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Multitasking

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Happy almost 2019! This was a year of many changes in my life, as you may gather from the embarrassing dearth of actual posts on this blog. Didn’t exactly nail that particular 2018 New Year’s resolution. But 2018 was nothing if not a learning experience for me, and I will be taking what I learned into a hopefully slightly more work-life-writing balanced 2019.

By far the biggest change in my life this year was getting accepted to and embarking upon a PhD program in childhood studies. This is probably a decision I could have/should have made earlier in my life, but see aforementioned learning experiences, I guess. The first semester was INTENSE (everyone promises it will be the most intense, and I’m holding them all to that), but it was also such a welcome change after working jobs that really weren’t right for me over the previous four years. Even when academic work is ridiculously hard, it still feels like what I want to be doing (it’s like writing in that way). This also marks the time I’m being paid to do something I fully want to do, so that’s certainly an exciting development!

Still no one is paying me to write things, but, as ever, I’m working on that. I completed my first middle-grade manuscript this year (for varying definitions of “completed,” of course; revise til publication or death is my motto). I really enjoyed working on SKY CHILD. A good antidote for writing career dissatisfaction is to just write something your 12-year-old self would’ve been super into.

I also had my first publication this year, albeit not a creative one: my paper “Beyond the Collapse of Meaning: Narratives of Monstrosity in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials” appeared in University of Toronto Quarterly’s special edition on monsters. I actually had a really good first experience with academic publishing, which is saying a lot considering the first notes I received basically boiled down to “so you’re gonna need to redo this.” (They worded it very gently and helpfully, though.) Also I love the idea that maybe someone might cite me when writing a paper about HDM and/or monsters. Maybe someone already has! Maybe some student out there happened upon my paper while listlessly scrolling through Project MUSE and thought “finally!” (or at least “eh, that’ll work”). All of these scenarios delight me, so I’m going to believe that they’re true.

In the world at large, 2018 was often … rough. As a consequence, so was/is my anxiety. But another development this year was that I found a new therapist once I moved to South Jersey, like the good millennial that I am. I don’t particularly want to say anything else about that, but it felt like something I should acknowledge in a post about this past year, because I don’t want to only talk about having anxiety when it’s not really that present in my thoughts. So people dealing with their brains, I’m here with you and for you! Being a scared person and being a good, kind, interesting, original person are not mutually exclusive. I should know.

(In werewolf story, a minor antagonist tries to make my protagonist feel bad about herself by asking her how she can be so clever and calculating after a bunch of really awful crap went down. “Shouldn’t you be horrified?” She tells him that she’s always horrified, but “I’ve learned to multitask.” So here’s me, terrified and fabulous, multitasking.)

I hope that everyone who reads this blog has had a wonderful holiday season and will have a great New Year! I know that in 2019, I will be doing a lot of work that I really love, and I’m so lucky and grateful that that’s a guarantee in my life. I look forward to sharing it with you!

Now, as is becoming traditional, I’d like to leave you with a little fiction excerpt to close out the year. In honor of completing a working middle-grade manuscript this year, I figured I could share something from that story! Unlike the previous two New Year’s Eve excerpts, this is actually taken from the manuscript itself. Perhaps some of you will recognize my Ninna from Writing II at Simmons; literally everything about the plot has changed since then, and she herself has become considerably pricklier, but she definitely still loves flying. For 2019, I hope you all find and/or nurture the things in your life that make you feel as free.

 

The city of Zimbir awaited a hero. For nearly one hundred reigns, great princes and leaders had gone forth to fulfill their destinies and returned victorious to take their places on the throne. These men relied on their strength, their wits, and the favor of their patron god — usually Zaluru, God of Storms, who understood power. It was Zaluru who had revealed the trials of the First King Nameshda after the waters of the Deluge receded, and Zaluru who had told Nameshda how and where to build the high walls that enclosed the great city. Ever after, Zaluru’s champions had defeated monsters, discovered treasures, and brought great glory to Zimbir.

But these heroes did not come along very often. All of the kings of the past century had earned their throne simply by being the brother or son of the previous king. Now, the people of Zimbir were hungry for proof that the age of heroes was not yet over.

Ninna ignored the people of Zimbir whenever possible.

“Ninna?”

Unfortunately, she could not ignore her mother. Ninna turned wearily as Sunemi opened the bedroom door without knocking, narrowing her dark eyes as she took in the almost-finished clay bird in her daughter’s hands.

“I assume this means you have finished your homework,” Sunemi said, in a voice that meant she assumed the opposite.

“Mm.” Ninna turned back to her bird. She swiped her thumbnail along its tail, giving texture to the earthen feathers.

“Ninna, it’s late.”

“Good night, then,” Ninna said pointedly.

There was a pause in which an argument may have started, but Sunemi just sighed and said, “Clean your hands before you go to bed. I won’t scrape clay from the linens again.”

When the door closed, Ninna relaxed her shoulders, and her wings made a shushing noise as they slid along the mud brick floor. She completed the finishing touches on her bird and carried it to the window to dry alongside its flock. A dozen little figures stared up at the sky, their wings readied for flight. A careless observer might believe they were flesh instead of clay, and that they were simply waiting for the right moment to leave the windowsill behind.

Ninna washed the clay from her hands in the small basin she had used to wet her latest project. Her homework tablet, dry and unmarked, lay abandoned in the corner. The flames from her clay lamps illuminated her bed, clothing chest, and little table, which was cluttered with more creations: a bird’s nest with eggs, a mouse that Ninna had studied when it scurried into the room, and a handful of votive figures ready for dedication. If only Ninna had been born to unwinged artisans; then her station would match her skills. Yet if she had, she would not have been quivering in anticipation of what she was about to do next.

Ninna snuffed the lamps and flopped onto her bed, leaning her chin on her hands. Unwilling to close her eyes and accidentally fall asleep, she stared into the darkness. Finally, she heard the soft, dull thud of hooves outside her window. She smiled and threw off her bed linens. As quietly as she could, she crept into the cool hallway, down the stairs, and through the kitchen. She paused, straining her ears for any sounds of wakefulness above her, then felt for the lacquered wood of the back door and pushed, letting the starlight in to pool around her feet.

All of the fashionable houses had walled back courtyards surrounded by palm trees: a miniature city for each winged noble. Ninna’s house, so small and far down the Great Hill, could not necessarily be called fashionable, but it at least had the courtyard and trees. The flowers around the central shrine were muted shades of purple in the darkness. The moon was at the half; the mortal world never kept the Moon Goddess Sueniti’s interest for long, and she had begun to turn her face away. Still, her light was bright enough to allow Ninna to pick her way past the garden and shrine to open the back gate.

As expected, a lamassu was waiting for her, his black eyes glinting in the moonlight. His powerful bull body was still and relaxed, and the fierce face, framed by his thick, curling black hair and beard, could almost but not quite be described as human.

Ninna whispered, “Come in, my heart.”

The lamassu smiled. The expression sat strangely on his face, giving it a lopsided cast that most would have found unnerving, but Ninna knew not to fear. The gods had sent the lamassu after the Deluge to protect the hapless humans. The spirit beasts rarely took interest in individual people, but this one had shown up on the day of Ninna’s birth and had never really left. When she was too small to realize how presumptuous it was to name a lamassu, she had begun calling him Lugu, after his crooked smile. Lugu didn’t seem to mind.

Presently, Lugu walked into the courtyard and knelt by the wall. Ninna didn’t need his help anymore, but she stepped onto his broad back anyway, careful not to tread upon his small wings. She held her balance as he rose to his full height, and from there, it was easy to pull herself up onto the wall. The tops of the rough bricks pressed the remnants of the day’s warmth into the soles of Ninna’s bare feet.

Ninna tied her thick hair away from her face with a scrap of fabric, feeling the wind shift around her. Her wings responded, spreading out to her sides and pivoting minutely to catch the air. Ninna tucked her elbows in, grasped her wrists in front of her —

And jumped.

After one, two, three wing beats, Ninna took her place high above the courtyard and just below the tops of the palm trees. By day, a coiled thing lived inside her chest, but every night when she took to the sky, it finally unfurled.

The sky was hers, and hers alone.

The wind, cool and sweet as river water, flowed around her. The hem of her nightdress flapped around her knees. Ninna closed her eyes and waited for that perfect moment when she couldn’t tell where her body ended and the sky began. She felt as invisible as the air. When her eyelids fluttered open again, she realized that she had drifted well outside the confines of the courtyard and had almost reached the branches of the palm trees. Dipping her right wing, she turned into the wind.

The maneuver was less graceful than Ninna would have liked, though at least now she could turn without plummeting. She flapped clumsily, rising and falling like a toy boat in a swinging bucket, and landed heavily back inside the courtyard.

“I’m getting better, aren’t I, my heart?” she said.

Lugu didn’t answer. Lamassu never did. He rustled his own wings and looked towards the sky, yet he remained on the ground, and would forevermore. His wings were too small and weak to carry him, like the wings of all other spirit beasts — and humans. Except for a single set.

Zimbir awaited a hero, but it did not know that one had already been born.

 

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Cilia

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I know that I said I was going to take suggestions for future blog topics, and I am, but we have once again come up against one of those news cycles that prevents me from thinking or screaming about anything other than the dumpster fire that is our country. That happens a lot these days. Many, many people have written about the violent and dishonest man trying to get onto the Supreme Court, and many of them have made better points than I ever could, so I won’t write about him. I also don’t want to write about traumas that I have not experienced or borrow emotions I have not personally embodied.

But I can write about the first time I understood misogyny, because it’s a memory that I’ve been thinking about a lot over this past week. It is, in fact, a very specific memory from when I was around 15. It’s not a traumatic memory. It didn’t even make me particularly sad at the time, though it does now. The fact that I can pinpoint this light bulb moment is probably somewhat unusual. I feel like systems of oppression typically reveal themselves over time. On the other hand, it took a while for me to even grasp the whole idea of “systems of oppression,” which I think happens a lot with white people like me. As a consequence, at 15, I still thought of prejudice as a personal failing.

Sexism, of course, was something that I knew. I’d been a girl child among boys who said girls were gross. I’d heard stereotypically feminine interests derided as overemotional, shallow, or weak. Plenty of men were sexist, and I obviously thought they were wrong. But though I knew the word misogyny, I couldn’t come up with anyone in my life who hated women. I knew such men existed, because I knew sexual assault existed, but I didn’t think I knew anyone who would fit that bit. Who was angry enough to hate women? Who didn’t have a woman in his life that he loved? To me, misogynists were violent outliers, and sexists were just ignorant men who could, ultimately, be proven wrong.

In fact, I thought I could prove the sexists wrong. Sexists thought boys were smarter than girls? Check my report cards, bro. Sexists thought boys were stronger than girls? …Well, I couldn’t prove that one wrong, but other girls with actual hand-eye coordination and/or muscle mass could. Sexists thought boys were deeper, more logical thinkers than girls? Watch me debate you into the ground. With my stubbornness and my intellect and my ambition, I was a walking, talking refutation to sexists everywhere, and if they just saw me, they would realize the error of their foolish ways.

Then, in high school health class, that cesspit of gender relations, I sat in the back of the class learning about ovulation. The teacher explained how the ova were pushed down cilia in the Fallopian tubes, which she described as “tiny hairs.” Next to me, a boy whispered to his friend, “Ew. They can’t even shave it.”

Oh. Oh. Misogyny.

In that moment, I realized that I’d been looking at it all wrong. Misogyny didn’t require men and boys to hate every specific woman or girl. It didn’t require the nonstop anger that I had previously thought was necessary for true hatred. Anger, of course, is present in misogyny, but so is disgust.

Now, of course, this boy was probably mostly trying to be a little edgelord. I don’t think he actually thought that women should be able to shave their internal organs. But there was genuine revulsion in his voice. Never mind the fact that he wouldn’t exist without those cilia. They weren’t pleasing to his sensibilities, so they had to be derided. Any part of me that wasn’t for him was subject to his contempt.

And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about that.

I could get good grades and write good stories and make good arguments. I could, and did, and still do make my appearance conform to certain standards of beauty that men have set along the way. But I could not shave my fucking Fallopian tubes, and so I could not prove this boy wrong.

Now, before I go any further, I would just like to note that a woman does not need to be in possession of Fallopian tubes or any other characteristic associated with XX chromosomes (up to and including the chromosomes themselves) for a misogynist to find her disgusting. My point is just that on that day in high school health class, I realized that I was up against something bigger than personal ignorance. I realized that the problem of misogyny was not entirely about the concept of female inferiority. It was about the simple fact of female existence.

As I said, I didn’t feel sad or even personally offended when this boy made his absurd comment. After all, he’d just made it clear that it wasn’t personal, because it wasn’t about me as a person. I did feel disgusted by his disgust, and while I’d like to say that I delivered a gloriously scathing rebuttal, all I actually did was give him an extremely dirty look. In a way, this boy helped me. He made me see that if I wanted attitudes like his to die out, I had to think outside of myself. He started to show me the system.

Now, though, I am sad, because his attitude has not died out. Female existence, down to the microscopic level, still disgusts the men in power. Any part of a woman’s life that doesn’t please them, that isn’t for them, is inconvenient at best and revolting at worst. She is to be thrown out like all disgusting, abject things.

There are ways to fight this. Voting is one. For the love of all things holy, vote for people who don’t throw us out. Education is another. I shouldn’t have been 15 before I knew that sexism and misogyny are not just personal failings. (Though, to be clear, they are also that. Like, if you are a man who enacts misogyny, you are a product of a system, sure, but you also suck as an individual.) There sure as hell shouldn’t be grown-ass men holding up female friends and relatives as human shields as though a not-actively-despised woman’s presence in a man’s life equals the absence of misogyny. We have to know what we’re up against, both from others and within ourselves.

So I will fight. But I will also be sad, because it’s all so personal, and because it’s not personal at all. I can scream all I want to, but I haven’t shaved my cilia, so who will even listen?

End of Act I

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Two days ago, I “finished” middle-grade story (a.k.a. SKY CHILD). Finished is in scare-quotes because, ideally, people will eventually tell me to do more things to this manuscript, because, ideally, someday someone will want to publish it. So it’s really no more finished than story or werewolf story (THE CHILDREN’S WAR and MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES, respectively), but it has joined those two manuscripts for my own definition of “books I have written.” So. I’ve written three books in my twenties. That’s sure not nothing.

I remain determined to see each of these manuscripts through to publication. This is not an easy thing to want or believe in, but I do want it, and I do believe. I don’t know if that makes me naive, stubborn, or brave. Maybe there isn’t really a difference among them when it comes to ambition and art.

But really, I’ve never chosen easy things to want or believe in. I’m starting a PhD program in a week and hope for a career in academia. I want to be a mother one day. With my work, I want to help make the world a better place, which requires the belief that the world can be a better place. I think I’ll have to be naive, stubborn, and brave to pursue all three of those goals.

I don’t know what the next “____ story” will be, but I don’t expect to last more than a week without a new project lined up. I do know that I’m starting several new chapters in my own story, and I’m excited to see what they look like. I’d like to start a new chapter for this blog, too, which I have severely neglected this year. I think I’ve said all I really need to say about myself for a while, so I’d like to write about other topics that people would be interested in hearing about. I’ll periodically ask for suggestions on Twitter and Facebook, and I hope you’ll throw some out there.

I spent a lot of my twenties “finding myself” (which is my family’s preferred euphemism for “flailing around in life”). I think (hope) I can now consider myself more or less found, and I really want to go forth into my thirties finding my place in a community. So I’d like to make all aspects of my life, including this blog, more of a conversation. I look forward to continuing that conversation with all of you soon!

Ode to a Home

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In two weeks, I’m moving down to South Jersey to begin working towards a PhD. Not long after, my parents are going to move to the mythical Central Jersey to downsize/be closer to their children/be closer to my grandmother. The Childhood Home (which has on occasion been an interim adulthood home, including right now) will soon be someone else’s, and I’m soon going to actually know where I’ll be living for far enough in the future to actually register to vote in someplace that isn’t my hometown.

I have not traditionally been known as someone who is, shall we say, good at change. I’m better than I used to be; it does help when you get frustrated enough with your life that you really, really want a change. I’m extremely excited about going back to school, and I’m not quite mourning the loss of the Childhood Home (yet). The whole moving situation has put me in a nostalgic mood, though, to the shock of precisely no one. (A conversation I once had with my mother revealed what an exhausting child I was to raise, as I began a sentence with, “As a kid, I would get preemptively nostalgic about …” and she interrupted me to say, “EVERYTHING.”) So this will be a preemptively nostalgic blog about a house that has not yet been vacated but knows that it’s about to be.

My mom has loved the house as a home, but does not love the house as a building. She never wanted to live in a split-level; she prefers Victorian houses, especially those with porches. I can never quite let her mention this without prompting her to admit that it’s been a good house, because I haven’t learned to accept that the people I love don’t always get 100% of what they want. I compulsively try to erase all trace of disappointment or regret, no matter how minor — especially if I somehow factored into the decision, as I obviously did when my parents moved here.

My sister and I were eight and had just finished second grade. I did not love the house as a home for a while. In our new elementary school, the friend groups were quite solidified; while I wasn’t friendless, I certainly wasn’t granted permanent membership within a group. A little over a year after we moved, my paternal grandfather died; a little over a year after that, my paternal grandmother followed. These losses contributed to a mythologization of “when we lived in Staten Island” in my mind. I saw those first eight years of my life as a time of wholeness and ease. Without entirely articulating it to myself, I felt that moving away had broken the unchanging spell of childhood, and now other, worse things were allowed to change, too.

(Goodness, but it’s obvious in hindsight that I was going to have OCD, isn’t it? Incidentally, after my grandma died, my parents made me go to therapy. They are Good Parents.)

I have the same impulse now that I do when I insist to my mom that we love this old split-level. I am afraid of making it seem like I had an Unhappy Childhood. I want to assure anyone reading this that I have plenty of happy memories from third through seventh grade, which I absolutely do. I don’t want anyone to feel sad thinking that I have disappointments or regrets (…which I absolutely do). But I can reassure you without lying: I did learn to love this house as a home. Even in those early days, I can see things that I loved in my memory. The exact configuration of my sister’s and my Barbie families on the guest room floor. The swing set in the backyard under the trees. The snow tunnel we built with our neighbor that entirely collapsed on all three of us. The books upon books upon books that I read late into the night, sprawled on a beanbag in my room.

And then, around eighth grade, I became friends with the people who are still my friends. Or I should say I became close friends with them; I’d known and liked them since I was eight, but hadn’t quite realized that they were my people. Throughout most of middle school, I’d floated around the outskirts of friend groups, wallowing in the common pubescent suspicion that I didn’t really have anything in common with anybody, only to figure out that yes, I did, and they were right across the cafeteria.

From that point on, The Kellett Basement became a hub of adolescent girl weirdness. If my life were a novel, critics would almost certainly call it a liminal space. I never felt in a hurry to grow up when my sister, my friends, and I congregated there; we allowed ourselves to be extravagantly strange without feeling like we were sacrificing our fragile teenage maturity. Or perhaps I’m projecting and should only speak for myself, so I’ll say instead that I felt that way, and I am grateful that my friends allowed me to. They completed the transformation of this house into home.

This house has absorbed so many good and bad memories. In the kitchen, women of several generations tended to their assembly line of vegetable chopping while the men cleaned and shucked an alarming number of clams in order to make enough clam chowder to feed a small army (a.k.a. my extended family). In the living room, my father played the piano; ragtime and jazz mostly, but also Christmas carols when seasonally appropriate, and my sister would sometimes wander in to sing. For ten years, a beloved and poorly behaved Portuguese water dog tore through the backyard and barked at the phone. Throughout the house, I experienced periodic cataclysms of anxiety and found safe places to weather them. I read and listened and made choices about the kind of person I wanted to be.

My new apartment is the second story of an old house that my mother will probably like as a building. It has patterned carpets and long windows. I hope that when my friends and family come to visit, they will feel at home. When that happens, then I will, too.

 

Badasses: A Condemnation

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I have a list of media pet peeves a mile long — like most writers, I suspect. Usually I prefer to use this blog to talk about things I do like instead of things I don’t (except when I write about politics), but today I’d like to talk about a trope and a mindset that I’ve been ruminating on lately: the Badass. Join me, won’t you, in what will probably be a rambling explanation of why I don’t consider any of my own characters badasses, and why I don’t think declaring any character a “badass” is a particularly useful thing to do.

First I should probably define my terms. These are going to be entirely my own perceptions, and if anyone disagrees with them, I’d actually love to discuss it. But in my mind, “badass” is a term that connotes several qualities. The first (and most positive) is taking no shit. I have no arguments with this particular characteristic. I enjoy characters who don’t allow people to push them around or talk down to them, and I have definitely turned to the assertiveness of fictional people for inspiration when my own natural spring of assertiveness has run dry. (Which it does pretty quickly. I’m working on it.)

However, based on my purely anecdotal observations, I think that the aforementioned assertiveness is often conflated with stoicism when people talk about badass characters. Now, obviously the degree to which a character does or does not wear their heart on their sleeve varies. Some characters play things closer to the vest than others. I certainly don’t expect every character to be as overtly emotional as, say, I am. But I think the designation of badass often imbues stoicism with a positive or aspirational connotation, when it’s actually at best a neutral trait and at worst a sign of repressed emotions. In fact, I’ve taken several of my characters on a journey from Don’t Show Emotions to Feel Your Feelings as they learn to deal with the hardships in their lives in healthier, more honest ways. That doesn’t mean that they’re widely broadcasting their every emotion; they’re just not hiding them as much as they used to.

The most obvious potential problem with badassery is its association with violence. Here’s where, like, every character ever played by Bruce Willis comes in. (I honestly have seen very few movies with Bruce Willis, but don’t @ me, I’m still right.) Many characters are declared badasses specifically because of their ability to fight and/or use weapons better than anyone else around them. There is a Very Obvious issue of toxic masculinity here; I imagine the Venn diagram of “male characters most frequently called badasses” and “male characters I would never invite over for lunch” has a significant amount of overlap. But as a fantasy and scifi fan, I actually think there’s a lot more to unpack here. Those genres fairly frequently feature large-scale physical violence, so there are potentially many characters who know their way around a sword/bow/laser blaster/whatever. When these weapons-friendly characters, male or female, are also assertive and/or stoic (particularly if their assertiveness and stoicism comes with a side of sarcasm or general prickliness), they are almost automatically dubbed badasses.

I think this does them a disservice. I think the term “badass” establishes a set of expectations for the reader/viewer, and any behaviors or traits that fall outside of these expectations can wind up being written off as a “weakening” of the character. I saw an example of this in the comments of one of the many, many articles I read about Avengers: Infinity War after I saw it. More than one commenter was annoyed with the character Gamora’s emotionality in the movie. To be as spoiler-light as possible, Gamora, who ticks all of the boxes I listed above, spends a decent amount of her screen time in Infinity War visibly upset. She even cries. To these commenters, these emotional reactions were a disservice to the character and made her less badass.

Now, if you’ve seen the movie and you know me, you may guess that I have some opinions about Gamora’s arc. But it had honestly never occurred to me to read her emotional reactions as a diminishing of the strength she has in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies (which have skyrocketed to the top tier of my favorite Marvel movies). I mean, in Infinity War, Gamora has kind of a lot to be upset about??? And I personally am much more moved by characters honestly experiencing their emotions than by them trying to suppress them. Plus, Gamora has always been more than just a badass, even if she does fulfill my criteria. The stoicism category is the most interesting in this case, because it is the one that sees the most over the course of the three MCU movies Gamora has been in. One of my favorite moments in Infinity War is the introduction of the Guardians, when Gamora is lip syncing to Quill’s music. She never would have done that in the first movie. She doesn’t have to hide what she’s feeling, positive or negative, anymore, so when the moment calls for some raw emotion — as several moments in IW do — she is at least able to express it.

Of course, there are many conversations and probably an academic monograph to be had about agency in the MCU, but my specific point here is that I don’t think that agency and emotionality need to be inversely proportional. Of course, when we’re talking about female characters, there may well be concerns with the former, but that doesn’t mean that writers should eschew the latter to make up for that. Female characters also seem to be the first to come under fire for perceived emotional weakness, as well. I understand that some of the criticism comes from, you know, centuries of women being perceived as “the weaker sex,” and consequently centuries of female characters genuinely displaying less emotional fortitude than their male counterparts. As a woman myself, though, my argument with this paradigm is not that women actually don’t have intense emotions; instead, I’d argue that having intense emotions is HUMAN, you can be emotional and resilient at the same time, and maybe more dudes should try admitting to the presence of a feeling other than anger once in a while. I mean, I’ve seen people criticize Hermione Granger for crying too much in Harry Potter — again, there are conversations to be had about her arc versus the male characters’, BUT MY GOD, do you know how much on-page crying there would be if someone documented my ages 11 through 17?

My philosophical objection to The Badass is probably clear by now. I dislike narratives that punish or dismiss emotion. For male characters, The Badass all too frequently upholds elements of toxic masculinity. For female characters, The Badass can comes across with a kind of not-like-other-girls defensiveness. (I don’t know enough nonbinary characters to make a sweeping generalization about their portrayals vis-a-vis badassery.) But philosophy aside, I artistically object to the category of “badass” simply because it’s boring. It’s flattening. I have characters who don’t take shit, who are varying degrees of stoic, and who are violent, but I wouldn’t call them badasses, because that would paint a picture in people’s mind. If someone describes a character as badass to me, for better or for worse, I feel like I know what to expect. I don’t want people to feel like they know what to expect from my characters at all!

So perhaps, as media consumers and media creators, we can describe the characters we love a little more specifically, paying attention to the times when they surprise us the most. And if something bad happens to them, don’t expect them not to weep. It’s what they do after they weep that matters.

Glory

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Almost all the snow in my backyard has melted. We might get more on Monday, but I’m pretending that we won’t. I’m sitting in a quiet yellow room, waiting for life to start blooming again.

I finally managed to see A Wrinkle in Time, and I predictably loved it. It wore its heart right on its fancy, shiny, sparkly sleeve, and it didn’t feel self-conscious about it at all. I respect and admire that about any type of art. I can’t really speak to it as an adaptation, because I don’t quite remember the book well enough to do so, but as a movie for children and people who are not afraid of Big Feelings, I found it very successful.

Blooming is, I think, a good word for A Wrinkle in Time. Colors open up and spill out across the screen, music crescendos, hope turns its face towards the sun. Or, you know, towards Oprah. Though my dear Claire wondered if she would feel, as she perfectly and delightfully put it, Oprah-whelmed by Mrs. Which, we both agreed that all of the gloriously decked out celestial guides were perfect for both Meg and the viewers. Mrs. Which especially isso gentle in her power. Gentleness is an awfully underrated quality. It provides rich soil for seeds of hope to hide in when they’re not quite ready to grow.

Meg herself is not quite ready to grow for much of the movie. This movie is not remotely subtle, but Storm Reid’s acting is. Even though a lot of emotions wind up baldly (and I’ll admit occasionally jarringly) stated in the dialogue, Ms. Reid conveys a whole host of unsaid things, as well. She conveys Meg’s sense of isolation, of smallness, within the tension in her shoulders and the slight frown on her face. Meg, of course, is not small, but fear is a diminishing state, and Meg has existed in that state for a long time. She fears that she is unworthy and unlovable, and so she doesn’t look up or out, in case she finds evidence that she is right.

But her story makes her look up and look out and look within. In all directions, she sees the universe, and that universe, the movie insists, is glorious. The universe doesn’t care if you think it’s too sentimental or showy in its beauty. The splendor of existence won’t mind if you think it’s a try-hard. It will be as vast and spectacular as it naturally is, and it will make room for even the smallest, most frightened girl to be vast and spectacular, too. Because she is. Because she always was.

It’s spring, and there may be more snow coming, but it’s time to bloom anyway — gentle and powerful, hopeful and huge.

Not Too Much To Ask; Or, Kathleen Will Never Shut Up About Les Mis

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I did not actually have any ideas for this month’s blog, so Anna suggested I write about my ideas for how I would do a Les Mis miniseries, because she has known me for 900 years and has spent 850 of them listening to me talk about Les Mis. For those of you about to check out of this post, I beg you to bear with me! Talking about Les Mis is also talking about LIFE ITSELF, so if you’re on this blog, you apparently have at least a passing interest in my thoughts on that topic. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my lifelong love affair with this story, here are the main points you need to know:

  • I saw the musical when I was 10 and understood most of it, immediately started reading the book and understood very little of it, put it aside until I was 12, still understood not a lot, but finished it and loved it anyway. I’ve read it a bunch of times since then (well, not the Waterloo tangent). My first copy literally ripped in half. I care about precisely three (3) 19th century novels, and somehow this 1400 page Romantic monstrosity is one of them.
  • Also the musical is just my whole life. I memorized the soundtrack immediately, and then my mom had to explain way more than she had intended because she had to beg me to please not sing certain lyrics in public. This was, you’ll note, entirely her fault for taking me to see it, even though somehow MPAA ratings were Law in our household. (Uh, except when I semi-conned her into letting me see Trainspotting when I was a freshman in high school.) (In hindsight, my bad.) (Look, I was really into Ewan McGregor.)
  • It is a scientific fact that, compositionally, I am 87% Les Mis opinions by volume.
  • A new BBC miniseries is being made! http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2018/les-miserables-casting

So obviously, in the background of my mind at any given time until this miniseries happens, I am running through all my hopes and dreams for this adaptation. My mom asked me who I would watch it with, and I answered, “I don’t think anyone would want to do that.” I’m an adaptation grinch by nature, but I also saw the musical movie three times in theaters (I know), so what I’m saying is that if anyone does wind up watching this miniseries with me, they should know they’re going to be in for six hours of alternating crying and yelling.

I am trying not to have preemptive opinions about the miniseries, though I do wish Davies would stop talking smack about the musical. Like, bro, I get that it’s probably annoying that people keep asking you about a different adaptation, but surely you realize that a bunch of people who care about the book got there by way of the musical, so perhaps cool it with the “shoddy farrago” remarks. But based on the cast members whose work I’m familiar with, I’m optimistic about the performances. (I am obviously obsessively checking IMDB until the full cast is on there. They have a Favourite now! That’s neat. She definitely doesn’t get to be in a whole lot of adaptations. But also where is my favorite?? RELEASE THE FULL LIST.)

But while I may not have preemptive opinions, I sure do have a wish list. Obviously, a significant part of this list is just all my favorite scenes, word for word (surely not much to ask in … six hours. Hmm.)(But listen, I’ll forgive almost anything for a phenomenal Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk) (RELEASE THE FULL CAAAAAAST LIIIIIST). I also have some big ticket items, as well, which are as follows:

  • First and foremost, please do not make this a Dark Muddy Colored Period Piece Of Sadness. I mean, it is a period piece of sadness — consider the title — but it’s also Romantic. Hugo went hard for symbolic light motifs, and the miniseries should, too. (Dare I mention the musical? Because, listen, nothing guts me quite like the Bright White Spotlight Of Sanctified Death. Take notes, Davies.) I want alllll kinds of light in this thing. Bright light, soft light, golden light, light like halos around specific characters’ heads at the appropriate moments, light seeming to emanate from their very faces. Don’t feel the need to be subtle; Hugo sure didn’t.
    • To whit: “God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a human being is to make her transparent.”
    • And: “Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn.”
  • This probably seems contradictory following Intense Light Symbolism, but I also want the miniseries to be super relatable. Like, sure, everyone’s kinda Jesus, but also they’re people living their lives that they would prefer (but generally don’t get to) keep living. I’m going to need the props and set design to provide tomes of information about everyone, especially if we see them in intimate spaces. The progression of Fantine’s rooms as they slowly shed belongings should be devastating. What small, pretty things will disappear first? Will they look like the small, pretty things that Cosette later places in her room? (They should.) I want to see characters pause mid-sentence to smile at a cat that walks by. I want to see them yawn at nighttime and catch glasses that they’ve upset right before they spill. I want nervous tics and “you weirdo” looks and startled smiles.
    • So putting those two thoughts together, I want the viewer to be able to look at any given character and have a moment where they say, “Same.” And then when that character has a moment of being kinda Jesus, the viewer can then think, “Wait, so then am I kinda Jesus?”
      • Yes.
  • I’m going to need this miniseries to be overtly, inescapably, relevantly political. Quoth Hugo, from the introductory note of his own damn book: “so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be need for books such as this.” There’s, um, kind of a lot of that going around. I do not want anyone to be able to walk away from this miniseries and think, “Gosh, things sure were rough in 19th century France,” and have that be the end of it.
    • This is one of my issues with the movie musical, actually. The musical itself can fluctuate in how confrontational it is about its politics depending on the production, and the movie version sadly dialed it down with certain choices. Example lyric change: “And the winter is coming on fast, ready to kill” became “And the plague is coming on fast, ready to kill.” Plague theoretically could kill anyone. Winter only kills the poor.
    • Listen: one of the most important and least comfortable thesis statements of this book is that injustice on a systemic level precludes morality on a personal level. Jean Valjean must break his parole to be a better person. He can’t follow the law, because the law won’t let him be a good person under the ridiculous restrictions of his parole. He also needs cash dollars. Or, you know, semi-stolen silver. (Another infuriating lyric change from the movie musical: there, the bishop says “I have saved your soul for God” instead of “I have bought your soul for God.” No! It’s bought! It has to be bought, because his soul can’t be saved without the material means the bishop provides. That shouldn’t be true! But it is.)
      • Basically, you don’t get to care about JVJ and be okay with literally anything about our judicial system. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. I want this miniseries to make you ask, “Wait, would it be easier for released convicts to live moral lives if they break their own paroles and assume new identities, too?” And then I want it to answer, “Yep.” And then, “Do something about it.”
        • Also: Do something about how women like Fantine are chewed up and spit out, because she’s definitely kinda Jesus, didn’t you see her symbolic halo? Do something for the girls like Eponine. They’re still here; they’re called trashy. But she hums when she looks in the mirror, and so do you, and so do they. Do something for the protesters, the revolutionaries. Not just the calm ones. The desperate, furious ones. They’re illuminated by the dawn.

So that’s what I need: big soul, big themes, small dear fragile human people. Transcendent beauty, fury, and love. Time and space collapsed, no distance at all between characters and audience. But really, isn’t that what I want of all fiction, all the time? It’s certainly what I try to do, even though my fantasy stories for kids and teenagers are, to put it lightly, pretty damn different from the Brick. But scratch the surface, and it becomes obvious that I imprinted on Les Mis as an earnest preteen duckling. As I always do when I read the book or watch and listen to the musical, I want my readers to think:

They’re just like me.

They’re holy.

I’m holy.

I will help all the holy people. I will make them transparent.

 

Born to Study

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The first time I wrote a paper for fun, I was in eighth grade. Actually, I wrote three. They were “character analysis” essays that I wrote to share with one of my friends, who had read the existing Harry Potter books on my request (by request, read “incessant badgering”) and found, to my delight, that she loved them as much as I did. I’m pretty sure I have the very first one I wrote (“Ron Ponderings”) in my bin of weird-mementos-I-should-probably-throw-away-but-won’t. Everything that I can remember about it fills me with the indulgent fondness with which I believe we should all regard our past selves. I remember my rush of excitement as I began to type out my thoughts into a daringly iconoclastic form (i.e., not a five-paragraph essay). All of the things I did in school were things I could do on my own, except about things I liked.

Two years later, an English teacher irritated me by making disparaging comments about both children’s lit and fantasy. (Side note: did anyone else run into this attitude in high school? I could never understand why someone would want to teach teenagers yet hold such contempt for the things they liked to read.) So when the opportunity for an extra credit assignment came up, I did the only logical thing and wrote nine essays. Three were about Lord of the Rings, three about the Prydain Chronicles, and three again about Harry Potter. My intended point was that children’s literature and fantasy had just as much depth as ~classics, because I have never changed even once in my entire life. I’m 99% sure that this teacher didn’t read a single word of the essays, but he did give his unbearable student the extra credit.

To me, creative and academic thought are the intertwined trunks of a beautiful old tree. When I am sad and weary, I can wedge myself between them and take shelter in the hollow space within, taking shelter as I make sense of the world once more through stories and theories. When I am excited and sure of myself, I can climb to the highest branches, supported by the words and ideas of those who came before me. At those times, I am sure that I, too, can make this tree grow.

All of this is to say that I’m pretty damn sure I made a good decision when I applied for PhD programs. And I am so happy and grateful and excited to say that the work I put into getting to this point has paid off: in the fall, I will begin pursuing my doctorate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University.

You better believe that some jumping up and down and screaming greeted that email.

Meanwhile, my first published paper is due to appear very soon in University of Toronto Quarterly’s special edition on monster studies. (I signed my author agreement and everything! There’s an introduction that refers to “Kellett’s argument”!) I’ll also be presenting at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and Children’s Literature Association conference (about Orphan Black and Six of Crows, respectively — still writing about things I like!). I’m 100% convinced that every paper I write and class I take makes my novels stronger, and that they in turn sharpen my academic analyses.

So the best future I can imagine for myself is to never, ever stop doing either.

 

A Misbegotten New Year

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It’s New Year’s Eve! I don’t have a thing that I want to say about 2017 other than, perhaps, “don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” so for my twelfth and final blog post of the year (resolution achieved!), I wrote a little scene for my dear friends who know the characters of MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES. If you don’t know these characters, I hope you likethe scene as well, though it’ll likely be a bit confusing, just because I didn’t want to spoil many details from the book. This is a little prequel scene from around eight or nine months before the story starts, actually, and the protagonist of MC isn’t actually in it (sorry, Millie). Instead, it’s told from the POV of Rosie, by special request (which delights me for a number of reasons, not least of all because Rosie is ridiculously fun to write). This got longer than I intended, just like the last post of 2016, which was a vignette about characters from THE CHILDREN’S WAR. So like that, I’m going to put this behind a cut. If you decide to read, I hope you enjoy it! Maybe I’ll make this a New Year’s Eve tradition!

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all take 2018 by storm.

Continue reading A Misbegotten New Year →

What in me is dark illumine

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Alas, I missed my self-imposed monthly blogging deadline again! In my slight defense, I currently work from home and have completely lost track of the date? Also, it is December, a time for abandoning last year’s New Year’s resolutions and wallowing in seasonal blah. At least for me, anyway. I’m always at my lowest ebb of energy and creativity at this time of the year, which never fails to be frustrating. But instead of despondently flailing around about it (I’ve done enough of that already), I’m going to devote this belated blog post to ten things I found inspiring in 2017. I may not be happy with the quality or volume of work I’m currently producing, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be once the days start getting longer again and my brain remembers that it is not, in fact, a hibernating frog. In the meantime, I’ll use this list to help fuel the little flame I’ve still got burning against the dark.

The Six of Crows duology by Leigh Bardugo: I’m going in relative chronological order of things I experienced this year, and I received the first one of these last Christmas. Not only were they fast-paced and fun (heists! schemes!), they were also a master class in multiple POVs and un-self-aware characters, which are highly relevant to my interests. I love characters who get in their own way, especially when they do so without even realizing it. That’s not always the easiest thing to write, though! In order for the reader to understand more about the character than the actual character does, you have to walk a very fine tightrope (which, incidentally, one of the characters in these books can literally do) of revealing and withholding emotional information. Leigh Bardugo does so beautifully, and I’ll definitely be returning to those books when I need my own characters to be complete human disasters (so, like, 90% of the time).

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts: I attended this conference for the first time in March. There, I made the decision to apply to PhD programs. Though I won’t find out the results of that decision for a few months yet, I clearly can’t deny that the conference itself falls under the heading of “inspiring”! I loved being surrounded by enthusiastic scholarly types so much that I finally realized that I always want to be surrounded by enthusiastic scholarly types. I only spent, like, 35% of the time as a complete nervous wreck (as opposed to my usual conference rate of around 85%), because everyone I met was so encouraging and friendly. I’m super excited to be going back again in March, particularly because the theme is Frankenstein Bicentennial and I’m going to be presenting a paper about Orphan Black. Speaking of which . . .

Orphan Black, created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett: This series ended earlier this year, and I literally wept tears of joy during the finale. I don’t think I’ve actually ever done that because of a piece of fiction? I’ve certainly cried because of fiction many, many times, but usually because a character just died or something, not because I was just so damn overwhelmed by the love shared by everyone. I don’t know about any of you, but in 2017, I really needed a triumphant conclusion to the story of a bunch of difficult, fumbling, wronged, brilliant women who love each other and therefore themselves, and Orphan Black thankfully delivered. Also, at this point it surely goes without saying, but if you enjoy the art of acting even a tiny bit, you will love Tatiana Maslany and despair.

Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar: This inspiration was scattered throughout the year due to this show’s nonsense schedule, but my god am I blown away every time Cartoon Network deigns to drop another Steven bomb. This show inspires me not only as a writer but also as a person. I want to approach grief, loneliness, and fear with as much grace, compassion, and gentle good humor as Rebecca Sugar’s extraordinary story does, both in my art and in my life.

Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner: This book (and the Queen’s Thief series in general) is such a ridiculous technical achievement in point of view, world building, and never wasting a single solitary word. How?? How does she do this?? Well, part of the answer to that question is that she takes a really long time, because I waited seven years for this book, but it was so worth it. When I’m revising, I honestly should just line these books up in front of me, but then I might feel too Judged, because they really are almost supernaturally well crafted. Also, I have never been quite as personally called out by a book as I was when the narrator sheepishly admits how much he dislikes being “unappreciated” for his intellectual interests and talents. I MEAN. Seriously, Megan Whalen Turner, what did I ever do to you to warrant this attack?

My students: I taught so many great kids this year, and I am so grateful for the privilege. Highlights included sharing good-natured jokes about the absurdities of grammar with a student who struggled with the material but tried extremely hard, reading 1400 words (!) about hyenas from an 8-year-old, reading two genuinely excellent ghost stories from students of the same age, and listening to an earnest high school student yearn for tickets to Book Con for her birthday. Developing my love of teaching over the past year has made the pieces of my life feel like they are finally fitting together.

Jane Unlimited by Kristin Cashore: This is another book that blew my mind with the intricacy of its plotting. Each part of this book was so richly detailed, and I don’t know a whole lot of authors who can play with like five genres at once. Also, I was delighted to recognize a setting stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, which was next door to the grad school that the author and I both attended. (I wrote a large portion of my Master’s thesis in that museum!) This book just felt like such a labor of love, and it reminded me of a time when I was engaged in a bunch of labors of love, so it was just an all-around wonderful reading experience.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, created by Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna: This show is so smart and funny and genuinely ground-breaking. I currently have one of its songs stuck in my head. It can be difficult to allow characters to make huge mistakes and hurt people while still keeping the audience understanding and rooting for them, but this show manages to do so by maintaining such a deep well of compassion for its characters (particularly its protagonist) even (or especially) at their lowest moments. Meanwhile, it also has club songs about going to the zoo, Fosse-esque stripteases with embedded Harry Potter references about being morally unscrupulous, and big Broadway “I Want” songs about mental health diagnoses. If I ever find myself wondering “is this too weird too pull off” in a story, I’ll definitely turn to this show for inspiration to just go for it.

The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor: I saw this last week and loved it desperately. Monster love stories are the best/only love stories. Aside from just deriving inspiration from all monsters all the time, I also felt very trusted as an audience member when watching this movie. It knew I would follow where it was going, and it didn’t need to drag me there. I kind of love a story that just says, “Listen, you’re either all in or not, it’s up to you.” There’s no need to convince people to love your monsters; they either will or won’t, and if they won’t, who needs ’em? 

Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Manhattan: I visited this church for the first time last week, and I fell completely in love. It was an explicitly American cathedral (and as such, it had chapels dedicated to immigrant groups and a sign outside welcoming all regardless of documentation), and I completely connected with the intermingled artistic styles, old and new, built right into the rising, arching bones of the sprawling building. There were small things there, too: someone had left the tiniest pink flowers on many of the chapel altars, and they were as beautiful to me as the stained glass. My visit reminded me that so many of the people who share my country are striving to live out grand and sweeping ideals in a million quiet little ways. The people who want to create beauty may not always be as powerful as the ones who only want to create their own wealth or wars, but we’ll always outnumber them.