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If you leave the last of the (local dairy's organic) milk in the fridge from Wednesday to Monday, it will go sour.

If you are smarter than me, you won't have to learn this the hard way. Bleah.

Q&A 19

Q: My question is, what is the etymological relationship between "Virtu" (as in Melusine's big important magical work) and "Virtuer" (as in Corambis' big important magic workers). Is it an old term that dates back to their shared origin, did one borrow from the other, or did both borrow from a third party? Basically, what is the cultural history that resulted in the semi-cognate?

A: Clearly, the reason you can make a Midlander/Marathine pun on virtus/virtue/vis AND that the Corambin word vi means magic and virtuer means magic-user, is that there's a Cymellunar root word back there somewhere from which all of these words derive.

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( spoilers for Corambis )

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Q: Could you elaborate on the scandalous Melusinian novels that Felix can't bring himself to read? I know you wrote about them in such a way that the reader could make a guess, but the idea just amused me so much that I had to ask.

A: They're clearly the paranormal romance/"urban fantasy"* version of Mélusine.

Q: What was family life like for Shannon, Stephen and Victoria as children? Were their relationships as we see them in the books shaped more by upbringing/personality or by later events such as Stephen becoming Lord Protector or Shannon coming out (assuming he did, and that he didn't just leave people to find out)? Urgh. I realise I'm not putting this very well.

( I suppose this answer is spoilery for The Mirador )

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*I put "urban fantasy" in quotes because--as we discovered on a panel about it at OddCon--whatever that genre is, "urban fantasy" is a misnomer. Urban fantasy is fantasy about cities--which the panel also discovered is a flourishing sub-genre including authors like China Miéville, Ellen Kushner, Fritz Leiber, and Terry Pratchett--but "urban fantasy," while very distinctly a genre, really needs a different name. (Oddly enough, both genres are clearly influenced--if not outright founded--by Charles de Lint and Emma Bull). I write urban fantasy; I do not write "urban fantasy" and couldn't if I tried.**

**This is not a slam against "urban fantasy." It is very much Not My Thing, but dude. Neither is hard SF. The fact that, obviously, I want to reappropriate the term "urban fantasy" for something else isn't because I think the books being called "urban fantasy" somehow don't "deserve" the label, but because, as a genre theory geek, I am frustrated by the fact that the term is being used to label a genre it doesn't describe, while a genre that it does describe, and which I think is really cool, doesn't have a label at all--or much recognition as a genre. From the genre-theory-geek perspective "urban fantasy" is actually really interesting, because what makes it a genre is the melange of genres it offers--fantasy, romance, mystery, action-adventure, maybe a little horror--but while the urban environment, or at least the postmodern cosmopolitan sensibility, is necessary to the genre, it's not really what books in this genre are about. Carole Nelson Douglas' Midnight Louie books are another example that fit into both genres: they're "urban fantasy," with the romance element and the mystery element and the fantasy element, but they are also distinctly about Las Vegas, and therefore are also urban fantasy. I realize this is all high-geek nitpicking, but, well, hi. Welcome to my brain.

And, okay, I have now used up my entire quota of quotation marks for probably the next week.

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Q: Did you do any research on various forms of mood disorders and mental illness for this work? Because except for the hallucinations and more or less complete functional incapacity he suffered, his period of insanity reminded me a lot of my more unpleasant (and thankfully not nearly as common as they used to be) depressive phases, If you did do research, you absorbed it well; if you didn't, well, good job with what my signif other calls "imaginative sympathy", cause you got it right.

A: Thank you! I didn't do any formal research, no, so I guess if I had to offer an explanation, it would be that I spent a lot of time very carefully thinking through the consequences of what I'd set up.

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Q: One of the things that really drew me in to the Doctrine of Labyrinths series was the way in which you had incorporated elements of Classical (Greek, Roman, Minoan) cultures. I am curious - how extensive is your background in Classics?

A: I majored in Classics as an undergrad at Case Western. (Okay, full disclosure: I double-majored in Classics and Literature, which was a cross-disciplinary program between English and Comparative Literature, and minored in Women's Studies.) So I took three years of Latin, two years of Greek, a variety of associated courses, and wrote a departmental honors thesis on Ovid's exile poetry. And before I went to grad school in English, I did the 6 week summer session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which was a crazy-intense crash course in both archaeology and Greek prehistory.

And, of course, the years when I was doing all this were the years when I was writing Mélusine, so it's not surprising that it all ended up in there.

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