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ETA: Warning for Corambis spoilers in comments.
I love how having comments screened gets me the "0 minotaurs" notation.
Yes, I am easily amused.
Q: It appears from Gideon's attempt to heal Felix's hands, and the work of the celebrants of Nephele, that wizards can perform healing with magic. Magic has direct effect on the physical world. Why is it then, that Felix cannot 'magic away ' his scars, or at least disguise them. Is this a feature of the way magic works in Melusine? Or is it theoretically possible but has never occured to him?
A: Okay. Point one: healing magic--like all magic that directly affects human beings--is heresy in Mélusine. Gideon could have gotten in serious trouble for doing that, except that everyone had rather more pressing matters to attend to (and Gideon, being a foreigner and not Cabaline, has a loophole). Corollary to point one: Felix has never learned healing magic. (Malkar certainly wouldn't have taught it to him.) Point two: it's very clear from the wizards we see who do know how to use magic to heal that it's working magic, not working miracles. Gideon accelerates the healing of Felix's fingers, but they heal badly (possibly because of the accelerated healing). The celebrants of the Gardens don't do a real great job on Mildmay's leg, either ( spoilers for Corambis ). And it's clear that magic, like ordinary medicine, works best on very recent illnesses, injuries, traumas, etc. Scar tissue that's decades old (and, yes, that's decadEs, not decads)? Not so much.
Q:What card game, if any, is Long Tiffany based off? (And I don't suppose they play with an Italian-style deck? That is to say, a deck with seven number cards per suit instead of ten.)
A: I didn't know that about Italian decks. Neat!
In my head, Long Tiffany is a vague analogue of poker. However, please note, I don't know the rules for poker (my knowledge of it is based on books like Tim Powers' Last Call), so I don't think that actually tells you very much about the game. *g*
Q: Why does Felix have eight ear piercings?
A: Because he's vain. And because earrings are a status symbol. I never did as much with that as I would have liked, but it's fairly ordinary in the Mirador to have two or more piercings per ear. Ordinary enough that no one comments on it--hence the fact that it has remained pretty much invisible to readers. :P
Q: Although I suspect you wanted to keep this consistent, why hasn't Mildmay's 'voice' changed in either vocabulary or word usage during his two year stay in the Mirador?
A: This gets discussed in Corambis.
Lastly, a slightly silly one:
Q: The waistcoat that Mehitabel made Mildmay throw away in The Virtu - Did Mildmay actually like it or was it as horrendous as Felix's favourite jacket?
A: Oh, Felix actually does have excellent taste. He just sometimes chooses to use his power for evil. *g* So, yes, the waistcoat was actually really nice. (Mildmay would never have agreed to wear it if it was a peacocky thing.)
Q: A friend and I were talking about the series, and she mentioned it had a lot of Catholic imagery in it-- the saints, which to her are more reminiscent of old world saints (St. George and other examples I can't remember) than the more recent ones, churches called 'Our Lady Of _____', priests who you give confessionals to. Was this intentional? If so, why? If not, how do you think it got in there?
A: Yes, of course it was intentional. I was looking for a way to make the religion of Mélusine both familiar and alienating; therefore it's a pantheon, but it has saints and cathedrals. Also, when I was ten, my parents took me to Italy, and my favorite pictures in the museums were always the martyrdoms, the gorier the better. (Yes, I was a strange and morbid child.) So I really enjoyed making up martyrs like St. Grandin and St. Holofernes. (I'm also fascinated by, and may someday do something more with the similarities between ancient Greek hero cults and the veneration of the saints.) And the same thing again in Corambis, where Our Lady of Crevasses sounds a little like a Catholic church in our world, but it's actually pointing towards something quite different. In terms of architectural style (since I know at least one person reading this will want to know *g*), Mélusine's churches are Gothic à la Nôtre Dame de Paris, while Corambin churches are Byzantine.
Q: Here's one thing I was particularly curious about. I've seen you make some posts about first person narratives in Felix and Mildmay, (and later in Mehitabel,) and the different variations they took along the way. But my question is, how long did it take for you to really stabilize their voices? Were there any particular steps you took to get there? Did it get easier over time?
A: Answering the last question first: yes, it did get easier over time. It's a little like learning a new language. Everyone's idiolect has rules, and you have to figure out what those rules are. Once you've figured them out, you apply them.
The biggest difference between my characters' voices and real people's idiolects is that my characters are a lot less flexible. They have to be, because they have to be consistent in order for readers to be able to keep them straight. But, for instance, in my daily speech, I'm perfectly capable of going from formal English, using complex-compound sentence structure, polysyllabic words, and an appalling plethora of abstractions straight into LOLcat, and then veering off to quote from Buffy or Bloom County or The Yellow Submarine and then back into dense and sophisticated formal English. Like Walt Whitman, I am vast and contain multitudes and frequently contradict myself. But my characters have to stick to their rules.
Also, yes, the process did take a long time. Felix was stable and distinct pretty much from the beginning, but then, of all of them, Felix is the closest to the way I naturally write. (He and Booth, although Booth's voice is self-consciously formal (on my part) and thus skates much closer to the edge of self-parody.) Once I figured out what Mildmay's idiolect was (although that took a while, as I've posted about before), he was also very easy, and code-switching between Felix and Mildmay is not only easy, it's fun. Mehitabel and Kay were much harder, and I'm very grateful for the external evidence that I seem to have done an okay job with them, because I personally was never quite sure.
Q: My favorite part of Melusine were the ghosts Felix can see, and how inscrutable they are. Do they have stories that go with them? I was especially curious about the weeping woman in St. Crellifer's and the man striking a flagstone in the Mirador.
A: Nope. No stories. I made them up specifically to be inscrutable.
Q: In a similar vein, because I love the sense of history that pervades the series, who was Mad Elinor? What happened to her?
A: Okay, this one I can answer. Elinor Ophidia was the daughter of King Faramond, and she's also a retelling of either (a.) "Donkeyskin," in which the princess did not escape from her father, or (b.) 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, in which Giovanni redeems his complete and total asshole-ism by killing himself instead of his sister. I've never been able to decide which I like better. Either way, Elinor's son Henry is the result of incest (father-daughter or brother-sister), and thus her madness, her imprisonment, and the fact that Henry was noted, as Mildmay says, for being a little peculiar.
(This is what happens when you ask me questions about things. You discover just how much I hate collapsing wave-forms.)
Q: Would you care to comment on influences from the general direction of Peter S. Beagle? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that you and he are both fascinated by how people tell their own stories. First person for a reason.
A: I love Beagle. Especially, though not exclusively, The Last Unicorn--and honestly, if I'd point to Beagle's influence anywhere in my work (if I had the brazen cojones to stake that claim), it'd be in the way he mixes fantasy and mythology and folklore and literature, so that the butterfly, for instance (whom, iirc, Beagle has confessed as a kind of self-portrait), can quote "Rumpelstiltskin" and Donne and folksongs and Hamlet and all sorts of other things while still belonging to the beautiful, delicate fantasy world of the unicorn. (Also, of course, Mommy Fortuna and the harpy, which is a set piece I aspire to be able to write something maybe one-fourth as magnificent as.) I love that. I love the word play. I love his prose style. I don't know if he's an influence, but he's definitely a lighthouse that I steer by.
Q: You were able to use/resolve issues of sexuality/dominance/submission via Felix in the story. Would it have been possible to do the same using a female character in the same 'role', and if so, would it have been easier or harder or just the same? What about with a 'non-white' character? I guess I'm asking about dealing with different minorities in the same role, and whether how you deal with them would be impacted (politically?) by that. Was it easier to deal with those other issues with Felix because he's white?
A: This is a very complicated question--and a good one!--so I'm going to break it down into sections.
Dealing with race first:
It is true that Felix and Mildmay are pale-skinned, but I think it's a little misleading to describe them as "white," since that's an identity marker that has quite specific and charged connotations in our world which it doesn't have in theirs.
Pale-skinned people are a minority in Mélusine; there seem to be two gene pools they can be drawn from: Troians, like Mildmay and Felix, and Monspulchrans, like Shannon (and presumably Kolkhis, but maybe there's a third gene pool I don't know about). Most of the people of Mélusine are brown-skinned, ranging from light and gold-toned brown like Mehitabel (one of the things that disappointed me most about the cover for The Mirador was that they ignored the specific description I gave them of the color of Mehitabel's skin), to the almost perfect black of Islanders like Vida. Stephen and Victoria, for instance, are dark-skinned. (( spoilers for The Mirador )) Mélusine also seems to be fairly free from racial prejudice--or at least from prejudice based on skin color (since the two are not the same, and I know that). Prejudice in Mélusine--since goodness knows there's a lot of it--seems to be primarily class-based. The only specific prejudice we're told about is the prejudice against red hair which Madeleine Scott flouts by using henna, and which we see again in The Virtu when Mehitabel tells Mildmay that the people of the southern Grasslands will expect a man with red hair to be a thug. (I'm paraphrasing.) And in Corambis, the people are all gold-toned--lions and foxes, Felix says. (Also, I should note that I felt no compunction about making up phenotypes that don't exist in our world. C'mon, I've already got wizards; clearly the gene pool of Homo sapiens sapiens in this world diverges pretty radically from ours.) The Ygressine are paler (and I suspect are related to the Troians, although I've never worked out the geography and so on of the other side of the world). Corambin racial prejudice--which also exists--is prejudice toward Ygressine (taller and paler) and Usaran people (shorter and paler), but most of Corambis and Caloxa are fairly homogeneous in their racial make-up, and the truly vicious prejudices are the Corambin prejudice against Caloxans and vice versa, which is about ethnicity and culture more than race.
(And, yes, there's a whole 'nother disquisition about "race" and "ethnicity" and "culture" and what those terms do and don't mean and how they overlap and how they don't.)
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that, internal to the books, Felix's skin color is not a marker of belonging to the dominant culture. In fact, he's a minority to the point of being a freak.
And that's not to say that he isn't a member of the dominant culture in Mélusine, because he is. He's a wizard and a courtier. He has a lot of specifically class-based power--just as the fact that he's male puts him one up as well. Mélusine is not as patriarchal and misogynist as it could be, given its real-world historical analogues, but women clearly do have to fight harder for credit and respect than men.
So to the actual question about sexuality and dom/sub issues: Felix had to be male from the get-go because the first thing I knew about him was that he was the middle term between Malkar and the boy he nearly rapes in the Arcane. He had to be, in other words, a person with the potential to be both rapist and victim--and in a consensual scene both tarquin (dom) and martyr (sub)*--and while I do not for a second deny that women can be dommes (or rapists, for that matter), it was easier for me (and remember, I came up with Felix when I was 19, so the choices I made then are not necessarily the choices I would make now) to see and to construct the dynamic with men. In fact, all the reasons for giving Felix power--his sex, his wizardry, his class status (even, for readers who live in a world in which pale skin is a status marker, his skin color)--is so that his fall will be more dramatic. More melodramatic, even, because I'm not going to deny that charge. Women as victims, minorities as victims, lower class people as victims: we expect that. (Which says several very sucky things about our society, but never mind.)
The one point at which I did not hold to that paradigm is sexual orientation. Felix is gay and there is prejudice in Mélusine against gays. (I don't know, come to think of it, if there's the same prejudice against lesbians. There doesn't seem to be, if we take Mildmay's reactions to Estella Velvet and her lover Faith as a benchmark. There may be a double standard there, and obviously if I ever figure out how to write the story about Cardenio and the Principia Caeli, I'll have to explore that.) And the gay man as victim is sadly just as expected as the categories I listed in the previous paragraph. So why is Felix gay?
1. The strong influence of Alec in Swordspoint
2. I needed Felix to be outrageous, scandalous--also socially vulnerable
3. Some things you don't get to argue with the character about, unless you want to make them someone else. Felix does not have sex with women. (No, I don't know why his reaction against sex with women is so strong. It's another thing he won't tell me.)
So, yes, I could have talked about dom/sub issues with a female character or a lower-class character or a minority character as Mélusine would recognize it. But the particular things I wanted to do were much easier to do with a man who had power.
---
*As it is constructed in Mélusine, the tarquin/martyr relationship is about power. Rape is also (always) about power--which Malkar's rape of Felix makes clear as Malkar uses that rape to literally steal Felix's power. So I am not conflating rape and tarquin/martyr (or D/s) relationships (completely! different!), but remarking that power dynamics are fundamental to both.
Q: [uttered in a tone of worshipful awe] How do you come up with all the side-stories? I mean the introduction to Melusine with Porphyria Levant and Silas Altamont, and the story of the Boneprince, and the ghosts in St. Crellifer's, etc. Are you ever tempted to make these ideas into short stories of their own?
A: Sometimes I need a story to do a particular thing: the story of Porphyria Levant and Silas Altamont, for instance, needed to introduce the obligation d'âme, the tremendous potential power imbalance between wizards and annemer (and hence the need for the Cabaline reforms), the various varieties of sexuality in Mélusine, and the idea of blood-wizards. So I noodled around until I put together a story that would do what I needed. Ditto with the origin of the Boneprince. Sometimes, especially for the littler stories or the throwaways, they just ping! into my head; whatever work was done was done in the back room, and we in the front office just say thank you and are grateful.
Q: Who was Charlett Redding, and why were her hands plated with gold when she died?
A: My notes say she was a legendary duellist. She's clearly on her way to having a hero cult, and thus in another few centuries may by St. Charlett.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
I love how having comments screened gets me the "0 minotaurs" notation.
Yes, I am easily amused.
Q: It appears from Gideon's attempt to heal Felix's hands, and the work of the celebrants of Nephele, that wizards can perform healing with magic. Magic has direct effect on the physical world. Why is it then, that Felix cannot 'magic away ' his scars, or at least disguise them. Is this a feature of the way magic works in Melusine? Or is it theoretically possible but has never occured to him?
A: Okay. Point one: healing magic--like all magic that directly affects human beings--is heresy in Mélusine. Gideon could have gotten in serious trouble for doing that, except that everyone had rather more pressing matters to attend to (and Gideon, being a foreigner and not Cabaline, has a loophole). Corollary to point one: Felix has never learned healing magic. (Malkar certainly wouldn't have taught it to him.) Point two: it's very clear from the wizards we see who do know how to use magic to heal that it's working magic, not working miracles. Gideon accelerates the healing of Felix's fingers, but they heal badly (possibly because of the accelerated healing). The celebrants of the Gardens don't do a real great job on Mildmay's leg, either ( spoilers for Corambis ). And it's clear that magic, like ordinary medicine, works best on very recent illnesses, injuries, traumas, etc. Scar tissue that's decades old (and, yes, that's decadEs, not decads)? Not so much.
Q:What card game, if any, is Long Tiffany based off? (And I don't suppose they play with an Italian-style deck? That is to say, a deck with seven number cards per suit instead of ten.)
A: I didn't know that about Italian decks. Neat!
In my head, Long Tiffany is a vague analogue of poker. However, please note, I don't know the rules for poker (my knowledge of it is based on books like Tim Powers' Last Call), so I don't think that actually tells you very much about the game. *g*
Q: Why does Felix have eight ear piercings?
A: Because he's vain. And because earrings are a status symbol. I never did as much with that as I would have liked, but it's fairly ordinary in the Mirador to have two or more piercings per ear. Ordinary enough that no one comments on it--hence the fact that it has remained pretty much invisible to readers. :P
Q: Although I suspect you wanted to keep this consistent, why hasn't Mildmay's 'voice' changed in either vocabulary or word usage during his two year stay in the Mirador?
A: This gets discussed in Corambis.
Lastly, a slightly silly one:
Q: The waistcoat that Mehitabel made Mildmay throw away in The Virtu - Did Mildmay actually like it or was it as horrendous as Felix's favourite jacket?
A: Oh, Felix actually does have excellent taste. He just sometimes chooses to use his power for evil. *g* So, yes, the waistcoat was actually really nice. (Mildmay would never have agreed to wear it if it was a peacocky thing.)
Q: A friend and I were talking about the series, and she mentioned it had a lot of Catholic imagery in it-- the saints, which to her are more reminiscent of old world saints (St. George and other examples I can't remember) than the more recent ones, churches called 'Our Lady Of _____', priests who you give confessionals to. Was this intentional? If so, why? If not, how do you think it got in there?
A: Yes, of course it was intentional. I was looking for a way to make the religion of Mélusine both familiar and alienating; therefore it's a pantheon, but it has saints and cathedrals. Also, when I was ten, my parents took me to Italy, and my favorite pictures in the museums were always the martyrdoms, the gorier the better. (Yes, I was a strange and morbid child.) So I really enjoyed making up martyrs like St. Grandin and St. Holofernes. (I'm also fascinated by, and may someday do something more with the similarities between ancient Greek hero cults and the veneration of the saints.) And the same thing again in Corambis, where Our Lady of Crevasses sounds a little like a Catholic church in our world, but it's actually pointing towards something quite different. In terms of architectural style (since I know at least one person reading this will want to know *g*), Mélusine's churches are Gothic à la Nôtre Dame de Paris, while Corambin churches are Byzantine.
Q: Here's one thing I was particularly curious about. I've seen you make some posts about first person narratives in Felix and Mildmay, (and later in Mehitabel,) and the different variations they took along the way. But my question is, how long did it take for you to really stabilize their voices? Were there any particular steps you took to get there? Did it get easier over time?
A: Answering the last question first: yes, it did get easier over time. It's a little like learning a new language. Everyone's idiolect has rules, and you have to figure out what those rules are. Once you've figured them out, you apply them.
The biggest difference between my characters' voices and real people's idiolects is that my characters are a lot less flexible. They have to be, because they have to be consistent in order for readers to be able to keep them straight. But, for instance, in my daily speech, I'm perfectly capable of going from formal English, using complex-compound sentence structure, polysyllabic words, and an appalling plethora of abstractions straight into LOLcat, and then veering off to quote from Buffy or Bloom County or The Yellow Submarine and then back into dense and sophisticated formal English. Like Walt Whitman, I am vast and contain multitudes and frequently contradict myself. But my characters have to stick to their rules.
Also, yes, the process did take a long time. Felix was stable and distinct pretty much from the beginning, but then, of all of them, Felix is the closest to the way I naturally write. (He and Booth, although Booth's voice is self-consciously formal (on my part) and thus skates much closer to the edge of self-parody.) Once I figured out what Mildmay's idiolect was (although that took a while, as I've posted about before), he was also very easy, and code-switching between Felix and Mildmay is not only easy, it's fun. Mehitabel and Kay were much harder, and I'm very grateful for the external evidence that I seem to have done an okay job with them, because I personally was never quite sure.
Q: My favorite part of Melusine were the ghosts Felix can see, and how inscrutable they are. Do they have stories that go with them? I was especially curious about the weeping woman in St. Crellifer's and the man striking a flagstone in the Mirador.
A: Nope. No stories. I made them up specifically to be inscrutable.
Q: In a similar vein, because I love the sense of history that pervades the series, who was Mad Elinor? What happened to her?
A: Okay, this one I can answer. Elinor Ophidia was the daughter of King Faramond, and she's also a retelling of either (a.) "Donkeyskin," in which the princess did not escape from her father, or (b.) 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, in which Giovanni redeems his complete and total asshole-ism by killing himself instead of his sister. I've never been able to decide which I like better. Either way, Elinor's son Henry is the result of incest (father-daughter or brother-sister), and thus her madness, her imprisonment, and the fact that Henry was noted, as Mildmay says, for being a little peculiar.
(This is what happens when you ask me questions about things. You discover just how much I hate collapsing wave-forms.)
Q: Would you care to comment on influences from the general direction of Peter S. Beagle? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that you and he are both fascinated by how people tell their own stories. First person for a reason.
A: I love Beagle. Especially, though not exclusively, The Last Unicorn--and honestly, if I'd point to Beagle's influence anywhere in my work (if I had the brazen cojones to stake that claim), it'd be in the way he mixes fantasy and mythology and folklore and literature, so that the butterfly, for instance (whom, iirc, Beagle has confessed as a kind of self-portrait), can quote "Rumpelstiltskin" and Donne and folksongs and Hamlet and all sorts of other things while still belonging to the beautiful, delicate fantasy world of the unicorn. (Also, of course, Mommy Fortuna and the harpy, which is a set piece I aspire to be able to write something maybe one-fourth as magnificent as.) I love that. I love the word play. I love his prose style. I don't know if he's an influence, but he's definitely a lighthouse that I steer by.
Q: You were able to use/resolve issues of sexuality/dominance/submission via Felix in the story. Would it have been possible to do the same using a female character in the same 'role', and if so, would it have been easier or harder or just the same? What about with a 'non-white' character? I guess I'm asking about dealing with different minorities in the same role, and whether how you deal with them would be impacted (politically?) by that. Was it easier to deal with those other issues with Felix because he's white?
A: This is a very complicated question--and a good one!--so I'm going to break it down into sections.
Dealing with race first:
It is true that Felix and Mildmay are pale-skinned, but I think it's a little misleading to describe them as "white," since that's an identity marker that has quite specific and charged connotations in our world which it doesn't have in theirs.
Pale-skinned people are a minority in Mélusine; there seem to be two gene pools they can be drawn from: Troians, like Mildmay and Felix, and Monspulchrans, like Shannon (and presumably Kolkhis, but maybe there's a third gene pool I don't know about). Most of the people of Mélusine are brown-skinned, ranging from light and gold-toned brown like Mehitabel (one of the things that disappointed me most about the cover for The Mirador was that they ignored the specific description I gave them of the color of Mehitabel's skin), to the almost perfect black of Islanders like Vida. Stephen and Victoria, for instance, are dark-skinned. (( spoilers for The Mirador )) Mélusine also seems to be fairly free from racial prejudice--or at least from prejudice based on skin color (since the two are not the same, and I know that). Prejudice in Mélusine--since goodness knows there's a lot of it--seems to be primarily class-based. The only specific prejudice we're told about is the prejudice against red hair which Madeleine Scott flouts by using henna, and which we see again in The Virtu when Mehitabel tells Mildmay that the people of the southern Grasslands will expect a man with red hair to be a thug. (I'm paraphrasing.) And in Corambis, the people are all gold-toned--lions and foxes, Felix says. (Also, I should note that I felt no compunction about making up phenotypes that don't exist in our world. C'mon, I've already got wizards; clearly the gene pool of Homo sapiens sapiens in this world diverges pretty radically from ours.) The Ygressine are paler (and I suspect are related to the Troians, although I've never worked out the geography and so on of the other side of the world). Corambin racial prejudice--which also exists--is prejudice toward Ygressine (taller and paler) and Usaran people (shorter and paler), but most of Corambis and Caloxa are fairly homogeneous in their racial make-up, and the truly vicious prejudices are the Corambin prejudice against Caloxans and vice versa, which is about ethnicity and culture more than race.
(And, yes, there's a whole 'nother disquisition about "race" and "ethnicity" and "culture" and what those terms do and don't mean and how they overlap and how they don't.)
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that, internal to the books, Felix's skin color is not a marker of belonging to the dominant culture. In fact, he's a minority to the point of being a freak.
And that's not to say that he isn't a member of the dominant culture in Mélusine, because he is. He's a wizard and a courtier. He has a lot of specifically class-based power--just as the fact that he's male puts him one up as well. Mélusine is not as patriarchal and misogynist as it could be, given its real-world historical analogues, but women clearly do have to fight harder for credit and respect than men.
So to the actual question about sexuality and dom/sub issues: Felix had to be male from the get-go because the first thing I knew about him was that he was the middle term between Malkar and the boy he nearly rapes in the Arcane. He had to be, in other words, a person with the potential to be both rapist and victim--and in a consensual scene both tarquin (dom) and martyr (sub)*--and while I do not for a second deny that women can be dommes (or rapists, for that matter), it was easier for me (and remember, I came up with Felix when I was 19, so the choices I made then are not necessarily the choices I would make now) to see and to construct the dynamic with men. In fact, all the reasons for giving Felix power--his sex, his wizardry, his class status (even, for readers who live in a world in which pale skin is a status marker, his skin color)--is so that his fall will be more dramatic. More melodramatic, even, because I'm not going to deny that charge. Women as victims, minorities as victims, lower class people as victims: we expect that. (Which says several very sucky things about our society, but never mind.)
The one point at which I did not hold to that paradigm is sexual orientation. Felix is gay and there is prejudice in Mélusine against gays. (I don't know, come to think of it, if there's the same prejudice against lesbians. There doesn't seem to be, if we take Mildmay's reactions to Estella Velvet and her lover Faith as a benchmark. There may be a double standard there, and obviously if I ever figure out how to write the story about Cardenio and the Principia Caeli, I'll have to explore that.) And the gay man as victim is sadly just as expected as the categories I listed in the previous paragraph. So why is Felix gay?
1. The strong influence of Alec in Swordspoint
2. I needed Felix to be outrageous, scandalous--also socially vulnerable
3. Some things you don't get to argue with the character about, unless you want to make them someone else. Felix does not have sex with women. (No, I don't know why his reaction against sex with women is so strong. It's another thing he won't tell me.)
So, yes, I could have talked about dom/sub issues with a female character or a lower-class character or a minority character as Mélusine would recognize it. But the particular things I wanted to do were much easier to do with a man who had power.
---
*As it is constructed in Mélusine, the tarquin/martyr relationship is about power. Rape is also (always) about power--which Malkar's rape of Felix makes clear as Malkar uses that rape to literally steal Felix's power. So I am not conflating rape and tarquin/martyr (or D/s) relationships (completely! different!), but remarking that power dynamics are fundamental to both.
Q: [uttered in a tone of worshipful awe] How do you come up with all the side-stories? I mean the introduction to Melusine with Porphyria Levant and Silas Altamont, and the story of the Boneprince, and the ghosts in St. Crellifer's, etc. Are you ever tempted to make these ideas into short stories of their own?
A: Sometimes I need a story to do a particular thing: the story of Porphyria Levant and Silas Altamont, for instance, needed to introduce the obligation d'âme, the tremendous potential power imbalance between wizards and annemer (and hence the need for the Cabaline reforms), the various varieties of sexuality in Mélusine, and the idea of blood-wizards. So I noodled around until I put together a story that would do what I needed. Ditto with the origin of the Boneprince. Sometimes, especially for the littler stories or the throwaways, they just ping! into my head; whatever work was done was done in the back room, and we in the front office just say thank you and are grateful.
Q: Who was Charlett Redding, and why were her hands plated with gold when she died?
A: My notes say she was a legendary duellist. She's clearly on her way to having a hero cult, and thus in another few centuries may by St. Charlett.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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