Read Alana's new story, “The Valley,” at The Edge of Propinquity!

I'm a New Fan

05/09/2008 06:13 PM

Quick link, via Julia:

The Get Out Clause, a Manchester band, recently used the cameras on every street corner to their advantage, collecting the footage under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK. The results are particularly awesome. The Telegraph has the video footage and details of their production. More of their music (which is also very good) is available at the band's site.

Speaking of bands of which I'm a fan, the Common Shiner site has an interview up with band founder, Morgan "Papa Shiner" Foster. Just, you know, to continue my shameless plugging. ;)

Guest Blog: J. R. R. Tolkien (excerpt from "On Fairy Stories")

05/09/2008 05:31 PM

I have been a bad blogger this week, and for that I apologize. On the up side, not blogging has meant I did more fiction writing, and I finished "Don't Let Go" last night (clocking 6447 words yesterday for a grand total just over my total word-count limit; I'm hoping Dylan will have suggestions on cutting it down the hair it needs to be cut).

To celebrate finishing it, I gave myself the morning off and finished a book I've been reading: Standard Hero Behavior by John David Anderson. If you haven't pulled this off your library or bookstore shelf yet, don't pass go, don't collect $200, just head straight to the library or bookstore and pull it off. This is Anderson's first novel, and it's entirely satisfying--it features fifteen-year-old Mason Quayle, a struggling bard in a town where all the heroes have left, as he blunders into his first quest: a mission to bring the heroes back. One of the town's missing heroes is his own father, and the quest becomes as much about discovering who his father was as it does saving the town from impending invasion. The story is the traditional hero's quest spun on its head, and it's delightfully satisfying. You all know I've read several brilliant books in the past year: this one's pretty high on that list. It's been marketed as a children's book rather than YA (possibly because it's not very edgy), so get over to your junior fiction section and check it out. (And if anyone is on a list serv somewhere with John David Anderson and could pass on my admiration, I'd very much appreciate it! I've gotten too used to being able to compliment the authors I admire in their blog comments, I think. *g*)

And now, for a short excerpt from "On Fairy Stories" by J. R. R. Tolkien, in lieu of an original guest blog.

--

There had been much debate concerning the relations of these things, of folk-tale and myth. . . . At one time it was a dominant view that all such matter was derived from "nature-myths." The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature. Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Marchen, fairy-stories--nursery tales.

That would seem to be the truth almost upside down. The nearer the so-called "nature myth," or allegory, of the large process of nature is to its supposed archetype, the less interesting it is, and indeed the less it is o a myth capable of throwing any illumination whatever on the world. Let us assume for the moment, as this theory assumes, that nothing actually exists corresponding to the "gods" of mythology: no personalities, only astronomical or meteorological objects. Then these natural objects can only be arrayed with a personal significance and glory by a gift, the gift of a person, of a man. Personality can only be derived from a person. The gods may derive their colour and beauty from the high splendours of nature, but it was Man who obtained these for them, abstracted them from sun and moon and cloud; their personality they get direct from him; the shadow or flicker of divinity that is upon them they receive through him from the invisible world, the Supernatural. There is no fundamental distinction between the higher and lower mythologies. Their people live, if they live at all, by the same life, just as in the mortal world do kings and peasants.

Oh No!

05/07/2008 07:36 PM

I missed Teaser Tuesday! I even had something for you guys. I just completely neglected to do any lj reading or writing yesterday. So, in repentance, here's a snippet of "Don't Let Go."

--

The music filled her up from her toes, and there was movement and chaos and electricity, and her thoughts vanished as she enjoyed the moment, enjoyed the tension in the space between them, the way he never let his body get uncomfortably close to hers. Likely because our proportions are all wrong, she thought to herself, looking up as he loomed over head. He winked down at her, looking as full of the music as she was, as though the drum beat had become both of their pulses at once.

They danced through a second song, not talking, just being part of the music, two bodies on the dance floor. Thoughts floated through her mind, none of them sticking longer than a moment. She wondered what Jonas might think to see her dancing with a good looking Manx giant, far too tall for her and with far more piercings than she would normally look at twice. It crossed her mind that Fin really wasn't her type, although it would be helpful to know a local who actually knew something about the Isle, which could, in theory, prevent her from failing her independent studies. If all she liked about him was the attention--which was nice, she admitted--she'd probably better make that clear from the beginning. A person could always use more friends.

But then she looked up at him, saw his eyes closed as he felt the music more than heard it, watched as the lights that sprawled across the dance floor caught in his hair and his ear studs. Just a little while, she thought as her stomach squeezed. I'll pretend for just a little while.

Quotes of the Day

05/06/2008 01:49 AM

I don't have anything profound to say, so I figured I'd just offer some of my recent favorite quotes.

"I'm kind of jealous of the life I'm supposedly leading." --Zach Braff (actor, from Scrubs and Garden State)

"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full." -- Henry A. Kissinger

"Walking through the YA section of the bookstore last night I realized there are clearly only two ways to survive high school: you can plot and scheme and gossip behind your friends' backs; or you can follow the fairies (werewolves, vampires, your choice) away into another world." -- Janni Lee Simner (on her blog 4/10/08)

"When it comes to adventure writing, I'm only a prima donna because I'm always right." -- Joe Selby (on his blog 4/30/08)

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing." -- Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 07-03-05

What might have happened if there'd been Letters to the Avalonians

05/05/2008 02:38 AM

Some friends and I are planning a King Arthur plotted Dogs in the Vineyard game. (DitV is a storytelling based system that I haven't played in before, so I can't say much more about it than its name.) Since I actually have done some Arthurian study (I took a tour course in England where we met with Geoffrey Ashe, who is an Arthurian scholar, and with whom I've communicated since), I'm naturally interested in pulling in some of the more obscure stuff that I've learned. Given my love of Glastonbury, England (where Geoffrey lives and where I've now been twice--and would go back at the drop of a hat if it weren't so expensive), I've started drawing on some of the legends I learned there: Joseph of Arimathea built the first-ever Christian church in Glastonbury, it is said. Glastonbury, originally surrounded by water due to the changing coastline (or during certain seasons, or surrounded by fens/marshes rather than sea, depending on the story), is the legendary Isle of Avalon, where Morgan and her priestesses once lived. The combination of those two ideas in one place--early Christians and Celtic mystics--makes for some interesting character ideas using some of the philosophies of Celtic Christianity (that I also picked up in Glastonbury).

All of this brainstorming led me to an interesting idea: like many early churches, might'nt the church at Avalon have received letters from Peter, Paul, or John, who wrote letters to so many of the other early churches, offering guidance? If so, what might those letters have said? And if the Letters to the Avalonians were classified for the Apocrypha, rather than for Scripture itself, what might have happened to that potential book of the Bible?

It all sounds like an Indiana Jones style adventure waiting to happen. Or, alas, something reminiscent of The DaVinci Code. Despite that, I think one day it may surface in my writing projects. That way, I'll have to go back to Glastonbury for research!

"Don't Let Go"

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What Makes YA YA?

05/04/2008 03:18 AM

I've been busy working on the Tam Lin short story (tentatively titled "Don't Let Go") over here, and so don't have much to blog about (although I did recently visit a bookstore and followed blue_succubus's example of photographing a display for a fellow blogger, whom I will post about when I have a cord that connects my camera phone to my computer). As you may have noticed, there was no guest blog yesterday; next week, if I still don't have a new one (there are several writers out there who have promised me entries, but I'm not sure when they'll come--writers are busy people, after all), I'll post a bit of Campbell or Tolkien, excerpting something about myth from one of their works, so that I don't entirely lose momentum.

In the mean time, there have been some great articles showing up about what makes a Young Adult novel in the YA category, one from Publishers Weekly featuring Sherman Alexie, and the other from Mirrorstone editor Stacy Whitman. Also courtesy slwhitman comes a new John Scalzi Whatever entry on the YA vs. the adult market. These were all interesting to me, so I thought I'd share them.

And now, back to the Isle of Man.