rhodrymavelyne

Once again I was late to the party. Years later I’m watching American Gods. Once again there were reasons I missed it. Not as good as my reasons for missing Hannibal, but I had them.

I’m always nervous about an adaptation of something I enjoyed. I liked the book a lot, even if I didn’t love it, reading it again and again as I did The Sandman. Bryan Fuller and Neil Gaiman putting their creative talents together seemed like something I shouldn’t miss, yet Bryan Fuller leaving made me apprehensive. I remind myself that he left Dead Like Me, yet I still loved it. This didn’t make me less apprehensive.

Falling in love with the televised adaptation of The Sandman made me decide to see if I could find clips on Youtube, see if American Gods interested me. Did they ever. Not long after I decided to buy the series on DVD.

I’m almost finished with the second season and I’m totally hooked. I was stunned to see so many people from Hannibal; not just Bryan Fuller, but Chris Byrnes, Gillian Anderson, Brian Reitzell, Johnathan Tucker, Demore Barnes, Scott Thompson, Jeremy Davies, Jesse Alexander, Adam Kane, and David Slade were all involved. Not to mention Omid Abtahi whom I’d found so compelling in the Heroes pilot, playing the lover of a djinn. Seeing Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday made me grin, for I grew up watching Lovejoy. Along with Emily Browning as Laura Moon whom I remembered as Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I absolutely adore Bilquis. She reminds me a little of Sylar on Heroes, journeying across America in search of victims, err, worshippers. He collected powers, she collected passions. At the same time she could be so loving, so utterly sympathetic.

All of the characters have been multifaceted, even the unsympathetic ones. I’m almost at the end of Season 2. I’m curious what’s going to happen next. I have some idea of what’s coming, yet there has been so many surprises.

The very concept of gods, how powerful they become, depending on how much they are worshipped is something I’ve played with in my own writing. It’s fun to speculate in fanfiction about how powerful pairings can become when people believe in them, spend a lot of time writing about them, drawing them, investing more than a little of their heart into them. Can worshippers create their own deity without even realizing it? Or can they consciously craft a god to act according to their will and wishes?

Either could be terrifying and wondrous. The deities we create can be uplifting or repulsive. Perhaps both at the same time. They can empower the ugliest parts of ourselves or the most beautiful.

It’s something I’ve wondered about in real life, the blind faith we can put in those we worship. It’s a theme I’ve returned to again and again.

Interesting to see in this series the old gods striking back, trying to take a stand against the newcomers. Or adapt and join them.

Like I said, I’m curious what will happen next.

In these times of trouble, I find myself gravitating back to Peter Jackson’s extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring. Drinking in the beauty of the costumes, craftmanship, bigatures, acting, landscape, music, and story; how all of it comes together.

I find myself sneaking peeks at the book by J.R.R. Tolkien, even though I’m busy with othr things, even though I’m in the middle of a lot of other books. I find myself looking for certain scenes. Frodo, Pippin, and Sam meeting elves while finding themselves pursued by Black Riders in the Shire. Frodo wondering if he should take any of his friends with him on his journey, only to run against Sam’s stubborn loyalty and determination not to leave him. Sam and Farmer Maggoty standing between Frodo and a mysterious rider, who turns out to be Merry Brandybuck on a pony. Frodo coming to the house at Crickhollow where the conspiracy of his friends is revealed. The confrontation of Old Man Willow in the Old Forest. The hobbits getting lost and trapped in the Barrow-Downs.

I find myself wondering if maybe Belladona Took and her sisters might have visited the Old Forest, met Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. Maybe Belladona found the gold which helped her husband to build Bag End in one of the barrows.

I found the Barrow-Downs fascinating. How different is a wraith from a wight in Middle-Earth? One seems to be much mor powerful. Both are bound to the corporeal world by treasure. The things that bind beings that are untangible, making them more tangible is something I’m exploring in my own worlds. Just how much did Tolkien influence me? He’s one of the great literary loves of my life. I’ve struggled not to copy him. To break out of the box confining me to high fantasy, yet I love many of the contents of that box.

It’s only too easy to let Tolkien’s world comfort me when my own reality is terrifying. To know it took him fourteen years to create his masterpiece. To be reminded that masterpieces take time. To realize I haven’t abandoned the ambition to create masterpieces of my own, even if it takes my entire life to do so.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it! :)

I’ll never forget the version of The Nutcracker ballet I saw performed in San Jose. The battle between the Mouse King and the Nutcracker got quite suggestive, involving a dance-off with a lot of pelvic thrusts which somehow went perfectly well with the music.

Seeing this sparked the inspiration which would become my story, Seven Tricks (written as K.S. Trenten).

This wasn’t the first time I’d been inspired by a classic. I wrote a short story called A Symposium in Space which mirrored Plato’s The Symposium. A gathering at dinner spoke of love as in ancient Athens, only this party was all female in a futuristic matriarchy called the Intergalactic Democracy. Alkibiadea (the feminine equivalent of Alciabiades) was actually a space pirate, chasing Sokrat (the female version of Socrates), literally right into the symposium. The narrator of the story was Phaedra, a young woman involved in a torrid and toxic relationship with Pausania, another one of the guests. I took great pride in inverting Pausanius’s exquisitely misogynist speech about the Heavenly and Common Aphrodite, allowing Pausania to turn it on its head, infused with all of her matriarchal mythical leanings.

A Symposium in Space was later expanded into a novella and republished by Nine Star Press. This gave Phaedra more of a voice, more time to explore her relationships with Pausania, Sokrat, and the Timea; her speaceship she gets attached to. The Timea becomes a metaphor for finding herself, learning to love herself.

Classics and fairytales reinterpreted are specialities are mine. Fairest and At Her Service (which I’m trying to republish on a more permanent basis in an expanded form) are fairytales reimagined. I deliberately gave Wind Me Up, One More Time the feel of a fairytale, a myth reimagined. Toys, industry, and turning to gold became metaphors and myths made real in the hearts and minds of the characters.

I dive deeper into these themes in Tales of the Navel (which I often posted about in Conversations with Christopher and other blogs at inspirationcauldron.wordpress.com). People create myths with their beliefs and legends, raising the shadows of the lost to the status of gods. At the same time former gods like Jupitre and Juno dwindle into shadows of themselves as people forget them. Hebe was always an overlooked goddess, something she feels and internalizes in a cycle of cup collecting and destroying. The various forces drumming up faith, hope, and trying to feed upon them made themselves known in Web of Inspiration, the fourth book in Tales of the Navel. (Yes, there are novels I’m working on self-publishing, which I’m trying to cultivate interest in with all the freebie stories I’ve posted at my blog.)

These are themes I’m attracted to and inspired by again and again. It’s why I can’t stop watching and re-watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Hannibal the TV series. Not only am I spellbound by the specific beauty of these series, but they’re infused with mythical elements which fascinate me. It’s what draws me to Renaissance and Baroque art. Similar themes, similar myths are depicted again and again, yet expressed differently through individual prisms of perspective. We draw on a communal pool of myth, yet we imagine it in different ways. We’re linked by this pool, yet we interpret it with a fiercely individualistic or a uniquely communal eye.

The pool fascinates me. Like Christopher in my stories, I’m drawn to it again and again. I gaze at the images, feel ideas swimming through my own imagination to meet them.

Here’s hoping those ideas never stop swimming, even after I do.

Once more, Goodreads is rejecting my book reviews or it is? I'm not sure. Just in case it, I'm posting my review here.

An epic tale of a conquered land; the enslaved, yet powerful elements of water, their age old battle with the elements of fire and the very human heirs to both whom act out that conflict. One of the chief voices in this novel are that of Pharinet Palindrake; twin, lover and beloved to the tragic Dragon Lord Valraven Palindrake, bound by and courted by the lords of fire as well as the rigid expectations of the feeble, diminished nobility of his native realm of water. The other is Variencienne, only daughter of the fire emperor and his cunning queen, given in marriage to Valraven, yet coming into her own power within her husband’s realm, bearing the wit, strength, and creative determination to heal the wounds fire and her own kin have left upon it. Rich in poetic prose with captures the imagination; bringing to life the strength, intelligence, and intuitive force of these two women whom offer up a detailed portrait of the people and places they interact with.

This is an amazing book, offering up a unique, living, breathing fantasy world to explore through its characters, a world similar enough to our own to feel very similar, yet possessing its own individuality and magic.

Brian Fuller referred to Hannibal as elegant horror. All of the artist flourishs from the beauty of nightmarish objects to the bella figura Hannibal himself cuts walking through a palazzo in his Italian suit add to the elegance.

Watching this show has brought back memories of another example of elegant horror, one I fell in love with when I was very young. The monsters cut a dashing figure across the moonlight, savouring the taste of blood, even as they felt the value of the human they drained. Hannibal makes me think of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, not the least for the tender, intimate moments which happen between two men amidst the horror. These moments meant as much to me as that horror, making the horror all the richer for their dramatic pauses, transforming it into art.

It’s hard to analyze this transformation. It’s so easy to simply to let myself be swept away by it, whirling my imagination around and around like the dominant partner in a dance, carrying my thoughts away in a rush, leaving me too giddy with the sensations to truly study them.

I want to do this myself, though. I want to create such elegance. My work is nowhere near as dark as Hannibal. I’m not sure if it’s as dark as Anne Rice’s, although Tales of the Navel: The Shadow Forest comes close. I want the Gardens of Arachne to be a place of elegant horror. I’m hoping to bring a touch of it to Omphalos. Fairy tales can be vehicles for elegant horror and I try to carry fairy tale magic to all of my stories.

The trappings of civilized, polished society can be a mask for something else which means to hunt, stalk, and bring danger into the heart of civilization. Crafting my own masks for my own characters is an art form I hope to polish, while I introduce them to stories. Creating my own mixtures of elegant horror is something I intend to explore, even if at times, I only add a dash, and at others, I mix in a generous portion.

Wish me luck.

Every time I read something again, I pick up something new.

Tokyo Babylon remains my favorite manga after over ten years. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it, mulled over its scenes, contemplated fanon involving these characters or interpreted canon.

Now I’m seeing a parallel between the woman who punishes her baby and the last story and Hokuto. Or perhaps I should say Subaru’s perception of Hokuto.

Subaru saw his twin dying in his place at the sakurazukamori’s hands, a fate he was resigned to. Perhaps he felt he deserved to be punished to loving a man like Seishirou, only he’s denied that punishment by Hokuto sacrificing herself.

The woman hits her baby because it’s like hitting herself. She failed to retain her husband’s love. She didn’t stop him from running off with another woman. She can’t herself, but she hits the child, whom she considers part of herself.

Subaru failed to win the bet, to change Seishirou. Hokuto died because of that failure, but she also left her twin behind by dying in Subaru’s place. It’s too late to yell at her, to cry at her not to go. He can only make himself suffer, living on as she wished, living on as she never would have wished.

In a way, it’s the ultimate revenge, a punishment as bad as Subaru could ever deliver to his sister for sacrificing herself to Seishirou, for stealing his sacrifice. Only is he really lashing out at Hokuto? Or is he seeing her as part of himself and lashing out at that?

The little girl, however, points out something Subaru had forgotten, something Hokuto herself would have reminded him of, if she were still alive. The baby isn’t his mother. He’s his own person.

Hokuto isn’t, wasn’t Subaru. She made her own choices. She decided to face Seishirou, to sacrifice herself in Subaru’s place. Subaru couldn’t have altered that decision, not in the state he was in. If he could go back in time, change things, maybe he could have. Punishing himself now, though, won’t change Subaru or Hokuto’s choices now. Hokuto and Seishirou won’t come back. All Subaru is doing is hurting himself.

Perhaps he does realize that at the end of the story. Perhaps this is where his dangerous, destructive wish begins, a wish that changed his resolve to kill Seishirou into something else. As painful as it might be to his grandmother or Hokuto, as imcomprehensible as it might be to Seishirou, Subaru starts thinking about what he, Subaru wants. There’s something dignified in the tragedy of this resolution, an assertion of the self, even though it may end in the annihilation of the self.

This is something CLAMP shows again and again in their stories, the value of an individual wish. It also shows how much our wishes can hurt other people.

Subaru is perhaps one of the most tragic characters CLAMP has ever created, because while he’s inclined to be kind to others, he’s also makes destructive choices for himself. Without Seishirou swooping into destroy the perils that menace him, or Hokuto kicking him into look after himself, Subaru isn’t going to bother.

It’s his choice, though, and there’s no one to stop him from making it. Or is there?

Perhaps the tragic events to come in X 1999 was Seishirou stepping in one last time to save Subaru from himself. For all his protestations of not caring, the sakurazukamori did that.

This is one of the reasons this manga stands out so strikingly among others. It gives a reader a lot to think about what truly makes a person happy, and the consequences of our choices. It explores them in a depth I find fascinating.

Perhaps this is why Tokyo Babylon remains my favourite manga.

One of my resolutions for this year was to return to a lot of my favorite books and read them again. One of them was The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, published in 1988. Reading the intro, I realized that it had been published when the WB movie, Batman, which first hooked my interest in the Dark Knight.

still remember that movie, all the complex emotions and interest it inspired. I saw it over and over again in the little theatre in the town of Davis. It was one of the two other films playing besides Ghostbusters 2 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. All three movies I watched, over and over.

This was the same summer I discovered Anne Rice, falling in love with her Vampire Chronicles. Batman caught my interest at the same time.

The movie Batman was gorgeous. It brought the gothic out of Gotham. Yes, something was missing from Jack Nicholson depiction of Joker. I got the impression that the Joker became Jack Nicholson rather than Jack Nicholson was the Joker. That classic villain was still so iconic, along with his adversity with Batman as his opposite, the power of both radiated from the big screen. Nor was it completely denied, although I sensed we were only scratching the surface of what could be. Vicki Vale, played by Kim Basinger was lovely against this dark, gothic setting of mystery and danger, even if she screamed way too much, especially for a hardened photographer who’d been on site in war zones. I detested the Joker’s romantic interest in her, yet I kept returning to it in renewed, homoerotic forms.

There was a lot of complain about in that movie, but it got me interested. It started an interest which continued to this day.

When I read Scott Snyder’s gorgeous graphic novels about the Dark Knight, or Marguerite Bennet’s equally stunning tales of Batwoman, I realize I owe that movie a lot. It introduced me to a fandom I’ve been part of for 20 years.

It introduced me to my husband. The first night we met, we stayed up, obsessing and talking about Batman. He created the beginnings of another bond which lasted to this day.

Batman changed my life. That movie in 1989 changed my life.

Thank you, Batman.

I call myself a science fiction writer. It would be more accurate to say I’m a fantasy writer. Neither label quite applies, though. Both genres use imagery of a rugged, survivalist journey through another world.

Those aren’t the stories I want to tell.

To me, science fiction means alternative universes. You might find decadent worlds, saturated with technology, or peaceful planets where warfare is waged via words. Trouble lurks in these settings, just as it does in any story. It just takes on a different form.

The conflict of my stories lie in mirror images, distorted reflections, and inversions of our own problems into a new, yet recognizable form. They lie hidden in beautiful gardens, bustling metropolises, or the choir of a church. My images often involve flowers, statues, cloud scapes, or a surreal setting which hints at the very heart behind magic.

These are not images the market associates with science fiction and fantasy. Not from what I’ve seen of a lot of cover art.

Science fiction and fantasy means other worlds, other universes, other realities. To question the very nature of realities and explore them in new forms. These are some of my goals as a writer. This is why I categorize myself as a science fiction or fantasy author.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m in the wrong genre, though, after looking at the rugged, masculine imagery associated with science fiction and fantasy. I’m not sure if its marketing schemes apply to me, since they’re directed at a male audience. I’m placed myself under the rainbow flag, hoping that queer science fiction and fantasy is a good genre to find my readers. I’ve met a lot of wonderful people, learned a lot, but I’m still not sure if this is the right genre.

I’m not sure if my readers even have a genre. My stories would appeal more to women, interested in pretty male heroes, gender ambiguous female characters, and magical settings which explore the heart of these characters.

I probably fit more in with the shoujo manga or shounen ai genre of manga than science fiction or fantasy. Only I’m writing prose, not drawing manga.

My characters embark on journeys, but not of physical combat and survivalist endurance. Their journeys are emotional, through dreamworlds created by their own hearts, or anothers. Much of the conflict takes place during dialogue. The pictures within their heads are often as strong as those in the landscape. Sometimes, those pictures literally change the landscape.

This is what was once described as magic. It’s a kind of art. Art and magic are never far away from each other in my work. In order to create magic, along with art, my characters need the space to do so. This often requires a setting very different than an action scene. The characters reflect these settings. They’re often more gentle and contemplative than a rugged, action oriented protagonist, who doesn’t have time for scuh things.

I’ve categorized myself as science fiction and fantasy, but the genre is an uncomfortable fit. For both myself and my characters. We reinvent ourselves in fairy tales and folk lore, but not even that feels quite right.

Rather than challenge a genre which has a lot of ardent supporters, I’m going to try and create a genre within science fiction and fantasy. A possible name for this is ambient fantasy.

Ambient is a term associated with the music which has inspired much of my prose. Amethystium, Enigma, Delirium, Cusco, and Karunesh’s work are often called ‘ambient’. There’s a touch of aestheticism to the name, isn’t there? It makes me think of some of the gorgeous art work I’ve seen at FanimeCon and YaoiCon of beautiful, androgynous figures in fantasy settings. I’m very interested in aesthetics, in polishing up my prose to make it as attractive as possible, letting it flow in a gorgeous stream. I want to recreate what has been lost in history and myth, shaping it into new settings and new characters. A lot of the individuals rattling around in my head want similar things to what I want. We’re trying to tap into a greater consciousness, yet we venerate what’s small and right in front of us. We’re searching for the beauty in our worlds and in others. We don’t always come to happy endings, but we try to learn from our misfortunes and continue. We’re very romantic, but we don’t really fit in the romantic genre. Not all of us. We’re explorers of our own inner landscapes, which create and inform the outer.

This is why I need a new sub genre. There are readers out there who’ll be drawn to this new type of science fiction and fantasy, for it’s not truly new. Shoujo and shouen ai manga readers have been searching for it for a long time, finding it in pictures. I want to bring it out in prose.

Are you interested?