Ditmar Time!

I know! 2010. But so beautiful!

It's that time again. Time to nominate your favourite Aussie artists and writers, so that one in each category can go up on the platform at this year's National Convention, Continuum, to collect the award that's our answer to the Hugos.

Anyone active in fandom can nominate. You don't have to be a member of this year's natcon to nominate, only to vote. Active in fandom doesn't mean you have to have been on a con committee or anything that exhausting. It's enough to have gone to last year's natcon or even be in a club, probably even to know someone who does the exhausting stuff and have them vouch for you.

This isn't a matter of vanity. Well, not completely. :-) If you're even on the short list, more of your books sell if you're a writer, you have a better chance to sell your work, whether it's art or fiction or articles. You're taken more seriously by the SF community and the publishers.

Then you can create some more!

I have three stories out or due out this year, so they will be eligible next year. My novel, alas, is no longer eligible, having come out December 2010, but this blog is eligible for the fan awards under "body of work". If you enjoy it, please nominate it!

Whether or not you nominate the Great Raven, why not check out the list of eligibles in all categories and contribute to Australian spec fic creativity? Your nomination may make all the difference between someone being on the short list or just missing out.  And there's some great stuff on the list, from YA from the big publishers to exciting small press anthologies.

 Here's a link to the nomination form: : http://ditmars.sf.org.au/2012/nominations.html and here is the Wikipedia entry on this year's eligibles: http://wiki.sf.org.au/2012_Ditmar_eligibility_list. It might be better to look at an official list, but this one doesn't claim to be exhaustive or official, just convenient.

 Nominate NOW! Then you can relax, secure in the knowledge that you have done a good deed and supported Aussie writing and art.

Kelly Dillon on Mythologies: Valkyries as Barmaids

Kelly Dillon’s contribution to Mythic Resonance was a tale of abuse. Who was abused? The Valkyries, those warrior maids – and barmaids! – of Norse mythology – and yes, that business about Valkyries as servants in Valhalla is absolutely right. Imagine what it would be like to drag some hero off the battlefield and then have to be his waitress for all eternity! And, as Kelly suggests, not all these heroes would have been Siegfrieds. All the gods would have wanted to help them out on the last day was "strong and willing to fight". Louts, in other words.

If your only experience of the daughters of Odin is Wagner, take a look at Kelly’s story and think again. There's a link to the Mythic Resonance samples above. Meanwhile, let Kelly tell you about her story herself.

I've often had my head stuck in the past, usually more so than was good for me.  For the most part it's been the myths that have enthralled me, and I've felt envious of these ancient peoples for whom the world was a much more interesting place.  We have our own modern 'urban myths', but the term has become almost synonymous with fictions that only the very gullible would believe.  And in those stories there are usually only victims, no heroes. 

 We may have proven it was round, but when did the world become so flat?

 Yet these old stories must still sing to us, to some part of our buried psyche, or they would not have endured for so long.  Speak to anyone and they will know of Pandora, of Medusa and the great Norse gods who step between worlds.  There is something in our blood that needs myths, even if our modern sensibilities compel us to chuckle afterwards and say, "Oh how quaint".

 I wasn't quite willing to let it go at that.  I spent years at university studying history, archaeology and then Egyptology, always with a focus on the myths.  I began writing, re-telling, trying to make them more accessible.  Most of my short stories now fall firmly within the category of mythic fiction and range from the well-known Grecian to the significantly more obscure 'Popol Vuh' of the Mayans. 

 Sometimes I bring the stories into modern times: What is Prometheus doing now?  (Find out in 'Spirit Legends: Of Ghosts and Gods')  Or what would happen to a modern father who made an Orphaic descent into Hades in search of a lost son? 

Other times I enjoy taking the original and twisting it, just ever so slightly, until something that was once familiar becomes a new story with a different purpose.

Such was the case with the story that was accepted for the' Mythic Resonance' anthology.

 'In Paradise, Trapped' exists within Norse mythology where Valkyries ride the skies above battlefields and the gods fear their deaths with the coming of Ragnarok.  It's a fortuitous time for a story of its origins to be in print, with the release of 'Thor' ensuring that anyone who has seen the movie with a passing interest in mythology will now know of the nine worlds of the Nordic universe and the Bifrost rainbow bridge that connects them.  They may even be familiar with some of the words, such as Yggdrasil, Midgard and Mjolnir, although how to pronounce them is a different kettle of fish. 

In this universe it is known that quasi-angelic female warriors called Valkyries collect the souls of heroic men who have died on the fields of war and usher them into an afterlife of paradise within Valhalla to stand ready for the final battle at Ragnarok.  As such, modern culture has glorified them until they are considered nearly goddesses in their own right.  However, this was not always the case.  Old images exist of the Valkyries within the halls of Valhalla, after their brief task upon the earth, acting as servants.  In fact, one of the names by which they used to be known was "Odin's Maids".   The dichotomy of it struck me; that beings of such perceived power could in fact be bereft  of it where it mattered the most, in their own homes.  What would the lives of the Valkyries really be like and would they be content with it? 

The overwhelming answer, as it occurred to me, was 'No!'

 In this way, 'In Paradise, Trapped' evolved into something of a story of domestic abuse - a perspective that is unfortunately still extremely relevant in modern times.  It is set at the tipping point between being unable to bear any more and deciding to do something about it, regardless of the consequences.  The protagonist is uncompromising not due to a flaw in her nature, but by having being driven to a point where any action is better than none, and any decision is preferable to spending time weighing options.  It's a clarity of resolution that will resonate with any person who has ever found themselves in a desperate situation.

 And that's the purpose of myths in the end - to show us facets of ourselves.  Whether they're heroes or martyrs, questers or sages, we can all relate in some measure to the archetypes of humanity.  We should openly celebrate our myths, for they have been with us from before we lived in caves and will exist long after we've pushed to the stars.

Kelly Dillon is a sci-fi fan and self-confessed geek.  She is an Archaeology graduate with a Masters specialisation in Egyptology, which encouraged a strong interest in ancient cultures and a tendency to see our own civilisation from an atypical point of view.  This has resulted in her writing often focusing on the theme of sacrifice and the grey areas within morality.  She has been published twice before in anthologies and is currently hoping to publish a novel dealing with the Nephilim and fall of angels.  In her lighter moments she works on a comedy based on the drunken adventures of a not-very-angelic angel as he attempts to avoid his heavenly duties.

SUE: Kelly is too modest to include any links, but while I was trying to find a picture of her on-line or at least a book cover, I found some of her published fiction on-line. I hope she won’t mind my including this link to Residential Aliens, but there are several samples of her work on this web site and the story I’ve linked to is about the kind of ball game they played in ancient American civilizations where the losing team ended up sacrificed to the gods. Go check it out!


Postscript: I forgot that Kelly had sent me a photo of herself. Here's a pic of her being very Valkyriesque, without the barmaid thing!

New SF Bookshop Opens In Melbourne!

Chuck McKenzie, that writer and bookshop proprietor and very funny man, is opening a new spec fic bookshop in Chelsea, a bayside suburb of Melbourne. The official opening of Notions Unlimited bookshop is this afternoon, March 17, from 4-7 pm. It's Shop 9, 426 Nepean Highway, Chelsea, so if you're in Melbourne today, why not come along? I'll be there, can't wait to see it. There are just not enough SF shops around and those that are deserve our support, especially the small businesses. And Chuck is such a very funny man... I'll take pics and report back.

The Enhanced Hobbit: What I'm Reading This Morning

Ah, the joys of ebooks! Okay, I'd rather curl up in bed with a paper book. But while I have several editions of The Hobbit, including the annotated edition and the hard-to-find Michael Hague one, none of them can do what this one does. In the first chapter, as Bilbo runs around in a panic, the Dwarves grab up the dishes to wash and sing a teasing song about how they're going to smash the lot. This scene is always wonderful, of course, but in this edition, you press Play and J.R.R. Tolkien sings it for you! There are three of these special moments in the book. There are also all the original illoes - remember, not all of his art made it into every edition. There's one that,for a long time, was only in the US edition. The line drawings are in colour, but if you prefer them as they were, just wave a hand over the page and voila! Back to black and white. All the maps are there too. This cost me just under $10 on iBooks. Now, excuse me, I'm going back to my book and have the Professor sing for me again.

Les Zigomanis On The Fairy Tale Of Publication

"Once upon a time there was a gifted young writer. She wrote a brilliant novel and submitted it to an agent, who got a bidding war going. Sixty publishers battled for the right to publish it. She was paid a huge advance and the book sold in the millions. She was invited to speak at every writer’s festival on the planet and was interviewed by Oprah. She lived happily ever after."

Well, it's nice to fantasise...

This is a new kind of fairy tale that doesn’t have a fairy godmother to wave a wand for you. Les Zigomanis, in his contribution to Mythic Resonance,"A Tale of Publication", writes of a would-be bestselling novelist for whom fairy tales aren’t real.

Take it away, Les!

When I was a goofy teenager (a longish time ago), I thought becoming a writer would inevitably translate into fame and success – probably because I was always reading best-selling authors at the time who were famous and successful.  But as I got older and became better acquainted with publishing, I learned the fairy tale of that notion, (although, obviously, it still does happen, so we can always live in hope).

"A Tale of Publication" was originally conceived as a school project years ago when I was studying Professional Writing & Editing.  I had the task of following the life of a book, from conception to publication, and initially drew up a flow chart.  Since I really didn’t like the idea of something just dry and straightforward, I created The Writer to take us through the journey.

He nurtured a lot of my initial attitudes – although I soon discovered they weren’t just my attitudes.  There were a lot of younger writers studying in the same Course I was who really believed they were going to become the next Stephanie Meyer.  It was a foregone conclusion to them.  It must be a rite of passage for writers to begin their writing-life deluded.   (You have to admire the aspiration, though.)

The original flow chart employed self-contained anecdotes, and I used a lot of my experiences (evil wife aside) as the basis for what happened, (right down to the toner running out of ink).  I saw, however, that the chart worked like an outline for a story.  It was the framework.  So I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote, until it had turned into a fully-fledged story.

Throughout, I tried to keep that fairy tale element.  It’s also the reason I thought it’d fit Mythic Resonance.  I think a lot (well, I hope a lot) of writers will be able to empathise with the frustrations The Writer experiences, but I also hope it’d be entertaining for people who have no knowledge about the industry.

Now I’m off to work on my best-seller …

Les Zigomanis is a freelance writer/editor (http://www.leszig.com/), and the chief editor of the annual fiction anthology, [untitled] (http://www.untitledonline.com.au/).  He’s had stories and articles published in a variety of journals, etc., and also had a couple of screenplays optioned in a past life.

Nigel Read On Fairies and Folklore

Today’s guest post is by Nigel Read. Nigel has had stories published in quite a few magazines and anthologies. It’s true he had some fiction in Andromeda Spaceways; what he doesn’t mention in his bio is that he was at one time a member of the co-operative – before me, actually – edited an issue and wrote the official ASIM jingle, which you can read on the web site.

When he isn’t writing jingles for funny science fiction magazines, Nigel is a lover of folklore. I know quite a bit about folklore myself, having written a book about monsters for children and agree that, as he says, fairies are not beautiful beings. Unless, of course, they're strong forest fairies who fall for the local blacksmith...

Nigel’s Mythic Resonance story, “Holly And Iron”, tells of the romance between an artistic blacksmith and a lovely, decent fairy lady. I found this intriguing, given that the Good Neighbours tend to be allergic to iron; his heroine is, but the couple manage anyway.

Nigel will tell you all about it. Welcome to the great Raven, Nigel!

 About the story:

"Holly and Iron" was motivated by a story of the same name by Garth Nix, in the Dark Alchemy anthology. Garth's story of a culture clash between Norman and Briton, between iron magic and the magics of holly and rowan, really bugged me. I suspect it was the historical re-enactor in me that couldn't stand the casual mashing together of different time-periods and different English legends. It was silly, really -- Garth is an accomplished author, and the story received decent reviews. Nevertheless, I determined to write a cleaner story of mythical culture clash; with magic, but of a subtler nature than most fantasy. Of course, like all stories, the initial inspiration got derailed. I think I read McKillip's The Forgotten Beast of Eld around that time, and without realising it my story drifted away from 'culture clash' to 'love story'. In hindsight, I don't mind that much. On a personal level, I'd much rather marry the exotic woman with the sexy accent, than have to fight her brothers. I guess I'm just a child of multi-cultural Australia! :)

About myths, legends, folk stories and fairy tales:

I love and hate, with equal measure, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I love it, because the writing is clever and wacky. And I hate it, because it takes powerful archetypes from our folk stories -- vampires and werewolves and so on -- and makes them banal. If Buffy was a one-off, it wouldn't be so bad, but it started a trend.

Nowadays, whenever I walk into a bookstore I feel like asking a sales assistant to direct me to the non-vampire section. They're obviously very popular, which isn't a bad thing in itself. But somewhere along the line vampires lost their bite, so to speak. They have become the stuff of teenage girls' fantasies.

It is possible to forget that people once believed that vampires really existed. In the eighteenth century, traditional folk tales about vampires spread out from the Balkans and eastern Europe. Superstitious belief in vampires in western Europe grew into a kind of mass hysteria. There were reported cases of corpses being staked, and of people being accused of vampirism. Now that's a powerful archetype! Add to this the vampire's symbolic role in the socio-political battle between Christianity and the older belief systems, and you have what they call mythic resonance. Vampires aren't sexy. They scare the fucking daylights out of us (at least, done well they do). They are the thing outside your window at night -- the nameless night-thing we all fear, from time to time. They are corruption and death. They are the stuff of nightmares.

As fantasy writers (and readers), I feel like we need to reconnect with these older, less tame versions of things. Elves aren't beautiful, graceful creatures that dispense wisdom -- they're tricksy creatures that steal babies and lure travellers into bogs. Werewolves aren't eco-terrorists -- they're unwelcome reminders of the violent, bestial nature of mankind. Of course, this doesn't mean that every fantasy story also has to be a horror story. They can still have happy endings...

Can't they?

Bio:

Nigel is currently a public servant (boo! hiss!), but has at various times also been an amateur actor, historical re-enactor and writer. He's had stories published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, and various themed anthologies (including Mythic Resonance, of course). His 2004 story, "The Dove", was recommended reading in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection.

Gernrereviews On YA covers - a link

Another great post from this blog, this time about YA book covers. She doesn't pose this time - the theme is all those ball dresses on the covers. Go check it out. http://genrereviews.livejournal.com/384633.html?view=1340537#t1340537

Tomorrow's guest post is...

Tomorrow I will be posting a guest spot by Nigel Read, who wrote "Holly and Iron" for Mythic Resonance. Nigel has some fascinating thoughts on folklore and history. The day after, Les Zigomanis will tell us a Tale Of Publication. There are some more that haven't come in yet, but should be worth waiting for.Keep your eye on this blog!

Paul Freeman on Chaucer, Brothers Grimm and Broomsticks

Paul Freeman’s story in Mythic Resonance is told in verse – actually, Chaucer-style verse, though the words are modern. I have a confession to make: I am a Chaucer fan. Every so often, I make my friends or family cringe by declaiming, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote…”. They usually shut me up before I can get much further.

I’ve checked out Paul’s web site and he really is a Chaucer fan! But Annabel And The Witch adds a touch of Brothers Grimm, but much funnier.

 I’m sure Chaucer would grin broadly. But I’ll let Paul tell you all about it.

Annabel and the Witch – a ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tale!

A while ago I became convinced that to make my mark in the world of writing I needed a facet to my work that was unique to me as an author.

This idea is the driving force behind my ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tales, an ongoing project that fuses the stronger areas of my prose and poetry writing. The result is a series of cross-genre short stories, written in iambic pentameters and rhyming couplets (i.e. Chaucerian style). One of these ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tales is Annabel and the Witch, published this year by Specusphere (mine’s the third excerpt):

http://www.specusphere.com/feature-articles/excerpts-from-mythic-resonance.html

The idea of the ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tales project grew from the Chaucer module I wrote for my M.A. in Creative Writing. Whereas Chaucer’s pilgrims told their stories on the way to Canterbury, I gave them stories to tell on their return journey, keeping the medieval theme.

Annabel and the Witch, my eighth ‘Lost’ Tale (originally attributed to Chaucer’s Prioress) tells the story of Annabel, a poverty-stricken girl living in Windermere during the Middle Ages, who gets kidnapped by a witch.

This is my first ‘fairytale’ Canterbury Tale, and is written as closely as I could manage in the style and tradition of the Brothers Grimm. My little yarn is, I hope, less grim (forgive the pun) and more child-friendly than some of the blood-and-guts laden Brothers Grimm fairytales.

Of my remaining ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tales, several have seen the light of day to some degree, though only one other has been published in its entirety.

In 2009, Coscom Entertainment, a Canadian publisher of horror fiction, commissioned me to write the 100-page narrative poem Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers – A Canterbury Tale by Paul A. Freeman (aka The Monk’s Second Tale):

http://coscomentertainment.com/?p=159

As for my future plans, I’m currently experimenting with different genres in my ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tale project and hope one day to have them published as a collection.

If you want to read more about my varied writing career, click on the link below:

www.paulfreeman.weebly.com

BROTHERS – SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN (TOLKIENESQUE) DWARVES

While I wait for the next guest post to arrive in my cyber-letterbox, here’s what was behind “Brothers”, my story in Mythic Resonance.

I’ve always loved re-told fairy tales anyway. To be honest, Snow White is not my favourite, but after a re-read of Lord of The Rings I started to think about Tolkien’s Dwarves as opposed to Grimm’s dwarfs. Tolkien gave his Dwarves a language, a culture and personalities; every one of them in The Hobbit is a person in his own right. Most of the short folk in Grimm’s fairy tales are presented in a negative way. They’re usually the villains or, if they help a hero or heroine, it’s for totally selfish reasons and the human concerned is considered perfectly entitled to trick them. The little men in Snow White are good guys, but not very interesting. Snow White is passive and keeps falling for the evil queen’s tricks, despite being warned. Then there’s the whole business of the glass coffin and the girl recovering when the poisoned apple comes out of her throat. I mean, come on!

What if, I wondered, the small men, far from being cutesy miners as in both Disney and the Grimm story, were warriors in exile? They would surely protect their charge rather than leaving her to be killed by her stepmother. 

It was only going to work if she was a stronger character; I made her one. I also gave the stepmother a stronger motivation for attempting to kill her than vanity.

I set it in a fictional country, but in our world – there is a brief mention of Shakespeare.

It was after I’d written the story and was checking out the wonderful Surlalune web site recommended by Juliet Marillier that I discovered Snow White was a folk tale with a lot of versions in many different countries including some in Africa!

I guess you can’t keep a good theme down.

Donna Maree Hanson Reflects On Medusa

Donna Maree Hanson is an Australian writer, editor and publisher of speculative fiction, who has been active since 2000. She has sold mainly short fiction, but has also written a book-length overview of Australian speculative fiction (2005).Most recently, her story "Through These Eyes I See" has appeared in Mythic Resonance. It offered a twist on the Medusa myth, in which the heroine heals with a look rather than turning to stone. I thought the mirrors were a particularly nice touch to the story, when you remember the role played by a mirror-polished shield in the original myth – and again it was a twist, as the mirrors protect the heroine rather than the monster-slayer. And personally I have always felt sorry for Medusa anyway.

Welcome to The Great Raven, Donna!

Many thanks to Sue for inviting me along with the rest of the Mythic Resonance crew to guest post on her blog.

When the call came out for Mythic Resonance, an anthology of modern-day takes on ancient legends, I was pretty stumped for an idea. It was a bit of a challenge to think up something new and fresh from something that is so old and so much a part of the modern myth as to be easily recognisable. People have done it but it was a new thing for me.

Then one day I was taking a long walk to visit my mother at the nursing home and , as often happens to me while walking, ideas floated up to the surface. There came to me a vision of the girl in a room full of mirrors, a prisoner of her own gift for healing. To me that legend of a healer or the myth of the healer is something that repeats itself so often as it is so much our own desires to find the obtainable cure. To me that was the core centre of this revisiting of a rather generic myth of a healer.

Initially, the story was rejected because the link between what I was writing and what the anthology desired was tenuous. However I was told that all the readers loved the story. I did not argue with this proposition and accepted it even though to me there was clearly a link but I understood that link was not specific enough. Later the editor wrote to me and asked me for the story back because the editor and his team had established a link. (Obviously they had not forgotten the story).  I then did a little bit of research on the angle of the Medusa myth and how "Through These Eyes I See" used and abused the resonances of that ancient story. Mandy does not kill with a look, she cures. The mirrors help her survive, help her to see as others do. When the modern day Perseus comes, he’s not a hero with altruism pulsing in his breast, but something that Mandy cannot abide to touch or to heal. He’s the representation of exploitation, of corruption, of power...

"Through These Eyes I See" is also about exploitation. Mandy has a gift and others exploit it. There is no joy in her gift for her. Its appearance robbed her of a normal life.  There is no benefit for her.  She is a prisoner of those who are meant to love and protect her.

I'm proud of the story and am really happy that Specusphere published it in this anthology.

If you want to know more about me and my writing I keep a writing blog at:

http://donnamareehanson.wordpress.com

Mary Victoria Interviews The World Tree

In 2010, I was looking forward to the publication of my debut novel, Wolfborn. It was going to be out on time to be launched at the World SF Convention, Aussiecon 4 – and then it wasn’t.  I asked my publishers at  Random House if they would please, please send me something I could take to promote the book and they came through beautifully – posters, bookmarks, sample chapters. I got myself into a signing session and had to flirt with the people in the long queue at the next table. “Free sample? Bookmark?” to get them to wander over while they were waiting for the graphic artist next to me to sign their books. There was a lady at a nearby table, signing like anything – Mary Victoria, who writes this wonderful series set in a giant tree. That’s how we met. When Mythic Resonance came out, although Mary didn’t have a story in it, I thought the theme of a World Tree fitted in perfectly. I’ll let Mary tell you all about it. I’ve just discovered she did some of the animation for Lord of The Rings - wow! A lady of many talents and I’m proud to welcome her to my web site.

The World Tree

  

            I feel like a fraud. When Sue asked me if I’d like to contribute a guest post about the origins of my World Tree in the context of the ‘Mythic Resonance’ release, I knew what I ought to write. What I ought to write, I thought to myself as I sat down at my computer, is a passably intelligent piece about where this idea of a world set in a tree may have come from. I should cite my debt to Norse myth (Yggdrasil, the original world tree, cradling Midguard in its branches,) to Kabbalistic metaphysics (the universe-containing Tree of Life,) and not least to the Japanese film director Hayao Miyazaki, who once put a city in a tree and made it fly, to my great delight. All these sources and many more played their part in forming the idea for the Chronicles of the Tree. If I were a proper thinker and not a total fraud, I would have written that article, made it highly informative and entertaining and included footnotes.

            Alas, I’m not a proper thinker. Or at least, my thinking refuses to come when called, or else comes in silly disguises, doing cartwheels. I was indeed influenced, consciously and subconsciously, by myth, metaphysics and beautiful Japanese animation while writing the Chronicles of the Tree. But I didn’t remember Yggdrasil and say to myself, “hey, that would make a great fantasy setting.” That would be far too logical. I don’t think story ideas come about that way – stories are fickle, promiscuous things. They like to borrow, beg and steal from multiple sources. When you try and make them explain themselves and their antecedents, they refuse to meet your eye. They sidle off, mumbling something about poetic license. They don’t like to be pinned down.

            The truth is, stories, and worlds, often come in the telling. No matter how much meticulous world-building you do in advance, some tales grow organically. Setting influences story, which in turn influences setting. The two are inseparable. Sometimes, the two are one.

            If I had been able to ask my World Tree, back at the start of the writing process, why this story had to happen in a giant tree the size of a mountain range rather than, say, a Medieval-style city state, the conversation would have gone something like this.

AUTHOR: Dear fantasy world, why are you the way you are? Why aren’t you something else?

             TREE: I think I’m quite old enough to be what I am without the likes of you questioning my motives.

            AUTHOR: I’m not questioning your motives. No one is. We just want to know, ‘Why a Tree.’ Couldn’t you be a mountain? You behave a little like a mountain.

            TREE: Well, I’m old…

AUTHOR: (Interrupting) What does that have to do with it? You sound like that poem about Father William. ‘You are old, Father William – ’

            TREE: (offended) All right, I won’t tell you. I won’t say anything at all; I don’t see why I should, if you’re going to be so rude.

            AUTHOR: I’m sorry. I’m sorry: I was being an idiot, the author getting in the way of her idea. Please go on.

TREE: (after a long pause to show how deeply offended she is) As I was saying, I’m old. Centuries – no, millennia old. I’m so old that I’ve grown into a sprawling, continent-sized mass. My trunk is a cliff-face hundreds of miles in circumference. My boughs are gigantic, like mountain ridges. Some of them can support human cities. Except that sometimes, they can’t. I’m so old that I’m growing infirm. My branches are hollow in places. There’s rot, and other problems besides. I’m not immortal: one whole side of me has dried up and died. There’s no more sap flowing there. Do you begin to see how that influences a story?

AUTHOR: Go on.

TREE: My physical condition affects my inhabitants, of course. Everything is made of wood or animal products. Everything depends on me. If I die, those living off my sap and skin will slowly die off too. Add climate change to the mix and you have an ecological disaster in the making. Those living on the dried up east side already have it tough, and it’s getting tougher every day. Perhaps it’s partly their own fault – perhaps it isn’t. But there are haves and have-nots in this world. There are the colonizers and the colonized.

AUTHOR: (retrieving a pen and paper for notes) Now I begin to see. Go on.

TREE: My nature also influences the human cultures that have flourished, and in some cases died out in my branches. People become conditioned by living over a void, high up in the clouds. They develop things like flying hot air balloons pretty quickly. They don’t trust empty space. Some go so far as to outlaw exploration: they become hidebound, or rather bark-bound. They live in rigid theocracies. They’ll destroy anyone who thinks differently. For them, it feels like a matter of survival.

(No answer from the author, who is now scribbling notes furiously.)

TREE:  (softly) But there’s one more thing. You already noticed it, perhaps half-consciously. I’m a woman. I’m worshipped as a feminine deity by these priests. But they’ve forgotten the truth behind all that glib nonsense they keep repeating. God is a tree, and also a woman. God grows, flourishes and eventually dies. Find out the truth behind those symbols. Does your story begin to make sense to you now? Do you see why it had to be a Tree?

AUTHOR: (abject now) I do see. Yes, that makes sense. Perfect sense. Thank you.

TREE: Any time. Now go be a good little author and write.

Mary Victoria was born in 1973 in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Despite this she managed to live most of her life in other places, including Cyprus, Canada, Sierra Leone, France and the UK. She studied art and film and worked as an animator before turning to full time writing. She now lives in Wellington, New Zealand with her husband and daughter.

If you’d like to read more about the Chronicles of The Tree and what Mary is doing right now, her web site is here.

What's Culture Anyway?

I'm lying in bed unable to sleep or even be soothed by a book, so what better to do than post? Yesterday morning, the ESL teacher asked us to get our students to fill in a sheet about themselves, their heritage and how they felt about it, for Harmony Day, which is an annual event we celebrate in our mini-UN of a school. My Year 8 features young men and women from various African and Asian countries, Turkey, Chile, Europe...But for some reason, some of those with an Anglo-Celtic background felt left out. Two boys insisted they had no culture! If we'd been able to start a little earlier I might have been able to convince them otherwise. I would do the research and the flags and finding the information to show them there's a rich culture there. As it was, all I could do was point out to them that Tolkien, at least, had felt differently and had written a whole BOOK to prove it. And if even so very English a thing as fish and chips(as made by Sam Gamgee)began with Russian-Jewish immigrants, all it says is that England is a melting-pot like anywhere else and richer for it. The very language is a melting-pot! But that doesn't say there's no culture. I must do something afterwards while we learn research skills. With books in it somewhere. Pity my oven is still broken or I'd bake some very English things out of The Hobbit for my class. Thanks to a friend in the US I have a wonderful article he found in a magazine years before the Internet, with recipes from "An Unexpected Party". The seed cake is especially nice. You can't get much more English than The Hobbit! Must get that stupid oven fixed these holidays!

First Guest Post: Gillian Polack

Introducing Gillian Polack, writer, mediaeval scholar and all-round fascinating lady. Gillian lives in Canberra and writes, among other things, for book-based web site BiblioBuffet. She blogs on Livejournal and creates menus for historical banquets at the annual Conflux SF conventions. 

And I didn't know you'd turned that Andromeda Spaceways story into a novel, Gillian! Sell it quick so we can all read it!

Meanwhile, enjoy her post, my friends. I admire someone who can use Jewish folklore, which can be very dark, to create a gently humorous story. There are writers who do it beautifully, such as Jane Yolen and Lisa Goldstein, but their stories are not humorous, at least not the ones I've read. Apart from a dybbuk story, sitting unfinished in one of my notebooks, I have never got around to writing anything connected with my own heritage. I may just be inspired to go back and try again.

A few years ago, ASIM published a short story of mine* about a Jewish feminist invoking the king of demons. This was part of a larger project, which is now out in the big world waiting publisher rejections. In this project, I wanted to explore possible Australian Jewish mythologies.

There is an aspect of Australian Jewish culture that is so far removed from Fiddler on the Roof Judaism that they almost belong in different universes. This is the culture of the Jews who migrated (mainly from England, but also from some part of Western Europe) very early in Australia's modern history. The Jews on the First Fleet were of this kind, and the guy Dickens based Fagin on was also of this kind** and so was an eighth of my family. That eighth is a very strong eighth. My family didn't get the Yiddishkeit my father's father could have given, because it was so much easier to adopt the English Jewish tradition that my father's mother's family brought, nearly a century earlier. In fact, one of the reasons I wrote the story (and eventually the novel) was because I wanted an excuse to explore this exuberantly resilient family tradition. I did an academic paper on the family foodways, but that just wasn't enough. I wanted to know what would happen if someone from that side of the family (left wing, social change agents, educated, passionate about committees) somehow ended up with magic.

I also wanted to learn about Jewish magic. Jewish magic is considered special, historically. In the Renaissance, Jewish magicians were thought to be somehow stronger, more connected with the esoteric. I know something about Medieval*** and even Renaissance magic and I thought "What if I extrapolate? What if I bring the Jewish magic systems forward from the fifteenth century and maybe earlier and turn them into an almost-lost family tradition?" The moment I articulated this, I was tempted beyond restraint. I asked difficult questions of a scholarly friend who knows a lot more than me about Jewish cultural history, and I put together a family and the members of that family and I started writing fiction.

And so, in a short story, a Sydney feminist calls forth Ashmodai.

Ashmodai isn't like the Christian Asmodeus. I like telling my Christian friends "Our demons aren't your demons."  Even when they have the same names, they can be very different.

Our demons aren't all bad. Some are very nasty (my learned friend told me that we don't say "Go to hell," we say "Go to so-and-so"****) but they follow much more closely the Medieval notion of angels and demons as all one kind. We didn't have the Fall, so there's no simple dividing line between different beings. We find it harder to define them as good or bad, light or dark. They resemble humans a lot more. I fell in love with my own traditions when I discovered them. It made writing fiction worthwhile for entirely new reasons. There are so many stories to tell about demons and angels who are not like Christian demons and angels.

I regard Ashmodai as the closest thing Judaism has to a trickster god. He's a trickster almost-god who studies Torah and was a friend of Solomon.  He commanded armies and had his own demon realm.  And he had a sense of humour.

Judith meeting Ashmodai was a lot of fun.  I still get occasional emails about that story, asking why she wasn't more scared, or admiring her patience. I now want to sell the novel so that I can write a sequel to find out what happens between the two of them.

*I don't write many short stories, so the fact that Sue read and remembered it impressed the heck out of me.

**Which is why I wince whenever I hear him performed with a Yiddish or Eastern European accent. Ikey Solomon was a Londoner. East End. Probably Sephardi.

***This may possibly be because I am a Medievalist.

****I won't give you the actual demonic name. I don't want you to use it on me! I don't know if I believe in Jewish demons, but they're Jewish and I'm Jewish, so I play safe. It's so much easier to flaunt curses from someone else's tradition.

Celebrating Mythic Resonance

The other day I got my contributor's copy of Mythic Resonance, in which I had a story inspired by Snow White. I've always liked stories with a mythical, legendary or folk tale theme. Years ago, I read a whole lot of books in a fairy tale series, from The Nightingale by Kara Dalkey to one by Charles De Lint in which Jack the Giant Killer is a modern lass called Jackie, who slays her giants in a city of present-day Canada. There was also Tam-Lin by Pamela Dean, based on a Scottish border ballad. I also loved Nicholas Stuart Gray's beautiful The Seventh Swan, a sequel to the fairy tale, which explores what it might be like to be that poor Prince stuck with a wing instead of an arm; it was set in Scotland, a Scotland in which there is magic and creatures from Celtic folklore.

More recently, Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts has played with Selkie folklore and Tender Morsels, which I'm reading now,  is inspired by the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red.

This anthology is full of stories inspired by, but not always actively based on, folk tales and myths.

I thought, in celebration of its release, I'd do something Mary Victoria did with an anthology in which she was published: invite as many of the authors as I could contact and some who were not in it, but who have written folklore/legend-themed fiction, to do a guest post on this web site. So far, I have had acceptances from: Mary Victoria, who will tell us about her universe in which everyone lives in a great World Tree inspired by the one in Norse mythology, Alan Baxter, who wrote a fairy tale about being kidnapped into Faerie and his fairies are not at all nice, something you find out when you read enough folklore, Paul Freeman, who is a major fan of Geoffrey Chaucer and wrote a cheeky narrative poem for Mythic Resonance in Chaucerian-style verse, but fortunately modern English, Donna Maree Hanson, whose contribution to the anthology was a thoughtful, rather sad tale which was a twist on the Medusa myth, set in the present day. Satima Flavell has promised a piece. Her story in MR was an adaptation of John Keats' poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci, not to mention a cheeky reference to a song by Lee Hazlewood, sung by Nancy Sinatra and the composer at one stage. Drat you, Satima, the song is running over and over in my head since I read your story!

 The wonderful Margo Lanagan will be joining us around the end of March, when she comes home from China and gets over her jet lag. ;-)

I'm still asking people and may end up asking the publishers to pass on my invitation to anyone I couldn't find on-line so this will be messier than Mary Victoria's series of posts.

Meanwhile, my very first guest post has come in from Gillian Polack, feminist, mediaeval scholar and fabulous fantasy writer.

Review Policy Update 2

Due to yet another flood of requests and some confusion, I've updated my review policy yet again, to make it clearer what I can and can't take. Basically, if I can't put it on my library shelves immediately I've finished with it, I really don't have time to review it.

Sorry! :-)

An interview with Mark Walden, author of the H.I.V.E series

Hi, Mark! Welcome to The Great Raven and thank you for agreeing to do this interview. I’ve read and reviewed all your books, so this is a great treat! The posts reviewing your books are among the most popular on this web site.

 1. Tell us about yourself – how did a person with your background in games design come to be writing young adult fiction?

Part of the reason that I started writing was down to the fact that I was becoming extremely frustrated with how uncreative the games industry was becoming.  The teams that develop video games are so massive now that it's rare that one person can have very much creative input or control and so I turned to writing as a way to produce something that I had complete creative control over.  It might make me sound a bit ego-maniacal (which, of course, I am), but there's something really liberating about being able to create something by yourself and also not having to answer to accountants or project managers.  Video games are “big business” these days and I'm afraid that's taken some of the fun out of making them.

2. What inspired the H.I.V.E series?

My best friend's cat.  No really, I haven't forgotten my medication.  My friend has a big, fluffy white cat that looks just like the cat that sits on Blofeld's lap in the old James Bond movies.  So, I was playing with this cat one day and it got me thinking that those old-school Bond villains always just seemed to appear out of thin air with very little back story and that got me thinking about how they became world- conquering megalomaniacs in the first place.  It was only a short mental walk from there to HIVE.  My best friend's cat is also called Otto, so he helped in more ways than one....

3.     Sometimes, I feel as if I’m playing a computer game in my head when I read your books - do your games-designing skills actually give you ideas for your fiction?

I think that they give you a good sense of what makes an exciting action sequence.  I think that the reader should be just as immersed in an exciting action-packed scene in a book as they would be in an equivalent section of a game.  So I suppose that some of my past experience has helped in that respect.

4. Tell us about your main characters, without too many spoilers for those who haven’t read the series and may want to. What did you have in mind when you created each of them?

I think that the main characteristic that I wanted Otto and the gang to share was that they were all clever and resourceful.  Otto especially is the sort of person who uses his brain to  get out of trouble rather than his physical strength and that's something that I personally find much more fun to write than the more traditional action hero.  It also means that I can have more fun with the dialogue between the main characters as they've always got a smart-ass answer for everything!

5. The first H.I.V.E. novel was very funny, with a sort of Hogwarts for villains, as well as teasing references to the Bond movies and the often-hilarious reasons why our heroes came to H.I.V.E. After that, the stories become darker, although there’s still humour. Was this planned out from the beginning?

Yes, it's all leading to a point where the main characters, Otto especially, are going to have to ask themselves where life at HIVE is leading them.  A school for villians may be a neat high-concept idea, but when you actually stop and think about it, it will inevitably lead in to some pretty dark places.  Having said that, I don't ever want to produce a completely straight-faced HIVE book, as the tongue should always be in the vague proximity of the cheek where Otto and the gang are concerned.

6. Is it difficult to create sympathy for characters who are, after all, training to be villains, without making them too nice?

Yes, but part of the point of the series, right from the start was to make the readers ask themselves what exactly defines a villain.  Without getting too philosophical about it, I don't think that the bad guy ever really sits there and thinks of themselves as the villain. More practically speaking, if the central characters of the books were truly evil it would be very hard to make the reader root for them.  For my money, the mark of a really great villain is that the reader likes them just as much as the hero any way.

7. Your action scenes and your technology are oddly convincing (with the possible exception of the giant marauding plant in the first book!). I’ve just read about the development of a “cloaking device” for war planes that reminded me of the Shroud planes in your books. How much research do you do for your books and what, if any, are your favourite sources of information?

I'm a massive techno-geek and I put a lot of effort into basing the technology in the books on bleeding edge research in the real world.  Most of the technology in the books is just over the horizon from a real world point of view and while there are a lot of science fiction elements it is usually based in reality in some way.  I do a lot of research on-line, although I do sometimes have to be careful.  For example, while I was doing some research for Dreadnought I realised afterwards that I'd just Googled the effects of a nuclear detonation, the details of the President's secret service security team and the internal layout of Airforce One.  To be honest, I'm surprised I didn't end up in Guantanamo Bay!

Thanks, Mark, for the fascinating insight into your work!

Additional:

The following question and answer appeared on the Good Reading Magazine web site. I’m reproducing it with permission, because I'm sure Mark would have given me the same answer and I thought readers might like to know. If you’d like to read the whole Good Reading interview, here’s the link: http://www.goodreadingmagazine.com.au/meettheauthor.cfm

Paramount has acquired the film rights to your ‘H.I.V.E’ series. Do you have any hints as to when the movie will be coming out?

No, not really.  I’m told that quite often the author is the last person to hear anything anyway, unless you're J.K.Rowling,  so I'm not holding my breath.  I do think that movie versions of books can be a double-edged sword though, the idea of a movie of HIVE is certainly exciting, but you can't help but worry how it might turn out.  For every good book adaptation it seems like there are ten bad ones.


Mythic Resonance Is Here

I'm pleased to announce that the Specusphere anthology, Mythic Resonance, in which I have a story,"Brothers"(Snow White and the seven Tolkienesque Dwarves), is now available from the Specusphere web site. Follow the above link and you'll find the purchase page, but if you want to check it out first, there's not only a book trailer but free samples from each of the stories. If you're coming to Continuum on the Queen's Birthday weekend, you can probably get quite a few of the contributors to sign your copy, including me(I will be doing some panels, I hope, but you will find me on the ASIM table about half the time.) Do check it out if you enjoy your myths and legends and fairy tales! I'm very excited, can't wait to get my tribber's copy!

On My Review Policy

Recently I've had three or four inquiries from folk anxious to get a review of their ebooks, so I thought I'd post here rather than answering individually. Guys, I'm a teacher-librarian. That's a dying species in Australia. Schools save money any way they can. One of the ways they save money is by taking it away from library budgets like mine. In the year 2012, I have a budget that would be someone else's petty cash. So I review YA books and put them in my library, as my way of giving our students something new, maybe even something not yet in the shops. I can't put an ebook in the library. I love my ereader, as you might have noticed if you're following this blog, but every book in my library is available, somewhere, in paperback. Or if it's out of print, at least I can still read it. But that's for me only. My policy states that I don't review anything that's only available as ebook. Please respect that. If it changes I'll announce it here, I promise.