Q&A 23

May. 8th, 2009 09:58 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
Due, no doubt, to some bizarre oversight, nobody has asked me this question, but thank goodness [livejournal.com profile] maryrobinette has answered it: how do you make realistic looking entrails?



Q: spoilerish for A Companion to Wolves )



Q: How do you pronounce Eusebian? More like use-bee-an or yoose-ee-bee-an?

A: you-SEE-bee-an

(Which isn't really the correct pronunciation, since the Greek /eu/ is not pronounced like the English long /u/, but it's how all my native Marathine speakers would say it, unless Felix is being a pedant.)



Q: Did it bug you that the artist didn't give Felix two different colored eyes on the cover of the first novel?

A: No. I grew up as a fantasy fan; I know just how utterly abysmally wretched fantasy covers can be. I was, and still am, deeply grateful for that cover. The composition is good, the anatomy is correct, Felix is recognizable as himself. And I love the fact that not only did they ask me what the tattoos should look like, they listened to my answer.

Q: Why no maps? I found the map of Melusine on your webpage, but I would have loved a map of the entire world...it would have helped me keep some things straight as I was reading.

A: Because Ace didn't want them. It wasn't a decision I had any part of. Most things about the books that aren't the words of the story were things I had no control over.



Q: What else can you tell us about Edith Pelpheria? I know that you didn't fully make up all of the folk tales and such, but I was wondering if you had any more of the plot, or the history of the play itself.

A: The playwright, Asline Wren, is Meduse's equivalent of Shakespeare. Edith Pelpheria is sort of a cross between Shakespeare's major tragedies and The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry by Elizabeth Cary, which is the only play written by a woman in the early modern period that has survived. Edith Pelpheria has long been a test of female tragic actors--like every Shakespearean in our world wants to do Hamlet. Mehitabel's comments in The Mirador actually give you as much of the plot as I know.

If I could write blank verse, I would have written the vigil chapel scene, but I can't fake it for more than a couple of lines.



Q: A piece of wisdom floating around suggests that a person needs to write a million words before they can produce something people will find worth reading. Similar advice says you need to spend a lot of time on writing before you get to a place, with a lot of luck, you can make a living off it.

How do you think academic writing fits into that? Can aspiring writers count academic oriented literature (particularly uppper-year and graduate work) as part of their portfolio of written works, or does only fiction count?


A: Um. Okay.

The million words of shit idea--which I've heard attributed to Ray Bradbury, although I don't know if that's true--is the idea that (a.) writing, like most things, is learn by doing, and (b.) learning takes time and practice. So, in order to become a good writer, you have to write, and you have to accept that the first million words or so are your apprenticeship, in the same way that when you sit down at a piano for the first time, you aren't going to be able to play a Mozart fantasia. You can't skip learning scales and finger exercises and the little Bach minuets and "Für Elise," and you need that million words in order both to learn how to write and to exorcise all of your influences and clichés. (There's a lot of my juvenilia that's bad Stephen King pastiche, for instance, and then there's every stupid plot-coupon fantasy clicé you've ever heard of.) The only way out is through, which is a mantra I chant to myself in the really bad patches.

Writing, as I said, is learn by doing. You can't learn how to write by reading, either how-to books or other fiction. (You can learn how to write better, but not the fundamental thing that is writing.) So, following that logically, the only way to learn to write stories is to write stories. Essays aren't the same thing. The million-words-of-shit koan isn't really about the quantity of words; it's about the amount of practice it takes to learn how to do anything well. (Ten years of working at it, the studies say.) And once you've learned to do something well, there's the lifelong grail quest of learning to do it better.

I do think you can certainly learn things writing academic papers that will apply to writing fiction. I learned to recognize my own tendency to talk in circles from academic writing, and it sure shows up in my fiction. You can learn things about putting a sentence together, and structuring a paragraph, things about exposition and how to be convincing. But writing essays will not teach you to write stories--and that's what the million-words-of-shit koan is really about: what teaches you how to write stories is writing stories--and then learning from your mistakes and writing more stories.

As for making a living at writing--that has nothing to do with whether you're a good writer or not. It has to do with whether you are a prolific writer. (Some prolific writers are excellent writers; see for example, [livejournal.com profile] matociquala. Some prolific writers are not excellent writers. It's a completely different continuum.) And even prolific writers have a hell of a time making a living with nothing but their fiction writing. Most writers have day jobs, or partners who are willing to shoulder the extra burden. (I, for example, do not make enough money from writing to live on--or, at least, I really wouldn't want to have to try it. My earnings supplement [livejournal.com profile] mirrorthaw's income nicely, but I have no illusions about who the breadwinner in our house is.) This is not a profession to get into because you want a steady or bountiful paycheck.



Q: spoilers for Corambis )



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 22

May. 7th, 2009 10:34 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
Q: Is there any print in Melusine? I don't remember any point where you stated explicitly that a book was/wasn't a printed one. Judging by the overall renaissance/baroque atmosphere, the fact that literacy is common enough for Mildmay to be ashamed of his own illiteracy, as well as by the mention of a romance Mehitabel is reading in bed, I'd guess that printed books exist, but on the other hand, Gideon and Hugo Chandler use tablets and paper does not seem to be widely available.

A: No, we definitely have the printing press. But I think Mélusine itself may be lagging behind the more technologically advanced countries to either side. Books seem to be imported rather than printed in the city, and paper is available but expensive: a luxury. (Gideon won't let Felix buy paper for him, even though Felix has offered; Gideon says it's wasteful to use paper for ephemera. Hence the wax tablet. And Felix figured out pretty quick that he could buy as many books for Gideon as he wanted. Everybody's principles have a weak spot. *g* )

Q: Birth control. Yes, I know this is a rather banal question, but it really nags at me: most women (or men) during the European historical periods roughly correspondent to Medusa's civilisation did not have completely safe or reliable means of birth control or abortion. Yet Mehitabel never even mentions any worries about the problems a pregnancy would pose for a rising actress (or Stephen's mistress, for that matter) and Mildmay, who is usually so preoccupied by the effects his actions might have on others, never considers that Ginevra or Mehitabel might end up pregnant. I presume that you basically skipped that because an explanation would be clunky and/or potentially irritating to readers, but I do keep wondering... and the story of Amaryllis Cordelia also changes significantly (well, for me) if her pregnancy was not, ah, planned beforehand.

A: Birth control and STDs are things that I frankly handwaved past. (Because if this world had syphilis, Felix would be dead, that's why.) Which is not a choice I would make now, but--as I keep saying--a lot of the choices about the world-building and the particular kind of story being told were made when I was in my very early twenties. I didn't want to deal with that particular set of realities, so I just skipped that bit.

On the other hand, I can assure you that Amaryllis Cordelia planned that pregnancy like a war. And like a war, first contact with the enemy destroyed her plan.

Q: Brinvillier Strych's name – I take it that the first name is connected to the French poisoner, but Strych? And just how is it pronounced?

A: Strych is from strychnine--no, there's nothing subtle about this name at all. I tend to pronounce it with a short /i/ and /ch/ as in "church," rather than /k/. Brinvillier, btw, is pronounced as if it were an English word: /brin-VIL-i-er/ instead of the proper French pronounciation of Mme. de Brinvilliers.



Q: You mentioned in a previous Q&A session that you knew a lot more about the Wizard's Coup than ever got included in the books. Care to give us a history lesson?

A: I should more accurately have said I used to know more about the Wizards' Coup than got included in the books. I'm not sure how much of it I can dredge up.

So. The Wizards' Coup was a response to the increasing corruption of the Cordelian court and particularly to the power held by blood-wizards and necromancers. There were seven wizards--the Cabal--and their annemer ally Michael Teverius. There was a very bloody purge on 17 Bucat 2101/21 Thermidor 16.5.1, in which Michael hacked to bits his cousin John Cordelius and his cousin's wife and killed their infant son Daniel along with the rest of the dynastic line of the Cordelii, and presumably a great many blood-wizards and necromancers died, although I don't know any specifics. The Cabal made the Virtu and persuaded the remaining wizards of the Mirador to enter into their covenant. All seven members of the Cabal died young. Their names (according to some very old notes) were Harriet Goronwy, Mariam Lester, Edgar Malanius, Leopold Novadius, Mordecai Sixtus, Theodoric Skinner, and Amphelisia Toralia. (These are terrible names and should not be taken as canon, except for Mariam Lester. Mariam also wrote a seminal treatise on some aspect of magic--I can't remember what it was--which she finished literally on her deathbed.)



Q: One of the things that I really like about all your main characters (Felix, Mildmay, Kay, even Mehitabel) is that their interesting attributes (all those things that might make them fall into Mary Sue territory -- striking coloring, talents, trauma, special skills, etc.) are as much disadvantages as much as they are advantages (sometimes simultaneously). Was this a deliberate invocation of dramatic consequences? (Thank you for that articulation of the distinction between drama and melodrama, by the way!)

A: Pretty much. I mean, the articulation came later, but the fundamental principle was there.

Q: spoilers for Corambis )

Q: spoilers for The Virtu )

Q: What drew Malkar to Felix? Did he go looking for someone he could use to further his plans and Felix fit the bill, or was there more to it than that?

A: I don't really know the answer to this one. Felix has some theories, and Malkar certainly wanted him to think it was all planned, but I think it was purely coincidental. Malkar went to the Shining Tiger to find a boy to victimize in a purely this-is-how-I-get-my-kicks way, and there was Felix all lit up with power like a carnival midway and no defenses at all.



And while we're on the subject of Malkar:

Q: You've said before that you dislike flat, unredeemable evil, and that was really refreshing to read in a world of Saurons and Voldemorts. You pull this off very well with characters like Kolkhis, who is a stone cold bitch, but who seems to be a fully rounded, nuanced, and interesting person. However, how do you reconcile this with Malkar, who is almost the Snidely Whiplash of the books?

A: 1. This actually gets addressed in Corambis.

2. What you're watching there--from Malkar, to Kolkhis and Ivo Polydorius, to the situation in Corambis, where there aren't really any villains, just people in conflict, some of whom do evil things--is my maturation as an artist. Thank you.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 21

May. 6th, 2009 11:27 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
My question post is now on its seventh page of questions. Thank you all so much for playing with me!



Q: My first question is, and maybe it has already been answered in your books, but sometimes my memory fails me like a tea-strainer: is The Virtu a construct perhaps made by those you call Virtuers? I noticed you explaining to us that Cymellune of the Waters was the mother continent of both Troians and Mélusiniens alike, and the Corambins also claim Cymellune as their background. (By the way, I love how you make an eclectic world filled with almost untracable historical undercurrents, just like our own world)

A: Nope. Q&A 19 explains the etymological link. Virtuer is a Corambin term and has nothing to do with Mélusine or the Cabal (the Cabal being the seven people who made the Virtu).

Q: And secondly: Is there a sort of symbolism to the word ´Virtuer´? Beside the fact that of course the French word means ´truth´, but I mean, this is the title of those wizards we encounter lastly , namely in your last book! spoilers for Corambis )

A: Is the French word you're thinking of vérite? So far as I know (and so far as my dictionary knows) "virtuer" is not a French word of any kind.

I needed a word to indicate a Ph.D. level magician. In the first draft I had something awful and awkward as a placeholder (I've forgotten what it was, and I'm okay with that); I don't remember how I came up with "virtuer" exactly--because of vi, most likely, and the fact that I'd sensitized myself to puns on "virtue." But as soon as I thought of it, I knew it was right.



Q:Do you watch "The Big Bang Theory"? Coz Sheldon reminds me(us) of a certain someone. :)

A: Nope.

Q: spoilers for The Mirador )



Q: There are a very large number of common sayings and similes, metaphors and other figures of speech in the four Labyrinth books which involve cats/kittens (also dogs and bears appear to a lesser extent [clockwork bears pop up a lot]). You included one such (very) roughly every 40 pages. The four POV characters have names which are cat-related as well: Mildmay the Cat Burglar; Felix (the name of a well-known cartoon cat); Mehitabel (ditto); and Kay whose nickname is Cougar--which is another name for a mountain lion.

Was all this intentional? Were you aware that you were doing this?


A: I like cats. And animal metaphors--unlike many other registers--translate pretty easily from one world to another. Also, Mildmay and Felix both being urban creatures, feral cats are the animals they're most familiar with. With dogs second and bears third, specifically because of bear-baiting, which we know is popular in the Lower City. I don't think there's any particularly deeper meaning than that.

Felix was named in spite of Felix the Cat, not because of.



Q: How do you reconcile the existence of human suffering with an omnipotent diety?

A: Being an atheist, I don't try.

But, really, the problem isn't reconciling human suffering with an omnipotent deity. The Old Testament, for example, is just fine with that. The problem is reconciling human suffering with an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity. And I don't know what you do about that.



Q: Do you have any plans to return to the world of Mélusine, possibly after a break? "Corambis" was open-ended, and there seems to be a number of issues still unresolved.

A: That's a big fat "maybe."

As far as I'm concerned, the story of the Doctrine of Labyrinths is over; the open-endedness is because, in my view, that's much better than too much closure (like the Victorian novels that end with the firecracker string of marriages). People's lives don't end just because a particular narrative has ended. (Or if they do, it's a very different kind of story than the one I was trying to tell.) I wanted to let readers have the feeling that Felix and Mildmay's lives continued off the end of the last page, the way real people's lives do. That doesn't mean I know anything about how their lives are going to go, or have any interest in finding out.

Right at the moment, I'm tired of Felix and Mildmay, much as I love them, and I'm tired of Meduse. If that changes in the future, I won't fight it, but I'm also not expecting or actively courting it. I want to do something different now.



Q: spoilers of a sort for the end of The Mirador )



Q: What is a porpentine? And, since I just reread "Wait For Me," about Booth--is/does/will he ever change his pattern of interacting with the world? Or have I been given a false sense of progression/potential character development by the fact that I read The Bone Key as a book instead of as a collection of discrete stories?

A: Early modern word for porcupine. See Hamlet; also my series of "fretful porpentine" icons.

Booth is changing, but as a process, it's (a.) slow, (b.) subtle, (c.) prone to backsliding. But when I write about him now, he's not quite the same person he was in "Bringing Helena Back."



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 20

May. 5th, 2009 10:50 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
We begin with a question which has been asked multiple times, and which is rather spoilery for Corambis:

ergo, click if you want to )

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&A 19

May. 4th, 2009 10:08 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
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.



spoilers for Corambis )



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 )

---
*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.



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.



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.



[Ask your question(s) here.]
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
It is, in no particular order:

1. Shakespeare's birthday (observed).
2. International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day
3. The day before Odyssey Con.

In celebration of 1 and 2, and to provide you all something to do while I am largely afk due to 3, I am posting the three scenes from Corambis that I most regret having to cut. None of them furthers the plot in any way. One, which you've seen before if you've been reading the Q&As, is a conversation between Felix and Mildmay about philosophers and bravery; one is possibly my favorite piece of world-building out of the entire book; the last is notable for being one of the few angst-free sex scenes I have ever written.

Also, a question came into today which will not make any sense on any other day, so I'm gonna stick it here. Call it Q&A Eighteen-and-a-Half:

Q: As a fellow Shadow Unit author, will you be providing backup vocals for Emma Bull at her Odd Con performance tomorrow night? :)

A: No, smartass. Not unless she asks me to, which I can't imagine why she would.



For the sake of corralling all these scenes in one place so that they can be easily found, I shall start by reposting the conversation about Chattan d'Islay (which belongs around pages 220-221, at the beginning of Chapter 10) that I put up in answer to a question in Q&A 11:

what Felix and Mildmay are reading )



Next, the sheer self-indulgent world-building, this scene would start on page 270 of Corambis--you'll be able to see instantly where I stitched the draft together:

Kay's tour of Our Lady of Mirrors, extended version )



And this (posted out of order to make it easier for people who don't want to read about explicit gay sex to skip this bit), which I suspect will gratify many of my readers, is the rest of the sex scene spoilers for Corambis, NC-17 )



And there you have it. Feel free to point readers of Corambis to this post. Although none of these scenes is in any way necessary to the book, they are all things that I was sad to have to axe.

Q&A 18

Apr. 23rd, 2009 11:20 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
Q: What books/authors would you recommend to people who like your books?

A: As the querent surmised, this is kind of a tricky one. But I'm going to take a stab at answering it by listing the authors who write the kind of stories (and the kind of prose) I want to write. (N.b.(1), this is not an exhaustive list. N.b.(2), this is not the same as a list of authors I enjoy reading (or did, when I could still read fiction easily) or of authors I admire. Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance: I admire her passionately, and I love her books, but I don't want to write her kind of story.) I'm not claiming that I necessarily think I succeed in writing like these authors, and in fact this list may be useless for the specified purpose. But here we go anyway:

Peter S. Beagle
Barbara Hambly
Ellen Kushner
Joan D. Vinge
Gene Wolfe



Q: I had thought when I first read Melusine that the reason one of Felix's eyes (his bad eye) was blue was because he had a cataract. That would have accounted for the color (bluish white) and the partial blindness.

A: Which is a good theory, except that cataracts being as common as they are, there would be no way for him to conceal that that eye was mostly blind.



Q: What is your favorite book-length poem or poem cycle?

Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, neck and neck with Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Runner-up is Beowulf.



Q: Does Felix see Corbie as an echo of Joline, or more to the point, did you, the author, create Corbie as a kind reminder of a Joline-type kid?

A: Except in being female, Corbie isn't the least bit like Joline. Which is to say, that never even occurred to me and certainly isn't what's on Felix's mind. Felix, consciously or unconsciously, sees Corbie as an echo of himself.



Q: How does inheritance and name inheritance work with the Teverii? First, is it oldest son, or oldest child? Are there only Lady Protectors when there are no sons? Also, when there are Lady Protectors, it seems that their children inherit their last name. Is this just an exception (from paternal name inheritance) to continue the family name ? Finally, can regular noble families have female heads?

A: ARGH! I haven't thought about any of this stuff in years, and I'm not sure I remember all the answers. But I'll try and fake it. Inheritance is actually by appointment, either by the head of the family or by the current Lord/Lady Protector, should the head of the family die intestate. Although it is MOST OFTEN the oldest child, that's by no means universal. The Teverii are not a very prolific family, so there's rarely a welter of siblings to choose between. Name-inheritance is complicated and is actually something negotiated during marriage settlements. In general it depends on which family is more powerful, not on which family is providing the bride or groom. And, yes, regular noble families can have female heads; there was one in an early draft of The Mirador, but she had to be cut because she and her grandsons were extraneous to the actual plot. (That's a feature of the way I write which I didn't mention in earlier questions about my process: I kitchen-sink the first draft and find out by trial and error which bits are actually part of the story and which bits aren't.)



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 17

Apr. 22nd, 2009 09:43 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
But first, I have a question for all of you.

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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.



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Q&A 16

Apr. 21st, 2009 11:05 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
We're starting with one that somehow wandered into the Q&A post from the last round, because if I don't, I will forget about it.

Q: What's the difference between being a kept-thief and being a pack kid? I get the idea that there are (as English comp. students like to say) "Both similarities and differences," but I'm hazy on exactly what the similarities and differences are. It's clear enough that Margot the pack-leader is a mostly-good guy while Kholkis and Felix's Keeper are bad guys, but are those individual personality differences, or are those differences inherent to their respective roles in the Lower City? My hazy understanding of the most important similarities and differences are that both train kids to work in a variety of criminal enterprises, but kept-thieves are bought, while pack kids may join the pack by some version of choice (choice that is constrained by a lack of other options), and that packs are to some degree focused on the good of the group while Keepers are focused on their own personal interests--but I'm not 100% confident about it.

A: The simplest way to explain the difference is to say that kept-thieves are a group of kids being led--or "kept"--by an adult, while a pack is a group of kids being led by another kid. Not all pack leaders are as benevolent as Margot, and I certainly hope there are thief-keepers who aren't as toxic as Keeper and Kolkhis, although it's obviously a system simply BEGGING for abuses. I stole thief-keepers wholesale from Oliver Twist, whereas packs are street gangs, mutated to fit the needs of an urban society without any kind of welfare or child protection services--and where clearly orphanages either don't exist or are very bad news.

Also, packs don't exactly "train" their members; it's just that everyone has to figure out what they can do to keep the collective afloat for one more day, and older kids teach younger kids what they know. Packs also shade off--as Mildmay comments disgustedly--into working class and bourgeois kids slumming for the "romance" of it, and those packs frequently end up as prostitution rings. (Felix's Keeper was unusual in directly and explicitly training children to be prostitutes; most thief-keepers, like Kolkhis, focus on thievery and smuggling and the like.) The packs that are made up of foundlings and orphans and abandoned children and ex-kept-thieves (most thief-keepers cut their kids loose at twelve or thirteen; Kolkhis keeps them longer if they're useful to her) stay away from prostitution if they possibly can.



Q: How much of the plot and story did you come up with before you started writing? How much did you have to go back and change?

As I've said in other answers, I tend toward the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of plot, so I very rarely have any definite ideas of plot before I start. (The exception to this is The Mirador, where I knew the ending well before I knew the beginning.) HOWEVER, comma, an integral part of my process seems to be doing the plot wrong in the first draft. This is most often a problem of character motivations (unlike [livejournal.com profile] matociquala, I don't have a circuit breaker in my head to keep me from doing the wrong thing), but it also happens because--apparently--the big events of the book will show up, but they won't bring any of their infrastructure along with them. So it's up to me to figure out, for instance: spoiler for Corambis ). Very wrong in the first draft. Very very wrong. But writing the first draft was also the only way I found out that that [spoiler for Corambis] is what happened. My process is very messy and not at all linear. Several people have commented on the appropriateness of the labyrinth as a central image for the sort of spiral-shaped structure of the narratives, and I have to confess, it's also appropriate to the process by which the books got written.

Q: You've said your main inspiration for DoL came from getting the idea of Felix, and then trying to figure out the world that would have to exist to make him. How much did he influence the world of DoL, and how much did the world influence him, during writing?

A: If you take Felix's pieces of the first seven chapters of Mélusine and excise the interlude in St. Crellifer's, you have (minus the bits that had to be cut for illogic and embarrassment) the original and originating piece of story around which the rest of the thing accreted. So Felix showed up a wizard, gay, vain, with a deeply traumatic past of which he is ashamed and fairly pathological anger management issues of which he is not nearly as ashamed as he should be, with a malevolent master whom he has not escaped nearly as cleanly as he thinks he has, living in a massive, windowless citadel with byzantine, antagonistic politics and an enemy as powerful as itself--and underneath the citadel are the catacombs which, not coincidentally, are all about the parts of his life Felix is trying and failing to leave behind. Oddly enough, I also knew about the Fire very early. (Originally, Felix had burn scars on one pectoral and shoulder, but there comes a point where you have to admit that enough is enough and prune back your Mary Sue climbing roses.)

That's what I knew when I started writing. Essentially, the rape scene was where the story started, with a little lead in and exploration of the consequences as far as I could see them. (Which leads to the next question, so hold that thought.)

The world there is fairly vague, so all of the specifics and concreteness of Mélusine were world-building based on what Felix gave me, and in return, all the details of Felix's past--Keeper and Joline and Lorenzo and Vincent and the specific influences they had and have on him--came from building the world. The magic system was also built around having to explain what Malkar did and how he did it, and that recursed around to making Felix really exceptionally geeky, in a very suave, cooler-than-thou kind of way.

Q: You said you only got the idea for Mildmay partway through writing-- what did the story look like before Mildmay was in it? What made Mildmay a necessity?

A: So, like I said in the previous question, the first seven chapters of Mélusine are more or less the original ... [I'm trying to think of the right word, which isn't coming, but if you were here, I could totally show you the hand gesture] ... discrete unit of story that the initial inspiration produced. Which is to say, I got Felix to Hermione with his entire life in ruins around his feet, and there I was stuck. Completely utterly stuck, like Winnie-the-Pooh in Rabbit's doorway or Rosebud the Basselope over a fence.

I was a college sophomore; I had other things to do. I left it alone, came back and poked it occasionally, but it just rolled itself up tighter and put its paws over its eyes. Eventually it occurred to me that Felix, in his current state of non compos mentis, could not get out of that jam on his own and maybe I needed another protagonist to come along and do the protagonist things Felix couldn't do.

That's what I needed Mildmay for.

The hard part with him was going back and generating those seven chapters' worth of stuff for him to be doing before he showed up in Hermione. It took me a long time to figure him out, and I was worried that his sections would be boring and people would skip them. Which turned out to be possibly the most unfounded worry I have ever had.



Q: How do you describe the Doctrine of Labyrinth series to others, especially those that don't read for pleasure?

A: Hoo boy. As anyone who's seen me try to answer the "What is your book about?" question can attest, I'm really not the person to ask. I tend to offer the basic comparison to Tolkien and then try to change the subject. There is nothing in the world I find more embarrassing than trying to describe my own books.



Q: I'm not sure if this really is a question about the Doctrine of Labyrinths, but I'll ask it here anyway. What do you see as the difference between drama, melodrama, and angst? You noted in Q&A #9 (snip) "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." You clearly distinguish between the terms. Would you please elaborate on that?

A: You people keep asking the hard questions.

Okay. In the specific sense I was using it in the sentence you quote, the quality of being "dramatic" is the quality that makes a story gripping. It's what generates tension and excitement. (There are other meanings for the word "drama," but that's the one I was using there.) "Melodrama" is over-the-top drama, or to put it another way, drama that doesn't earn the tension it generates, like a three-act opera about the agony of a paper-cut. It's openly and cheaply manipulative. One of the things that produces it is stacking the deck against your protagonist, as I stacked the deck against poor Felix. (This is another of those choices I would make differently at 34 than I did at 19.) Of course, the other side to melodrama is that many readers enjoy it and seek it out--it's an easy catharsis.

(The best example I know of the the difference between drama and melodrama is the difference between Shakespeare's King Lear and the version perpetrated by the Restoration playwright Nahum Tate, in which Edgar marries Cordelia at the end and they all live happily ever after. Tate's version is melodrama; it provides excitement and the opportunity to weep vicarious tears over the sufferings of Gloucester, and then it ends with a pat, politically conservative moral and a wedding. Your emotions have been exercised--if, like Tate's audiences and audiences for the next 200 or so years, you enjoy the surfacy, facile manipulations of melodrama and consent to let them work on you--but not deeply. Shakespeare's Lear, on the other hand, leaves you wrung out and adrift. It doesn't offer cheap consolation against the visceral and existential sufferings of its characters, and it ends in bleak nihilism. It earns its effects by not pretending that there are easy answers or happy endings.)

Angst is emotional suffering. Some readers enjoy it; some readers avoid it. I think it can be a component of either drama or melodrama, but the longer the narrative dwells on the protagonist's angst, the more likely the charge of melodrama is to be made. And to stick.

ETA: Another possible characteristic of melodrama is intense physical suffering without concommitant emotional suffering--or any physical aftereffects of suffering, like needing extensive rehab. An example of this kind of melodrama would be the Sexton Blake stories Dorothy Sayers satirizes (affectionately) in Murder Must Advertise. The physical suffering (I've never been able to decide if readers are drawn to it--as they certainly are--by sadism or masochism or some of both) generates drama, but the lack of consequences make the drama unearned. Melodrama, QED.

ETA2: In fact, the difference between drama and melodrama can be boiled down to just that: consequences.



Q: You said in the last post that there is a reason for Stephen's Mother's suicide. Is this a reason that is explained in the text, and I should just go back and reread? If not, what is it? (If it is explained in the text, we can all look it up ourselves.)

A: I'm not sure any longer if it's explicitly in the published text or not. So spoilers for The Mirador ). I realize that that sentence is ambiguous as it stands, and if there isn't a clarification anywhere else in the book, I apologize for that.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 15

Apr. 20th, 2009 11:02 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
Q: Where did Mildmay get his name from, in story? I know where his first name comes from, but where did he get the fox epithet from, and why? I'm guessing it has to do with him becoming a more established assassin, but how does that automatically equal fox?

A: Mildmay is called "the Fox" partly because his cheekbones give him a foxish look (and, of course, once the dye is stripped out, his hair is fox-colored, but nobody (except Kolkhis) knows that when they start calling him the Fox, so it's just one of those little narrative ironies). There's also a lot of folklore in Meduse associated with foxes and their cunning, their ability to evade or escape traps. Foxes are liars, and also storytellers. And like anyone who's willing to be an assassin for hire, they are amoral. It fit him.



Q: firstly, was there a reason that the Bastion didn't want Gideon back after he was captured with Mavortian von Heber and Bernard, and secondly, what was it that Gideon had on Thaddeus that he wasn't telling Mildmay about?

A: I don't know the answer to the second question--I have never been able to figure out Gideon and Thaddeus's backstory. But to answer the first question, the Bastion let the Duke of Aiaia have Gideon to make an example out of. Cementing good relations with the local leaders, etc.



Q: I was also wondering, how did you come up with the word ´annemer´ for non-magical person? Is it because the (duplicated!) ´n´ wich in various European languages is a negation? (Sidetrack There´s also that word in J.K. Rowling´s universe, where to me it sounds very negative: a blunt, snubbed and cut off sound).

A: I actually don't remember how I came up with "annemer." It probably has to do with a- being a Greek negating prefix (e.g., amnesia, aphasia, etc.), but honestly, even that is just speculation. I don't remember doing any particularly deep cogitation about it (if I did, I'd probably remember the derivation); sometimes I just reach for a word and take what presents itself. "Mikkary" was like that, too (although the pun on misery, as Felix remarks, is obvious).



Q: You use or repurpose a lot of uncommon words (for instance, "Margrave") and slang (molly, violet boy, janus). Coralines seem to be a rosary type prayer/meditation aid, although many cultures use beads or knotted string. When I google "coraline" however, I get Neil Gaiman's book, and definitions of the name (from coral! like "crystalline", I guess). Is a coraline something that exists as an object, or is it simply a word you borrowed to describe something familiar and make it foreign?

A: Yes, a coraline is a rosary. Since rosaries get their name from having originally been made of dried rose petals (unless that's an urban legend), I was looking for something that could have a similar origin: coralines, being the devotional aids of a maritime people, were originally made with coral. (And yes, magpie-like, I did lift the word itself from Neil's book.)

Q: Kept thieves don't have last names, although whores seem to (at least, Vincent does, but then he comes from what seems to be solidly middle class or higher, originally...). Are there other social classes that lack last names? Is this part of a class thing? Does Cardenio having a last name signify anything?

A: Yes, it is a class thing, the distinction between the working class and what probably gets called the criminal class, although that's a misnomer: kept-thieves and whores and pack kids, spiders and pimps and resurrectionists, sangermen and ketches and cade-skiffs. The people who make their living, legally or illegally or some of both, in Mélusine's underbelly. But of course people with surnames can end up in those places, and they may or may not choose to drop the surname, just as people without surnames have nothing to prevent them choosing to adopt one. So it's not reliable.

Cardenio is almost certainly of working class origins, so Richey is the surname he was born with.



Q: We know the specific type of gem used in the rings of several different wizards in the series, and that Felix has had two different gems in his rings. Do the gems used in a wizard's rings have any meaning attached to them?

A: Cabalines (and Troian wizards--another thing apparently communicated between the two cultures by the wizards of Cymellune, like the calendar) believe that particular gems have affinities for particular types of magic, so as a wizard becomes more skilled and more politically/socially powerful, s/he will probably buy rings to suit. Felix's silver and moonstone rings that Malkar corrupted, for instance, are better than the rose agates set in "silver" (i.e., copper under a silver wash) that were the best he could do when he first got free of Malkar (and, no, that bit of backstory never made it into the books), but they're not as attuned to his particular talents as the gold and garnet rings the Celebrants give him. I never worked out the gemology in detail, but it is not accidental that Felix's gold and garnets are so perilously close to Malkar's gold and rubies.



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Q&A 14

Apr. 19th, 2009 11:11 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
Q: You wrote in your most recent Q&A that Mildmay is a champion for the underdog. Do you feel that in hindsight, Felix is also inclined that way?
Yes, he acts like an asshole (although I cherish the character very much) but the worst trouble he gets in is mostly because he tries to help wandering spirits, repairing things that are broken (the Virtu itself), revenge on behalf of Gideon and Mildmay, and the things in Corambis which I won´t mention. Would you say that maybe Felix is the champion of the ´unsaved´? As a total projection of the complexities he himself has to deal with?


A: Yes. Mélusine p. 332:
quote )



Q: Does Mildmay have precognitive abilities? There are a few times when he has foreshadowing of something going wrong, and he says that whenever he ignores that feeling, it always does. He can't see ghosts, but he does seem sometimes that he can feel when they're there (Boneprince's Garden, for example), but that might just be because he doesn't ignore the possibility, rather than feeling them directly.

And if he does, does that mean that these things aren't automatically tied into having magic or not? Like how some annemar can see ghosts?


A: Like his sense of direction, Mildmay's instincts are preternatural. I don't know the exact mechanism, but I think it's more a matter of processing subliminal cues than it is precognition or clairvoyance.



Q: I will probably regret asking this, but what does Felix mean by his keeper doing "lamprey" stuff? Isn't that a kind of eel?

A: Yes, a lamprey is a kind of sucker-mouthed, parasitical eel--or eel-like marine animal. In Mélusine, the word is used to refer to child prostitutes who specialize in fellatio.



Q: On what historical works did you base the traditions and theories of magic in the books?

A: Um. I didn't. To the best of my knowledge, I made it all up.



Q: Re: Apprentice to Elves: Are you enjoying it as much as you did the first one? Or haven't you started it yet?

A: We haven't started it yet, as both [livejournal.com profile] matociquala and I are currently in the part of the creative cycle after the forest fire has been through and before things start to grow again. But we have a lot of shiny ideas.



Q: Ages ago you said that something you almost threw out in the first 50 pages of _Melusine_ became important in Corambis. Tragically I have lent out my copy of the book, so I can't look for it. Do you remember what you were talking about? Sorry I can't find the link to your exact quote. Or any other example of something you insisted on keeping without knowing why that did turn out to be important.

A: Oh dear. I'm afraid I don't remember that specific thing--but I can give you the example of Nera, which my editor wanted me to take out of Mélusine (because, as always, we were severely pressed for space) and I insisted on holding onto, even though I didn't know why. Come to find out, it's vital to The Mirador and not insignificant to Corambis.

... the thing I was talking about may have been the dream Felix has of being lost in a labyrinth on page 19.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.



Q: What about the Jeanne-chat-type of names? I know enough French to make out the mechanism, but what's behind those names? Are they nicknames or actual given names? And why is it done only with Jean/Jeanne?

A: No, they're real given names. It's an extrapolation of the Francophone habit of combining Marie with almost anything (the example I can remember off the top of my head is one of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January books, where there's a minor character named Marie-Neige: Mary-Snow). I swapped it over to Jean/Jeanne so that it could be a co-ed phenomenon. The reason in Meduse (the world of the books) is that Jean/ne is such a common name that people started putting common nouns with it to distinguish one from another. So there's Jean-Soleil (John-Sun) and Jean-Tigre (John-Tiger) and Jeanne-Chatte (Jane-Cat) and Jeanne-Bette (Jane-Betty)--it doesn't have to be a common noun; it can be a (more ordinary) compound name like Marie Antoinette or Maria Theresa. (But making up the names with common nouns is more fun.)



And here's a question that's been asked a number of times:

Q: One thing that appealed to me most about Mildmay's character was the vast repertoire of stories that he knew. Since I knew that you'd based some of Mehitabel's plays on real plays, I was wondering whether any of Mildmay's stories had real-life equivalents.

Q: Do you know any of the stories that Mildmay tells. I'm currently in the middle of rereading Melusine, and I want desperately to hear the whole stories about the Iron Black Wolves, Jennico Sun Eyes, The Princess of Comets (not Comments as I just typed), and all of those poor doomed rulers of Marathat. To say nothing of the cultural significance of Sunlings.

Q: Will you ever write an anthology of the amazing stories that Mildmay tells, such as the one about Jenico Sun-Eyes (Melusine, pg 136 in the paperback)? They sound amazing and I want to here them. On a similar note, are any of them based on extant stories, myths and legends? if so, which?


A: Sadly, the answer to almost all of this is, no. Mildmay's stories are deliberately left very sketchy precisely so that I wouldn't have to write them. Writing folktales that sound like genuine folktales, instead of like twee and overly clever pastiches of folktales, is hard; I did try to write the story he tells the merrows--Julien Tinderbox and the vixen named Grief--but I have since become exceedingly grateful that it had to be cut for space, since I was uncertain about it at the time and have since come to find it embarrassing.

By and large, I put the story references together the same way I put together the scraps of history, so that the tiny bits you get can act like miniature poems. And there are some real-world analogues. Brunhilde (I don't remember how I ended up spelling her name, but I didn't do anything crazy, so she's recognizable), for example, is Brunhilde, only obviously instead of the stupid self-sacrifice ring of fire blah blah patriarchal oppression blah, she got to go around having adventures instead. Mark Polaris is Marco Polo. Things like that. But the stories themselves don't have analogues--or if they do, they're severely twisted. spoiler for Corambis )



And to round out the issue of Mildmay's stories:

Q: For a street kid with no formal education, Mildmay sure knows a lot about Melusine royalty/lineage and Mirador intrigue. Even more than some people who have an interest in the subject, or who live in the Mirador. I know he picks up stories, but where did he learn all these esoteric facts?

A: Popular culture in the Lower City has kept the history of the Marathine monarchy alive, whereas in the Mirador it's been severely out of fashion--not to say suppressed--since Michael Teverius murdered his cousin John Cordelius and declared the Protectorate. So the Lower City knows all about the kings and queens, the Thestonarii, the Ophidii, the Cordelii, whereas the Mirador has the history of the Teverii down cold.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 13

Apr. 18th, 2009 09:39 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (writing: felix-M.S.R.S. Dropout)
A clarification, just in case: you are entirely welcome to ask questions about things other than the Doctrine of Labyrinths.



Q: I originally thought when Zephyr that perhaps Mildmay was the apprentice that he mentions when he tells the story of Zephyr's fate. Do you know who that apprentice was (was it a character that shows up in the books)? I am guessing now that it wasn't Mildmay since Mildmay doesn't have any magic at all.

A: The apprentice certainly wasn't Mildmay; I don't know who he was, or if he escaped the witch-finders. He very well may not have.

Q: Do you think that Mildmay and Cardenio ever meet again?

A: spoilery, I suppose, for The Mirador and Corambis )



Q: Now here is my question: Is it ever revealed why Felix's right eye is bad? Was he born with this or did he have some kind of accident?

[and later]

I now guess that he was born with it because otherwise it wouldn't be a different color than his good eye. I think. What I really would like to know is how much he can see with his bad eye. Because sometimes it is mentioned and then there are long passages where it doesn't seem to matter at all.

[and]

Q: Why does Felix have one blind eye? Both within the world of the books, and as an authorial choice?

A: Felix's bad eye isn't completely blind. He can certainly see shapes and colors with that eye, although probably not much more. And, yes, it's a congenital defect. (The vision in my right eye is markedly worse than my left, so there's some experiential basis here, although my vision overall is much much worse than Felix's. And, yes, it's something that I only notice occasionally, much like with Felix. The good eye compensates a lot, and since he's not completely visionless on that side, he doesn't have the trouble that people who are entirely blind in one eye do, of having this huge blind spot. He's got bad peripheral vision on that side (another trait I have experience with, although my peripheral vision sucks on both sides), which is why Mildmay's figured out not to approach him from the right, but also to guard that side in a crowd.)

As to why Felix is half-blind ... ::sigh:: A lot of this has to do with the Mary Sue Reform School Dropout icon that I'm using for this post. Felix has an embarrassingly large number of the identifying traits of a Mary Sue: red hair, unusual eyes, unusual height, childhood trauma (with scars!), exceptional powers, charisma to burn, the terrifying temper which he cannot control (okay, yes, a Byron Sue more than a straight Mary Sue, but still), still more trauma ... The only significant difference between Felix and a Mary Sue is that Felix is an asshole. And I, as his author, am very well aware of it. (He's also a geek. But I think that in my particular case that makes him more of a Mary Sue rather than less.) But the half-blind thing fits into the Mary Sue-ism: a quote-unquote "romantic" disability. Felix bears the brunt of having been made up when I was 19.

I chose that specifically, though, because it's something he could learn to hide, and the idea of hiding weaknesses is very important to Felix's character as we first meet him.



Q: Is Cymellune a reference to Atlantis?

A: Cymellune of the Waters (as I said in the last round of Q&A when this came up--just to let you know I'm quoting myself) is a lot Atlantis and a little bit Venice and maybe a smidgen of Sodom & Gomorrah. Also Minoan Crete.




Q: There is a common thread running through all four books of half-siblings, starting with (obviously) Mildmay and Felix themselves, but also Mavortian and Bernard, Shannon and his siblings (though it's also mentioned in Mirador that they might not even be that). In Corambis, it's mentioned once that Kay and Isobel are half siblings. Is there any significance to this?

A: I suspect there is, but my brain has never bothered to explain it to me. By which I mean, I, too, have noticed that my narrative generates a lot of half-siblings, but I don't know why. Part of it is because the specifics of the families of these characters requires that they have (in Felix and Mildmay's case, as an example) different fathers. I also seem to have a fondness for the Cinderella-ism (both Kay and Shannon are youngest sons of different parentage than their older siblings), but again, I don't know why, aside from the exigencies of generating the narrative, which needed Shannon to be scandalous for reasons other than being Felix's lover. (Kay's complicated and fraught family history is one of the things that had to get excised from Corambis for lack of space, but again, there were reasons for him to have two elder half-sisters that had nothing to do with my brain saying, "Ooh, more half-siblings! Awesome!")

So yeah. It's a thing. But I can't tell you what it means.



Q: You said in Q&A 9 (I think) that the choices you made about Felix back when you first started writing him aren't the choices you'd necessarily make now. If you were writing him now instead of them, would you do anything differently and if so what?

A: This ties back into the question of Felix as a Mary Sue. If I were writing him now, he'd be considerably less quote-unquote "romantic." (Unusual coloring, traumatic past, disability, exceptional talent: PICK ONE, or at most TWO, since I doubt I'll ever train myself out of writing characters with traumatic pasts. And there's this deaf wizard I need to find a story for.) To be fair to myself, a lot of the narrative of the Doctrine of Labyrinths is about de-romanticizing Felix, but the fact remains that, well, I'm 34 now instead of 19. I see things differently. And this is, by and large, a Good Thing.



And one about Mildmay:

Q: How good a thief is/was Mildmay? I get the impression from his narration that he was very good, yet, at the beginning of Melusine, he's living in poverty and seems to be getting poorer.

A: Mildmay's precarious lifestyle at the beginning of Mélusine isn't a reflection on his abilities as a thief. It's because he's wanted for the murder of Cerberus Cresset and thus there are only a very few fences who will deal with him. Ditto finding clients.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 12

Apr. 17th, 2009 12:07 pm
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
I'm going out of order here, because this is a follow-up question to yesterday's:

Q: I still think that you wrote more into Mildmay, magicwise. Xanthippe said the casting Thamuris worked normally took four celebrants and a caster and Thamuris just used Mildmay. So either Mildmay is a hellofa big anchor or he could access something four celebrants together could do. Also, why did the Kloidanikos notice Mildmay at all, let alone create a link to him in the garden of dreams and then keep the link going for years after Mildmay had left the physical garden? Third thing I am wondering is, I think it was the Tibernians who defined the Virtu as a monumental working of noirant and clairant magics or some such, should go dig my book out and check, but, well, it's late. So when noiarant Felix went to fix the Virtu, he would need access to a clairant channel or something he did not have to fix the damn thing, wouldn't he? And he told Mildmay he only needed him. Why was that? Anyway, thanks for all the lovely books and for being accessible to your fans and I look forward to reading your books in the future.

A: That's supposed to point you toward something important about Thamuris's power, not Mildmay's. And the symbolic link between Mildmay and the Khloïdanikos is via Felix, probably partly because of the binding-by-forms (and Thamuris's symbolism). (Also, that's dreamwork, not necessarily magic, and everyone in the Doctrine of Labyrinths has symbolic dreams. It's the way my fiction works. See also The Bone Key.) Felix explains why he needs Mildmay to mend the Virtu on p. 347 of The Virtu (394 of the paperback), and it's explicitly because he isn't a wizard. It's not about noirant/clairant, it's about having enough psychical/physical reserves that Felix doesn't, quite literally, kill himself in the process. Also, noirant and clairant aren't immutable categories and don't work quite the way you have hypothesized. (Remember, it's all metaphors. None of it is literal truth.)

I really don't want to get into the technical nitpicky details of the magic system, especially when I can't guarantee that I remember everything accurately (seriously, I had a hard time articulating it at all, and still have to walk through it in my head to remember which is thaumaturgical architecture and which is architectural thaumaturgy).

Your original question was, why don't Mildmay's magical powers show up in Corambis? My answer is, because he doesn't have any. I understand that I cannot control how you interpret the text; all I can tell you is that your interpretation has no relationship to what I intended for the books, and there's no argument you can make that can convince me I intended something else.



Okay. Back to answering in the order in which questions were received.

Q: spoilers for The Mirador )



Q: spoilers for Corambis in the lead-up, but none in the actual question ) Do you/did you enjoy teaching? Is it something you'd want to do again or are you happy with it being part of your past?

A: My attitude toward teaching is very conflicted. I do enjoy the actual act of helping someone learn. I think that's awesome, and there's some evidence to indicate I don't completely suck at it, although I'm not a gifted teacher the way my friend [livejournal.com profile] heresluck is. But I came to hate teaching when I was a teaching assistant--and I mean real, visceral, miserable loathing. The work load was back-breaking; the position pinned between professor and students, neither quite one nor quite the other, was uncomfortable; and the responsibility imposed by the grading system was insupportable--not to mention the effect it had on the students' attitudes.

I've had the chance to go back and teach since I got my doctorate, and that semester was actually much more enjoyable--and (probably not coincidentally) much more about actual teaching. But I could feel the old anxieties crawling up to get their stranglehold around my neck toward the end of the semester. And for me, teaching is very hard work. [livejournal.com profile] heresluck finds it energizing; I find it draining. And when I'm teaching, the work of thinking about my teaching expands to use all the available resources in my brain, and it gets harder and harder to find the time and the energy to write. And not writing makes me profoundly and chronically unhappy.

So for one semester every two or three years, it's okay. And my answer might be very different if the system were different, if both teacher and students could concentrate on the learning process instead of on jumping through these stupid quantifiable hoops.



Q:You said, in Q&A 5 that your architecture always has some source of meaning. Can you please delve into this? Are these meanings based on scholarly ideas(i.e. the genders of Greek Columns? Or the use of the Gothic Revival in the Nineteenth Century?) or more of an emotional basis

A: I meant mostly, though not exclusively, that labyrinths and mazes are a dominant motif throughout the books. And also, the idea of thaumaturgic architecture/architectural thaumaturgy means that human-made structure are always important. However, it's also important that the Mirador has no external windows, that almost all buildings in the Lower City have roof accesses, that the Mirador in itself is an archaeological dig waiting to happen. I'm not, myself, well-versed enough in architectural schools and history to go much farther than that. (Although, when I said the churches in Mélusine are Gothic, I should add that St. Kirban's is definitely Romanesque.)

Q: I know you have a broad understanding of the Latin language. Can you tell me how this effected any of the Doctrine of Labyrinths.

A: Well, there's the geeky multilingual puns (Virtu, Cade-Cholera, etc.). I also use Latin to represent the principal language of most of Kekropia (Troian (Greek) is really only spoken along the coast), and thus the lingua franca of the international scholarly community. (Ergo, the book titles in Latin.) So, yeah. Pretty much woven into the fabric of the books, would be the answer.



spoilery for The Mirador )

spoilers for Corambis )

Q: Nitpicky detail, but is there any backstory to Felix's last name? I've always been a bit curious about it, especially given the references to Melusine's gates, both in reality and in Felix's oneiromantic forays. Since some Lower City denizens have surnames and some don't, did he make it up himself or did someone else (his keeper, Lorenzo, Malkar) name him?

A: I've answered this one before (that's information--you can go look for the previous answer--not me whingeing)--Malkar gave it to him; it's Caloxan. It's also symbolically and thematically appropriate to him, and, yes, that pleases me.

and spoilers for The Mirador )



Q: You mentioned in the recent crapstorm about Amazon that you don't like them- do you mind me asking why? I've heard some anti-Amazon sentiment in the past, but it started when I was in high school and I thought it was the best thing since the printing press. However, if it is bad for writers and/or readers etc I will stop giving them my money.

A: I don't like Amazon because I don't like their privacy policy and I don't like their business practices (i.e., the infinite expansion of the products they sell, their schlumphing over ABE Books like a Gelatinous Cube, etc.). I prefer to buy books from people who care about books, which I don't think characterizes Amazon at all. (Support your local indie bookstore!) But this is all purely on the personal level as a consumer. To my knowledge, Amazon is no worse for writers or readers than Borders or Barnes & Noble.

However, if you would like an alternative, may I suggest Powell's?



[Ask your question[s] here.]

Q&A 11

Apr. 16th, 2009 10:56 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
Thank you to the other person who commented with a link to your review!



More than one person has asked about the possibility of more podcasts. To which I say, I don't know. Maybe?



Q: What was the most difficult writing problem you faced with Corambis?

A: My own dreadful tendency to think with my genre conventions. I had to rip half the book out and try again because of that.

Q: I really enjoyed the way that you articulated class issues in Melusine and The Virtu, but I was surprised by the way you handled them in The Mirador. Specifically, in the first two books we learn from Mildmay about how often the decisions of the Mirador's inhabitants have caused pain, fear, and death for the denizens of the lower city. But Mildmay seems disinclined in The Mirador to connect these injustices with their authors. It's not that I'd expect him to stand up and accuse the Lord Protector before Court and Curia, but I had thought he'd at least be angrier in his own head with the representatives of the ruling class he'd met. Why did you go in this direction?

A: Okay. Complicated question, and I'm not sure I can give you a really satisfactory answer, but here are some reasons:

1. Mildmay has SO MUCH other crap to deal with that I don't think he has the energy to campaign against social injustice.

2. He doesn't believe that complaining will change anything.

3. And if you can't change anything, it's a waste of time and energy to be angry.

4. Alternatively, I could point out that he is angry, but his anger is all aimed (sometimes displaced and sometimes really not) at Felix.

5. And, really, for Mildmay, this is just The Way Things Are. It's not fatalism, exactly, but it is definitely a kind of despair. You don't get angry about things unless you can imagine them being different.

Q: spoilers for Corambis )



Q: I just got to the bit with the Titan Clock in Corambis, so I wondered if it was just me -- Titan Clocks: related to the red velvet and clockwork room in House on the Rock at all?

A: I didn't visit the House on the Rock until well after I'd come up with the idea of Titan Clocks, but yeah, there is a kind of EXTREMELY CREEPY convergence there.



Q: I thought for sure the Corambins were going to have an explanation for Mildmay's uncanny abilities (with labyrinths, with spell casting, etc.) and why magicians were able to use something of his in their spells when Xanthippe for one said they should not have been able to. I was sure that Felix/Mildmay and Thamuris/Mildmay formed some kind of closed magical circuit in the spell castings--noirant wizard and clairant complement or channel type of thing; Mildmay a yin to Felix's yang or some such--and I was so looking forward to Mildmay's mortification when that came out and Felix having to rethink their relationship based on that. You never really point out a magician in the series and say, here is a clairant, so other than metioning lightness and darkness I had supposed that clairant was more of a materially based gift (Mildmay all over) while noirance was more to the manar. So how does it work in your mind? How exactly does Mildmay complement Felix and Thamuris' magics? What is Mildmay's magic? He certainly had something more than simply non-magic annemer--or didn't he rate an explanation? Kidding.

A: First of all, Mildmay has no magical abilities. (This is a case of "Because I'm the author and I said so." Mildmay as I wrote him has no magical abilities.) His sense of direction is exceptional, but that's not the same as being magical. Secondly, I'm not sure what you're referring to with this: "magicians were able to use something of his in their spells when Xanthippe for one said they should not have been able to." Xanthippe says Thamuris shouldn't have used Mildmay in his Pythian casting, but that's not the same thing as saying he shouldn't have been able to.

Your theory is very interesting, but it's not about the books I wrote.



Q: Did this conversation make it through revisions? Do you mind telling us?

I think that was the conversation about life on other planets, which did make it into the book.

Either that, or it was this conversation about Chattan d'Islay, which had to be cut for space:

from an early draft )

Q: this is spoilery )

Q: Did Corbie show up with her name or did you give it to her? (Foxes, ravens . . . )

A: She brought her name with her. And was utterly and definitively her name from the get-go.



Q: My question is, did you have a reason for the parade of horrible mothers in the series, or was this simply the way the story developed given the lives and backgrounds of most of your characters? The only one I can think of who was protrayed as a reasonably "good" mother was Stephen's, and if I remeber correctly she inexplicably commits suicide.

A: (There is a reason for Stephen's mother's suicide.)

Yes, there are a lot of bad parents in the Doctrine of Labyrinths, fathers (e.g., Philip Lemerius) as well as mothers. This correlates with the fact that most of the people in the Doctrine of Labyrinths aren't very good people.

Many of the women who are bad mothers (I think) are bad mothers because the circumstances of their lives make them that way. Methony, for instance. We don't know what kind of mother she would have been if she hadn't been trapped in a prostitute's life. (Given her strong resemblance to Felix, you are welcome to be dubious about her nurturing potential, but my point is, we don't know.)



Q: Was Mildmay's injury and consequent disability part of your original conception of the story? It so drastically changes the way he is in the world, and his ability to support himself (in more ways than one) that I wonder if depriving him of his "panther-like" grace (doesn't Felix call it that in the Virtu?) had consequences for the story that you didn't anticipate?

In other words, why did you do that to a cat burglar?


A: I did that to Mildmay because I had to have a reason it was impossible for him to go back to his life in the Lower City. (Also because I was 19 and wallowing in angst.) And, yes, his lameness has been frustrating for me as well as for him.



Q: What does Melusine's money look like? Does it all have Stephen Teverius stamped on it or something? (Or perhaps a stylized gorgon, hence the name? )

And, related, what is the relative purchasing power of a gorgon?


Gorgon on the face of the gorgons, yes. I don't know about the centimes. Not Stephen, though. I think I said somewhere that the obverse is a wheel, but I may be making that up (in the delusional rather than creative sense).

I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out the relative purchasing power of a gorgon, in the same way I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out any actual distances.



Q: So the hours of the day are either in the 24 hour system, or associated with flowers, the weekdays are, I'm guessing, French inspired?, years are indictions, and what are wheels? And what are the Corambin specifications like "in the Seventh of the oOne Hundred Forty-seventh" for instance, refering to?


The days of the week are actually Italian inspired (Marathine days of the week are French).

Wheels are what Mildmay calls septads: groupings of seven indictions.

So the Seventh of the One Hundred Forty-seventh is the seventh indiction of the one hundred forty-seventh wheel since whatever date the Corambins count their calendar from. (I think that's from the founding of Cassander, the first Cymellunar Corambin city, but I don't remember for sure, and although I know I've got it written down somewhere, I don't know where.)



[Ask your question(s) here.]
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
I woke up this morning with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" stuck in my head. This is actually enjoyable--especially since last week, pursuant to the "Stand by Me" video (and, no, I don't remember how I got to one from the other), I'd found Pat et Stanley (Pat is the hippo). And today, poking around further on YouTube, I found The Tokens (awesome except for the bad decision on the final Alleluia Wimoweh), and that led me to the wikipedia entry on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", which led me to FLORENCOM's YouTube channel, which starts with Solomon Linda's original 1930s "Mbube" and then just keeps going (The Soweto String Quartet totally and completely WINS THE INTERNETS. I'm just saying.)

So here. Have some music with your Q&A.



Also, to the person who commented with a link to your review of Corambis: thank you!



Q: How do you normally develop the plot? Do you plan them all out before you actually write it, or do you just plan the main events, and the details would come to you naturally during the actual writing?

A: Actually, I pretty much make it all up as I go along.

Q: Also, do you read the sentences aloud when you're writing to test how it would sound?

A: Not always, but yes, I frequently do.



Q: Is the village of Mouldiwarp closer to Porpentine or Heronshaw?

A: The village of Moldwarp (please note correct spelling) is actually quite isolated, except for the Lemerii country seat, Copal Carnifex.



Q: What are the roots (both in this world and the world of the Doctrine of Labyrinths) of the Caloxan dialect that Kay uses? I've been fascinated by your explanations for Felix and Mildmay's dialects, and look forward to hearing about his.

A: I talked about the relationship between the Caloxan dialect and early Modern English already, so the other half of the question is clearly up to bat.

Caloxan and Corambin, like Marathine, are descended from Cymellunar, which is why Felix and Mildmay can understand the Corambins and vice versa. (I actually cheated a little bit there, because I could not face dealing with the language problem again--but it turned out to be thematically and narratively necessary for Corambis to be a very self-conscious descendant of Cymellune.) The Marathine dialect has a lot of other influences that have shaped it, whereas Caloxan should be imagined as being pretty close to Cymellunar (like the isolated communities in Appalachia who speak something pretty close to Shakespeare's English). And Corambin is just that same language with more streamlining and modernization.



Q: I love your books, and the way you write fantasy, especially the characterization, has inspired me in my own writing. I'm working on a novel now, but I have the hardest time writing action scenes. I'm more interested in the effect they have on the characters than in themselves. Do you have any advice about how to write Stuff Happening?

A: Oh dear. As I think my books demonstrate, I'm much better at internal action than external. Also, I'm bad at kinesthetics (as hanging around with a very kinesthetic writer like [livejournal.com profile] matociquala has shown me). So I can tell you what I've learned, on the understanding that I consider action one of my weak points.

1. Don't try to describe everything. Unless you're writing in omni, your viewpoint character won't notice everything.

2. Focus on specific physical sensations. Cannibalize any experience you've had that's relevant. Everyone probably knows the burn of exhausted muscles, for instance.

3. Draw diagrams if that helps.

4. Go ahead and make a fool of yourself. Get up and try to put yourself in the various positions you imagine your character taking.

5. If you have another person available, make them help. I find this particularly useful for anything involving hands. Because I can't visualize accurately.

6. If you have a friend (parent, sibling, child, lover, etc.) who has taken martial arts or done stage fighting or SCA tournaments or or gymnastics or dance or anything that involves learning fighting techniques and/or spatial awareness and proprioception, exploit them shamelessly. Especially, try to get a feel for what is and isn't humanly possible. (I love Dorothy Sayers, but she didn't have a clue in this regard.)

7. Um, honestly? Avoid action scenes as much as possible.



spoiler for Corambis )



Q: Did you ever consider writing the series with Mildmay as the central character and Felix as the secondary one?

A: Nope. Felix came first. I didn't even meet Mildmay (metaphorically speaking) until Felix was already somewhere in Chapter 7 of Mélusine.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 9

Apr. 14th, 2009 10:01 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
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.]

Q&A 8

Apr. 13th, 2009 12:28 pm
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
spoilers for Corambis )



Q: Where does Felix's last name come from? Anything to do with a gate?

and

Q: Nitpicky detail, but is there any backstory to Felix's last name? I've always been a bit curious about it, especially given the references to Melusine's gates, both in reality and in Felix's oneiromantic forays. Since some Lower City denizens have surnames and some don't, did he make it up himself or did someone else (his keeper, Lorenzo, Malkar) name him?

A: Firstly, I got Felix's last name from the English city of Harrogate (and subconsciously, probably from Harrogate, Tennessee). Also the school, Harrow, and then of course the noun harrow (as in the toad beneath the harrow) and the verb, as in the Harrowing of Hell (and there's a terrible pun on "harrowing" in The Yellow Submarine, too). There's also a Harriers' Gate in the Mirador. So, like almost everything else in the Doctrine of Labyrinths, Felix's name is a pun.

Secondly, internal to the books, Harrowgate is the name Malkar chose for him; I don't think this is ever specified, but Mildmay's example makes it clear that kept-thieves don't have surnames. (I've wondered occasionally if Felix was the name he was born with, or if Keeper or Lorenzo chose that--Vincent knows him as Felix, so it was obviously his name pre-Malkar, but I don't know if it's the name Methony gave him or not. He won't tell me.)

Q: Is the ability to use magic a innate one? In other words, is it true that annemers can never learn to use magic in their lives?

A: Yes. You either are a wizard or you aren't one. Abilities usually manifest at or around puberty.

Q: Why is Felix the most powerful wizard in Mirador? Is it because he's very talented and was taught by Malkar?

A: He's the most powerful wizard in the Mirador because his innate ability to do magic is very powerful. There's a tautology for you. Sorry. But it's an inherent quality of an individual wizard's magic. Being taught by Malkar allows him to look at problems in a different way than the orthodox wizards, and thus frequently to be able to solve problems his colleagues can't, but it has nothing to do with his power--except insofar as his power is what drew Malkar to him in the first place.

Q: Can Felix control his true dreams to help him witness or find out the truth about a certain part of the past?

A: He could, but he never has. And I'm not 100% convinced it would be a good idea.

Q: Why was Mildmay so interested in Felix from the first time they met? Is it because Mildmay was quite... well, desperate at that time, so that he was thrilled to see a person that was related to him, even if that person was a hocus and crazy? Or, and this is what I think, he just natrually tends to symphathize with people in a disadvantage place, and Felix looked scared to death.

A: When Mildmay and Felix meet, Mildmay is very much adrift: in a strnage place, with people he doesn't trust and his whole life in ruins around him. Felix gives him (a.) a way to displace all the stuff he doesn't want to think about into worrying about someone else and (b.) lets him feel needed, which is Mildmay's weak point. And, yes, Mildmay is by his nature a champion of the underdog.



spoilers of varying intensity for Corambis )



Q: I'm curious...in The Mirador, you added a new narrator, Tabby, alongside Felix and Mildmay. Did you find that more or less difficult? Did you worry how the fans would accept a new narrator?

A: Mehitabel was very hard to write, for reasons I've talked about in earlier Q&As. I had a hell of a time finding a way to distinguish her voice from Felix's.

And I expected that fans would resent her. I just hoped she'd be able to win them over, and from what I've seen, by and large she has.

Q: Also, was there any point where you had the thought and feeling of, 'I cannot write anything else in this world...'?

A: Starting somewhere in the second draft of Corambis and continuing on to the present, yes. *g*



Q: Now that I have Corambis and have finished all 4 books I am going back and re-reading them all one by one. I'm back in Melusine when Felix is in his "insane" period. Felix seems to see people and things with an uncanny perception for their genuine nature. Are the things he sees his own personal feelings of the people and situations, or is his strong concentration of Aetherealness guiding him to see their true nature? (bears, dogs, etc) I was really quite fascinated by this and wonder if you could elaborate some on how and why Felix became (for lack of a better word) "insane".

A: No, Felix is seeing something that's really there, although his interpretations are strongly colored by the fact that he is, as Mildmay would put it, completely batfuck insane.

And, yes, although I did not have the concept worked out at the time, what Malkar did to Felix, in sundering him from his magic, left his strong aethereal talent wide open, with neither protection nor filters, not even the intervention of his rational mind. That's why he sees ghosts and auras and these weird symbolic animals.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 7

Apr. 12th, 2009 09:54 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
To all the people who want to read the false start to The Mirador: I am trying to think of a really really polite way to say, Oh HELL no.



Also, a reminder: many auctions at [livejournal.com profile] con_or_bust end today, including mine.



Q: Did you consciously intend for Mavortian and Bernard to be a kind of warped reflection of Felix and Mildmay?

A: Yes. Or at least, once I figured out that they were half-brothers, I did.

Q: Corambis...as in the jumping spider?

A: Corambis as in the name of Polonius's character in Hamlet Q1.

Q: I know there's no map included in the Doctrine of Labyrinths books, but is there one in existence? Did you ever make one simply for your own reference?

A: There is a map of Mélusine.

Q: Did you ever reach a point while writing the Doctrine of Labyrinths, even in the very early years, where you just felt like giving up?

A: I started writing these books somewhere around 1993, when I was a sophomore in college. I was then and continued until May 2004 (i.e., after I'd sold Mélusine and The Virtu to Ace) to be a full-time student, first getting my B.A. with a double major, then doing UW-Madison's one-year English Lit. M.A. program, then working on my Ph.D. and--for several semesters--also teaching. I started writing and submitting short stories seriously in 2000. And I've always been a writer who has a lot of projects started simultaneously (this is not, btw, necessarily a virtue). So with the first three books (since I had a draft of The Mirador written before I sold Mélusine), if I was frustrated or stuck or just didn't feel like writing, I had plenty of other things to turn my attention to--and no reason I couldn't. Up until October 2003, when Ace said, "Yes, we will give you money for these stories," nobody but me cared whether I finished them or not. So there wasn't any angst about it.

Ironically, there were several moments during the writing of Corambis when I would have been pathetically grateful to be allowed to throw in the towel--or just to leave the fucking thing alone for a month or three--but at that point I had a deadline and a contract and three published books' worth of obligation to finish the story.



spoilers for Corambis )



I'm going to combine two questions here, and then cut-tag for length:

questions about fanfiction )



Q: In the real world, the colder a place is, the shorter the people living there are. However, it is the opposite in the world of Melusine, where Troians are higher than Marathines, and Marathines are higher than Colaxan. Is there any reason for that?

A: 1. Is this true? I certainly don't have the knowledge or training to argue it, but I can think of counter-examples.

2. Troia and Mélusine are pretty much in the same latitude, and Caloxa is much further north (and therefore, because I am a northern hemisphere writer, colder) than either.

However, that makes it look like I actually thought about the issue in those terms, when in fact Troians are taller than Marathines because Troians are pseudo-elves, and Caloxans are slightly shorter on average because of the admixture of Usaran genes, and the Usara are pseudo-dwarves.



And we end today's installment with another repeated question:

Q: What was the story behind the client who wanted Coruscant's copy of Artemisia de Charon's Principia Caeli? For that matter, do you even know, or was it just a means to an end in this particular case?

A: Someday I will figure this out and will write the story about Cardenio Richey, Vey Coruscant's copy of the Principia Caeli, and a serial killer stalking the Lower City (c'mon, you all knew Mélusine would have to spawn a Jack the Ripper eventually). So, yes, it does point toward something else, but I don't yet know what the something else is.



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 6

Apr. 11th, 2009 10:50 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
I'm not sure if this first question is spoilery or not, so I'm putting it behind a cut-tag just in case it is:
spoilers? )

Q: How much of the plot was planned out in advance, and how much was changed over time, as you wrote the books?

A: Um. When I started writing, I didn't know any of it. I wrote Mélusine and the Virtu by Doctorow's headlight method.1 With The Mirador, I knew the end before I knew anything else, and it was like a nightmare about a plague trying to find the way to get there. And with Corambis we were pretty much back to the headlights, although there I had a bunch of things left over from the previous three books that I knew I had to resolve somehow. Which isn't so much planning the plot out in advance as it is having a list of questions you have to figure out the answers to and then embody the answers in the plot. Also, all of the books had scenes that I knew I wanted to write scattered through them, so another way to look at it would be as stringing rope bridges from one rock spire to the next.2 But that's also quite distinct from having a plot worked out in advance.

So, basically, the answer is: none of the plot was worked out in advance. Except by my subconscious, which seems to have known the whole story all along. It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

---
1"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

2Apparently, in my head, novels at that stage look like the fabulous rock spires in Chinese landscape painting. Or, you know, the trees in an Ewok village.



Q: When you started writing, did you have that particular ending in mind? Why did it have to end there? (not that I'm asking 'Why did it have to end', I know why it has to end, but why did it end in that way? I liked the ending, mind, I'm just a curious creature)

A: spoilers for Corambis )

Q: Where did the original ideas for Mehitabel, Gideon, and Kay come from? And to a lesser extent, Shannon?

A: Gideon, as best I remember, was created purely out of the needs of the story. And then, poor bastard, he fell in love with Felix. Shannon was much the same way: I needed a person with particular traits to be Felix's lover at the start of Mélusine, and then I got interested in the ways he could be used to point out things about unreliable narrators and also about obsession vs. love. Mehitabel began purely as an ironic comment on the Victorian governess and what she might or might not be hiding behind her dull and proper façade. And I don't know where Kay came from. Like Felix and like Mildmay, he presented himself as a person with a particular set of traits and issues and we went from there.

Q: In The Mirador, you mention Gideon using a tablet and a stylus to write. Am I right in assuming that's of the ancient Roman method, with words scratched into bees wax? Or is it another word for paper and pen/ink/quill/etc? Or is paper too expensive to be used so frequently? *continues to dither with trivial details*

A: Yes. Wax tablets. Because paper is expensive.



Q: Who was your favorite Shadow Unit character to write? To read? Why?

A: I love reading Solomon Todd, but I can't write him at all. My favorite character to write is probably Frost, because she's so perfectly, ruthlessly honest, and it disconcerts everyone.

Q: How did the character of Mehitabel develop (how was she inspired, what was your original plan for her in the books, if it changed)?

A: Originally, Mehitabel was going to be Mildmay's wife. (Yes, really. There's about 50,000 words of a false start to The Mirador in which they are married.) She was originally a much less complicated person, with fewer layers and no secrets. spoilers for The Mirador ) It took me a long time to get into her head.

Q: Out of everything you've written, what was the most rewarding to finish?

A: Mélusine, because there's nothing like the rush you get with your first time. And Corambis because finishing it also meant finishing the series, and I was--and still am!--giddy with triumph at having gotten the whole thing written and published.

Q: How, prey tell, did you get the idea for the concept of the story "Sundered"?

A: I wish I could tell you. There are a lot of different things that come together in that story: the bitter rivalry between the sisters, the aliens who are embarrassingly romanticized by the humans, the alien society and its complicated social structure. So some of that comes from C. J. Cherryh and some of it from Ursula K. Le Guin and some of it is from being viciously competitive myself and trying to learn to be a better huamn being than that and some of it is from the urban fantasy of the 80s in which the elves are all utterly glamorous and beautiful and I want to drown them in a bucket.

And mostly, that's how writing stories works. It's not one idea; it's where one idea runs into another idea. Like the Reese's commercials: "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!"

(The story, btw, is here.)



[Ask your question(s) here.]

Q&A 5

Apr. 10th, 2009 10:09 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
First, although no one has actually asked this in the form of a question yet: if you think you spot an allusion, you're probably right. Poe, Lovecraft, Eliot, Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, The Cat Came Back, Coppélia, Sayers, Milton, Dickens, Tolkien, various Brontës--basically, anything I've read or seen or heard has been treated as fair game if I could warp it into the appropriate shape.



Here's another question that's been asked more than once:

Q: Is there any way possible we could hope (possibly years from now) for more to the story, either a precursor dealing with younger versions of Felix & Mildmay or post-Corambis incarnations?

A: Anything's possible. By which I mean, if I get an idea for another story about Felix and Mildmay (or Mehitabel or Kay or anybody else), I'll write it. But I don't promise that I'll ever get more story ideas for them.

Q: I suppose this is a spoiler, or an anti-spoiler, as it's about something that DOESN'T happen )



Q: How did you develop the Corambin/Caloxan way of speaking? Does it adhere to some other set of speech patterns (Jacobean, Elizabethan, something else) or was there more invention there?

A: The Caloxan dialect is--obviously--based on Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare's English). However, I realized very early on that if I actually wrote Kay's narrative in EME, very few modern readers would have the patience to wade through it. (EME prose is, um, stately at best. Also convoluted. And just plain difficult for modern readers to parse.) So I cast about for other ways to make Kay's voice sound strikingly different from Felix and Mildmay, and also archaic. The inverse-contraction thing (where he and other Caloxans drop subjects instead of contracting the verb) is an occasional feature of EME; I just extrapolated it out into a dialectical principle. So, yes, Caloxan is mostly EME, modified to suit my purposes.

several questions' worth of spoilers for Corambis )


Q: In one of the previous Q&A's you talked extensively about accents and, in particular, Mildmay's. I've never had any trouble "hearing" him, but Felix eludes me despite your descriptions. Is there anyone his inflection is modeled after, or could you possibly point me in the direction of someone whose voice I could use as a jumping-off point to get the gist of how he sounds?

A: My two best models for Felix--David Bowie and Jeremy Brett--happen to be English, and I suspect it's very easy (especially for Americans?) to hear Felix with a British accent, because we associate that with snotty upper-class intellectualism of the kind Felix specializes in. But he doesn't sound British. None of them sound British. If you've listened to my podcasts, in them I'm "doing" Felix as best I can, given that my voice is the wrong register. So if you can imagine Jeremy Brett doing an American accent--American as spoken by the dominant culture in the Midwestern states, with occasional undertones of the mid-South--that's what Felix sounds like.



And one more, because it's connected to an earlier question in this post:

more spoilers for Corambis )



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