thing I want to create is a two-chip cookie.

I’ve posted a few times on the persistence of Victorian Morals in girls’ fantasy, and how they lead to characters who do the self-sacrifice thing even absent any supernatural justification.  So I was pretty interested to come across a YA fantasy heroine whose ethics were not based on Victorian religious assumptions, and who unreflectingly did things that made me think “Wow, really?”

I was even more surprised to find this in a book set in 1800s England.  In a character who is the local minister’s daughter.

Chime by Franny Billingsley is an interesting and ruthless book.

To begin with, it has a heroine who in spite of being the minister’s daughter never thinks once about god, jesus, or religion.  She’s moral and self-sacrificing enough — she intends to spend her life looking after her sister to atone for her sins — but those sins have no religious context.  The moral tension in this book comes from conflicting loyalties.  Is the heroine more loyal to humans or to the Old Ones that inhabit the swamp?  Virtue steers her onto one path, inclination steers her toward the other, and she judges herself wicked because of her inclinations.

Well, this is a trope we’ve seen before, isn’t it.  Of course the heroine’s inclinations will turn out to be right in the end, and the spirits of nature will be revealed as better than the humans who lord it over them.  So I was prepared for this to be one more sweetly pretty ecofable in which animism is shown to be better than christianity.  But it didn’t quite fit into that mold, mainly because of the absence of christianity.  Which left the heroine to choose between animism and a very strange, unsettling human ethics.

For instance, witches.  The mere possession of red hair and lack of an alibi condemn one bit player as a witch, and everyone agrees that she must hang.  When her innocence becomes obvious after her death, well, that is sad, isn’t it.  I think the heroine muses on that for oh, about twelve seconds, as she walks past the dangling body.

The Old Ones, as well, are to be killed, though in their cases the trials are optional.  It’s hard to explain how this plays into the story without major spoilers, but suffice it to say that when I got to that part I said ‘She DID?  REALLY?  WOW.’  And the heroine did not.  Share my amazement and shock, that is.  Once again, she gave about twelve seconds’ thought to something I was still trying to close my dropped jaw on a week later.

So, wow.  Absolutely not Victorian morals, in an 1800s England minister’s daughter.  I got what I was asking for, sort of, and it’s given me something to chew on all right.

The thing I can’t figure out, though, is whether the author did this on purpose.  Because what I experienced as a cold-shock subversion of moral tropes could just as easily be seen as an unreflective transplantation of Buffy-style “sometimes they just need killin’ ” morals into a historical setting — sort of like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  Just because I’m steeped in Victorian childrens’ literature doesn’t mean that every author I read shares my preoccupations.

In the end, though, doesn’t matter.  I like the dissonance between what I expected and what I got when I read Chime, the unapologetic presentation of a different moral system. And truly, if it’s presented without apology because the author never thought of apologizing for it, isn’t that exactly the essence of an alternative moral system?

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.