So, I had my first fencing lesson yesterday, and it was Good. Going to take a fair bit of work to simply learn how to coordinate the movement of leg and (foil-wielding) hand, or become tolerable at moving across a room in a fighting stance--I'm neither well-coordinated nor light on my feet, so I suspect this could be a good stretch for me. Fun stuff.

(Well, except for the part where I thought I hadn't been working very hard at all, then went to put my gear away, and pulled something in my knee--but I'm hoping that will heal given a couple days.)

So I signed up for a month's worth of twice-a-week lessons, and will decide where to take it from there--whether I want to invest in the cost of gear and continued lessons (I do have some qualms about that), or to simply take what I've learned in that month and consider that a worthwhile thing in itself.

Either way, it should be an interesting month!

(Because it really is September, isn't it? How'd that happen?)

September's story is "Three Wish Habit." (Story is rated PG-13.)

I swallow hard. I can't afford three wishes. I had trouble finding the cash for one. But I can't go away empty-handed, either. Anyone who's had a wish would understand. When you wish for something and it comes to you, there's this feeling of power--a rush of blood, a racing of adrenalin. A high, dizzy feeling, like you can do anything, anything at all. And the best part is that you can.

This one was very much a "what if" story for me--what if wishes were illegal, and could be bought and sold on streetcorners?

So, talk of Njál's saga fanfiction led lnhammer to ask me who my OTP (One True Pairing) for the saga would be. :-)

( It was amusing to realize I don't have one )

I guess I'll just have to stick to sighing happily over the thought of Eowyn/Faramir and Meg Murray/Calvin O'Keefe, my own personal favorite forever OTPs.

During the livelongnmarry auction, sister_coyote offered to write medieval literary fanfic. It will come as a surprise as no one reading this journal that, when I won the auction, I requested a Njál's Saga story. I didn't ask for anything specific--after all the time I've spent exploring the saga, I was curious to see what parts of Njála would grab someone else writing in its world.

So I was delighted when the resulting story, "Blood and Ash," showed up in my inbox this morning. :-)

Blood and Ash
She was no fool; she knew it could not be the end.
Njal's Saga. Hildigunnur-centric; Hildigunnur/Hoskuld, Hildigunnur/Kari. 2700 words.

Spoilery, of course, if you can spoil an 800-year-old story--it deals largely with events from the very last page of the saga, in fact.

Getting to read this this morning made me very, very happy. Thank you, sister_coyote!

And if the Mabinigion (which I still very much need to read) is more your flavor of medieval story, keep an eye on her journal--her other livelongnmarry fic (for rymenhild) will be set there. :-)

So the draft of TE is out to readers, the couple articles I'm working on are still waiting on interviews ... all of which means: I have a real, live three-day weekend. I can't remember the last time I've had a full weekend. Well, okay--camping in May, but it feels longer ago somehow, or maybe a vacation, however lovely it is, isn't the same as an agenda-free weekend. I've been forcing myself to take one day a week off for a while now (Saturday, because my ancestors have a long history of resting on Saturdays), and that's been good for me, but three days--luxury.

So I've been reading, and playing too much of an addictive little game called Elven Blood over on Facebook, and getting to that market on the south side of town I've been meaning to visit forever.

I'm thinking about TE in a backbrain way, especially as comments from readers begin to come in (okay, I've taken time out from my weekend to read them so that the backbrain work can happen), but otherwise, I really do feel like I'm on a mini-vacation. And will feel more like I'm on one when Sunday comes and I don't make myself get back to work.

By Monday, my brain just might explode from all this unstructured time.

Dear Protagonist Who When It Comes Right Down to It I've Been Through An Awful Lot With,

You know, this place feels sort of empty without you.

No, no, I know you'll be back. It's not like you're moving out for good yet. You're just spending some time with a few critiquers--it's sort of like the character equivalent of summer camp. I bet they let you stay up late and eat chocolate and set things on fire all you want.

Not that I'd know. I'm being good, see. I haven't opened any of your files. I haven't called just to see if you're okay. I know how these things are--the revisions will go better, if I stay away for a little bit. And it's not like you're not grown-up enough these days to be on your own, for a little while at least.

Besides, I have things to do. I've put off a lot on account of you, and it's about time I started catching up. I know how summer camp is. You'll be back before I know it. The truth is, you probably won't be gone nearly long enough.

Only, you know, this place does feel sort of empty without you.

Me

It seems the past few weeks I just keep adding and adding books to the post-apocalyptic YA reading list. Post-apoc YA books that are either new or due out in the next few months include (and I have this suspicion there must be others I'm missing--anything else that should be there?):

- The Compound, by S.A. Bodeen (April 2008)
- The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins (October 2008)
- The Diamond of Darkhold, by Jeanne DuPrau (August 2008)
- The Other Side of the Island, by Allegra Goodman (September 2008)
- The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan (March 2009)
- And, umm, Bones of Faerie, by this Janni Lee Simner person (January 2009)

I'm beginning to wonder, honestly, if it's something in the water. :-) (In a post-apocalyptic world it would be, right?) Certainly something in the air these past few years much be spawning so much in this particular YA genre--and I'm not convinced that it's just that we live in dire times, though that's part of it. But living in dire times isn't really all that new a thing. I think that probably half my life or so, all told, we've probably lived in what were considered dire times.

The thing that fascinates me is that, when I started writing Bones of Faerie, it seemed no one was writing post-apocalyptic fiction. Writing something post-apocalyptic seemed an awfully child-of-the-cold-war thing to do, and I kind of wondered if that would be a problem--but I put those concerns aside, because this was a book I really really wanted to write.

I'm reminded of this notebook I have from high school, with a page in it filled with names for characters. Around the time my peers began having children, I stumbled upon that list, and all those names I loved and wanted to use? They were the names my friends were giving to their kids. Whatever made me like those names at 15, it was making everyone like those names.

It's so strange, how things we don't see influence us all in similar ways sometimes, and even afterwards, we can't quite say what those things are.

In sarah_prineas's journal, there's a discussion going on about how the skillset for writing for kids is different from that for writing adults.

My first thought of course was to say it isn't, but for middle grade (older elementary school and preteen) fiction, at least, there are subtle differences. One of them that occurred to me as the conversation went on: to write for kids, you need to see kids as characters first, and children second.

And then I got to thinking of pmsamphire's post on how not to do an American accent. He talks about how you should never write an Elf, for instance, but only a character who is an elf.

And I think that's it exactly: in kids' fiction--and teen and adult fiction with younger characters in it, too--you need to never write a Child, only characters who are children.

( More thoughts )

In the dream, there were an awful lot of people milling about, in what started off as my home but turned into some sort of hotel. It took me a while to realize they were mostly writers. They were all making elaborate representations of the plot and structure of their novels--huge sheets of paper, colored pencils and detailed illustrations that were works of art of their own, each writer's schematic different, but all of them--extensive. Complicated.

I thought of my own books, which I just sort of jump in and write, without building anything like this sort of scaffolding first, and I felt strange. A little disconnected.

"Wow," I said to these unknown writers. "You're all way more structure based than me."

No one answered me. No one looked up from their work.

"Who are you all, anyway?" I tried instead. "Did you go to Clarion together? Writers of the Future?"

"No," someone told me. "This is just a professional development day." Turns out this particular group of writers had been getting together once a month, pretty much forever, to work on their stories. The rest of the dream devolved into a discussion about the great rates they got on the hotel, which was somewhere in Phoenix.

Pretty mild, as writing-related anxiety dreams go. And in retrospect, it seems worth remembering both that I had no desire to reach for the paper and colored pencils myself--and that no one suggested that I should.

Dear Protagonist Who Might or Might Not Make It Out of this Book Alive,

When a mythical being says, "What will you give me for this," your answer should never, ever be, "Anything."

Not even when the "this" in question is your own life.

I know it's too late for that to do you any good this time around, but I'm telling you anyway. For future reference.

Helpfully yours,

Me

The new kitten's name, by the way, is Mouse.

This after many more dignified names rolled off her like so much water. Because we're well aware around here that Mouse, while a fine baby name, isn't the sort of name that all cats can carry into adulthood, let alone middle age. There's a good chance that one day, a weightier name will still be called for.

But this is not that day, and this day her name is Mouse.

The Icelandic men's handball team is going to the finals, yaaaay!

akirlu's link to this account of the 1992 olympic marathon last-place finisher brought tears to my eyes. Wow. Just--wow.

It had not actually occurred to me that anyone's reaction to watching Dara Torres' swimming might be to feel insecure about their own bodies. I find that troubling in more directions than a linky post can cover.

Scottish penguin knighted by the king of Norway. A citation from King Harald the Fifth of Norway was read out, which described Nils as a penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood."

cedarlibrarian on why hating a book is fandom, too.

Avram Grumer paperblogs the Denver worldcon.

Excavation of a farm that may have been the home of Egill Skallagrímsson. No sign of Egill's buried silver yet, though.

I'm delighted and honored to have an article on my travels in Iceland in the farewell issue of the Journal of the Mythic Arts.

( To go with it, a much overdue index of Iceland trip reports )

Rereading the article and skimming the reports has me longing to go back. That island in the north Atlantic continues to tug on this desert girl--I know we'll return again someday, though I don't yet know when.

I was incredibly impressed watching Dara Torres win a silver medal in the 50 meter freestyle a couple days ago. Seeing an athlete around my age win at anything was inspiring all by itself, but what really inspired me was her attitude.

The first headline I saw afterwards talked about Torres' swim as a loss--focused on how she'd missed the gold by a hundreth of a second. But watching that swim--this wasn't a swimmer who was disappointed or thought she'd failed in any way. She was ecstatic; she hugged the gold medal swimmer beside her; and if she thought this anything other than an amazing victory, it definitely didn't show.

After she'd helped her team win a second silver in the 400 meter relay a few minutes later, she told reporters, still smiling, still clearly thrilled, "You can't put an age on your dreams."

Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of a story about an olympic gymnast, right as her father was explaining how she'd decided "silver wasn't good enough." I felt sorry for her, and a little bit angry too. What's "not good enough" about being the second best in the world at anything? That's incredible. This morning, I caught a mention of how another gymnast had finally won a gold after being "disappointed" by several silvers. Disappointed? Disappointed?

Okay, I do get that, if I'm honest with myself. When Torres first finished, I saw that hundreth of a second and started thinking "oh, man" and "if only," too--until I saw her face, her joy at taking that medal. That was the part of that swim that really stayed with me.

It's so easy to focus on the tiny bit of a thing we didn't do--on the sliver of a second that we somehow missed--rather than on all the amazing things we've done. Too easy--because we lose much of joy and of life when we do that.

One doesn't need to get as far as the life-equivalent of a silver medal for this to be true, either. A few days ago, I heard an interview on NPR with a shot-putter who was favored to win a medal, but who just sort of had the kind of off day where things fell apart and it didn't happen. The athlete's wife is expecting a son in a month, and an interviewer asked him--and I thought this a cruel question--"What will you tell your child about this day?"

He answered, "I'll tell him I cared about something enough to dedicate eight years of my life to it."

Yeah, that. Exactly that.

- First walk across a keyboard
- First game of chase-the-older-cat
- First game of chase-my-own-tail
- First expedition into a paper bag
- First jump up a screen door
- First time stuck on a screen door

Good times, good times.

More like IMs, really.

Dear A: You're not perfect. But once in a while, you do things that make me love you as much as that character who is.

Dear Maps: I love you, too. Couldn't write this book without you. Yay, maps!

Dear M: You just ... completely changed the terms of your bargain. In the fourth draft. Huh! No, no, I don't think she'll accept this one, either. Now I just need to figure out, umm, why not.

Dear H: What he just said, what you just said--you think everything's going to be all right, don't you? Oh. Ouch. Sorry?

ETA: Dear Waterproof Paper: You're as lovely as maps, you solve multiple plot problems, yay!

Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

How the world ends: A general supernatural apocalyptic war that destroyed many of our cities and left others with dead and dangerous zones no one sane enters, plus the usual marginal neighborhoods have become a bit more marginal than they used to be.

( But even saying that much is arguably an almost-spoiler, so I'll put the rest behind a cut )

(The post-apocalyptic reading list and thoughts on some of the other books on same.)

al_zorra and aberwyn have been talking about the fictional and societal tensions between mothers and daughters, which got me to thinking about the tensions between parents and children in general in fiction.

When I first started writing, and especially when I first started writing for younger readers, one of the comments I would get regularly from editors and critiquers was that my parents were "just too mean." I always toned said parents down when asked, but on some level I really didn't understand: I felt like I was just being realistic. I was just out of college, when I started writing, and the parent point of view made less sense to me than the child point of view, in many ways.

Around the time I wrote Secret of the Three Treasures, I began to get it, because it was so clear to me that Tiernay West's mother was--from her point of view--just trying to keep Tiernay alive so that she'd survive to adulthood. I found I had at least some sympathy for that view, though it was directly at odds with Tiernay's desire to get out into the wide world--a desire I also had sympathy (a lot of sympathy!) for.

When I began working with a Scout troop--I'd finished writing the original draft of Secret by then--this dynamic became clearer still: that children yearn desperately for freedom and the wide world; that parents desperately want to keep their children whole and alive and safe from that world until they have more skills with which to survive there; that neither side is wholly right or wholly wrong. I saw, too, the painful extra layer of tension added by the fact that both sides, whether they admit it or not, desperately also don't want to hurt each other. Though both sides will hurt each other, when they feel they need to, because those desires to be free and to protect are both so strong, and both so important.

When I write, I'm still 10 or 15 on the inside, and that's still where my primary sympathies lie as a writer. (When I'm not writing, my sympathies lie all over the place, depending on the circumstances.) But now I get that it's not enough to just understand my protagonist, or even my protagonist and a few close friends. As with any secondary characters, understanding the motivations of parents and making them real--making those parents neither sources of all truth nor obstacles to all goals--can only deepen the story.

As a sort of corollary, I also find I'm not working as hard to get those parents out of the way these days. I still don't want parents stepping in and solving my protagonists' problems, of course. But there's a lot to be said for making them a tangled fallible human part of the story and its concerns, rather than a simple "too mean" impediment to same.

Salon's analysis of the Twilight books seems to be the source (a source?) for this quote from the author, which I've been hearing repeated a fair amount:

Unlike Buffy, Bella is no hero. "There are so many girls out there who do not know kung fu, and if a guy jumps in the alley they're not going to turn around with a roundhouse kick," Meyer once told a journalist. "There's a lot of people who are just quieter and aren't having the Prada lifestyle and going to a special school in New York where everyone's rich and fabulous. There's normal people out there and I think that's one of the reasons Bella has become so popular."

Except. Except except except except.

I wasn't going to post about Twilight again, but I find this notion that the alternative to being Buffy is being Bella deeply troubling.

Because there's a lot of middle ground between Bella and Buffy. Most girls and women wouldn't deliver a roundhouse kick in a dark alley, sure--but most of us do have a sense of basic self-preservation, don't put ourselves into mortal danger on a daily basis (something Bella manages to do even when the supernatural nasties are absent)--and, when the men in our lives fail us, we mourn, but we don't cease to function.

In the real world, Bella no more represents most of us than Buffy does, for all that it's reasonable to say they both in some way represent basic desires.

I find the idea of Bella as representative of "normal" deeply, deeply creepy. Bella doesn't represent me, and she doesn't represent any of the "normal" girls and women I know, each of whom is strong in her own way, no Buffy powers required.

Women are strong in countless ways, some of them loud and clear, others remarkably quiet, so quiet you can miss them if you're not paying attention. That's what normal looks like.