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How Do You Know She’s a Witch?
She looks like one!
It's not easy being green. Image via oz.wikia.com
As Kermit so aptly put it, witches have had it rough. I’m sure that was what he referred to with his comment. Always looking out for others, that one.
Witches have always had a bit of a bad rap. If you go searching through the history books, you’ll find whole heaps of instances where a drought or famine or rash of cattle deaths — or a rash in general — prompted the good townspeople to fear a witch in their midst. One might even call them the scapegoats of humanity throughout the centuries. It resulted in not a few bogus trials and torture and death sentences. It also happened to be one of those guilt by association things. You know nice little Esther Pemberley down the street?
You do know her?!! You must be a witch too!!!! [Insert torches and angry mob with pitchforks here.]
What do you burn apart from witches? MORE WITCHES! Image property of the Monty Python boys, brought to you by rjciurus.com
Needless to say, the witches who were accused and inevitably found guilty met rather ignominious fates. And instead of being witches, they were mostly just…you know. Women. Sometimes old, quirky, or wealthy (magistrates loved to accuse wealthy widows because when they offed them in the “justice” system, they got to keep the spoils estates), sometimes young and into some kind of mundane trouble.
Makes me rather happy that I not only live in a land where women are mostly equal, but I live here in the 21st century. Four hundred years ago, there is probably a stake with my name on it.
Like this steak. Wait... (Drool courtesy of steamykitchen.com)
Like vampires and horror, witches were one of my childhood staples. I loved magic. I loved magic so much that I begged Santa for a real magic wand and figured he had just forgotten or ran out of time on Christmas Day that year. I subsequently looked under my bed every day for over a year. I contented myself with reading about witches or magic. Books like the Chronicles of Prydain made me yearn to be Eilonwy. Whenever I played Candy Land with friends, we fought over who got to be the magical blue witch (because as children, this is a never-ending and vital argument).
I was never afraid of witches, even the really bad ones like the WWW (Wicked Witch of the West) or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. I thought Glinda was a wee bit dumb. I loved the idea of witches who had power within them, wand or no wand.
It didn’t take me long to fall in love with urban fantasy. The Night World witches came first and had me hunting through herb shops wanting to try Thea’s spells. Then I discovered the Secret Circle, and I was hooked like magic was crack. When I got older, it was the sorcerers from the Belgariad and the Aes Sedai of the Wheel of Time (I know, I know, not “witches” and not urban fantasy). Then came Kim Harrison‘s Rachel Morgan. Her witches fall into either the “earth witch” category or the “ley line” witch category. Magic has defined lines, though as Rachel of course finds out, where the line is tends to move. I liked that, but I still loved the idea of magic coming from within the character, like the Will and the Word used by Eddings, or being able to channel the One Power.
Little did I know that all of those ideas and preferences were beginning to culminate in the germination of my own witches, the ones who populate my trilogy. To me, nature is the essence of magic, and witches, if you will, are nothing more than conduits of that essence. They can change things and get nature to do things for them, but it all comes from the same place. Nature, science, that type of power that is bigger than humanity. Magic in this sense is never “good” or “evil” — it is the user that gives it the intent and meaning, for good or ill.
My question for all you fantasy readers out there — and writers — is this: how do you know she’s a witch? What gives witches their powers? Where does magic come from?
You can make it up — that’s what this is all about. But show me your magic.
How do I know she’s a witch? Well, I’ll tell you, gentle viewers.
If she weighs the same as a duck, she is made of wood! And therefore…a witch!
Related articles
- How did people react to witches and witch craft (wiki.answers.com)
- Grave Witch by Kalayna Price – Review 4 of 5 (readingdivas.wordpress.com)
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A Twilit Diatribe and Other Sordid Stories
This post has been milling around in my brain like a school of directionless fish for the past several weeks. I thought about re-reading the entire series before writing it and then decided it wasn’t necessary. So here I am to tackle one of the literary phenomena of this decade:
Twilight.
Before I get started, I want to make plain and clear that I am in no way attempting to demean Stephenie Meyer or her work.
I’ve read all the books. I will begin with that. And I wanted to read them. I picked up Twilight in the hot, humid Tennessee of 2008, and after plowing through the first volume, went out and bought the second and third. And then I went to the midnight release of Breaking Dawn at the Nashville Borders where I used to have my writing group. I even went to a book discussion group about it. Through all of that, I wouldn’t call myself a Twi-hard. I read them again a little while later, and things started to bother me.
I had just gotten out of a bad relationship. Suffice it to say that this man wouldn’t take no for an answer. Re-reading Twilight, I started to ask how it was okay for a man (one ultimately decades older) to sit in a high school girl’s bedroom and watch her sleep. Any man. As their relationship progressed, I wondered why Bella put up with the fact that Edward seems to think any decision she makes is stupid, and that he knows better always.
Let me interject here that I do not think any of that was Stephenie Meyer’s conscious intention.
The fairy-tale lover inside my head at this cries, “But he loves her!”
The part of me who has dealt with abuse both first and second hand responds, “Controlling, boundary-crossing love is not love.”
I get the forbidden love thing. I do. It’s enticing and seductive. But there’s a lot of wisdom in throwing that kind of love out the window from the get-go. Because even though Edward and Bella got one, in the real world, happy endings don’t exist. I actually said this in my wedding vows: Anyone can get on a shiny horse and trot westward, but it takes a truer and more perfect love to be there when the sun comes up, or when the sun is obscured by clouds, or when life happens. True love is only found on the other side of the sunset.
As I re-read the books a couple times, I began to be a bit irked by the writing. Lots of passive voice, some inconsistencies (one moment Charlie’s eating one thing, the next something else entirely). From a literary standpoint, the books are far from perfect. This is something I blame a lot more on Meyer’s editor than on herself. The books also improve in quality as the series progresses, as well they would.
I stumbled across a blog once devoted to ripping Twilight to shreds. Line by line. Impressive endeavor — that’s a lot of lines to rip apart. At first, I felt like someone had torn scales away from my eyes. “Really?! That happened?” But after a while I began to feel pretty bad for Stephenie Meyer. If anyone took that much time out of their lives to put my book through a wood chipper, I would probably be a sobbing mass of snot and tears.
Which got me to thinking. Yes, there are some things wrong with the series. I don’t think that Edward and Bella have a very healthy relationship, and Jacob isn’t any better with his rape-y kisses. I’ve always hated romance novels that begin with a big strong man stealing a woman and raping her into loving him. It’s a big, sick exercise in Stockholm Syndrome, and it perpetuates some very, very nasty myths about women. All that said, for all you can pick apart Meyer’s books until Edward’s old and gray, there is one vital little fact that Twilight critics miss.
She did something right.
In spite of all the nit-picky (and some glaring) things, Stephenie Meyer accomplished something that just about every writer yearns for. She wrote four books that not only set her up for the rest of her life, but forged an intensely loyal and devoted fan base. She branded herself. Very few authors ever achieve that. Millions of fans around the world love her books, and I have a feeling that although the literary critics might hang themselves at the prospect, her books are going to stick around for a long time. More than the money, she has fans who adore her. Her pages grabbed hold of millions of people and dragged them through her story.
No matter what you think of Twilight, you have to admit that she did something very, very right. You can’t fabricate the kind of response she has gotten. Yes, she’s had some seriously good marketing and publicity, but face it: the response of her readers is genuine. And you can pour as much money into books as you want, but you can’t buy that. She found a bit of magic, and she communicated it to her readers in a way that keeps them coming back for more. Begging for more. Hysterically crying at the thought of having more. Twilight fans are so rabid that I can’t go see the movies in the theater unless I find a time all the kids are in school and I’m the only one there — I can’t stand all the screeching every time Robert Pattinson or Tayler Lautner shows his face.
Regected Riter is My Hero
While I don’t expect my books to take over the world like Stephenie Meyer or J.K. Rowling did, having even 10,000 readers like theirs would pretty much make my life. Having a readership that thinks of your characters as friends, who thinks about what they would do, who gets to know them and the story to the point that they have whole conversations about it — that is the dream, gentle viewers.
So as we trundle through NaNoWriMo and frantically try to achieve our word counts for the month, I’ll be thinking about a woman who has inspired both undying love and virulent vitriol. I’ll be pondering Stephenie Meyer and what she did right, trying to figure out what my magic is.
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Into the Breach
Good afternoon, gentle viewers, and a Happy Halloween to you! Or a joyous Samhain, if that’s how you roll. Or you know, Dia de los Muertos is tomorrow, I reckon. Holiday season is in full swing! And I have the tea to prove it. Nom nom nom.
Twelve short hours before NaNo begins. I looked around for a midnight write-in, but the closest one to me was downtown D.C. (snore), and I’m not driving over an hour to hang out in a Starbucks at midnight. It does look like there are some serious NaNo events throughout the month in Maryland, though, so I should be able to find something. In fact, I am going to a write-in on Thursday because it’s close and my day off. Woohoo!
Apart from my NaNoRebels challenge goals (1,500 words a day, an hour or more a week refueling), I’ve set a few goals for myself for the month. Here they are!
1. Finish the first draft of book two (almost there!). This is so that when I pitch to agents in January, I will not only have one bright and shiny work to show them, but two! That’s right, people. For the low price of ink on paper, you get two — count ‘em — two finished works! If this woman can write two, she can probably write more.
Salesman Jesus wants you to publish my books.
2. Get a start on book three for the same reasons as Goal #1, if you change “two” to “three.”
3. Behind Goal #3, we have one last little thing to say on my goals! While in general the idea for NaNoWriMo is quantity and not so much quality, my personal goal is to write lucid and cohesive work this month. I don’t want to have to spend another month making it readable when I go back and edit.
Anyhoo. I wrote almost 3,000 words yesterday, finally pushing book two forward in plot and action. That’s a huzzah moment. I also went back and read it and liked what I had, even though I wrote it with my pink earbuds glued to my ears rocking Daft Punk at 3 a.m.
Right now I’m at about 87,000 words, which should be right on track for the end to be at around 120,000 for the first draft. It’s long, but I wanted hefty books. They’re supposed to be chronicles, for FSM’s sake, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t be 250-pagers.
The fun thing about this trilogy is writing different characters who are also different species. The first protagonist was a seer and a shapeshifter (she’s still around), and the second is a witch who was forcibly turned into a vampire against her will. That gives me some fun things to work with and to explore the magic of the world a lot more in the second book rather than having to look at it solely from an observer’s point of view. Anna gets to be actively involved in the magic aspects of things.
My chunk from last night also introduced a new character who will be awesome. He is going to be tricky to write for a lot of different reasons (not the least of which that he is completely batshit insane), but he’s got a lot to offer the story and the other characters. Plus, I got to hear him say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty” to Sarah. Ha. She deserved that.
It’s Halloween time, gentle viewers! Get your spook on!
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Make Them Beg For More
The best compliments I have ever received about my writing were all some derivative of the following: “I want more.”
That is the bit of ambrosia all of us yearn for. If we write for an audience, we spend our time willing life into the empty whiteness of a blank page and searching and sifting through life for those bits of magic to put in our jars, hoping that’ll be enough to coax our work to live.
The goal is an insatiable lust for our work, for the worlds and characters we funnel onto the page. How do we do that? Originality. Creativity. Skill. Luck. Any number of things go into it — I’m probably not alone when I say that I rather hope luck plays less a role than skill, but I don’t make the rules. And speaking of rules, here’s one from The 25 that sticks its fingers all over that “originality and creativity” thing:
17. Avoiding Clichés
Everyone “gets” clichés. That’s why they show up virtually everywhere. Clichés may be thought of as overused and predictable, but few people complain about movie car chases. For every person who doesn’t want “same old,” hundreds continue to enjoy stereotypical hard-boiled dicks helping dames in distress. Depending on your audience, a well-placed cliché can be more effective than an explanation.Nevertheless, we need folks like you to buck the trend. So here are some ways to spend a half-hour:
- Create a cliché-free protagonist: you. Choose a career you once contemplated. Change your age, gender, race. Investigate something that intrigues you. Invent a situation that boosts your heart rate. Send your character to a place you’d like to visit. Now write.
- Remove from a work unnecessary parts of speech—such as replacements for the perfectly acceptable said, and words like angrily to reveal how someone slams a door. Say no more than readers need to know; let their imaginations work.
- I’ve intentionally loaded my five contributions to this article with more than my usual share of clichés. Circle them. Do it now. The early bird gets the worm.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to use cliches if you use them sparingly — about as sparingly as you might sprinkle salt on your ramen. What I mean by that is that if you’re going to say something verbatim like, “Her skin was as soft as silk, as white as snow. She was as pretty as a picture.” — if you’re going to say that, turn it on its head somehow. “Her frozen body would occupy a place in my memory that amnesia couldn’t touch, cocooned forever by winter and premature death.” There. It’s not the best example perhaps, but the cliches from the first bit get flipped at you with a catapult in the second bit. Yeah, her skin is soft and white. She froze to death in the middle of winter. She’s pretty as a picture? Yeah. A picture of a loved one, dead. Forever.
I think the masters of the craft manage to tease us with something familiar and then jerk us round the bend so quickly that we end up somewhere we didn’t expect to go. They disturb our expectations in words so tantalizing and succulent that we can’t help but follow. They make a cliche into something tangible and create art from contrast. If you can learn how to continually surprise and delight (or horrify, or titillate) your readers, you will spark that insatiable hunger for more.
All writing serves to forge a connection. If you’re reading this, I’ve taken my thoughts and implanted them into your brain without ever opening my mouth. (Except to breathe, because I’m a little stuffy right now.) It’s almost like telepathy — in fact, I’ve heard a writer describe writing as such. I can create an image of an elephant with one tusk wearing a fez, and you’ll see it when you read that whether you want to or not. It’s a connection, and if you feed enough magic into it, you’ll start to feel a tug on the other end. A pulling sensation that means your readers want more. More story. More characters. More of the beating thrumming heart you created from that blank page.
A well-timed cliche can create a basic connection with a reader, but it’s like communicating with two cans and a ball of yarn. It’ll only be so long before your readers search for something to keep that feeling going, and if you deliver something original and alluring, that connection changes to fiber optics.
Use your jar of magic to infuse your words with bait — bait that will hook your readers to your stories for as long as you write them.
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Pawing the Ground
Picture me as I look ahead at the month of November. It’s getting cold outside. The challenge is before me, waving its little red flag. My feet start to paw the ground in front of me. I might even snort a little, bursts of steam in the chilled air. The arrival of November will launch me forward to tackle that challenge. So what am I doing to prepare?
I’ve focused myself on the fact that no matter what, the challenge of writing 1,500 words of fiction per day plus spending time actively nursing my psyche each week and working and planning for the holidays will be just that. Challenging. It’s going to require discipline more than anything — to get up early and write before work if I’m going to be working a double close (which they have me scheduled for next Sunday), to get my body back in shape, and to continue posting here every day to cheer the rest of you on who have decided to travel those thirty days of insanity with me.
I get to wave the flag for you to paw at the ground. I hope all of you end up ripping that red waving flag to bits with your horns as you conquer the challenge.
Rar.
As many have said before me, writing can be a lonely calling. We spend a lot of time closeted with our thoughts in our own little world and don’t necessarily interact much. But I’ve seen a trend pop up toward social writing, where writers involve one another, support one another, and ultimately help each other grow. That kind of community is as precious as a golden septum piercing.
Well, I think it's hella tight.
So in addition to the personal pep talks and being my own personal cheerleader, I’ve tried this week to get practical. To figure out what my goals are for NaNoWriMo and give myself more focus than just “getting through” the thirty days of November. For those of us participating in the NaNoRebel group (or even if you’re doing it classic style), there are some questions to ask yourself before the first comes up and gooses you.
1. If your goal is to work an existing story, do you know where it’s going? This can mean an outline if you’re the plan-y type, but if you’re like me it can mean immersing yourself in your story and feeling it out. Watching your characters unfold in your head to see what lies beyond the turns. That can help stave off writer’s block before it starts.
2. Are you trying to finish a story or just get one started or to do a big push in the middle to get stuff out? (That sounded like toilet humor, but it wasn’t. I promise.)
3. If you’re starting from scratch, do you have a feel for your story from start to finish? Any notes you can jot down can be helpful if flying blind scares you.
4. If you’re re-writing this month, what are your goals for your new draft? Write them down and keep a list of your insidious first draft foibles that always need editing out (some examples: passive voice, use of adverbs, issues with dialogue attribution, a tendency to let the readers see you set the scene instead of lifting the curtain on an already hot set).
5. Are you aiming for just quantity or do you want quality as well? I’ve heard many people say they end up with 50,000 words of crap at the end of the month. This doesn’t have to be true, especially if you do some of the above.
6. Are you doing this just because or are you doing it because you feel the tug of the words? Regardless, this is a big commitment and a lot of work. As long as you’re doing it for yourself and your story, you’ll get something out of it. And if you share your whiz-bang awesome progress with me, I’ll give you a cookie. (Or some other prize. See this post for details.)
All that said, I’m spending the rest of the day before I have to go sling beers reading what I have of my second book. So far, so awesome, but I have a ways to go, and I need to get to the end to decide what my goals are for NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words would easily take me to the end of book two and partway into book three, which is most likely the goal, but we shall see.
See you all later, gentle viewers. I’ll be here pawing the ground.
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Late Night Rewrite
At long last, a rewarding post appears. Due to an ill-timed evening nap of three hours in duration, I found myself wide awake around the witching hour. After watching Face/Off and walking the dog we are sitting, I settled down at my trusty iBook dinosaur to work on revising the first draft of my novel. I got a solid twenty pages or so done. What that accomplished is more than just rewriting — I recently rewrote the beginning in its entirety, and today I got the new bit woven into the original, ironing out that seam a bit. It flows the way I wanted it to. I might need some cutting done, because it’s a little exposition-heavy, but that can wait. Because you know what?
HUZZAH!
I got something done!
Do you have any idea how good that feels, gentle viewers? I’ll give you a clue. AWESOME.
My character is getting where I want her. The tone is closer to what I was trying to achieve. There’s some quirk and some wit, and some grit. I smoothed out a few bumps. Filled in a few holes. All in all, I am tremendously happy with what transpired this evening. It may be almost 4:30 a.m., but by golly, I feel accomplished. If I can keep this up (When! When, Emmie!), I should be on track to start officially agent fishing this fall. Trundling right along. Thank you, gorse bush in the bum.
It doesn’t hurt that my day job (night job?) is slinging beers at a brewery, and it has been painfully slow lately. The money has not been seeking me out much. July and August are our slowest months of the year, and I’ve been feeling it. My bank is broke. As Louis C.K. says, “I’m so broke that if it’s free I can’t afford it.” Nothing like financial trouble to start pushing you in the right direction for your dreams. I will make writing my career, dang nab it.
Cheers to a night where I got some work done. Today was a progress-laden day. Hour and a half workout, finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and tackled my second draft with renewed vigor. I think this calls for a second HUZZAH!
New Project
I started this new project several months ago, sort of as an exercise. It’s an autobiographical piece with a rather lyrical turn of phrase, poetic in parts, somewhat experimental. It’s pretty special, because it’s going to be a gift. I’m copying it into a leather journal I bought, which is painstaking but will be worth it in the end.
It’s a joyous project that I’m very excited about. It’s going to take a while, which is why I finally got going on it now. I had something happen today that sort of spurred it on and lit a fire under my bum. I can’t wait.
More than anything though, I can’t wait for the next month to go by. Or rather, the next 3.5 weeks. There is a lot in those weeks that I am looking forward to, but mostly just the sheer joy of being finished with this job. And this weekend is a long weekend, so hurrah for that!
In Pursuit of Happiness
According to the preamble to the Constitution of the good old U.S. of A., this is one of those little inalienable rights that we are endowed with as human beens. And it’s this particular right that I am in the process of taking out for a spin.
I know that it doesn’t guarantee happiness, but if the right to pursue it is there, that’s good enough for me. (Random thought: how is it possible to guarantee this?)
What this means for me is that I am going to chase this little fledgling (actually full-fledged) dream of writing for a living. I don’t say “being a writer” because I am one of those — I just don’t get paid for it. Unless I am a horrible person and write at work when I should be doing other things…ahem.
Today I was thinking about my story. And the stories of others. There is a quote that says a story is life with the dull parts taken out. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, seeing as how plenty of stories have dull bits in them — and the idea of what is dull is subjective. However, I will say that I think a story has to be told as though it’s unfolding in front of you. Some authors manage to make it work in other ways, like telling it through letters or through dialogue — I’ve seen that work effectively in the past — but most of the time it needs to just play.
Even though 99% of novels are written in past tense, when they’re written well, it’s like you’re in the same room with the characters. You can smell their sweat and feel the shivers. If it’s told like you would tell a friend what you did yesterday, it won’t keep my attention. It lacks the flow, the tide that sucks you in. Such a flow is not something that is easy to accomplish, especially in a vomit draft.
A lot of times, when we write, we have a concept in our head and we write it down the way it makes sense to us. It’s in the editing process where we go in with a scalpel and cut into it until it makes sense to others. The best writing makes readers forget they’re reading — and this holds true with non-fiction as well as fiction.
This post is really not cohesive. For that, gentle viewers, I apologize.
Here’s a brief update on my writing progress before I attempt to cajole my body into sleeping:
(Ooh! “Sleeping” put me at exactly 500 words so far! How exciting.)
Today one of my characters got blown up. I kind of think she deserved it. She’s been in a snit this entire book. Regardless, I feel bad for her. She has a lot going on in her noggin. I just wish she’d stop acting like a 12-year-old hormone bomb and more like the badass lion she is. Seriously.
I am making some good progress. Elemental looks like it will wind up being about 100,000-120,000 words, which is right where I want/expect it to be. Primeval will probably get trimmed a bit, but its successor might be able to get away with being a bit longer. Right now I’m at roughly 85,000. I did the math on Primeval yesterday and found that as is, it’s about 440 book pages if you count it out assuming around 250 per page. That’s the length I’m going for. I’m not Jo Rowling…yet.
To round out this meandering sort of post, I just stumbled across a rather perfect metaphor thanks to a friend who posted a picture of a little dark cloud against an overcast sky. It reminded me very much of Winnie-the-Pooh, who decided one day to disguise himself as a little black rain cloud in his pursuit of honey, which happened to be at the top of a tall tree. He did so by rolling in some very black mud and holding tight to a balloon, hoping that the bees would not think he was threatening their livelihood.
Whilst floating above the earth, Pooh sang, “Oh, I’m just a little black rain cloud!” (The full lyrics to which can be found here) Needless to say, the bees were not fooled by this endeavor, and Pooh swiftly found himself plunging rear-end first into a gorse bush.
The moral of this story is this: We have the freedom to pursue our honey by whatever means we see fit. It may be at the top of a very tall tree, but if we’re not afraid of falling a few times and getting some gorse in our bums, we just might get there one day.
*In case you’re wondering which books these are, they are, respectively: David Eddings’ Belgariad and Malloreon series, which are phenomenal; and Daughters of Darkness, by LJ Smith, who was the woman responsible for hooking me on vampires about 15 years ago. The characters to which I’m referring here are Ce’Nedra and Mary-Lynnette.
Emmie Mears, Author
Ted Mosby….Architect.
Both of those have a certain ring to them. 
Imagine my surprise and warm fuzzy feelings when I discovered (thanks to WordPress’s handy-dandy stats box) that someone had searched for “Emmie Mears author” somewhere. How lovely! Now I only feel bad that I don’t have a book published yet…woe.
Bear with me, gentle viewers. I will do everything in my power to get Primeval and Elemental into your hot little hands as soon as humanly possible. If only it was as simple as willing them onto the shelves….and the bestseller lists.
To the illustrious personage who hath made my day brighter by their curious search-capades: thank you!
This process is a long one, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be worth it in the end. I have a good friend who is going to help me edit Primeval and Elemental before I begin to query agents, and because I am committed to making this my career, I want to get everything in tip-top shape before I start. I can’t wait for the rejection letters to come pouring in.
Sometimes I feel like this blog takes place under water. The surface of the water is smooth and unbroken until someone lets out a “Yop!” and creates some ripples — then I know I’m not alone out here. If you find yourself puttering around these pages, know that you’re appreciated.
Seeing as how once I do get an agent and get this ball rolling faster, this blog will remain my conduit into the world and make its nest on my website, I rather want to nurture it. I’m not sure if it’s a baby bird or a fish. Either way. I’ll leave you to ponder the philosophical ramifications of my blog’s species taxonomy. I am going to snuggle down and take a nap.
