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Great Moment in VRS
May. 13th, 2019 03:16 pm"That why a* novel was just too irritating. The perky heroin** was driving me crazy."
*YA
**heroine
*YA
**heroine
Random quote of the day:
“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
—Nora Ephron, Wellesley College Commencement Address, 1996
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.
Mirrored from Better Than Dead.
Parallel lives
Jun. 16th, 2011 01:42 pmIt’s funny the parallels life hands you. I’m currently doing the final polish on my old novel, Blood Geek, which has a heroine (Susan) who spent most of her youth caring for a sick parent. She’s ready to burst free of her constricted life, to explore the larger world in a way she’s never been able to before.
When I wrote this story I was much younger myself and imagining what it would be like to have your life defined by the illness of another. I had no experience of it in my real life. But there is this haunting echo, now that I am helping to care for my own mother, that keeps bouncing through the chambers of my heart. It’s a little disturbing. I knew more than I thought I knew back then.
How could I have? Because those parallels were not just about one thing, not just about the illness of a parent. They were about living a constrained life and wanting to break free. Back when I wrote this book, I had spent a number of years living such a fenced-in life, dealing with my own illness. I also was yearning to break free, to explore the larger world—in a way I’d once done before getting sick. The book was great therapy in that, although I’m not Susan and her life is not mine. It encouraged me to break free and I did for many years.
And now I am in a different phase of my life. I have no vision for what comes next. I can’t see that far beyond the day-to-day. I do know that when I get back to writing something new again, I don’t want it to echo that day-to-day in the slightest. Which is not to say I might not use some of these characters again—in fact, I fully intend to. But they will be engaged in some other enterprise, something that blows the doors open to other worlds with no fences.
I also know this, and the last week or so has only crystallized this “revelation”: creative work is not a luxury for me, although I’ve been treating it that way lately. Creative work is absolutely necessary. It helps keep me as sane as I’m ever going to get. It helps me breathe. I need that room to breathe or I, the me that means something, will cease to exist. I will become nothing more than another middle-aged woman going through a life of duty and chores. That person will not be worth knowing, and will not be a balm of comfort to an aging and ill parent, or anyone else. Including myself.
Creativity sets me free, no matter how limited my life is at any given time, to be the best person I can be. I will cling to it, thank you very much, as my golden-glowing life preserver until I slip beneath the waters of oblivion.
Mirrored from Better Than Dead.
There aren't really five separate and complete coincidences here, but I've broken the existing ones up into five easily digestible bits, so that should count for something, right?
1. Last week I pulled all the story collections I have out of the TBR bookshelves and put them near my bedside because that's the place I usually read short stories (although I left the story collections by single author in the shelves). I was gob-smacked to discover how many anthologies I had, some of which I'd forgotten about. (Which tells me I need to stop buying story anthologies until I've cleared out the ones I have.) Amongst these was an anthology called Powers of Detection: Stories of Mystery and Fantasy edited by Dana Stabenow.
2. Friday I was reading Dead Man Rising by Lilith Saintcrow in which she'd named a very minor character Ms. Stabenow.
3. "Wait," says I, "didn't somebody named Stabenow edit a collection of stories I have?" I went to the now handily available pile of anthologies and looked her up. I read the author blurb about her and noticed she'd written some mysteries centering around a detective named Kate Shugak.
4. On Saturday a book I'd ordered arrived in the mail: The Female Trickster: The Mask That Reveals by Ricki Stefanie Tannen.* I'd realized I needed to do some depth work for one of the thematic pillars of my current WIP. I started reading the book that afternoon. Although I'm not entirely in love with every aspect of Tannen's thinking, it's going to give me what I need for understanding some of the psychological underpinnings of what has been an instinctive process in this book. On page 10 Tannen mentions her favorite female detective characters, the ones she views as aspects of female trickster energy: V. I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, Blanche White . . . and Kate Shugak, written by Dana Stabenow. There are several references to Shugak/Stabenow in the index. I look forward to reading what that's all about.
5. There is no fifth thing. Yet. (I told you so.)
While reading Tannen's book I'm thinking she's completely missed the boat on a whole 'nother aspect of female trickster energy as she defines it: Xena, Buffy, the vast majority of urban fantasy, and some of the paranormal romance.
How does she define a female trickster? A woman who has (Jargon warning! Jargon warning! She's a post-Jungian!) authority, agency, and autonomy and uses humor as an important tool in combating social stereotypes.
The three A's, as she defines them: autonomy - "being able to maintain a stable identity while inhabiting outsider terrain;" agency - "used as a sense of action and being able to act on others' behalf. Those who have agency have the power and freedom of physical and psychological movement within their culture" (and, apparently, they own their own detective agencies—har! Get it?); autonomy - "feeling free to choose your intentional behavior - necessary for successful identity formation" (i.e., able to run your own show).
Sounds pretty damned xenabuffyufpr to me.
(You know, it's not that I hate jargon, I can play the game. I just think that sometimes jargon is the antithesis of communication. It's about exclusivity and being an insider that pushing the marginal types and the chirping cricketdom of the commoners out of the discussion. Which is extremely amusing when it is employed to write about the marginal types, but jargon does not especially appreciate irony, in my experience.)
I may have to email Ms. Tannen and tell her about this whole well of material she's overlooked. I'm sure she'll just love my second guessing of her grand theory, don't you? If she pays any attention at all, she'll probably (with some justification) look at these older female detectives as forerunners of the said xenabuffyufpr thing. The female detectives were quite edgy in their day, real ball busters. In more ways than one.
What I'm not one hundred percent convinced of is that these types of female detectives represent true trickster energy as I understand it. It seems to me that the essence of the Trickster has more to do with chaos theory than working for a social good. These female detectives certainly busted up some stereotypes, stretched the boundaries of the system, but ultimately they all worked within the system.
I must think more on this, and see if Ms. Tannen can convince me.
*ETA 2021: Ultimately, this book left me with a sour taste. Ms. Tannen practiced a lot of cultural appropriation and pretty much shoehorned the trickster into her preconceived notions. Not a convincing thesis at all.
1. Last week I pulled all the story collections I have out of the TBR bookshelves and put them near my bedside because that's the place I usually read short stories (although I left the story collections by single author in the shelves). I was gob-smacked to discover how many anthologies I had, some of which I'd forgotten about. (Which tells me I need to stop buying story anthologies until I've cleared out the ones I have.) Amongst these was an anthology called Powers of Detection: Stories of Mystery and Fantasy edited by Dana Stabenow.
2. Friday I was reading Dead Man Rising by Lilith Saintcrow in which she'd named a very minor character Ms. Stabenow.
3. "Wait," says I, "didn't somebody named Stabenow edit a collection of stories I have?" I went to the now handily available pile of anthologies and looked her up. I read the author blurb about her and noticed she'd written some mysteries centering around a detective named Kate Shugak.
4. On Saturday a book I'd ordered arrived in the mail: The Female Trickster: The Mask That Reveals by Ricki Stefanie Tannen.* I'd realized I needed to do some depth work for one of the thematic pillars of my current WIP. I started reading the book that afternoon. Although I'm not entirely in love with every aspect of Tannen's thinking, it's going to give me what I need for understanding some of the psychological underpinnings of what has been an instinctive process in this book. On page 10 Tannen mentions her favorite female detective characters, the ones she views as aspects of female trickster energy: V. I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, Blanche White . . . and Kate Shugak, written by Dana Stabenow. There are several references to Shugak/Stabenow in the index. I look forward to reading what that's all about.
5. There is no fifth thing. Yet. (I told you so.)
While reading Tannen's book I'm thinking she's completely missed the boat on a whole 'nother aspect of female trickster energy as she defines it: Xena, Buffy, the vast majority of urban fantasy, and some of the paranormal romance.
How does she define a female trickster? A woman who has (Jargon warning! Jargon warning! She's a post-Jungian!) authority, agency, and autonomy and uses humor as an important tool in combating social stereotypes.
The three A's, as she defines them: autonomy - "being able to maintain a stable identity while inhabiting outsider terrain;" agency - "used as a sense of action and being able to act on others' behalf. Those who have agency have the power and freedom of physical and psychological movement within their culture" (and, apparently, they own their own detective agencies—har! Get it?); autonomy - "feeling free to choose your intentional behavior - necessary for successful identity formation" (i.e., able to run your own show).
Sounds pretty damned xenabuffyufpr to me.
(You know, it's not that I hate jargon, I can play the game. I just think that sometimes jargon is the antithesis of communication. It's about exclusivity and being an insider that pushing the marginal types and the chirping cricketdom of the commoners out of the discussion. Which is extremely amusing when it is employed to write about the marginal types, but jargon does not especially appreciate irony, in my experience.)
I may have to email Ms. Tannen and tell her about this whole well of material she's overlooked. I'm sure she'll just love my second guessing of her grand theory, don't you? If she pays any attention at all, she'll probably (with some justification) look at these older female detectives as forerunners of the said xenabuffyufpr thing. The female detectives were quite edgy in their day, real ball busters. In more ways than one.
What I'm not one hundred percent convinced of is that these types of female detectives represent true trickster energy as I understand it. It seems to me that the essence of the Trickster has more to do with chaos theory than working for a social good. These female detectives certainly busted up some stereotypes, stretched the boundaries of the system, but ultimately they all worked within the system.
I must think more on this, and see if Ms. Tannen can convince me.
*ETA 2021: Ultimately, this book left me with a sour taste. Ms. Tannen practiced a lot of cultural appropriation and pretty much shoehorned the trickster into her preconceived notions. Not a convincing thesis at all.
For the record...
Jul. 6th, 2008 03:00 pmI am getting a little tired of kickass heroines who make stupid choices out of anger. If they were really that kickass and working in a dangerous profession like bounty hunting or magical badass detecting, they would not survive such recklessness and bad decisions.
But why be a party pooper, huh? Many a Hollywood writer/director has made a good living out of reckless, bad decisionmakin' heroes who wouldn't survive ten minutes in the real world. That's why they call it "fantasy."
Girls can play, too.
And I'm still reading.
But why be a party pooper, huh? Many a Hollywood writer/director has made a good living out of reckless, bad decisionmakin' heroes who wouldn't survive ten minutes in the real world. That's why they call it "fantasy."
Girls can play, too.
And I'm still reading.
