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But first, I have a question for all of you.
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Q: Why do bad things happen to gay characters? Specifically Gideon, Felix and Isolfr (I know he's not gay, but bad (well, dubious consent) gay related things things happen to him. And uninformed, modern observers would have trouble recognizing his not-gayness).
If you've answered this in the first round (I know you've explained several times why bad things happened to Felix in Melusine), perhaps you could comment generally on it, especially as gay characters tend to have gay related bad things happen, ie. Straight male characters getting raped by men (especially more or less on screen) is very rare, whereas it almost seems to be mandatory for gay protagonists (not that it's why you did it, since you have a bunch of good reasons for it).
A: First of all, ( spoilers for A Companion to Wolves )
But more broadly, I think this ties back into the question about drama and melodrama and angst from yesterday, and ties forward into the question I'm going to answer after this one, about women characters. But let's put the provisional answer as, many women writers are more comfortable writing male characters, and in particular, many writers, both male and female, seem to think that gay men are like women (with the emotionality and the emphasis on relationships etc. etc., and let me just add that that's as gross a stereotype of women as it is of gay men). So gay men get slotted in (for some women writers) as a way to have a male protagonist and yet write the emotionally fraught stories that interest them. I think gay men are also appealing in this context because they're men--i.e., high status and automatically quote-unquote "interesting" to both readers and writers--but because they're gay, there's a social vulnerability (frequently translated into emotional and physical vulnerability) which is more like the social status of women. This also leaves the high prestige and invulnerability of heterosexual men unquestioned, so nobody's rocking the social boat too hard. In other words, terrible things happen to gay protagonists because writers perceive them as vulnerable. (And not, sadly and horrifyingly, without rather a lot of real-world evidence to back them up.) Making a male heterosexual protagonist sexually vulnerable is deconstructing our social categories in ways that lots of writers either (a.) don't think of, because it's hard to describe water when you're a fish, or (b.) don't want to deal with.
The preceding paragraph is full of horrible over-generalizations. I know that and I apologize for it. And offer by way of balance the next question, which is extremely specific to me:
Q: In Corambis there are at least three gay male characters,possibly a fourth (I haven't finished the book yet). Yet the last time you had a female gay character was in Mélusine, and that was a very small part. I like that you address homosexuality and I like Felix and Kay, but as a queer woman it feels disproportionate. I've noticed in your other works you don't write very many women characters, and I wondered why that is, and do you think you'll ever focus on a female protagonist or a gay female character?
and
Q: Female characters: you have wonderful, strong female characters (Mehitabel and Booth's Miss Coburn, for instance), but your protagonists tend to be male (I understand that, in "A Companion to Wolves", there are no female characters at all, but I haven't read the book). Is there any particular reason for that?
A: Busted.
That is a 100% fair cop.
(To digress for a moment, although it is true that A Companion to Wolves has no human female main characters, there are female characters in the book. In fact, it's probably the most feminist thing either![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala or I have ever written. So it's a special case.)
So I need to talk about why, when I am self-evidently a woman and vocally a feminist, I have so few women in my fiction. Which means I need to talk about my relationship with my own femininity, which is ... conflicted, to put it kindly.
Like many women my age and older (happily, this seems to be subject to rapidly accelerating change these days), I grew up reading books which had a fairly sharp gender divide. Books with female protagonists were books like Anne of Green Gables (which I hated) and Little Women (which I also hated). If you wanted books where interesting things happened, you were pretty much stuck with books about boys. Or horse books, but even there, the most readily available series was the Black Stallion books, with hello, boy protagonist. (I think one reason I liked the Sunfire historical romances so much was that Things Happened. My favorite was Amanda, which only nominally fits the series' romance paradigm and is mostly about the Oregon Trail.) I should add that I realize that this is a skewed and biased view of YA fiction, even in 1985, but it was how it seemed to me. So some default got set in my head very early that Girls Are Not Interesting. Also, even when girls got to be in interesting books, they were generally, well, girly. Weepy and passive and frequently kind of stupid, as opposed to their brothers or male friends. I didn't like girls in fiction. Even when I imagined myself in, for example, one of Anne McCaffery's Pern books, I wanted to be a brown rider, not stuck with the queen. (Yes, I had a platonic, cross-species crush on Canth. I still think this shows I had good taste.)
Add to this the fact that my own personal experiences of femininity have mostly been unpleasant. Menstrual cramps (which were grotesquely severe when I was in high school), the difficulties and pains of being, *ahem*, generously endowed, a variety of fun harassment from both boys and girls in junior high and high school, the frequent conviction that I had to be some sort of alien when faced with girls my age . . . Being female didn't seem any better than reading about female characters.
(N.b., much of this improved radically once I got to college--and even more when I got to grad school--where people were, by and large, (a.) geeks and (b.) prepared to behave like adults to each other, and I finally found women who were LIKE ME. Also people, both male and female, who didn't care whether I wore make-up or shaved my legs or participated in any other markers of normative femininity.)
So things got set in my head fairly early on that women are not interesting and I don't understand them and don't have anything in common with them. (Yes, I know this is nonsense. Prejudices instilled by early conditioning always are.) I'm fighting against this set of beliefs, but it's an uphill battle (writing Mehitabel was hard)--all the more so seeing that I don't sit down and deliberately create characters the way, for example, gamers roll up a character. They come to me, and because I have this deeply entrenched belief female characters aren't interesting, the vicious circle means that mostly male characters show up. Thus, women are underrepresented in my books. (I'm hopeful, btw, that this is beginning to shift; my recent spate of highly narrative dreams has been notable for its female protagonists.) I know it, and I don't like it, and I'm working on it.
Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )
Q: What was the hardest thing to cut from the books?
A: Mostly, the trauma of cutting scenes seems to vanish away very quickly, so the only scenes I'm still bitter about are the ones in Corambis--which I'm going to post late Thursday or early Friday, so you all have something to read while I'm at Odyssey Con.
Q: How do you develop minor characters? Do they tend to (since there are so many, I'm sure it's done in a variety of ways) spring fully formed, or what, exactly?
A: Generally, the minor characters get created situationally. Giancarlo is a good example. Somebody had to be in charge of the Curia, and the most immediately salient feature of his character was how he dealt with Felix. So I made a decision about that, and the other details were added as necessary around the thing I knew.
Q: So, why couldn't you've written DoL in omniscient?
A: Um. A severe lack of the necessary writing chops?
Felix insisted on being a first-person narrator from the very beginning, even when I was trying to argue--as I then believed--that I couldn't write first person. And as things developed, I think the books would have lost a great deal without the first-person narrators.
Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )
Q: So, we know that the name "Corambis" references Polonius's character in Hamlet Q1. That said, is there some specific reference to this character that applies to Corambis itself?
A: Nope. I just repurposed the word because I like it. I'm capricious like that.
Q: I'm really really bad at pronouncing things the correct way(It still trips me up that Stephen is pronounced more like Steven, and not Ste-fen). So in Corambis, when Mrs. Fawn was gushing over Felix and said Mirador and the Catacombes somethingsomething Arcane(I left my copy in the car so I can reread it between classes--I don't remember), Felix mentioned she pronounced it the wrong way. When you did that reading of the chapter, were you pronouncing it the correct way, or pronouncing it the way Mrs. Fawn would have horribly mispronounced it? If you mispronounced it, what is the correct way?
A: No, I pronounced it correctly. Felix would, and it saved me from having to deliberately mispronounce it.
Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )
Q: Are Felix and Milly-Fox characters you write about, or people who live in your head, that scowl and tap their feet when they feel you're not telling their story properly or fast enough?
And if so, do you expect them to shut up now that it's done? XD
A: As I've said, I dislike the metaphor of talking about characters as if they were real people "living" in my head (although I succumb to the shorthand occasionally). This is a personal dislike, not a condemnation of other people's metaphors or conceptual frameworks.
So, no. Honestly, if they were real, I think they'd be as relieved as I am that the series is ended.
Q: Do you happen to know where the Kalliphorne and her mate came from? I was struck by her appearance in Corambis, as well as her cameos in other books. I mean she is a perfectly Melusinian take on the mermaid (or mermatron, as seems to be the case with her), but at the same time I don't actually think of Meduse (is that the right name for the world?) as a place with magical animals.
A: Nope. No idea. They're just there under Mélusine, being completely anomalous. (And, yes, Meduse is what I call the world.)
Q: I also want to know what (if any) real world roots the White Eyed Goddess has, and why she recurs in so many different cultural contexts in the books? She has much more the flavor of actual mythology from this world, and much less (very much less) of the all-loving Mother Goddess of much recent fantasy. Which is to say that as made up deities go, I like her very much.
A: Well, she recurs because she turned out to be thematic and a good way to comment on how religion changes based on the needs of various societies. Her real-world roots are, as best I can remember, mostly the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone. I think I was taken with the idea of making Persephone an agent rather than a victim. So her origin is me thinking about Persephone as Queen of Hades with power in her own right, rather than as the skeevy Greek version of Patty Hearst.
Q: Was there any particular reason why Felix was the most powerful wizard in the Mirador, besides him being the protagonist?
A: To give the other wizards a reason to resent him. Also, he had to be exceptionally powerful for Malkar to be able to use him to break the Virtu. (And then later, ditto for mending it.)
Q: Why, to you, is it so important to show the story of the character started before the book did?
A: Two reasons. One is that it makes both the character and the world feel deeper, less like a solipsism of the author. The other is that, for all that I resist the metaphor of the characters being "real" in this world, I do believe I have to grant them reality in their own world. It's part of respecting them, which given the shit I put my characters through, is a necessary balance. And if they're real people, they have lives, and those lives inevitably extend beyond the borders of the story. So my second answer is the obverse-face of my first. Writing fiction is inherently solipsistic, but, for me, if I'm going to do it well, I have to fight that solipsism as hard as I can.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Dreamwidth? Y|N|WTF
Q: Why do bad things happen to gay characters? Specifically Gideon, Felix and Isolfr (I know he's not gay, but bad (well, dubious consent) gay related things things happen to him. And uninformed, modern observers would have trouble recognizing his not-gayness).
If you've answered this in the first round (I know you've explained several times why bad things happened to Felix in Melusine), perhaps you could comment generally on it, especially as gay characters tend to have gay related bad things happen, ie. Straight male characters getting raped by men (especially more or less on screen) is very rare, whereas it almost seems to be mandatory for gay protagonists (not that it's why you did it, since you have a bunch of good reasons for it).
A: First of all, ( spoilers for A Companion to Wolves )
But more broadly, I think this ties back into the question about drama and melodrama and angst from yesterday, and ties forward into the question I'm going to answer after this one, about women characters. But let's put the provisional answer as, many women writers are more comfortable writing male characters, and in particular, many writers, both male and female, seem to think that gay men are like women (with the emotionality and the emphasis on relationships etc. etc., and let me just add that that's as gross a stereotype of women as it is of gay men). So gay men get slotted in (for some women writers) as a way to have a male protagonist and yet write the emotionally fraught stories that interest them. I think gay men are also appealing in this context because they're men--i.e., high status and automatically quote-unquote "interesting" to both readers and writers--but because they're gay, there's a social vulnerability (frequently translated into emotional and physical vulnerability) which is more like the social status of women. This also leaves the high prestige and invulnerability of heterosexual men unquestioned, so nobody's rocking the social boat too hard. In other words, terrible things happen to gay protagonists because writers perceive them as vulnerable. (And not, sadly and horrifyingly, without rather a lot of real-world evidence to back them up.) Making a male heterosexual protagonist sexually vulnerable is deconstructing our social categories in ways that lots of writers either (a.) don't think of, because it's hard to describe water when you're a fish, or (b.) don't want to deal with.
The preceding paragraph is full of horrible over-generalizations. I know that and I apologize for it. And offer by way of balance the next question, which is extremely specific to me:
Q: In Corambis there are at least three gay male characters,possibly a fourth (I haven't finished the book yet). Yet the last time you had a female gay character was in Mélusine, and that was a very small part. I like that you address homosexuality and I like Felix and Kay, but as a queer woman it feels disproportionate. I've noticed in your other works you don't write very many women characters, and I wondered why that is, and do you think you'll ever focus on a female protagonist or a gay female character?
and
Q: Female characters: you have wonderful, strong female characters (Mehitabel and Booth's Miss Coburn, for instance), but your protagonists tend to be male (I understand that, in "A Companion to Wolves", there are no female characters at all, but I haven't read the book). Is there any particular reason for that?
A: Busted.
That is a 100% fair cop.
(To digress for a moment, although it is true that A Companion to Wolves has no human female main characters, there are female characters in the book. In fact, it's probably the most feminist thing either
matociquala or I have ever written. So it's a special case.)So I need to talk about why, when I am self-evidently a woman and vocally a feminist, I have so few women in my fiction. Which means I need to talk about my relationship with my own femininity, which is ... conflicted, to put it kindly.
Like many women my age and older (happily, this seems to be subject to rapidly accelerating change these days), I grew up reading books which had a fairly sharp gender divide. Books with female protagonists were books like Anne of Green Gables (which I hated) and Little Women (which I also hated). If you wanted books where interesting things happened, you were pretty much stuck with books about boys. Or horse books, but even there, the most readily available series was the Black Stallion books, with hello, boy protagonist. (I think one reason I liked the Sunfire historical romances so much was that Things Happened. My favorite was Amanda, which only nominally fits the series' romance paradigm and is mostly about the Oregon Trail.) I should add that I realize that this is a skewed and biased view of YA fiction, even in 1985, but it was how it seemed to me. So some default got set in my head very early that Girls Are Not Interesting. Also, even when girls got to be in interesting books, they were generally, well, girly. Weepy and passive and frequently kind of stupid, as opposed to their brothers or male friends. I didn't like girls in fiction. Even when I imagined myself in, for example, one of Anne McCaffery's Pern books, I wanted to be a brown rider, not stuck with the queen. (Yes, I had a platonic, cross-species crush on Canth. I still think this shows I had good taste.)
Add to this the fact that my own personal experiences of femininity have mostly been unpleasant. Menstrual cramps (which were grotesquely severe when I was in high school), the difficulties and pains of being, *ahem*, generously endowed, a variety of fun harassment from both boys and girls in junior high and high school, the frequent conviction that I had to be some sort of alien when faced with girls my age . . . Being female didn't seem any better than reading about female characters.
(N.b., much of this improved radically once I got to college--and even more when I got to grad school--where people were, by and large, (a.) geeks and (b.) prepared to behave like adults to each other, and I finally found women who were LIKE ME. Also people, both male and female, who didn't care whether I wore make-up or shaved my legs or participated in any other markers of normative femininity.)
So things got set in my head fairly early on that women are not interesting and I don't understand them and don't have anything in common with them. (Yes, I know this is nonsense. Prejudices instilled by early conditioning always are.) I'm fighting against this set of beliefs, but it's an uphill battle (writing Mehitabel was hard)--all the more so seeing that I don't sit down and deliberately create characters the way, for example, gamers roll up a character. They come to me, and because I have this deeply entrenched belief female characters aren't interesting, the vicious circle means that mostly male characters show up. Thus, women are underrepresented in my books. (I'm hopeful, btw, that this is beginning to shift; my recent spate of highly narrative dreams has been notable for its female protagonists.) I know it, and I don't like it, and I'm working on it.
Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )
Q: What was the hardest thing to cut from the books?
A: Mostly, the trauma of cutting scenes seems to vanish away very quickly, so the only scenes I'm still bitter about are the ones in Corambis--which I'm going to post late Thursday or early Friday, so you all have something to read while I'm at Odyssey Con.
Q: How do you develop minor characters? Do they tend to (since there are so many, I'm sure it's done in a variety of ways) spring fully formed, or what, exactly?
A: Generally, the minor characters get created situationally. Giancarlo is a good example. Somebody had to be in charge of the Curia, and the most immediately salient feature of his character was how he dealt with Felix. So I made a decision about that, and the other details were added as necessary around the thing I knew.
Q: So, why couldn't you've written DoL in omniscient?
A: Um. A severe lack of the necessary writing chops?
Felix insisted on being a first-person narrator from the very beginning, even when I was trying to argue--as I then believed--that I couldn't write first person. And as things developed, I think the books would have lost a great deal without the first-person narrators.
Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )
Q: So, we know that the name "Corambis" references Polonius's character in Hamlet Q1. That said, is there some specific reference to this character that applies to Corambis itself?
A: Nope. I just repurposed the word because I like it. I'm capricious like that.
Q: I'm really really bad at pronouncing things the correct way(It still trips me up that Stephen is pronounced more like Steven, and not Ste-fen). So in Corambis, when Mrs. Fawn was gushing over Felix and said Mirador and the Catacombes somethingsomething Arcane(I left my copy in the car so I can reread it between classes--I don't remember), Felix mentioned she pronounced it the wrong way. When you did that reading of the chapter, were you pronouncing it the correct way, or pronouncing it the way Mrs. Fawn would have horribly mispronounced it? If you mispronounced it, what is the correct way?
A: No, I pronounced it correctly. Felix would, and it saved me from having to deliberately mispronounce it.
Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )
Q: Are Felix and Milly-Fox characters you write about, or people who live in your head, that scowl and tap their feet when they feel you're not telling their story properly or fast enough?
And if so, do you expect them to shut up now that it's done? XD
A: As I've said, I dislike the metaphor of talking about characters as if they were real people "living" in my head (although I succumb to the shorthand occasionally). This is a personal dislike, not a condemnation of other people's metaphors or conceptual frameworks.
So, no. Honestly, if they were real, I think they'd be as relieved as I am that the series is ended.
Q: Do you happen to know where the Kalliphorne and her mate came from? I was struck by her appearance in Corambis, as well as her cameos in other books. I mean she is a perfectly Melusinian take on the mermaid (or mermatron, as seems to be the case with her), but at the same time I don't actually think of Meduse (is that the right name for the world?) as a place with magical animals.
A: Nope. No idea. They're just there under Mélusine, being completely anomalous. (And, yes, Meduse is what I call the world.)
Q: I also want to know what (if any) real world roots the White Eyed Goddess has, and why she recurs in so many different cultural contexts in the books? She has much more the flavor of actual mythology from this world, and much less (very much less) of the all-loving Mother Goddess of much recent fantasy. Which is to say that as made up deities go, I like her very much.
A: Well, she recurs because she turned out to be thematic and a good way to comment on how religion changes based on the needs of various societies. Her real-world roots are, as best I can remember, mostly the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone. I think I was taken with the idea of making Persephone an agent rather than a victim. So her origin is me thinking about Persephone as Queen of Hades with power in her own right, rather than as the skeevy Greek version of Patty Hearst.
Q: Was there any particular reason why Felix was the most powerful wizard in the Mirador, besides him being the protagonist?
A: To give the other wizards a reason to resent him. Also, he had to be exceptionally powerful for Malkar to be able to use him to break the Virtu. (And then later, ditto for mending it.)
Q: Why, to you, is it so important to show the story of the character started before the book did?
A: Two reasons. One is that it makes both the character and the world feel deeper, less like a solipsism of the author. The other is that, for all that I resist the metaphor of the characters being "real" in this world, I do believe I have to grant them reality in their own world. It's part of respecting them, which given the shit I put my characters through, is a necessary balance. And if they're real people, they have lives, and those lives inevitably extend beyond the borders of the story. So my second answer is the obverse-face of my first. Writing fiction is inherently solipsistic, but, for me, if I'm going to do it well, I have to fight that solipsism as hard as I can.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
