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truepennyWe begin with a question which has been asked multiple times, and which is rather spoilery for Corambis:
Q: I found it interesting that Kay's mother was Usaran but although he talks about other people thinking of him as a barbarian he never seems to think of himself as anything other of Caloxan. I guess within the book there so many other challenges to the identity he has constructed for himself that any angst about it has fallen down the list of things to worry about but I wondered if you were originally planning to do anything with Kay's family background that didn't make it into the book?
Q: If no one else has bitten yet, I'd love to know more about Kay's complicated family history; I'd caught that he didn't get along well with most of them, and that his mother was Usaran--are her difficulties with her children and step-children merely the result of temperament, or is there a cultural factor at work there as well--would she have expected to, say, raise her brother's children, while her own were raised by her husband's sister--since brothers and sisters seem to be very important to each other in Usaran social structures? Or did you get that far...Also, we hear about Isobel (are she and Kay simply Too Much Alike to deal with each other?) but what's become of Serena?
Q: I think in one of the Q&As you said that you had worked out some of the backstory on Kay's family. What was it? And could you maybe explain a bit about Cymellune? Thanks!
A: Kay's father, the Margrave of Rothmarlin (I don't know his first name), was married twice. The first time was to the daughter of a wealthy burgher of Rothmarlin (the largest town in the margravate and the nearest to the castle of Rothmarlin); he had two daughters with her, Isobel and Serena, and she died--of pleuriny or something like that--when the girls were small. Then on one of the annual campaigns against the Usara, he captured and fell in love with Kay's mother, Zillah. She got pregnant with Kay, and he married her, despite howling opposition from both her family and his margravate. She was disowned (which is a very serious step among the Usara), and his first wife's family would have liked to do the same to him, but couldn't because he was their Margrave. He and Zillah loved each other in what was almost a folie à deux way, the sort of thing category romances valorize, but that didn't mean that she was suited either to be a Margravess or a step-mother--or a mother. "Benign neglect" is probably the best description of Zillah's parenting style--and that would be on a good day. And then her husband died and her son became Margrave, and she was stuck. She couldn't go back home because her family wouldn't accept her; Rothmarlin was not her home and the one person who had made it worthwhile for her was gone. She became ever more alienated and bitter and terrifying, and I'm sure is now making Kay's cousin Cedric's life a living hell.
So Kay knows that he's half Usaran, but he's never met his Usaran kin; he doesn't even know which usar they belong to. He may have killed several of them, and that did bother him, but only in a fairly abstract way, and he hasn't worried about it since the beginning of the Insurgence.
Serena was the family peacemaker. She died when Kay was eighteen, of one of those diseases that people die of in pre-modern societies. Isobel and Kay cannot get along for love or money, for they are, indeed, too much alike.
Also, yes, the first and terrible draft of Corambis included rather more about Zillah. And Cedric.
And there was an ancillary question about Cymellune buried in there, too:
Cymellune is a bit like Atlantis and a bit like Rome and a bit like Constantinople/Byzantium/Istanbul And Troy, particularly as Troy was used in the founding myths of Rome and Britain. Also Minoan Crete and Thera and Pompeii. It was the capital of a great empire which lasted for a thousand years or more, and it was swallowed by the sea for reasons that are no longer known. Marathat and Tibernia and the other countries of the middle and western parts of this rather vast continent are cultural descendants of Cymellune, as is Corambis. In the east, the Cymellunar influence is contested and balanced by the Troian influence.
Q: From your experience, what can be learned or gained from a English literature degree or course, for a person's relationship with literature, for life and for writing? What can NOT be learned or gained?
A: I think the most important thing a person can learn from taking classes in literature (English or otherwise) is how to read critically. How to do a close reading, how to take apart a piece of text in order to understand how it does what it does. That's the skill set, and it's far more important than having read author X or studied period Y or being able to explain piece of literary history Z. It's also important to learn how subjective literary analysis is, to have that experience of reading a piece of criticism or listening to another student's interpretation, or the professor's interpretation, and saying to yourself, "That's really smart, but I don't agree with it." And, of course, to learn how to close read and analyze an argument about a text as well as the text itself.
In my (notably immodest) opinion, therefore, a literature degree should teach a person how to read. But of course it can only do that if the person is willing to learn and willing to migrate that knowledge out of the classroom and into his or her daily life. That part--the willingness--nobody can teach.
Q: Are there some books that you'd consider as "must-read", either because they're too brilliant or too important?
A: That "too important" question is a total swampy mire, because the first corollary question is, "too important to what or whom?" If we narrow it down to "canonical Western literature between, say, 1000 and 1950," yeah, I have opinions. But there's huge sweeping enormous tracts of literature that are entirely excluded: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, South American, etc. etc. etc. Not to mention Western literature that isn't "canonical," or is only slowly and painfully elbowing its way into the canon: literature by women, by African-Americans, by Native Americans, "genre" fiction, etc. etc. etc.
Books that I think are brilliant and everyone should read them (perforce limited to books I personally have read, and I'm the first to admit that there are GREAT GAPING HOLES in my reading, especially as, by and large, I avoid non-sffh 20th/21st century novels and recently there's been that whole problem wherein I cannot seem to read fiction at all) include Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, fiction), Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko, fiction), Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, fiction), Young Men and Fire (Norman Maclean, nonfiction), Little, Big (John Crowley, fiction: fantasy), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, fiction: science fiction), The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco, fiction), all of Shakespeare (poetry and plays), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard, play), Sandman (Neil Gaiman, graphic novel), The Dead Zone (Stephen King, fiction: horror), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, fiction), Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, nonfiction), The Nightmare of Reason (Ernst Pawel, nonfiction), My Alexandria (Mark Doty, poetry), King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (Stephen Booth, nonfiction), Beloved (Toni Morrison, fiction: horror(?)), The Last Unicorn (Peter Beagle: fiction: fantasy), The Importance of Being Ernest (Oscar Wilde, play) Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, fiction) The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) ... and I could keep going indefinitely. Although Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) holds universally, that remaining 10% is still a tremendous amount of absolutely amazing writing. And this list is so completely not meant to be exhaustive.
Q: What made you pick the terms "molly" and "janus" and "ganumedes"? (I don't ask about "violet boy" only because it seems obvious.) Were they just made-up words, or do they have a pun/deeper meaning? Also, I noticed all these terms seem to apply to men only...is there any kind of prejudice/acknowledgement regarding lesbians in these societies?
A: "Molly" is 18th century English slang for gay men. Janus is the Roman god of doors, gates, beginnings and endings, from whose name we get January. He's most often depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. It seemed like a reasonable slang term for bisexual people. ("Janus," incidentally, may apply to either men or women.) Ganumedes is a transliteration of the Greek name more commonly spelled Ganymede: the mortal boy carried off by Zeus to be his "cup-bearer," where "cup-bearer" is a modern Bowdlerization for "boy toy."
The lack of slang terms for lesbians in the story reflects the lack of lesbians which reflects in turn the lack of female characters, which--as I said in an earlier Q&A--is a problem I'm working on. I would, however, also point out that we only learn about all these different terms for gay men because one narrator/protagonist is a gay man--and one who is very hyperconscious of labels. We wouldn't know the Troian term for a gay man if Felix hadn't gone and hunted it out because he hates self-identifying as a moll.
Q: Are the rubies Ginevra wants retrieved from her Otanius lover (and which Vey tries to use in her effort to raise or contact Strych) directly connected with Malkar's rubies, or only with Strych (e.g. removed from his rings after he was apparently killed, and put into the Corundum Gate in an effort to neutralize them)? Or did Vey want them simply because they were a set of rubies of similar quality to the ones Strych had in his rings? I assume Strych would have used rubies in his rings, since we know Malkar did.
A: If you'll recall, Ginevra explains the provenance of the rubies. They have nothing to do with Strych. Also, Strych wasn't a Cabaline wizard; he would have had no reason to wear rings. (Vey doesn't.)
Q: I suspect we already know as much about Porphyria Levant/Strych/Vey Coruscant/Loel Fairweather as you do, but if there's more backstory that didn't make it into the final drafts, or more about what Malkar did between Strych's "death" and his return to Melusine to buy Felix, it would be fascinating to learn it. At what point did Malkar reveal himself to Vey, since she obviously doesn't know he's Strych when Melusine begins?
A: Nope. What's in the books is what I know. I think I may at one point have known the chronology of Malkar's plotting with Vey, but I don't anymore.
Q: Also, why would an attempt to raise Loel Fairweather have raised Magnus instead?
A: Um. Because I needed it to?
The less-meta answer would be that the wizard involved didn't know what they were doing, and that made the magic go very peculiar and unpredictable.
Q: Why was Shannon such an absolute asshole to Felix in Melusine--after Felix when mad--but in the Mirador, when befriending Mehitabel, he actually seems like a decent person? (I mean, I understand that Felix and Shannon had just broke up, but Felix was also hellishly out of his head and creeping around everyone like an abused child, why would Shannon go out of his way to rub salt into his wounds?)
A: I have tried to convey throughout the series that Felix's representation of his relationship with Shannon is neither trustworthy nor complete, and that in fact Shannon's reaction in Mélusine is based on a lot of history that Felix never shares with us. Also, as Shannon attempts to explain in The Mirador, he and Felix bring out the worst in each other, and that in a particularly dysfunctional and destructive way.
When I say Shannon and Felix are bad for each other, I am really not kidding.
The other answer is that it was my first novel, and I didn't have either the chops or the discipline to get it right.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Q: I found it interesting that Kay's mother was Usaran but although he talks about other people thinking of him as a barbarian he never seems to think of himself as anything other of Caloxan. I guess within the book there so many other challenges to the identity he has constructed for himself that any angst about it has fallen down the list of things to worry about but I wondered if you were originally planning to do anything with Kay's family background that didn't make it into the book?
Q: If no one else has bitten yet, I'd love to know more about Kay's complicated family history; I'd caught that he didn't get along well with most of them, and that his mother was Usaran--are her difficulties with her children and step-children merely the result of temperament, or is there a cultural factor at work there as well--would she have expected to, say, raise her brother's children, while her own were raised by her husband's sister--since brothers and sisters seem to be very important to each other in Usaran social structures? Or did you get that far...Also, we hear about Isobel (are she and Kay simply Too Much Alike to deal with each other?) but what's become of Serena?
Q: I think in one of the Q&As you said that you had worked out some of the backstory on Kay's family. What was it? And could you maybe explain a bit about Cymellune? Thanks!
A: Kay's father, the Margrave of Rothmarlin (I don't know his first name), was married twice. The first time was to the daughter of a wealthy burgher of Rothmarlin (the largest town in the margravate and the nearest to the castle of Rothmarlin); he had two daughters with her, Isobel and Serena, and she died--of pleuriny or something like that--when the girls were small. Then on one of the annual campaigns against the Usara, he captured and fell in love with Kay's mother, Zillah. She got pregnant with Kay, and he married her, despite howling opposition from both her family and his margravate. She was disowned (which is a very serious step among the Usara), and his first wife's family would have liked to do the same to him, but couldn't because he was their Margrave. He and Zillah loved each other in what was almost a folie à deux way, the sort of thing category romances valorize, but that didn't mean that she was suited either to be a Margravess or a step-mother--or a mother. "Benign neglect" is probably the best description of Zillah's parenting style--and that would be on a good day. And then her husband died and her son became Margrave, and she was stuck. She couldn't go back home because her family wouldn't accept her; Rothmarlin was not her home and the one person who had made it worthwhile for her was gone. She became ever more alienated and bitter and terrifying, and I'm sure is now making Kay's cousin Cedric's life a living hell.
So Kay knows that he's half Usaran, but he's never met his Usaran kin; he doesn't even know which usar they belong to. He may have killed several of them, and that did bother him, but only in a fairly abstract way, and he hasn't worried about it since the beginning of the Insurgence.
Serena was the family peacemaker. She died when Kay was eighteen, of one of those diseases that people die of in pre-modern societies. Isobel and Kay cannot get along for love or money, for they are, indeed, too much alike.
Also, yes, the first and terrible draft of Corambis included rather more about Zillah. And Cedric.
And there was an ancillary question about Cymellune buried in there, too:
Cymellune is a bit like Atlantis and a bit like Rome and a bit like Constantinople/Byzantium/Istanbul And Troy, particularly as Troy was used in the founding myths of Rome and Britain. Also Minoan Crete and Thera and Pompeii. It was the capital of a great empire which lasted for a thousand years or more, and it was swallowed by the sea for reasons that are no longer known. Marathat and Tibernia and the other countries of the middle and western parts of this rather vast continent are cultural descendants of Cymellune, as is Corambis. In the east, the Cymellunar influence is contested and balanced by the Troian influence.
Q: From your experience, what can be learned or gained from a English literature degree or course, for a person's relationship with literature, for life and for writing? What can NOT be learned or gained?
A: I think the most important thing a person can learn from taking classes in literature (English or otherwise) is how to read critically. How to do a close reading, how to take apart a piece of text in order to understand how it does what it does. That's the skill set, and it's far more important than having read author X or studied period Y or being able to explain piece of literary history Z. It's also important to learn how subjective literary analysis is, to have that experience of reading a piece of criticism or listening to another student's interpretation, or the professor's interpretation, and saying to yourself, "That's really smart, but I don't agree with it." And, of course, to learn how to close read and analyze an argument about a text as well as the text itself.
In my (notably immodest) opinion, therefore, a literature degree should teach a person how to read. But of course it can only do that if the person is willing to learn and willing to migrate that knowledge out of the classroom and into his or her daily life. That part--the willingness--nobody can teach.
Q: Are there some books that you'd consider as "must-read", either because they're too brilliant or too important?
A: That "too important" question is a total swampy mire, because the first corollary question is, "too important to what or whom?" If we narrow it down to "canonical Western literature between, say, 1000 and 1950," yeah, I have opinions. But there's huge sweeping enormous tracts of literature that are entirely excluded: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, South American, etc. etc. etc. Not to mention Western literature that isn't "canonical," or is only slowly and painfully elbowing its way into the canon: literature by women, by African-Americans, by Native Americans, "genre" fiction, etc. etc. etc.
Books that I think are brilliant and everyone should read them (perforce limited to books I personally have read, and I'm the first to admit that there are GREAT GAPING HOLES in my reading, especially as, by and large, I avoid non-sffh 20th/21st century novels and recently there's been that whole problem wherein I cannot seem to read fiction at all) include Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, fiction), Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko, fiction), Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, fiction), Young Men and Fire (Norman Maclean, nonfiction), Little, Big (John Crowley, fiction: fantasy), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, fiction: science fiction), The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco, fiction), all of Shakespeare (poetry and plays), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard, play), Sandman (Neil Gaiman, graphic novel), The Dead Zone (Stephen King, fiction: horror), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, fiction), Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, nonfiction), The Nightmare of Reason (Ernst Pawel, nonfiction), My Alexandria (Mark Doty, poetry), King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (Stephen Booth, nonfiction), Beloved (Toni Morrison, fiction: horror(?)), The Last Unicorn (Peter Beagle: fiction: fantasy), The Importance of Being Ernest (Oscar Wilde, play) Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, fiction) The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) ... and I could keep going indefinitely. Although Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) holds universally, that remaining 10% is still a tremendous amount of absolutely amazing writing. And this list is so completely not meant to be exhaustive.
Q: What made you pick the terms "molly" and "janus" and "ganumedes"? (I don't ask about "violet boy" only because it seems obvious.) Were they just made-up words, or do they have a pun/deeper meaning? Also, I noticed all these terms seem to apply to men only...is there any kind of prejudice/acknowledgement regarding lesbians in these societies?
A: "Molly" is 18th century English slang for gay men. Janus is the Roman god of doors, gates, beginnings and endings, from whose name we get January. He's most often depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. It seemed like a reasonable slang term for bisexual people. ("Janus," incidentally, may apply to either men or women.) Ganumedes is a transliteration of the Greek name more commonly spelled Ganymede: the mortal boy carried off by Zeus to be his "cup-bearer," where "cup-bearer" is a modern Bowdlerization for "boy toy."
The lack of slang terms for lesbians in the story reflects the lack of lesbians which reflects in turn the lack of female characters, which--as I said in an earlier Q&A--is a problem I'm working on. I would, however, also point out that we only learn about all these different terms for gay men because one narrator/protagonist is a gay man--and one who is very hyperconscious of labels. We wouldn't know the Troian term for a gay man if Felix hadn't gone and hunted it out because he hates self-identifying as a moll.
Q: Are the rubies Ginevra wants retrieved from her Otanius lover (and which Vey tries to use in her effort to raise or contact Strych) directly connected with Malkar's rubies, or only with Strych (e.g. removed from his rings after he was apparently killed, and put into the Corundum Gate in an effort to neutralize them)? Or did Vey want them simply because they were a set of rubies of similar quality to the ones Strych had in his rings? I assume Strych would have used rubies in his rings, since we know Malkar did.
A: If you'll recall, Ginevra explains the provenance of the rubies. They have nothing to do with Strych. Also, Strych wasn't a Cabaline wizard; he would have had no reason to wear rings. (Vey doesn't.)
Q: I suspect we already know as much about Porphyria Levant/Strych/Vey Coruscant/Loel Fairweather as you do, but if there's more backstory that didn't make it into the final drafts, or more about what Malkar did between Strych's "death" and his return to Melusine to buy Felix, it would be fascinating to learn it. At what point did Malkar reveal himself to Vey, since she obviously doesn't know he's Strych when Melusine begins?
A: Nope. What's in the books is what I know. I think I may at one point have known the chronology of Malkar's plotting with Vey, but I don't anymore.
Q: Also, why would an attempt to raise Loel Fairweather have raised Magnus instead?
A: Um. Because I needed it to?
The less-meta answer would be that the wizard involved didn't know what they were doing, and that made the magic go very peculiar and unpredictable.
Q: Why was Shannon such an absolute asshole to Felix in Melusine--after Felix when mad--but in the Mirador, when befriending Mehitabel, he actually seems like a decent person? (I mean, I understand that Felix and Shannon had just broke up, but Felix was also hellishly out of his head and creeping around everyone like an abused child, why would Shannon go out of his way to rub salt into his wounds?)
A: I have tried to convey throughout the series that Felix's representation of his relationship with Shannon is neither trustworthy nor complete, and that in fact Shannon's reaction in Mélusine is based on a lot of history that Felix never shares with us. Also, as Shannon attempts to explain in The Mirador, he and Felix bring out the worst in each other, and that in a particularly dysfunctional and destructive way.
When I say Shannon and Felix are bad for each other, I am really not kidding.
The other answer is that it was my first novel, and I didn't have either the chops or the discipline to get it right.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 07:54 pm (UTC)Thanks for this Q&A, it's quite fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 08:00 pm (UTC)Everyone should read "Earnest"
Date: 2009-05-05 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 03:28 am (UTC)She covers both your labels as in she goes into some details about the city of St. Louis and even created some structures to fit in certain areas she'd been in personally.
Now there is someone who does Urban Fantasy without say, the sci-fi part of the fantasy and his city is New York. However, despite the label of fiction, it really ought to be labeled non-fiction as it describes a whole reality that people pretty much ignore and try not to think about. I don't recommend you reading it unless you like your doses of reality hard core.
Now your pretty good at both kinds of Urban Fantasy (see? Capitalization rids the need of quotation marks :])in that you have the sci-fi adventure part down but also the city-building and detailing. Actually, you're one of my favorite world builders, one out of seven authors who can actually get me to see and feel a cityscape at the same time at near hallucination intensity. As someone who goes through books like kids go through candy I can say with fair certainty that it's not a common skill. I seriously hope Corambis isn't the last book you'll write. I'll be in mourning for months.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 04:00 pm (UTC)But obsessive, nit-picking readers like me are why Conant Doyle threw Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls! Thank you for letting us pelt you with questions (and patiently answering them) instead of telling us to go away!
no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 08:52 pm (UTC)-_- sorry, finals are coming up next week and my brain has gone funny on me.