Alma Alexander

As far back as the 1950s, my husband remembers seeing a quote from somebody saying that within 20 years all land on this planet will be *owned by somebody*. There is no reason to suppose the person who said was far wrong. I am sure it came to pass.

All OWNED by somebody.

No more wild places.

I would like to take a moment and think about what this means to us, the human race, as a species, as storytelling beings.

We began telling stories about the things that surrounded us and for which we had no explanation – and which thus had to occur through the agency of something beyond and outside of us, something divine, something wild. We created gods who lived in inaccessible places – sometimes odd and made up ones, fanciful and wonderful (but of necessity based on things that we knew – for instance, Valhalla) or real ones which were hard or impossible to get to by ordinary human agency and therefore gained an air of mystery and mysticism, like the top of Mount Olympus – and gave into their hands the power of the thunderbolt.

As human culture and civilization grew and our knowledge and insight increased, our stories grew and changed. The things that we knew in the present moment quickly slipped into yesterday, and yesterday slipped into history, and history slipped into legend, and legend turned into myth – and it was all born of that wilderness that existed outside of ourselves, the things that were NOT of Man but were greater or weirder or stranger or more worthy of awe or veneration.

The stories we told our children – all the fairytales ever told, all the fables, everything – were rooted in the wilderness. In the Wild Woods, where ancient and gnarled trees which were maybe a thousand years old grew in the gloom of spreading boughs, never before seen by human eyes. In the empty open places of the deserts. Atop great craggy mountains wreathed in cloud.

But that was BEFORE. Before that “every inch of this planet is owned by somebody” days. That was in the days where the gods and the creatures who inhabited our myths and our legends and our fairytales had room to live and thrive. Centaurs and dryads and rusalki and Koschei the deathless and the firebird and Quetzalcoatl and talking golden carp and the little mermaid and ifrit and djinni and flying horses and dragons and elves and witches and wizards and evil gnomes named Rumpelstiltskin who knew how to spin straw into gold. All of these, and more. They lived in those wild places where humans dared not go, and they loomed huge in the imaginations of generations of children.

No longer.

The wild places are going, or gone. There are no more tracts of forests into which no human has ever penetrated. There are no deserts where no human has ever been. There are no mountains which no human has ever climbed. We have gone to all of our wild places, and explored them, and mapped them, and conquered them, and… and tamed them. We own them now. If you don’t realize what that means think of the difference between a wild stallion and a working gelding pulling a cart on a farm. Think of the difference between the Minotaur and the domestic ox. Think, for that matter, of the startling differences between wild turkeys and the empty-headed domestic variety whose only redeeming feature is that they have lots of white meat to serve at the Christmas or Thanksgiving table. Think of Aslan (“he was not a TAME lion”) and that toothless mangy old beast in the back of the cage at the zoo.

We have gone to all the places where the wild things were. And they can hide in those places no longer.

Revealed, they are… diminished. There is less reason to fear something you can classify, and sort, and put into textbooks, together with means by which it can be combatted or defeated.  We own our planet, but we no longer have a place where our minds and imaginations have a chance to escape, to play, to invent, to learn.

Perhaps the explosion of fiction of the ilk that is now known as “urban fantasy” owes something to this phenomenon. The creatures who used to be the wild ones have been driven out of their refuges and hiding places – and they have evolved to suit their new niches, the dirty back alleys of cities, the glass and steel metropolises. Our werewolves are no longer the shaggy feral creatures who came howling out of the scary night to frighten our ancestors – they now prowl the underground of our cities. Our vampires no longer live in distant castles behind high walls with creaking wrought iron gates – they are among us, and some of them (God help us) even sparkle. Even the Fae have found their way into the city lights. Everything is changing.

What does it mean to the Wild Things when the ownership of all the places which they once thought belonged to them is now claimed by us? If a human being signs the purchase papers for a stand of enchanted trees, does that human being now also own the dryads whose trees those are? Do they have to pay rent now? Does the human being who purchases a mountain and the mineral rights to everything within it also own the dragon’s hoard in the caves deep inside?

How are these bargains to be enforced on the creatures of our imagination, the creatures of the Wild? Are they really to be considered something that we can own? Has slavery returned to haunt humanity? Will the creatures we are buying and selling – in the end – rise up and fight for their rights? (Heh. Occupy The Wilderness…?) Do we have any right to fight back? What, after all, would WE do if the tables were truly turned and they came to us and told us that THEY owned the land, and therefore US?…

There are still stories here. But they are very different stories to the ones we have traditionally told. And they are getting harder and harder to hunt and find. It’s a little like those staged hunts now, where the so-called “hunters” are taken to a place from which they can safely and with 100% certainty shoot into an enclosure and bag their trophy of a lion or tiger or bear. Our wild stories have been increasingly corralled. There are still those which are loose, to be sure, but they’re more sophisticated than we knew them of yore, and harder to catch and kill and skin and display.

We’ve put the stamp of ownership on all of our wildernesses, and somehow we have thus closed the fences around ourselves. We are milling around inside those fences, thinking ourselves free, thinking ourselves mighty, while all the time the wonder and the glory of the wilderness is leaching away from us, leaving our memories, leaving us helpless and disarmed should something come up for which we no longer have the dark places of our world or our spirits to search for antidotes in.

Perhaps there is only one way left to go – up. Into the sky. Into the last wilderness of stars and space.

It is a tragedy that this last great journey of mankind will probably be undertaken with a single driving urge – to find out how we can stake our claim on these, too, and “own” them just like we now “own” every inch of planet Earth.

And maybe the last and best hope of humanity lies in the possibility that we will finally fail, and accept that we can only end with what we began – the wild places which we do not understand, and whose creatures we can invoke to frighten us into becoming bigger and better than we thought we could be.

 

 

 

Aaaaand here we are again. In just over 24 hours human beings will usher in yet another year, the fireworks will go off (or whatever method of celebration is locally pursued), people will laugh and scream and kiss and shout “Happy New Year”. The next day dumpsters will be full of empty champagne bottles, spent streamers, clumped confetti, old calendars. And we will have a new date to put on our checks, on our correspondence… on our lives.

It’s a time for looking back as much as for looking ahead.

That pic, up there? That’s a park in the city where I was born. Those are the earliest memories I have of Decembers, the crisp days on sun and snow, the sparkle and glow of snow under haloes of street lights and strings of holiday lights out where the sellers of cards and tinsel had their tables on the sidewals of the old city, standing behind them while their breath steamed from their lips and while they hopped up and down from one foot to the other clapping mittened hands together for warmth, the way snow crunched underfoot when I walked upon it with my small hand in that of a parent or a grandparent, hurrying hither and yon on end-of-year errands of one sort of another. Those were the days I had a bedtime, and staying up to midnight was an adventure, and New Year’s Eve was something big and magical that I was allowed to stay up for and await even when my eyelids were at half mast and I was yawning mightily – but it was NEW YEAR, and I was part of the family which had gathered together to greet it.

I lost a couple of decades of my life to living in the “wrong” hemisphere, where December was full summer, where New Year parties were barbeques on the beach, and I NEVER accepted that – some part of me, deep inside, rebelled at the wrongness of it all, because if you look at almost ANY remotely “traditional” Christmas card (yes, even those sent in Australia or South Africa) it will show you the snow and the cold legacy of my own childhood. Yes, I realise how Eurocentric this all makes me sound – but sue me, I grew up there, and to me that was the right and proper way, and I could never ever shake that. The first “Real” winter I spent back in the proper hemisphere, dressed in a manner I deemed fit for the season (sweaters and gloves and boots and scarves and woolly hats) and looking at the bare branches of winter outside, watching the first fat flakes of snow falling, I cried. I was somehow deeply, viscerally, HAPPY and all was right with the world once again.

I need these long cold nights at the turning of the year, when I lay my head on my pillow and watch the winter moon rise into the sky through my bedroom window. I need them to recharge, to think, to remember, to gather the strength for the things to come which will be sent to try me (and some will. Some always come. That is the way of the world, and ever has been).

Tomorrow night, I will rip the last leaf out of the old calendar, and we will start again. Anew. Clean slate. Fresh new January 1.

Come in, 2012. The house is warm. There will be mulled cider. There will be quiet plans made by and beside the people I love most in the world.

May the New Year come gently to all of you out there, and may it treat you well

(…yes, I’m in the middle of it. Why do you ask?)

Here’s the thing. First drafts are supposed to be awful. HTat’s what they are FOR. You simply give yourself the permission necessary to WRITE BADLY if you have to, for the purpose of getting the bones of the story down on the page. There will be time for fixups later. So you do this thing, and the story comes out, and there it is, staring at you. And yea, verily, in your mind’s eye it was ever beautiful – and it’s still marginally lovely – but now that it is outside of you it begins to be glimpsed in its true shape. And there. Are. Imperfections.

Let’s see. THIS can be tweaked. THAT can be fixed. THIS OTHER THING needs to go, really. SOMETHING ELSE needs to be written, and added in, to add clarity.

You know the drill.

For most of us, the architecture of the town of FirstDraft is familiar, and I have no real doubt that we’d probably recognise one another’s FirstDraftTtowns fairly easily. But a strange thing happens when each individual writer leaves the city limits, en route for the wilds of SecondDraftia. It’s a sort of dimension portal, and it sends everybody to a different place, unique to themselves, full or peculiar traps and difficulties that are never quite found in the same shape or form in any other writer’s world. To paraphrase a well-known bon mot, all First Drafts are kind of rotten in a similar way. Every Second Draft has its own unique problems.

Different writers react to the art and the craft (and it IS both) of rewriting in their own peculiar ways. Some tell me that they enjoy the act of rewriting and editing far more than they enjoy the actual storytelling – because for them the telling of the story is the hard part, and now that they have that, in however awful a shape, for them the real fun begins, and that is actually chiselling this raw and barely recognisable slab of marble into a real Michelangelo’s David, chipping away one tiny flake of marble at a time until it is all perfect and polished. Others, – and oh dear GOD I fall into this category – want to tear their hair out at the roots at this point. Because the story, you see, it is TOLD, and yes we who feel this way can SEE that it isn’t without flaw (NOTHING ever is) but in some senses it IS perfect, it has a shape and a form and a balance inside our heads, an changing ANYTHING tends to have consequences everywhere, and you are faced with continuity issues from hell itself, and AAAARGH.

It’s the difference in tone – having a character say something as simple as “I’m sorry” in a different tone of voice, an inflexion that might change it from an empty phrase of cold indifference (I’M SORRY but I couldn’t care less really) to a genuine and sincere sympathy (I’M SORRY that your goldfish died. I REALLY am.) – well – it changes that character. And it changes the way other people respond to that character. And THAT changes other conversations. And that changes what people might have known, and when they might have known it. And THAT changes the flow of the story. AND that…

Well, you get the idea. Before too long, you pull out one thread and you realise that you are suddenly hip deep in the Big Muddy and it’s all falling apart around you and you’re scrambling to hold together in a coherent whole something that looked perfectly solid just a moment before. It’s like the cement holding the story together suddenly turns to jello on you and the edifice starts tottering precariously and oops, there goes a piece you really didn’t want to lose but argh it doesn’t fit any more, and dammit, there’s all those words on the cutting room floor and wasn’t tehre something important there that you absolutely need to salvage – or rephrase – or do something constructive with…

 

Pardon the mess.

I need to go back to my own reconstruction now. There is a glaring piece of continuity error that I need to address right now.

And you know what the worst of it is? It’s that if you’re good enough you’ll end up with a seamless piece of prose that doesn’t look like it’s been tinkered with, that looks like it’s always been perfect, that it was born this way. A reader who never saw the original will NEVER KNOW. And they shouldn’t, that’s part of the point, but while you’re in the throes of working as hard as you know how,trying your damndest to change your beloved tale from passable to good or maybe even from good to great, you know that THIS part of your job is always going to be done alone and in the dark and without reward. It’s just a hard slog. Yes, knowing that there is something worthwhile at the end of it all helps but in the meantime you’re working on your own in the dark with a flashlight held between your teeth and with the right tools ALWAYS just out of reach in the shadows.

I am hoping that this thing I am working on now is going to fledge very soon, and that it is going to be an eagle, soaring high and powerful up there in the open skies. I’ve got a good story here, I know that much. I am trying very hard to make it better, and it can always be better, I know that. But still – this is one of those things that I will be glad to HAVE DONE and that I am far from happy to BE DOING. With luck those of you who might read it one day will never know what I changed, how I tweaked, what I had to lose and what it was necessary to graft on. And please, for the the sake of everybody involved… if you should happen to see a little dust on the floor, or a stray broken bit of a past imperfection littering the floor at the feet of the completed story statue, be merciful, and forgive. And kick it discreetly someplace out of sight.

Chisel in hand. Back into the fray. See you on the other side.

So, then. Would you betray your kind? Your race? Your species?

I watched two movies recently which made me examine my own feelings on the matter – the first, in the cinema and on the big screen, and twice in quick succession (went to see it first with my husband and then took my mother to see it) was the new “apes” franchise movie, “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes”. The second, on TV and the small screen and for the first time, “Avatar” (Yes, I know it came out years ago. No, I never went to the cinema to see it. So sue me.)

For those who have been living under rocks over the period covered by the release of these two fairly high-profile movies, here are basic nutshell summaries of them:

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: well-intentioned human scientist develops virus which has cognitive improvement effects… and before human testing is approved, tests it on our closest genetic relatives, the great apes, specifically chimps. The virus naturally turns out to be more than the scientist bargained for, and not only improves cognitive abilities but sends actual intelligence and sapience levels into the stratosphere. Inevitable conflict between humans (the profiteering kind who are in it to grab as much individual gain in terms of money and power as they can and who as usual are relaying on raw force and firepower against entities fundamentally unable to retaliate in the same manner) and the now just-as-intelligent-if-not-more-so and certainly functioning on a higher moral ground great apes then ensues. Humans lose.

“Avatar”: not-so-well-intentioned humans arrive on an alien world populated by a sapient race other than their own which is inconveniently in their way when it comes to raping the planet of its natural resources in the fastest, most ‘efficient’, and most destructive way possible or imaginable. The humans conveniently classify the other race as “savages” and feel no compunction in basically ripping their world from them – because, well, they are sitting on “our” Unobtainium (and wasn’t that an inspired choice of name for the natural resource in question). The humans are benevolently inclined and offer things like ‘schools’ (just what in Hades would they be teaching the little savage children in these schools? Other than a language that as a slave race they must now learn in order to communicate effectively with their masters and possibly some variation of “your religion sucks, take mine, it’s better, take it I said or I’ll shoot you”, of course…) and ‘medicine’ (for what, exactly? Given that we are on an alien world WHOSE AIR WE CANNOT BREATHE FOR LONGER THAN A BRACE OF MINUTES WITHOUT CHOKING ON IT and whose pathogens are unlikely to affect us, or ours them?). The natives, understandably, want none of it. Which makes them ungrateful, and, well, savages, right? Therefore to be expediently exterminated. But as usual the humans who rely on the flash and the bang and the gung ho haven’t explored or bothered to understand or even learn about some of the more esoteric aspects of the world they are about to wantonly destroy for their own personal gain. The world fights back. Humans lose.

In both movies, I found myself tearfully cheering on… the OTHER SIDE. The one which was taking on the human beings. The one which would whip the human beings’ collective asses.

In “Apes”, during the scene on the bridge, I was practically whooping when the apes got one over on the idiot police and army goons in their jackboots and helmets, pointing Uzis at unarmed opponents who fought with nothing but raw courage and faith and, when it came to it, sacrifice, throwing naked bodies into the field of fire so that some died and others could live, and live free. It was a palpable payback, and dear GOD, a deserved one. Human beings had made this mess – they had dabbled in things that they did not understand, as usual, and their immense hubris in doing so had brought them down low before the thing that they had created. And no, I am emphatically not using their innocence or ignorance as an excuse in this. Yes, the human race is not perfect and yes we are fallible and perhaps I should simply stand up with the jackbooted thugs and scream “It wasn’t my fault!” and shoot at the nearest ape – but I can’t, dammit, I can’t, not when they look back at me with intelligence and even compassion (They! They pity ME!) and I know that what was done to them may not have been done by my hand but it was done by hands like mine and as like as not in my name, “for the common good”.

I pretty much could not watch the climactic battle scenes of “Avatar” at all, sick to the stomach at the inequality and the injustice of it all. When the gung-ho military leader of it all meets his Maker I may not have pumped my fist openly but inside I was jumping up and down and screaming “YES! YES! YES!”

And yet in “Avatar” we are left with a dubious proposition  which I have seen much discussed out there in the cyberworld – namely that, even given (at least according to HUMAN psychology, but we are dealing with aliens here so that might have been allowed to be explored under the circumstances) that the disparate clans could not really unite under any single one of their own (because, well, what’s in it for them, right?), once again the “savages” are shown to achieve whatever they achieve ONLY by submitting to and being led by one of US. One of the great human kind. The parallels to our own history and the rise to the top by the white guy who rose to a leadership position (and only by virtue of this was victory by the ‘savage’ underdogs achieved) were inevitable, and they came thick and fast. The premise was that even an enemy who went “native” on them could somehow be trusted more than any single one of their own kind. And in “Avatar”,  the leader of “our” side, the side that is annoyed that the best and deepest deposits of the Unbotainium that we want and we somehow claim as “ours” sits right underneath the Mother of All Trees which just happens to be home to an entire sapient species, that leader, the one who is willing to destroy that tree even with its inhabitants still within it (perhaps especially then!), he is the one who faces our protagonist, the “gone-native” fellow, with the deadly question which is supposed to hobble him and destroy him: “WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO BETRAY YOUR OWN KIND?”

What is my kind, then? That guy? The one willing to order extermination, annihilation, genocide and environmental catastrophe because of a shareholder’s bottom line? THAT is the “kind” I should take my stand behind? Really?

What does it mean, then, to be human?

Rephrasing the question from the top of this essay, would *I* betray my kind, my race, my species?

Probably. In a heartbeat. Because in my mind and in my soul that ‘Being Human’ thing (I mean, in a species sense, as opposed to being anything else) is so much less important than  ‘being human’ (in the sense that if I can’t identify with what is the best of us there is no point in any of it at all and sometimes the best of us, the most ‘human’ of us, is not found inside ourselves but instead in that thing which we are trying to control or destroy…)

In a war like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, damn right I would have stood with the apes.

In a war like the one in “Avatar”, damn right I would have gone over to the “savages”.

Send in the goons now, if you have to. But here I make a stand. I will stand for fairness, and decency, and compassion, and the basic idea that what is yours is not necessarily mine because I can simply take it by superior force. If my kind/ my race/ my species violates that, then I might well side with the ‘enemy’. And if anyone thinks that makes me any less ‘human’… then there isn’t anything else I can say to make that person understand,  because it is likely that eventually that person and I will be staring at one another across a great divide and they will be asking me in genuine outrage what it feels like to betray my own.

 

And my only answer to that would be, “I am not. YOU are.”

 

 

Well we writers are often asked were we get our ideas. So I thought I’d look around and see what caught my mind’s eye right now, and this just goes to show, EVERYthing is grist to the mill…

***
It’s Fall again, but this year it kind of snuck up on me. I don’t know if it’s just that this summer has been really bizarre (we kind of had our October in late July and early August, to the point that there was a snarky widget floating around the Internet which said something like, “Searching for Pacific Northwest Summer/Error/Season Not Found”) or if I’ve been doing other things and had my head down and no time left to look for the first turning leaves – but hello, all of a sudden we have… autumn. The leaves which I failed to notice changing are starting to litter the back deck; today has been one long drawn out mess of wind and rain with no end in sight, the first windstorm event of the season has ALREADY knocked out power to parts of the neighbourhood that I live in, from 8AM yesterday to something like 1:30 AM this morning which is a substantial power outage – and we haven’t hit OCTOBER yet. It’s been a long cranky summer, and autumn promises to deliver more of the same.

And yet… I can’t help it. I LOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR. When the sun does come out it’s crisp and cool, and everything turns golden, and apples are out, and the sky is that perfect peculiar shade of autumn blue which doesn’t really happen at any other time of year because it simply doesn’t have the red-and-gold backdroup of the fall foliage to set itself up against and preen in its cerulean glory. People start complaining that the days are shorter – well, yeah, they start getting that way, and that means that the twilight comes earlier and the lights go on, and everything turns into a scene from some strange suburban fairy tale with the golden gleams coming from windows and outside house lights reflecting off damp driveways, and the quiet sense of things starting to feel drowsy, ready to close their eyes and dream their way through winter that is coming. I don’t mean I am particularly enamoured of Halloween decorations coming out in mid-September, but that isn’t AUTUMN, that is pure naked commerce, and I refuse to let it spoilt anything at all.

So. Even today, then. I’m sitting here looking out over a wild wood, swaying in the wind, with rain lashing into the trees. And it’s Fall. And I’m weirdly happy.

***

The other day I had to go to a gathering of local writers and give a talk on stuff – the State of The Industry and All LIke That. I don’t really get that much of a chance to play dress-up, so I dug out a pair of heels which I wear pretty rarely – not that I wear heels very often because they tend to make my feet hurt in both the long- and the short-term (I wore pretty high heels to a friend’s wedding just over a year ago – the friend in question is Jewish – if you’ve never danced the Hava Nagila in high heels I would advise that you don’t try – it took me a fortnight to get feeling back in my toes…). But these particular high heeled shoes were a special case. I remember that I bought them at a heavy sale for some RIDICULOUS price, they were (for whatever reason) being practically given away, but they’re Italian shoes, they’re really rather beautiful, and they are (more importantly) well-balanced, so that it doesn’t FEEL like I’m standing for hours with a pair of chopsticks stuck into my heels. And I wear them for special occasions, and so – well – out they came.

I discovered that something was wrong fairly quickly because I kept on getting caught on the carpet, like a cat with too-long claws. I’d take a step and either the heel would be caught so solidly that it almost pulled the shoe off my foot or else the carpet tried to follow my shoe as I lifted my foot off the ground. Upon examination, it turned out that there was a sort of small nail in the heel of the shoe and on both the shoes it had come out of the heel itself or the heel had worn sufficiently down for it to protrude to the point that it became a carpet hook. So, no problem, I packed up the shoes and I took them to a shore repair place to get the matter attended to.

The shoe repair person took one look and barked, “How OLD are those things?”

Reader, it would appear that I now own a pair of Obsolete Shoes. Because lo, the heels are not DONE that way any longer and have not been done that way for some time, and it would take something pretty special to fix the thing so that it would be wearable again. I would have thought it was a matter of pulling out the old nail, chainging the heel pad, and putting in a new nail to hold it so that it was flush with the heel surface – but what do I know, and apparently it is more complicated than that.

I don’t know how to feel about that, really. Those shoes are vintage 1980′s, it isn’t as though they had dragged their heels (heh) around since before the war. But if my shoes are that old, that obsolete, that throw-away-able, jeez louise, how old and throw-away-able am *I*? What happens when some nail in my own carcass comes loose and some doctor looks at me and barks, “How OLD is this body?”

That wasn’t the first time I had this brush with “mortality” – a decade or more ago a visiting young child who was being given a tour of my family’s home with his parents was introduced to my teddy bear, the one which had been given to me on my first birthday on which occasion he was bigger than ME. I still have him, threadbare and belowved, the old-fashioned kind fo bear with the articulated limbs and the solid sawdust fileld body and buttons for eyes, and the only place you can now see his original brave golden colour is on the remnants of fur behind his folded ears. In any event, the kid was told that the bear and I kind of shared a birthday, after a fashion – since his was counted from the day that he came to live with me. And that the bear would be turning thirty six years old on his next birthday.

The child turned round and horrified eyes on me and spluttered, “How… how old are YOU?”

I still have that bear, as it happens, and in a couple of years’ time it will be turning fifty years old.  That’s a grand old age for an old teddy bear to reach. I may have to throw him a party.

He’s still here with me… but I suppose everything has its hour.

I’m gonna miss those obsolete old shoes. I am, really. It isn’t that I wore them all that often, but they were a pretty pair of dress shoes that I thought I could always count on, and now… well… they’re not there any more. Unless a miracle happens and I find some old-time cobbler who still has a supply of old-fashioned heel nails at hand to fix a pair of old and loved shoes which I am so very very loath to lose…

***

Hey, go take a gander at some of the Amazon reviews that have accreted to the “Midnight at Spanish Gardens” book here. Some more reviews are coming in soon (I know because the reviewers have been emailing me to tell me to keep an eye out for them) but those that are already on the Amazon site are from readers… and I’d love more… so if you are hankering for something new to read on your Kindle (or, well, visit Snashwords for other e-reader types – and the book is also available electronically through B&N) go pick up a copy and leave me word of what you thought. I’ll be here, waiting. And if you’re wondering what else I’ve been up to of late, check out the Alexander Triads (the first two – “Once upon a fairy tale” and “Cat tales” – are available both on Amazon and on Smashwords. They would LOVE a nice review from a friendly reader, too…

***

Happy reading. Happy Fall. See you next month.

 

 

 

I… have a new book coming out. As in, the day after tomorrow.

I got a bit busy, with promo and stuff. I was doing interviews, guest blogs, what have you, for most of this month. In fact – and here’s where the value for money comes in – you can go here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/534046.html

and you’ll find links to a bunch of guest blog essays for various blogs, a handful of interviews, and more are to come – so if you go and you like what you see, keep an eye on that blog because I’ll be posting further round-ups there as things happen.

But in the meantime – the new novel.

It’s called “Midnight at Spanish Gardens.” It’s about a real place, a place that once did exist, a magical place. A place where the Veil Between teh Worlds is very thin indeed, and it is easy to step through it, and into a strange new world. And in case you think I haven’t been busy enough with the direct guest-blog-and-interview blog tour promo, I’ve also been doing a series of blog posts collected under the tag “Veil Between Worlds” and you can go read those essays here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/tag/veil%20between%20worlds

It’s all about the special places of our lives, the special experiences. Let me tell you some more about the cafe called Spanish Gardens – I wrote about it in an essay, and this essay eventually became the foundation of the new book. I give you… a glimpse behind the Veil:

 

AT THE SPANISH GARDENS

Evening. You walk down a shuttered street; there are “Closed” signs in shop windows and on doors as you stroll past. Illuminated displays of things. This is not Rodeo Drive; you’re likely to see cheap, ordinary shoes. Maybe tools. Printed T-shirts. A bicycle shop.

A narrow alley opens between two buildings. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that it leads anywhere at all. But you turn. The passageway between a couple of blank brick walls widens abruptly into a courtyard. There is a doorway, dark now, with some sort of gilt writing on the glass. An accountant, maybe, or a dentist – I forget what it was, and maybe it even changed once or twice during my time here. And across the courtyard, dimly lit, a coy sign above the door, there it is, the Spanish Gardens.

It does not look very Spanish. It certainly doesn’t look anything like a garden.

The outside is utilitarian. The door is  an ordinary metal frame with somewhat dusty glass, inscribed with the hours of opening ( late afternoon, night; to this kind of place daylight is not kind). Next to it a large shop window, with one of those half-curtains like you see in cafés or neat suburban kitchens,  leaving the top part of the window open; through it, you can just see the top of the till. Through the glass door you can glimpse a narrow room, one side taken up with a glass-fronted display cabinet such as you would find in a deli, the other crammed with a couple of narrow tables covered by red and white checked tablecloths, flanked by old-fashioned wooden chairs, no two of them exactly alike. Over in the corner, beside a crimson-curtained doorway above which hang signs indicating this is the way to the toilets, a tall stool with a mike and an amplifier and a couple of speakers. Sometimes, Friday or Saturday nights, there are people here strumming guitars, singing songs like “Starry Starry Night” and stuff by John Lennon.

There doesn’t look to be enough room to swing the proverbial cat, but next to the first table there’s an arched opening, and there is another room beyond. It has a further cluster of red-check-tablecloth tables and mismatched wooden chairs. There is a large blackboard on one wall, on it graffiti from previous patrons, an ever-changing display; above the entrance archway a picture of a bullfight, a charging black bull, a matador in gold with a red cape flourished jauntily. The only nod to Spain in the place, just about, if you don’t count the guitars.

The tables have smoky oil lanterns, the old-fashioned kind. There is other occasional lighting but it’s muted, covered in shades which make the light reddish, dark. In that light the inside metamorphoses somehow. The floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows in this second room are covered with a thin, cheap red material – upholstered with it, almost, a whole wall, a gathered fall of red curtain. In a more garish light it would look cheap and contrived; in what light there is it looks mysterious, theatrical, inviting.

The glass cabinet out front has delicacies on display, and you can order pies and puddings from there. You can order burgers and fries, and pasta, and it’s all cheap, because a lot of the people who come here, who pass the knowledge of this place in whispers from senior to freshman through time-honoured secret channels, are students. But the cheap and plentiful food is not the only reason that the Spanish Gardens is famed. This place makes the best Irish Coffees on the planet, bar none.

You would come here for your celebrations – your graduations, your anniversaries. Young women with long lanky hair and bold eyes were given wine-red roses at these utilitarian, almost dingy, tables, and their memory of the event is glamoured in a romantic spell. You bring your girlfriend here to propose (I was taken there twice, for that purpose). You go there in a rowdy crowd after the pomp and circumstance of the graduation ceremony, and you order Irish Coffees (“Keep ‘em coming!”) and you get beautifully, headily, cathartically tipsy while some crooner wove his way through “House of the Rising Sun” on his high chair and you bellow the lyrics with him when you could remember them. You came here to laugh, and to cry, and to share, and to grow, and to guzzle cream pies and to linger over coffee after some sad movie show, and to be able to tell some newcomer, somewhere, sometime, “Ah, yes. I know the Spanish Gardens”.

It’s gone now, it’s been gone for many years – the red curtains, the checked tablecloths, the secret recipe for Irish Coffee, the guitars, the picture of the bullfight. It lives, however, still. In me; with me.

Ah, yes. I knew the Spanish Gardens.

 

 

You want to come visit?…Well, you know where you can find ME. My main website is at www.AlmaAlexander.com  and I I blog regularly at http://anghara.livejournal.com  and if people want to get to know the real me that’s the more dynamic site right now. I’m also on Facebook .

Happy reading. Enjoy your summer.

Why on earth do we write fiction?

Why do we read it?

One of my husband’s favourite “writer” stories concerns a Southern writer with a very Southern mother, whom he called up to tell her that his novel was being published. After a pause, the mother asked, a little desperately, “But do they KNOW it’s a LIE?” The writer admitted to this, whereupon the mother sighed and said, “Well, I will NEVER understand it.”

That’s what the rest of labour under – coming up with stories that you and I and those who pay us money to publish us and to read us KNOW are absolute filthy lies, made up to a word, sometimes literally impossible or unimaginable given the known rules of physics and biology in the world as we know it – genre is particularly guilty of this, because we lie egregiously about the possibility of interstellar travel in times that make it possible to set a story in such a Universe (as opposed to a thousand years to get from one star to the next) or the existence of vampires, werewolves, angels or fairies at the bottom of your garden.

And you, the reader, know that we are making it up as we go along. And you are willing to follow us on that journey. Few readers who read a fairy tale about brownies in the home will then go on to start leaving milk and cookies on the hearth from then on (even if they did have a hearth, which many modern homes don’t) or wander off to the bottom of that garden with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to look for those fairies we – the writers- stated must be there. Instead, you close the book with a happy sigh, and you go on with your own mundane everyday existence, secure in the knowledge that no brownie will wash the dinner dishes and that you must do so yourself if you want clean plates to eat off of the next day.

And then you come back, and you pick up another book. Of fiction. Of lies.

Yes, we all read non-fiction too. We read news; we read non-fiction on subjects that interest us (like a travel guide to a place we want to go and visit, or a history book about a period that fascinates us, or a science book about the real universe which doesn’t (yet) include faster-than-light travel, or even just a celebrity gossip magazine); we read instruction manuals that help us put together things or make other things work properly; we read contracts, and nutritional data on the back of food packaging materials, and textbooks for school, and political manifestos. But when it comes to many of these things we are already armoured with a set of opinions and attitudes, and reading items which challenge those opinions and attitudes are generally greeted with skepticism if not outright hostility – because how DARE those other people (whom we believe, according to our own lights, to be so egregiously wrong) try to shove their silly, ludicrous, ridiculous, astonishing, and dammit downright dangerous ideas down our throats?! How dares an atheist challenge an evangelist’s conviction about the Rapture (even when it demonstrably doesn’t happen…)? How dares a liberal politician challenge a conservative politician’s stance on things? How dares a feminist challenge a representative of the reigning patriarchy? HOW DARE THESE PEOPLE?

But here’s the thing.

People WILL read about those “other” ideas in fiction – sugarcoated as they are in the “lie”. It seems to be less threatening, somehow, to accept an idea which – if presented to you unadulterated as straight fact and therefore non-fiction – would instantly make you go into frothing attack mode. People who are adamantly against the idea of gay marriage might not respond too well to such a concept in a fiction book, to be sure, but they will respond to it in a different way than they do when faced with it in their own physical reality. Kids who are being bullied or otherwise mistreated because they are different in whatever way from their tormentors – because they are gay, or black, or Jewish, or [insert quality of choice here] – might take heart from a novel which tells of a teen who is being bullied because he is a blue-skinned singleton on a planet full of orange-skinned people and looks DIFFERENT – and somehow overcomes this in the story.

Yes, we all know it’s all a lie – but I believe it was Tolkien who once described fiction as a lie breathed through silver. But fiction is an incredibly important medium for getting the truth out there – even when you pretend that it only happens to other people, or to people who cannot exist or will never be real. A generation of readers breathlessly followed the growing up and the growing wise of a young wizard named Harry Potter without EVER doing a single magic spell themselves (whatever the idiots who insisted that the books taught our children “witchcraft” had to say about it). A girl called Scout learned about discrimination and courage in a NOVEL and a different generation of readers learned about those things with her. The list goes on.

Yes, there are books which are PURE entertainment. Yes, people do read them – and then happily leave them behind in the seat pockets of airplanes because these books have no re-reading value whatever and have served their purpose – which was to while away several long boring hours cooped up in close confinement with a couple of hundred of other bored and cooped up people with whom you do not wish to carry on a scintillating social conversation. And yes, there are certainly books that go too far in the other direction and their message, their “lesson”, is so thinly wrapped in that silver tissue of lies that they are barely fiction at all.

But the best books, the ones that we instinctively keep, the ones we go back to again and again – they succeed as entertainment, yes, and they can be as riveting as anything – but they leave you knowing more and feeling more deeply than you had been capable of before you read that book. They leave you empowered. They might have lied to you about the context and the circumstances – but the truth that lies within those false parameters is nonetheless the real truth and some part of you knows this, recognises it, values it. People say about certain books, “This book changed my life”. SOmetimes, they even mean it.

And that’s the power of fiction.

THAT is what it’s all for.

 

My own most recent experience, with a just-finished novel only now beginning to make its rounds to beta readers and agent and such, illustrates  an interesting point.

Readers like rogues.

Think about a more famous situation than my own story, right now. Think Star Wars. (No, the ORIGINAL Star Wars, not the latter three abominations.) They had their protagonist all nicely set up – there he was, a pent-up wannabe hero-boy trapped on a nowhere-world just waiting for a chance to show his mettle in a situation where it matters. And lo, he is given the chance – off Luke Skywalker goes, to seek his glory and to get his girl.

But oh. Wait. Enter Han Solo, stage left. And people kind of grin and sit up and raise their eyebrows, and we’re off. In that deathless scene where they rescue the Princess from the prison cell even she is instantly and immediately sarcastic to Luke who kind of stutters and stammers and yanks off his stolen startrooper’s helmet and kind of babbles about being there to rescue her. Yes, Solo stammers and babbles too – but he ends HIS stint at it by simply blowing up the com link. Enough talking. Let’s DO.

Off goes Luke, seeking Jedi-ness, seeking wisdom, seeking Yoda, doing yoga on a steamy jungle world and getting metaphysical revelations.Solo?… goes off on adventures. The adventures get him into trouble. And yet even when Leia and Luke and the cavalry come to rescue him from Jabba’s Han Solo is still the man of the hour and everyone else is just dancing to his tune.

He’s a rogue. Just keeping this genre – so’s Captain Mal in Firefly. So’s Captain Kirk, really (when was the last time he played by the rules?) Inigo Montoya. Captain Jack from Torchwood, anyone? For that matte, Doctor Who? Paul Atreides?

As the saying goes, nice guys finish last. They seem to be difficult to write believable stories about, stories which show them in the best possible light without putting the reader to sleep. It seems we aren’t – at least when it comes to fiction – interested in reading hagiographies; we like a little bit of spice to our protagonist, to know that our lead character is capable of doing something underhand if it needs to be done while staying  BASICALLY honourable and upright.Don’t get me wrong, there ARE villains, and there are places for villains, and we loathe a properly moulded villain as we should – and there are signs and portents telling us who the truly BAD people are in any given tale so that we can respond to them in proper vise. But there are people for whom we root, instinctively, passionately, BECAUSE they  have a Past, or have a Secret, or have a Flaw. The Rogue. The Bad Boy. The one that comes in dressed in black leathers riding a Harley and waits, silently, while the heroine looks from him to the wet-blanket hero who’s standing there wearing a white had and whining about how he deserves her undying devotion and then turns her back on the white-hat and runs, not walks, to the promise of danger and excitement and adventure and not-quite-safety that the guy on the black bike represents.

Shifting into a slightly different genre… It’s no accident that Elizabeth Bennett falls for Darcy. It’s no accident that Jane Eyre runs to Rochester. It’s far from an accident that Cathy can’t let go of Heathcliff. It’s no accident that in so many romance novels the hero is less than holier-than-thou – at the very least until he meets and is tamed by our heroine’s devotion and goodness – the surfeit of goodness that she carries, because it has to suffice for BOTH of them during the happily ever after which will ensue after the consummation of the romance. But dammit, that’s what keeps it INTERESTING – which romantic heroine worth her salt wants to spend the rest of her days with someone who is ALREADY all nice and reformed? What’s the challenge in that?

When I was creating my own “bad boy” character, I was writing about a young man in his late teens who has been damaged by a number of things that happened during his formative years. He was uprooted from his original home and his family, he is failing at something that the rest of his family consistently succeeds at, he is racked with guilt over his perceived role in his older sister’s death, and when he takes matters into his own hands and tries to put things right everything goes spectacularly wrong for him… and yet so far every beta reader who has picked up this story has a consistent favourite character, and it’s this guy. He’s a rogue, you see, and rogues (especially those whose intentions are basically okay-to-good) attract us all because there is some part of us all that thinks that we, as readers or viewers of a story told in a book or seen on a screen, have the actual power to wade in and rescue these characters from themselves somehow. And failing that, their adventures, even if filled with heroic and catastrophic failures, are that much more EPIC, more fascinating, than the good boy’s stepping up all bright eyed and bushy tailed to receive his little gold star from his teacher for a well-done piece of homework.

In a well-told story, characters change. With a protagonist who is poisonously good to begin with, that change cannot go anywhere at all that is remotely in the right direction – that kind of protag cannot get GOODER than he (or she) already is. With a rogue whose heart is in the right place… well, there is always the possibility that the call of the Dark Side will prove too strong, of course, but the far more tantalizing possibility is that things will go the other way, and we root for that… and in the meantime, we enjoy the hell out of the journey. With a rogue possessed of charm and wit and the occasional leavening stab of bright-eyed malice, life is never dull.

There is a whiff of something that smells like Redemption, and we are suckers for Redemption. Even the most cynical of us lapse now and then and believe in a smidgin of it. It’s hardwired into us. The basic underlying plot of any tale is the road to redemption, someone’s redemption. It makes us feel better to see it, to sense it, to be a part of it. Rogues have more fun – always assuming, of course, that they won’t slide all the way into the pure evil on the far side.

Which book are you reading RIGHT NOW? Does it have a rogue in it?…

I recently tripped over a blog entry, here:

http://community.penguin.com/_Talisman-Books-by-Alison-Goodman/blog/3471740/150186.html

And here’s the definition she uses: “By talisman book I mean one of those novels that you read over and over again, a book that seems to resonate through you, that wards off the disappointments and insecurities of everyday life.”

If you are asking me what three books I will run and get from out of a burning building, there are probably three.

1) My dogeared paperback copy of Lord of the Rings – yes, I know the book is replaceable easily enough, it isn’t as if it’s out of print or anything like that, and anyway I could probably quote you the entire damned book chapter and verse if you asked.  But sometimes it isn’t JUST THE BOOK. It really is the talisman. And this book – broken-spined, tattered, beloved – this book was probably one of the first thing that made me kneel at the altar of fantasy and begin SERIOUS worship there. Tolkien made me realise that the big epic dreams that crowded my imagination were FOR REAL, and were valuable. This book is the physical embodiment of that realisation for me. It’s a talisman not just because of its identity but because of what it represents, the kind of hugeness and wonder and awe and the way it made me cognisant of my place in this world.

2) I’d like to say “Tigana” by Guy Gavriel Kay, because as I keep telling everyone it’s one of the best BOOKS I’ve ever read, genre quite aside, the writing and the story make this amazing for me and so does the visceral emotional connection I feel to the underlying themes of the book; I’d like to say “Nine Princes in Amber”, the now out-of-print paperback edition that made Roger Zelazny lift his eyebrows in utter astonishment when I gave it to him to sign and ask me where on earth I’d got that copy because it had been out of print for YEARS – because of the legacy that Zelazny left me during the writing workshop which he presided over and which I had the privilege to attend (in the year that he died); I might, in fact, say all too many names and hesitate before my bookshelf too long and burn up with my beloved books before I could decide which of the novels on the shelf would be worth the saving (and in the end I’d probably grab at random anyway). But I might also reach for a volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, because all stories live inside that book, and I could read them and dream up the rest of a lost world by his tropes.

3) – because it’s irreplaceable – a really disreputable ancient and ill-favoured old-fashioned hardcover book with dull gray covers which give nothing away and which have been chipped away at the corners and on the spine – a broken down book, loved well long before I had my hands on it, with scribbled commentary in the margins and on the bottom of the pages. You’d think it was a worthless old thing if you set eyes on it; you would pay ten cents for it at a yard sale. You probably wouldn’t take it if it was pressed into your hands for nothing at all. You’d think it had no value beyond being something to start a bonfire with. You’d be wrong. This is the book that lived beside my grandfather’s bed, the book that he read and re-read and re-read, the scribbles in the margins are his thoughts, and in his hand. He’s been gone these twenty years. He’ll never speak to me again except through this book, and I WOULD go through fire to get it.

But those are talisman books in the purest and most glittering sense of the word. There are many many books that I love, and have adored over the years.

There were the books which drew my tears – “Les Miserables”, Howard Spring’s “My Son, My Son”, Karl May’s “Winnetou” (although it took me YEARS to unlearn all the “facts” I though I knew about the American Indian culture in general and the Apache in particular after I finished reading his work), Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”, almost ANYTHING by Ursula le Guin, a book not many people reading this will have heard of but whose title translates as “The Time of Death” by a writer of my own tongue and tribe by the name of Dobrica Cosic and another book by one of my own, Ivo Andric’s “Bridge on the Drina”.

Lest you should think that I spent my entire reading life weeping, there are books that drew my laughter – Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”, T. H. White’s “Once and Future King”.

And there are the comfort books I return to because I have loved them and  because I know them and because if I am sick or tired or ailing I know I can go back to them and find solace there – “Song of Arbonne”, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, Mary Stewart’s Merlin books, “Shadow of the Moon” by M. M. Kaye or any fat historical novel by Sharon Penman (but particularly “Here Be Dragons”), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Poisonwood Bible”, lots of stuff by Pearl Buck, books by Henryk Sienkiewicz, John Galsworthy, Boris Pasternak, Nikos Kazantzakis, Daphne du Maurier. Of more recent vintage, Catherynne Valente whose poetic vision enthralls me or Neil Gaiman whose dark and sardonically twisted tales and characters draw me in and China Mieville whose surgical command of the English language leaves me breathless and humbled.

I am a certified bookworm, rarely without a book halfway through somewhere in the house, often several in different parts of the house. And if I’m not reading them, I’m writing them…

…would you forgive me if I added #4 to my Talisman Book list, above? One of my own, a hardcover edition of “Secrets of Jin Shei”, the book to remind me what I am,  what the culmination is of all the gifts that all my other books have poured like gems into my waiting spirit. The truth is that I haven’t actually re-read the whole thing, not once, since it was first published. Possibly I am too afraid to, afraid of what I will find within those pages whose origins lie so deep within myself, afraid of all the things I will possibly – no, probably – find in there that I would have done differently, or would change even now if I could. But even if I never read those words that I wrote again in their entirety I’ll take a copy with me. And show it to people, after, if I lose the power of speech and they ask me who or what I am. Because that is what I am. Will always be. I am the creator of THIS THING, this book, this collection of words, this story… this talisman.

I am someone who loves books. Someone who loves reading them, who grew up to live and breathe writing them. A once-and-future writer – with hands and spirit overflowing with the talismans of language, of words. Someone who was lucky enough to have had poetry poured into my soul when I was just a child, and who was allowed to wander through the wild wood of story unfettered and free to taste of whatever fruit or stream I could find. I grew up in an  Eden of Word – and I still live there today.

With all my talismans safe beside me.

So – what are YOUR talisman books…?

I”ve always been in love with them. When I was younger it was hardcover notebooks, often A4 in size, in which I would hand-write ENTIRE NOVELS (I know I did. I have a few of those books still. With ENTIRE NOVELS written in them. In HANDWRITING. Often in pencil.) Later, especially when I graduated to the computer as a primary writing tool, they became smaller things I toted around in various purses and handbags and scribbled quotes and half-finished poetry and ideas into, for later transference into the computer where they could be further developed into full-fledged stories. Some were set aside as dedicated “Research journals” for particular projects, and are filled with scrawled notes culled from various research books read along the way, thoughts and ideas on applying facts discovered during research, often with hand-cut tabs which allow me to separate out stuff into distinctive sections so that I will at least know where to LOOK for them later. Frequently, as it gets closer to the writing of the actual story in question, these notebooks will blossom into a colourful and chaotic proliferation of multi-hued post-it tabs which guide me as to which bits belong in which chapter or section of the actual story I’m trying to write.

I currently have a stash of these notebooks, bound in interesting textured covers, sitting in a small pile on a side table and waiting for their turn at glory. They don’t know yet what they are going to be, what they are going to build. There’s the usual crop of idea-notebooks in every handbag I own, every suitcase, every travel-minded container (just in case I ABSOLUTELY NEED ONE right there and then and can’t be bothered to go hunting through a different bag).

In a sense, this defines a writer. Scratch through a writer’s pockets or bags and you’ll always find these things, full of chicken scratches of half formed and barely coherent ideas, sometimes in shorthand which even the writer is hard-pressed to recognise a week or a month or a year after they had scritched it down for remembrance.  If not a notebook, you’ll find old envelopes with scribbles on the back, napkins from fast-food restaurants with ditto (avoiding the occasional ketchup smudge), till slips from stores which went out of business six months before but whose ghost haunts the bottom of someone’s handbag because the back of a bill contains the first inklings of a deathless idea.

I take my notebooks everywhere. I take them travelling, and write down the things I see and hear and experience and taste and the things that leave me gaping in awe and the things that make me laugh and the things that make me annoyed. I take them out to restaurants with friends, and scribble furtively in them when I happen to notice a strange character sitting at a table a little way away and am suddenly mugged by that person’s life story (or my version of it, anyway) which I just have to jot down and preserve because some day I might need a character JUST LIKE THAT for a story not yet born. I leave them lying by my bed when I go to sleep at night because who knows what dreams may come (and need to be nailed down in ink on paper before they vanish like the ephemera that they are.

If people want to buy me presents and have no idea what to get me, a nice blank journal is always welcome. Yes, even though I already own more than I think I could possibly need.

Blank journals represent something to me.  A restless, exciting state of possibility and of Things To Come. They tremble with the yet-unborn spirits of stories still to be told. They whisper to me out of that inviting emptiness calling to me to come  and fulfill them, to help them find their destinies, and along the way, pursue my own.

They are physical links to that place that lies Between, where the stories live and fly.

At this time – let’s see – I have something like ten pristine journals waiting for their turn to shine. That’s at least ten stories which I still have to write. My life is full already, and all I have to show for it so far… are these empty pages.

Want to keep a writer busy, keep a writer dreaming? Give them journals. Give them beautiful things to put their pen to paper into. And watch their imagination spread their wings, and take flight.