Patricia S. Bowne

… 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.

Hero's Path page six, by Marvin Hill

When my agent started talking about epic fantasies, I was skeptical. My personal voyage in epic fantasy had begun well with Tolkien, drifted lazily through David Eddings, and ended with my first attempt at reading Terry Goodkind. Every now and then I’d take another stab at epic fantasies while visiting my parents; my Dad read them one after another, like eating potato chips, and I could pick one off the bookstore shelf for his Xmas present without even opening the covers. But they seemed interchangeable to me, and I could reread the same one every holiday without realizing it.

Hero's Path page twelve, by Marvin Hill

My agent had a better opinion of the genre. Epic fantasies, he told me, were not one band of picaresques roaming faux-medieval England after another. They were varied, large-scale adventures and took place in exciting and different worlds. He suggested quite a few, so I have been reading them. But it’s not large-scale adventure and different worlds that are the most striking characteristics of these books. It’s homely pleasures and happy endings.

Of course, I knew this when I was picking those random fat paperbacks off the shelf for my father. They were never going to

Hero's Path page fifteen, by Marvin Hill

surprise him with an unhappy ending. Neither would he be bothered by ambiguity about whether the good were in fact evil, or the evil in fact good. Basic assumptions about the things that make for happiness in life would not be questioned; love and family, good meals and worthwhile work, the satisfaction of manual labor and a bath afterwards, would be vividly described without being obscured by the protagonist’s angst or ambition. Characters in an epic fantasy – good characters, at least – got out of their own heads, and wouldn’t bore my father with incessant self-examination.

Hero's Path page twenty, by Marvin Hill

I, however, thought self-examination mattered. How people decided what their quest should be interested me far more than the mechanics of how they achieved it; I preferred Robertson Davies and Louis Auchincloss, authors in which the setting and adventures were often determinedly mundane compared to their characters’ vivid interior lives and dilemmas.

So after a twenty-year hiatus, I return to reading epic fantasy and find much of it basically unchanged. Its protagonists still work hard, enjoy good meals and love their horses. They still often sidestep the gigantic question of how to determine their lives’ significance; they live in worlds where options are limited, and quests are handed to them by magic or prophesy. Villains are still easily distinguished from heroes, even without a program. Exotic locales are still valued, and people who apparently never read The Arabian Nights are making a fuss about how innovative The Crescent Moon is. And my Dad could still read them one after another, like eating potato chips.

Hero's Path page twenty-two, by Marvin Hill

What I find I like best in epic fantasies is the beginning, in which the author establishes the Good Life that protagonists will be fighting for. Being able to make good and help your father, a steady job in the stables and pleasant companions, a cup of tea with a friend. These are the things I care about, and care to read about. The grand magic and exciting battles, in which monsters threatening these homely pleasures are introduced, almost triumph, and are vanquished: not so much. The more straightforward and tension-free those parts are, the more quickly over, the better for me. In fact, you could replace all those middle chapters with ***here the hero triumphs***, and I would be just as happy. Because to me, the real adventure is still the interior one to decide what your life’s journey will be about, absent quests and villains, and how you’ll turn yourself into the kind of person who can enjoy that Good Life.

I wish someone would create a subgenre for those stories.

Hero's Path page twenty-five, by Marvin Hill

The art here is from Hero’s Path by Marvin Hill, a local block print artist who also thought that the epics ended too soon, before the hero had dealt with any of the important stuff. He corrected that in his art (and, many of us think, in his life).