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I’ve never thought of toads are being particularly sympathetic creatures, but when I began studying them for the novel, I was surprised at how sympathetic they became. Something about the eyes, maybe?
A fantastic article in the Atlantic looks at the challenge for a male author trying to write from a female persepective. I love the conclusion:
As literary critic Sarah Seltzer says, “writing across gender may be harder, require more research and humility. We may fail or get ‘called out’ for letting our biases show, or being ignorant. But the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.”
This is exactly why I was willing to commit to a female protagonist in WITCH, the first novel I’ve written intended for publication. I’ve fretted over Abigail, and I’ve worried that, as a male author, focusing upon her as my main character may discourage potential agents, editors and/or publishers.
I’ve decided I don’t care. Maybe it’d be easier to put out a manuscript that featured a lithe, blue-eyed, blond-haired lad as a protagonist, in a world where the girls are boyish and plucky until they decide they’re more interested in “lipstick and nylons.” But I’m ready to read something different. I’m ready for fantastic worlds that don’t crib most of their mythology from Tolkein. I’m ready for compelling characters transformed by the world around them.
Funny thing? The first draft of THIEF, the novel that follows WITCH, came together in less than half the time of WITCH. Maybe my worries are accurate. Maybe I’ve made my life more difficult by choosing Abigail and her story. But she’s made me grow as a writer. And maybe a person, too.
Twelve years after the release of Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan recognized he’d caught something special:
“The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.”
When I think about American music, I hear the Violent Femmes song with the lyric: “I like all kinds of music/but I like American music best.” When I try to define what I mean by the homey little phrase ‘American music’ I return to Dylan’s allusive, elusive description. I want Northern Arcadia to have a comparable musical tradition. Little problem. That ‘wild mercury sound’ was born from the blues, by which I mean…
“the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the “Deep South” of the United States around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.”
– source: Wikipedia article on the Blues.
There are people of all different skin colors in Northern Arcadia, for reasons I’ve touched on before. But there is no group of human beings who could be considered analagous to the African-American communities in the colonial Americas. When I first came to that conclusion, I stalled. I worried I’d never find a way to bring that ‘wild mercury sound’ to life in the taverns and camps and cobblestone streets of my novel new world.
This is the point when dhao bo, the toad people native to Northern Arcadia, stopped being a special effect (or an obscure reference) for me and became something rather more substantial in my imagination. Making music central to the toad people’s culture didn’t seem like a stretch. Toads and frogs and all their ilk warble on for hours, right? And of course (it flashed across my mind) the dhao bo tribes could croak messages back and forth network-style, allowing for some fairly sophisticated planning and military tactics. The dhao bo of Northern Arcadia would likely share an oral history, which would provide more information and a better context for dhao bo tribesmen during Pierre’s artifact hunt than Pierre himself.
And the music of Northern Arcadia no longer seemed destined to be completely funk-free.
More childhood misinformation: the native american tribes east of the Mississippi were almost entirely nomadic, lacking sufficient engineering or agricultural skills to sustain large fixed populations.
The Cahokia Mounds in St. Louis, Missouri testify otherwise. More on Cahokia in a later post. What recently caught my attention was the existence of a large historic site in Wisconsin dating back the 11th century. The two didn’t exist independently:
“The inhabitants of the new settlement imported ritual objects and luxury goods from Cahokia, and probably from the Middle Mississippian settlements in central and Northern Illinois.”
Densely-populated settlements, agricultural expertise, and trade routes stretching from present-day Wisconsin to Missouri… the New World prior to the 18th century is starting to sound like the Old World.
Well, except for the people from the Old World having guns and horses.
Kotaku.com tries to figure out what happened with the poorly-reviewed video game first-person shooter that is Aliens: Colonial Marines.
The first major problem was the game’s story: even four years after Colonial Marines was announced, nobody had locked down a final script. Narrative designers at both Gearbox and TimeGate were writing and rewriting constantly, and TimeGate had to discard entire scenes and levels because of story changes during development, according to three sources.
“For a couple months, we were just kind of guessing,” said one of those sources. “It’s really weird to work on a game when you don’t have a basic idea of how things will work.”
(Also? I had no idea there were such things as ‘narrative designers.’ Neat!)
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I’ve never seen an illustration that aligns perfectly with the clockwork dragon you might glimpse in the background of the northern arcadia books, but the full-color image here and in the header for the site comes tantalizingly close. The menace … Continue reading
As recently as 1934, sophisticated American citizens still had the capacity to believe in something as marvelous as…
“(S)ecret caves, a lost civilisation and above all, a treasure trove of gold in unimaginable quantities. And all this in the ground below the present-day metropolis of Los Angeles.”
The full article (originally published in the LA Times) detailing the lizard man find is worth a read. The maps of the tunnels are fun, too. Please do note there are no lizard people in Northern Arcadia. There are, of course, toad people. And caves. Also, possibly, cities hidden in the ground long before the arrival of the men from the East.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s decades-old complaints about fantasy protagonists, articulated in a marvelous Slate article about the relationship between her books and the miniseries bearing the Earthsea name, ring true:
I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”).
Abigail Moore is a redhead, with pale skin. Every other major character (including the two principals in THIEF) has olive, tan or coffee-colored skin. Religion divides the colonists, greed corrupts and the desire for power still sets faction against faction.
But while people from many different ethnicities can be found in the New World, ‘race’ as a concept isn’t considered useful or germane. (I’m not sure it’s useful anywhere. But in my fictional world of Northern Arcadia, on this point, people happen to agree with me.)
One of the things I wanted to explore in the Northern Arcadia books was the notion of a uniquely American fantasy setting. I love me a good castle, and I was raised on the Arthurian legends and Tolkein’s stuff, but there’s plenty of the fantastic on these shores. The mound city of Cahokia, the Roanoke Dare stones, the ruins in the Pueblo Canyon and the traces of large urban structures in the Amazon all served to inspire various threads and strands of Northern Arcadian lore. As a new feature, and to help break the monotony of me announcing the receipt of new rejection letters, I thought I’d share links to New World stuff I think is fantastic and inspirational, both.
The narrator for the History channel show “America Unearthed” is, like so many of his fellow travelers, a little breathless for my taste. But a recent episode on the American Stonehenge was provocative. When I was a kid, I left school with the impression the New World, prior to the arrival of Europeans, was empty of everything except wildlife and a few scattered tribes of Native Americans. This episode is a nice reminder of the extent to which that particular narrative is wrong.
This morning brought my second rejection letter from a possible agent. My spirits sank when I scanned the boilerplate. The potential for Abigail Moore and Northern Arcadia seems so obvious to me. The speed and ease with which the second Northern Arcadia novel, HEIST, is coming together, tells me this is a viable endeavor, one I could cheerfully extend and elaborate for years to come.
One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to communicate my vision for Northern Arcadia in a way that people in the publishing industry find inspirational. Hell. Maybe it’ll even be today.