It’s getting to be that time again, folks!

As June dawns, so does the first yearly installment of Camp NaNoWriMo, and I’m signed up for the torture glory of roughing it through 50,000 words in a month again.

For those of you who don’t know, Camp NaNoWriMo is an offshoot of NaNoWriMo proper, a month long endeavor to pump out a novel in the 30 days of November. 50,000 words, start to finish, 1,667 words per day. NaNo proper is always in November, but last year they started summer camp. There are two sessions — one in June and one in August — and this writer is going to hit both.

I have a tradition to maintain of going at this challenge rebel-style, which is to say I’ll be working on finishing the first draft of my existing WIP. The “rules” are to start from scratch, but they’re not picky about people following them as long as you’re going second star on the right and straight on till 50k.

As is Emmie-licious, I like to put my own little twists on things. So if you’re interested in pumping up the action and injecting Camp NaNoWriMo with a little steroid syringe, get ready!

Here’s the sitch:

I watch a decent amount of TV. Right now it’s Game of Thrones and The Vampire Diaries. But every marathon on Netflix costs me writing time — so this time around, I have a solution.

Everyone has their vices. Some of us might share the Damon Salvatore vice, others might have other things that get in the way, like ironing your underwear or making snoods from angel hair pasta.

Just TRY to tell me you don’t want him to be your vice too. Even if you’re a straight male or a nun. I dare you.

Whatever it is that you like to do but that keeps you from writing, fix it in your mind.

Got it?

Okay. I give you…..

Commander Emmie’s Can-Do, Communal Camp of Creation!

Statute the First: Write 2,000 words per day.

Statute the Second: Spend at least two hours per week doing something that rejuvenates you.

Statute the Third: Earn your vices with words.

The first two are self-explanatory, so here’s what I mean with the third one. If your vices, like mine, get in the way of your writing, turn the table upside down on them. Want to polish off the last four episodes of Next Food Network Star? That’ll cost you 4,000 words.

An hour of television costs 1,000 words. Reading is GREAT, but if you’re like me, you might snuggle in between the covers of an old favorite and end up realizing four hours later that you didn’t touch your WIP today. Pay for your reading time minute for minute. Thirty minute writing sprint? Thirty minutes curled up with le book. Going out drinking with your mates tonight? Not till you hit your goal. They can sit in your living room and entertain the cats while you polish off your 2,000 words.

Want to go extra hardcore with earning your vices? I’m trying to lose some weight, which means I’m fighting my super-lazy metabolism AND the estradiol progestione I ingest each day to avoid any untimed joy bundles. If I want to see what happens in the season one finale of Vampire Diaries or the next round of The Bachelorette (I know, I know…everyone gets a guilty pleasure, right?), I have to earn it. 1,000 words for every hour AND fifteen minutes of upped heart rate, gasping for breath.

Why do I want to do this to myself?

Damn fine of you to ask, I say! Capital! Capital!

The first reason is to complete a first draft of a novel in less than two months (it’s already begun). If I hope to make a career out of my scribblings, I’m going to need to put out more than just one book every three years.

The second reason is that I really want my tattoos. And I’m not letting that happen until I’ve gotten back down to a healthy BMI and my goal weight.

The third reason is that to accomplish any goals, it takes discipline. Camp NaNoWriMo (and NaNoWriMo proper) is a writing bootcamp disguised by chunky graphics and happy fonts. I like to take it a couple steps farther because I believe in a holistic approach to life. If you’re making things happen in one area, you can make things happen in others.

So. Who’s with me?

A thin veil for thirty days of sweaty, feverish typing.

I ought to start this with a disclaimer. I do not hold a British passport; I am not a subject of the Queen. I will have no legal right to vote on this subject in the autumn of 2014. But it matters to me.

I hope one day to make my home in Scotland. I would like to raise my children there. I want to bring my family back to to the land of my ancestors. There are Scots on every branch of my family tree. Some of them are closer to the trunk than others, but they’re all there. Since 2004, I’ve spent a lot of time in Scotland. The first time I ever went, I was alone. It was me, a large rucksack, and two months that changed my life.

The north-west point of mainland Scotland, John O’Groats.

I spent over eight weeks there that summer. Listening, learning, absorbing. I saw everything from misty glens to sheer faced cliffs. I climbed Ben Nevis and visited chambered cairns and standing stones. But what I recall most about that trip were the people.

From the Glasgow cabbie who cheerfully bid me “Welcome home!” when I told him I had Scottish ancestry to Robin, a young man from Rothesay, who took me out with his friend Neil to fly on the beaches of St. Andrews — they accepted me and welcomed me. Kind and gracious and welcoming are the Scots.

It’s on this beach I tried to fly. Parachute. Harness. Gust of wind. 20 feet in the air only to be dropped on my arse. I washed it off in the North Sea and found sand in various orifices for weeks to come. Weeks. Thanks, Robin and Neil.

That land snared me so tight that I found ways to go back year after year. At Christmas in 2006, a few New Zealanders introduced me to the Scottish band Albannach. Albannach means, quite simply, “Scottish” or “Scots” in Gaelic. Their music is reminiscent of a time when drums served to make you dance, to make you fight, to stir your soul. From the first strains of Donnie’s pipes, they caught me. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet them several times and to see them live more times than I can count now — they breathe a fiery passion for their homeland, and they believe that a Scot is a Scot, even unto a hundred generations.

Even then, I’d seen Braveheart. It’s a romanticized portrait of a violent former time, to be sure, but the facts as they are remain unmolested. William Wallace was a hero. He led the Scots to many victories and a few losses. Some of those victories, like that at Stirling Bridge, were brilliant displays of tactics and courage by the outnumbered Scots. And it remains that Wallace paid for Scotland’s freedom with his blood and a horrific, torturous death long before Robert the Bruce was able to rally his countrymen to victory on the field at Bannockburn.

The Wallace Monument at Stirling. The bridge is long gone, but you can see Wallace’s sword at the top of the tower.

Robert Bruce himself is a paragon of Scotland’s heroes — and a bit maligned by Braveheart’s writers. He saw Scotland freed, and she remained thus for four centuries.

It should be noted, in the interest of fairness, that Scotland’s greatest enemy has — at times — been her own rulers. Nobles wooed by prospects of English titles or land, lured by empty promises at the expense of those who had no voice.

While doing my research on my family, I found a line of Scots that people on Ancestry.com were quick to believe came from the Earl of Panmure. It was exciting to think that perhaps I came from some noble house — but the facts didn’t line up. Some were content to leave those gaps unfilled, but I’m not. That Scot, with all the other Scots on my tree, was most likely a peasant. A crofter or a farmer, and likely no one of note. Indeed most of my Scottish ancestors had no voice. They were subject to the whims of their rulers, and I’ve no doubt that the political machinations of the time are what forced my forebears from their homeland.

For the first time, the people of Scotland have a say in what becomes of her. They didn’t have much of a choice when James Stuart, sixth of his name, landed on the thrones of both Scotland and England. They didn’t get to vote on the Act of the Union in 1707, and many Scots dissented — and were forcibly put down.

Monument at the Culloden Battlefield, where hundreds of Scots died fighting to return a Stuart to the throne. The battle was nearly a massacre in proportions, and what followed was brutal retaliation against the Highlanders.

Three hundred years have passed since then.

This time round, there is a chance for Scotland’s independence to come without bloodshed. This time round, I doubt it will come to that. I can most sincerely and fervently say that I hope it will not. The basis of my belief in Scotland’s independence is one of principle. Scotland is a discrete nation with a distinct culture and history. Why should she not have self-determination?

It bears mentioning as well that Scottish history is not the national history taught in Scottish schools. Scottish children learn British history, which is by and large an Anglocentric pursuit. I think that if more Scots had grown up learning more in-depth about her long and fascinating story, there would likely be greater support for independence. As children progress past primary school and onto secondary, a bit more emphasis is placed on Scottish history and identity, but it’s not the same.

I remember how I felt when I found that certain parts of American history had been glossed over in my classes. History should be the property of the people. It affects us and the choices we make.

From a political perspective, a split of the United Kingdom would be difficult. Would Scotland retain membership in the European Union? What would happen to the North Sea oil reserves? What would change? Would they get to keep golf? (Okay, that last was a joke.)

Those who are against Scottish independence say that the United Kingdom is more prosperous as a whole and that membership therein does not compromise the individual identity of its member nations. But under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which the UK has signed), Scotland has a right to self-determination if she so chooses.

Scotland of course benefits as a part of one of the world’s major powers — but what if the status quo  in your country’s foreign policy grossly diverges from your wishes? Such was the case in the last major election in the UK, with the Conservatives (Tories) winning on a national scale (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) when in Scotland they garnered a tiny 15% of the vote. Yes, you read that right. 85% of Scotland did not vote for the current UK government, but they don’t have the option to get out of it. Scotland is significantly more liberal than England, and when your country has five million people to your neighbor’s whopping 59 million, your voice gets lost in a very large crowd.

It’s difficult to be objective in a case like this, but then I’m not trying to be. I’m merely trying to express an opinion and give a few reasons for it.

I believe that Scotland should be free. She should have the chance to go it alone and make what she can of this new era. Her people are capable, hardworking, generous, and kind. They have eked out a living on a hunk of largely barren rock for ten thousand years. They have fought back superior forces and given us people like David Hume, Alexander Graham Bell, Alexander Fleming, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Burns, Adam Smith, Kirkpatrick MacMillan (Like bikes? He invented them.), Craig Ferguson, Julie Fowlis, and many more.

Why do I care about all of this? I guess it comes down to who I am. I am a Scot. What makes a Scot? Is it blood? Yes. Is it ancestry? Yes. Is it birth? Yes.

But beyond all those things, I think what makes a Scot is a passion for the land, her people, and her heritage. It’s the beauty of her languages — the cadence of Scots and the fluidity of Gaelic. It’s her haunting stories, lively reels, whirling jigs and the piercing sound of the pipes. It’s a belief, in her history and her perseverance. It’s hope for her future. It’s fire and passion born of rock and rain.

Even if you don’t support the coming referendum, a Scot can be any of those things and all of them. I am one. MacLennan and MacLachlan, Maule and MacMillan, Brown and Hamilton, Taylor and Mears. By blood and bone and the stories passed down from my ancestors who never forgot where they came from — I am one. And this Scot happens to believe that Scotland is a living place, and she must and shall go free.

Saor Alba.

Rainbow over Loch Ness — one of my favorite moments ever.

The aforementioned Scottish band Albannach are offering a new album entitled The Independence EP for free on their website. If you click the image below, you’ll be taken to the page where you can download it.

Cover of The Independence EP — click to be taken to the download page.

They are a band of patriots, people who genuinely believe in Scotland’s ability to govern herself. One of their dear friends, writer and historian David Ross, passed from this world two years ago. His life was a testament to that belief and will not be forgotten by any of us who were lucky enough to have met him.

Nelly. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had a one of those this morning. It comes from several things. First, a permanent state of denial about my metabolism’s ability to do its job. Some people can eat till the cows come home and manage to be scrawny forever. Me? Not so much. Second, I have a difficult time saying no to burgers. Thick, juicy, medium rare prime Angus meat? Yeah, throw some pepper jack cheese and avocado on there with some pico, and I’ll give you anything you want. Third, whatever hormone it is that convinces women post-birthing that labor wasn’t really that bad seems to work in me to make me forget how good I feel when I’m working out regularly.

What I really feel like with a regular exercise regimen ^^^. What my brain remembers: iron maidens and thumbscrews. (Cover of Bliss)

So that leaves me waking up today with the scale rapidly approaching the highest number its ever seen. Yikes.

And I realized that there is a nice little metaphor in there, in spite of the weight I’ve accumulated. Ready?

Dreams are like weight loss goals. They’re there, each New Year sees them getting a cursory once over and a few weeks of renewed striving only to dive into that chocolate box sometime around Valentine’s Day. You forget how good it feels when you’re working toward them and succeeding, because dizzam, does that burger taste delicious. And you really need to catch up on The Bachelor, because you missed the last two episodes. So whatever it is you’re doing can wait.

They’re both a source of guilt. Each time buttoning your “fat jeans” feels tighter, you think, “Okay. Tomorrow something’s going to change. Tomorrow I gotta get on this for real.” Same thing with opening a Word Document and realizing it hasn’t been modified in three months when you said you were going to work on it every day. Both might see you with your face in Edy’s (or Dreyer’s if you’re west of the Rockies) Butterfinger ice cream while the tears of self-recrimination drip onto the candy swirl.

Pure, liquid Kryptonite.

We don’t like to admit that it’s all us. There is precisely one person and one person alone who muddles up the water of your goals. That’s you. We, as humans, like to have scapegoats. “American food is all so full of calories! How do I lose weight eating this stuff?” “My dog ate my manuscript. Woe is me!” But really, what we’re saying is that we lack self-control. I lack self-control. Hell, sometimes I self-sabotage. We all do.

The other day, I said that reaching goals is about vision, plan, and discipline. You can’t have the plan without the vision, and discipline with no end goal doesn’t accomplish much. So whatever it is that gives you focus, use it. For me, it was seeing a number on the scale I thought I’d never in my life see again. It snapped me out of the denial of thinking the scale was just wrong (sometimes it fluctuates wildly — by like ten pounds) and made me realize that as usual, my mental and physical state corresponds to how productive a writer I am.

I need focus. I need structure. Most of us do, to some extent.

So today I’ll wrap up with an award I got last week from Amanda Leigh. It’s both a humbling reminder to myself to get some focus back and a nod to the work I’ve already done.

I’d also like to say that I am tremendously grateful to this community of bloggers here on WordPress. Yesterday I woke up to a very, very generous gift from a fellow blogger who I have never met in person. We have a great group of people here, and all I can say is that I will pay it forward when I am able.

Ms. Amanda graced me with the Beautiful Blogger Award!

Here are the rules. Thank the giver (thank you Amanda!), share seven things about yourself, and pass the blog along to seven people.

Okay. Seven things about me…

1. I make killer guacamole.

2. I tend to tear up when I hear Gaelic, which may or may not make it a difficult language for me to learn.

3. I want to learn Welsh.

4. I have plans for some very serious tattooage.

5. When I got my ears pierced, it took three years for them to heal properly (I had difficulties with certain metals).

6. As a teen, I loved Marilyn Manson, Korn, Nine Inch Nails, Limp Bizkit, Fuel, and Rob Zombie. (And to be honest, I still do.)

7. My first big concert was Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill tour, and she used to star on my favorite Nickelodeon show, You Can’t Do That on Television!

Alrighty, seven bloggers. These are some blogs I always enjoy reading. Sorry if you all have gotten this award before!

1. Patricia Sands

2. Kristin McFarland

3. Anna Meade

4. Angie Richmond

5. August McLaughlin

6. Lillie McFerrin

7. Anonymous Legacy

These seven women are people who are not only beautiful outside and in, but they make an effort to help others, whether in improving their writing, supporting important causes, or simply encouraging creativity and a spirit of wonder. They’re all truly magnificent women that YOU should get to know.

So today, I’m going to set a couple of goals.

1. Learn from others.

2. Drink at least eight glasses of water.

3. Write at least 2,000 words.

4. Dance about.

What little goals will you set today to help you regain (or maintain) focus on your goals? What wisdom helps you stay disciplined?

There are some sparkly things germinating in Emmie-land, and I thought today might be a good day to share them with you.

First of all, I’ve mentioned it already, but I’ve begun writing a new novel. It’s new territory for me both in genre (still paranormal, but comic book style superhero paranormal), and it’s written in the first person present tense. The latter is quite new and interesting. I like the immediacy of it as well as the intimacy, but it of course has its drawbacks as well. Making sure to stay in the correct usage can be a bit tricksy. I’m also writing it from the perspective of a Scot, so making sure I use the correct Britishisms is going to be fun. The tone is quirky, snarky, and a little self-deprecating. So far I’m having a ball. You can follow my progress on this novel in the sidebar of this here blog.

While I’ve decided to can the Silver Thorn trilogy pending massive overhaul, it’s not something I want to entirely give up on. Once I finish the first draft of the WIP, I will go back to those books and try to squeeze the gold from the dross again.

The third exciting announcement is that I am building a website — a proper one. It’ll have the normal snazz with a few fun twists, including a store (!), which should hint at some things coming up in the not-so-distant future.

I am considering a small series of short stories that may serve as a prequel to the Silver Thorn books once I go back to them. I have one that I am going to start submitting to magazines and a couple more in the works. Exciting? Yesh.

Call it Emmie 2.0, call it whatever you want, but I’ve been stewing a bunch of ideas in my brain for the last few months, and they’re beginning to coalesce into something more cohesive than chunky soup. An idea bisque, if you will.

What I’ve come up with for the fifth or sixth time is that goals need three things to become accomplishments: vision, plan, and discipline. So when it comes to both writing and losing stubborn love handles, all three have to work together.

I’m psyched to share these upcoming changes with you — so hold onto your butts.

That didn’t come out right.

That said, allow me to apply the metaphor like the ointment for my soul that it is.

I started working on The Silver Thorn Chronicles in 2005. I finished the first book in 2008 and the second one in 2011, and the third one is about halfway done. I spent about eight months last year trying to polish up the first book and attempting to fix a myriad of structural issues to some avail. If you’d asked me four years ago, I would have said this trilogy would be my opus, the crowning glory of my achievement.

It also happens to be my first completed writing project, so glean from that what you will. (Feel free to pahaha at my expense — I am.)

To me, this project looked something like this:

A baby so beautiful, they gave her a wee award for it. Ah, Earth. Reinforcing superficiality right out of the womb. Photo from mybabyphotos.net.

I was under the impression that great works of writing birthed themselves from hours of labor and descended fully formed into the world. And as I’d birthed that one, I thought it was utterly lovely. I thought it would be a hit. I thought it would poof my career into existence with some crappy smoke effects and a 25 cent sparkler.

Like many budding writers, I missed a Really Big Point.

Writing isn’t like pregnancy. Not really. You might feel like it is, but you have a lot less control over what happens to the fruit of your loins than you do over what comes out on paper. I’ve always been a die-hard pantser, writing and writing without being that great at planning or plotting. Some pantsers succeed marvelously — but most of those only do so after many failed attempts.

I’ve realized in the past year that my beautiful baby looks instead something like this:

Wait. Gimme my rose-colored glasses back. GIMME! (Image via buckaroos.homestead.com)

Writing well involves study. Even the greatest writers don’t simply poof into existence holding a sparkler and a fog machine. Want to place any bets on how much crumpled paper littered Shakespeare’s floor before he got that balcony scene right? Very seldom will you find a writer who manages to shite out pure gold, and if that happens, it usually is only lauded as such posthumously.

I do not shite gold, and you probably don’t either. More’s the pity.

The good thing about this is that writing is a learned skill. Some of it you can learn by strapping books to your head while you sleep reading heaps within your genre (and other genres). You can learn more of it by reading books on the craft and yes, by reading crappy books that somehow got published (or someone self-published without so much as a cursory edit).

You can learn a lot by reading, but the rest you have to learn by writing. You have to try it and see what works. Before, the only way you knew if something worked was if it got published. Now with the dawn of self-publishing, you can put it out there yourself and see what it does.

For me, what all of this meant was that when my rosy glasses fell off and got trod upon, I found that my opus more resembled something on the bottom of Mary Shelley‘s shoe, and that I’d given birth to an ugly baby because I thought that’s what writing was. I thought writing meant you were stuck with whatever came soaring out of you, and that’s not at all the case.

(I think most women can agree that the birthing process would be much easier if babies indeed came soaring out of us.)

So what I have now is approximately a quarter million words of an ugly baby. “Daaaaamn, girl,” you might be saying. “That’s one ugly baby.”

You’d be right. However, she isn’t all bad. She’s got pretty eyes and nice skin tone. She might, under the right tutelage and prodding, turn out rather lovely. But I don’t have it in me right now to start from scratch, and I also don’t  have it in me to take that metaphor to the next step of cutting off the ugly baby’s nice parts and sewing them up with replacements.

No. I’m going to scrap the baby metaphor entirely now.

I’ve started an entirely new project, into which I got about 5,000 words before MS Word decided to fangoriously devour a third of it, along with the two hours of my life I spent attempting to recover the file. This project is fun. To an extent I’m pantsing, but I’m writing with the mindset of mutability. This project’s DNA is not set in stone from conception. It doesn’t dictate a certain flow or end goal; as the writer, I can orchestrate where it goes and make sure it goes where it should. I have control over its skeleton and musculature, flesh and adornments.

When it’s done, it won’t be a baby at all. It’ll be a sculpture.

Writing is an art form, but it’s also a skill. It’s one learned through effort and error, tears, recrimination, and fictional (I hope) murder of darlings. This book will not take me three years to write. You can hold me to that, gentle viewers.

That said, I will keep you updated on my progress. I might even break the rule of posting fiction and give you a sample chapter to read, if you would be interested. This has been a lesson in humility for me, but it’s also been somewhat liberating. There is a lot of pressure in thinking that something has to come out right or the world will end in a shower of sparklers and fog machines. Once you recognize that you can grow a skill and have the patience to do so, it frees you from the burden of having to create ex nihilo. 

There’s a lot coming soon on the Emmie front, and a lot of it feels rather exciting. Stay tuned, gentle viewers. Stay tuned.

What hard lessons have your career taught you? When have you found you had to shift down a new path? When have you had to go outside your comfort zone?

Cover of Rob Roy

Last night I began watching Rob Roy. It’s one of those movies I’ve meant to watch for quite a long time and simply hadn’t gotten around to. One thing I noticed was that Jessica Lange‘s performance was superb. Another thing I noticed was that there seems to be a trend in the treatment of women in these hero-legend films.

Let me clarify. I don’t mean treatment in regards to people’s behavior toward them (though that is a by-product of what I mean). I mean the portrayal of them. Their roles. The words that come out of their mouths and the way the writers decide what is going to happen to them. I’ve noticed a couple specific common threads:

1. Family focus: Most of these hero-legends involve some real or perceived threat to the wider scope of the protagonist’s life. The woman is the one who says, “No, your priority is your family.” To which the hero says something about duty and honor yadda yadda, which leads directly into…

2. Sexual violence: Murron in Braveheart is nearly raped by a particularly disgusting English soldier. Mary in Rob Roy is raped pretty brutally by Archibald Cunningham. This is usually used as a plot device to push the hero into the Big Bad Conflict with the antagonist. Murron is killed for even trying to fight back, and Mary screams at Rob Roy’s friend when he says his honor requires him to tell Robert MacGregor, “If I can bear it happening, you can bear the silence!”

Historians doubt the veracity of these claims — whether or not Marion Wallace (renamed Murron for the film) or Mary MacGregor were raped — and to that I would say that I think many people would prefer to think of the past as having some honor, to hope that rape would not have been as commonplace as I think it must have been. They may have dubbed it “ravishment,” but if it’s as common as it is in a time where women can vote, work, and hold public office, I have no reason whatsoever to doubt that it would have been a much more normal occurrence in a time where women were thought to have little intelligence and hardly any rights over their person and livelihood.

3. Martyrs: The women in these hero-legends are often depicted as martyrs. The Princess in Braveheart is a good example — she’s forced to marry Edward the II against her will, and her little form of rebellion is to sleep with Wallace. Murron flat out dies, and Mary has to bear her rapist’s child — yet the men (who generally also die) are considered the heroes and go to their graves only to have history make legends out of them.

The women are made into bait, martyrs, or even stumbling blocks for the heroes. You tell me what is more heroic: leaving your home open to raiders with no protection or being violated and then choosing to bear it in silence to prevent additional violence and the destruction of everything you love. The problem is, the latter doesn’t make for a spectacular film in the Hollywood rite.

This isn’t to say I dislike William Wallace or the legend of Rob Roy MacGregor, only the portrayal of the women in the films about them. We all know that Hollywood takes license with stories that have any basis in history, and it’s that I take issue with.

I would like to see a film where the women are not beaten, raped, and made into martyrs when the heroes are portrayed almost equally in a negative light because of their utter selfishness that destroys their women in its blindness. William Wallace refused to wait to marry Murron against her family’s wishes (which were for the decent reason of wanting to make sure Murron wouldn’t be widowed at an early age due to the rising tension in Scotland), and his carefree amorous glances drew the English’s attention. Rob Roy refused to listen to his wife and protect his home, leaving it open and unguarded when Cunningham arrived to burn it down and violate his wife.

These are both rather poor decisions, but the women bear the retaliation for their folly.

And this is why, since we’re on the topic of Scotland and legends, that I cannot wait for the movie Brave.

Some brilliant person in the Pixar world got the idea (or optioned the rights from a Ray Ban shaded author who is forever too cool for school) to turn the entire above stereotype on its head. Young Merida gets to be the one who wants to change her lot in life — and in her ignorance sparks a curse and has to undo it herself. The formula of a hero not listening to family and thus endangering everyone, then having to fix it? This time Merida isn’t the bait or the martyr, she’s the hero.

Bravo, Pixar. Bravo.

What this post really means, what these stereotypes of women in period films really say, is that growing up I looked around to see female heroes in my movies and TV shows and books and found very few. It was only men being the ones to save the world. In the past twenty years, this has begun to change. Buffy opened the door to it, but it’s really the creators of art that have control over where it goes from here. Having Joss Whedon in charge of The Avengers made me happy — Black Widow was in all ways a superhero — but the Wonder Woman movie couldn’t even get off the ground. It tried, but it ended up flailing around like a little kid in a cape. What does that tell us?

It doesn’t tell us that there’s no story there — it says Hollywood doesn’t think it can sell a female superhero.

So here’s to all of us who write — it’s our duty to show young women female heroes who are complex, strong, and flawed. It’s our job to show them that women are more than martyrs, that our lives have value beyond how we handle sexual violence, and that our voices matter. If we keep writing it, eventually we’ll see it happen.

Let’s change the lot of the XX.

Check out the Brave trailer:

The Picts were, simply put, Celts. The earlier settlers of prehistoric Scotland such as the Caledonii of the northern Moray area (stretching to Sutherland in the west) gave way to the Picts. The Picts have been described as enigmatic, mysterious, and somewhat lost to the annals of history like a left footed sock. However, they are not as mysterious as one might think. Their history is well-documented in many cases, and new archaeological discoveries have shed light on their intelligence and the extent of their civilization.

Far from being mere painted barbarians rebelling against the advance of Rome, the Picts had an organized social structure. They had high kings and advanced artwork, and they were among the foremost stone carvers of that time period — Rome included.

An example of Pictish stone carving: The harper on the Dupplin Cross, Scotland, circa 800 AD (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the most often cited descriptions of the Picts comes from Venerable Bede, an early medieval scholar and historian who detailed much of the history of northern England at the time and his kingdom of residence, Northumbria. At the time of his writing, he describes that the Picts and their southern neighbors were on speaking terms politically. Kudos to both sides for that, though as history would pluck up its irony harp, the Northumbrians were to blame for the eventual demise of the Pictish kingdom‘s influence — in Bede’s lifetime no less.

One of the more interesting references Bede makes in regard to the Picts is that their kings descended from the maternal line. The origins of this report are steeped in legend a bit like a cuppa you’ve gone and forgotten in the kitchen for half an hour. Legend states that when the Picts arrived in the British Isles (likely from Scandinavia), they first stopped by Ireland to politely inquire after some land. The inhabitants of Northern Ireland at the time (confusingly called Scots) said the Picts couldn’t sit there, but that there was a rather nice green island to the east visible on clear days, and they might fancy taking a wee maritime jaunt that-a-way.

According to this legend, the Picts had been a bit absentminded in their preparations for this new colonization attempt and had neglected to pack anyone with a set of…erm…double X chromosomes. To this the Scots responded that they’d be happy to give them a few of their own women under the condition that the Picts chose their kings from among the female line. So the Picts sailed away with their new wives and made a happy new home in what is now Scotland.

By examining the genealogy of Pictish kings, it does appear that the high kings were chosen by matrilineal succession, at the very least in some circumstances. (Bede states that this was most common when there was some dispute about succession, and it’s unclear how common of a practice it was.) What the role of women consisted of in Pictish culture is open to debate, but it would stand to some logic that if they valued women enough to acknowledge the passing of lineage through them (something not unheard of in other cultures, but still quite rare), they had some sort of social status.

This view is reinforced by an article by Dr. Ross Samson in “British Archaeology” in 1995 in which he supports the view of Pictish women holding a high amount of social stature relative to their foreign counterparts due to the number of symbol stones he believes to have been erected to mark their graves. According to Dr. Samson, one in five symbol stones (which he asserts were erected as memorials) seems to refer to women via the mirror and comb symbols carved into the faces of the stones. To put this number in perspective, in ancient Ireland, historians and archaeologists know the names of about 10,000 men — and only 200-300 women, or about 2%. If the Picts commemorated a staggering 20% of their women, that would be a tantalizing statistic indeed.

The Dunrobin stone with wonderfully preserved symbols. See the mirror and the comb at beneath the salmon and sword. Image via tenthmedieval.wordpress.com — if anyone knows the photo’s origin, do let me know.

The Picts were undoubtedly a warlike people — they defended their territory against the Romans first and then the people of northern England. Their name itself means “painted ones” loosely translated (An-Cruithne as dubbed by Irish Scots, which also indicates paint), and there is still some debate over precisely what that means. Most depictions (get it?) of the Picts do not show visible tattoos, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t exist — and their name could also refer to literal paint that would wash off and thus not feature largely in a legacy of artwork.

As is tradition in that northern bit of island, the Picts’ most famous battle at Mons Graupius involved them being outnumbered, outweaponed, and taking on a regimented force with singleminded courage. (Sound familiar? If not, see: Battle of Stirling Bridge, Battle of Falkirk, Battle of Bannockburn, Battle of Culloden to get a quick overview.) This particular painful battle left the Picts routed and dispersed — though not for long.

Not much is known about the religion of the Picts. It seems likely that they practiced a form of Celtic pantheism, but little is known of the religion that predominated their lands prior to their conversion to Christianity. What’s interesting is that following that conversion, some scholars referred to them as apostates. Why, I can’t say, but who doesn’t love a religious rebel? What is known is that by the eighth century, the Picts had constructed a monastery on Easter Ross that was producing chalices, metalwork, and illuminated manuscripts similar to the stunning Irish Book of Kells.

In addition to that, they were using the Golden Section or “Divine Proportion” in their architecture, which is a ratio of 1.618 to one — a ratio that is seen in nature in spiral shells and even in human faces considered to be beautiful. For all the talk of these Picts being howling barbarians, they seem to have treated their women well, valued art, and been capable of sophisticated mathematics. All of which are hallmarks of a cultured society.

Though their language is mostly undocumented — and what clues exist are subject to speculation and educated guesswork — it’s clear that the Picts were far more than roving warbands. They participated in politics and fought when necessary, and depending on whose tale you decide to ingest, their matrilineal form of succession ultimately gave birth to Cinead mac Ailpin (or, Anglicized, Kenneth Mac Alpin — the first King of Scots). Some myths say that mac Ailpin conquered the Picts, but historians of the 19th and 20th centuries have shied away from this view in favor of the first King of Scots being born of a Pictish mother and thus uniting the two peoples under a common ruler. It seems likely that these two groups, the long-established Picts and the Gaelic Scots who migrated from Ireland, simply intermarried and gradually smushed themselves into one jolly family with a common enemy to the south. And if that’s true, it might be a great argument against those who accuse the Scots of being too busy lopping off one another’s toes to create a unified nation — but that’s a discussion for another day.

Whichever way you slice with your claymore, the Picts have influenced the history and culture of a complex and beautiful land. Far from being a mystery cloaked in an enigma, there is concrete evidence of their existence and, more and more, of their sophistication as a people. I for one cannot wait for the next installment.

What do you think of the Picts? Do they make you want to churn up some woad and turn blue? How have they inspired the romance and legend of ancient Scotland?

If you’ve enjoyed learning about the Picts, you might like the following articles:

The Truth About the Picts, The Independent

Matrilineal Succession Among the Picts, Carla Nayland

Archaeologists Uncover Pictish Seat of Power, Past Horizons

And if you missed my first installment in the Scotland The Brave series, do go here and check it out!

100-200 words. Any genre. 

The prompts were:

Mmm…roller coaster. Image via caramichaels.com

This phrase (must be used verbatim):

“have to let go”

And this concept:

Star-Crossed

Without further ado, here’s my entry for the week!

My hands clench on the rail. I expect him to come down the exit ramp. Anyone. No one appears.
The sudden hush after the tearing screech buzzes in my head as if a hive of bees has nested between my ears. I can’t breathe.
The ring box nudges my hip where I stuffed it into my pocket this morning after dabbing concealer over the angry welt on my cheek. It’s taken me all day to track him here.
The computer screen freezes on the picture. He’s in the front row. The empty seat to his right is a missing front tooth in a model’s smile. I picture myself there, stony and blank. Instead I’m here as the image etches itself into my memory.
I recall the throb of my cheek nudging me from fitful sleep. My resolve to find him and return the ring. To tell him he’ll never lay a hand on me again.
Cacophony bursts out of silence. Sirens. Screams.
I look at the picture again. His hands clutch the safety bars as tightly as I hold the gift shop rail.
I have to let go.
I drop the ring in a souvenir cup on my way out.

In spite of the excitement, I’m treading cautiously. As much as I would fancy the idea of Scottish kings running through my veins, Ancestry.com isn’t huge with the enforcement of sources. You can merge your family tree with just about anyone without having to cite any sources — and they don’t have to cite them either. In fact, the website counts other people’s trees as sources. Which, I’ve noted on several occasions has led to parents born after children and other  silly inconsistencies that don’t quite hold up to my standard of academic integrity.

That said, my foray into genealogy has provided me with some highs — the chills of discovering that my ancestors inhabited certain places I’ve always felt particularly drawn to, the slew of deliciously unpronounceable Welsh names, and the dizzying excitement of having to decipher which Williams, Roberts, and Johns come from which generation when my family forewent creativity and kept things a little too simple.

Through all of this time spent pouring through census records and genealogy books written by some very extended family members, I realized just tonight that I’ve been sitting here for a couple weeks like a bird with its head stuck in the sand.

I’ve got heaps of names in front of me. Some branches of my tree extend back almost a thousand years, if the info is correct. So many names and generations that the inside of my head looks something like this:

Desert dunes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s rather breathtaking at first, no? But after a bit, all the grains sort of run together, and you realize you’re looking down when you ought to be looking up.

The past runs beneath our feet like those sand dunes. Our feet leave marks in it when we pass by, and sometimes if we squint, we can see the marks of others. And yet we only get one turn on this rock, and if we spend the whole time looking at the ground, we’ll miss everything that goes on in the sky.

Looking up and forward is what has made humans different from the other critters that scurry around the face of this dinky little world as we hurtle around the sun. My kitty is lounging on my chest right now, watching me type. She likes to see the cursor move across the page. Her purr is comforting, but she’s not about to correct my grammar, and if she types anything, it would be by pure chance if it came out wordlike.

As valuable as the past is to learn from and incorporate into our dream of the future, at some point we have to make the future into the image we see of it. That’s something that makes human beans unique, no? We desire to shape our lives, and sometimes even the world.

Digging through the past can yield some gems, but sometimes the real wealth is looking forward. I may or may not be the ultimate third cousin (or something) of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots and Hero of Scotland — but if I believe in Scotland like he did, like Wallace did, like my acquaintance, historian and author David R. Ross did, then maybe one day I’ll do her some good as well.

Burying your head in the ground will only get sand in your eyes. Eventually we all have to yank our heads out of whatever it is that blinds us and start living. Start doing. Start being. Because at the end of the road, there’s only one person to blame if you see a Dead End sign instead of a Welcome sign.

I can learn from my ancestors who were pioneers and patriots, refugees and freedom fighters. Some were slave owners and fought Native Americans off their land. Others fled persecution themselves and lived quiet lives. There’s wisdom somewhere in there — that there’s good and bad in all of us. It’s up to us to choose each day what we pull out of the drawer.

I can tell you one thing — the view from the sand won’t get you too far, but once you start moving along it can help guide your steps.

When do you need to remind yourself to look up and forward? What motivates you to be who you want to be? 

Related articles

• Who Do You Think You Are? (emmiemears.com)
• Robert the Bruce (ojameswhoartthou.wordpress.com)
• Genealogy: how I got hung up on my family tree (telegraph.co.uk)