Juliet E. McKenna

This is really interesting. If you look back at the short story I posted yesterday, you’ll see that I have now edited one word. I have changed the line in question to

noting which pupils could now usefully be directed towards reading Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey.

Because in the comments on my main blog, a reader wondered why only girls should be directed towards those books, as the initial text implied. That’s a very good question and the quick answer is self-evident. There is no good reason why only girls should read Austen and the Brontes. Indeed there are many good reasons why boys should read the full range of such classic literature.

The longer answer is more complex and more revealing. Writing this story, I was drawing on my own memories of A Level English, where, yes, we studied Keats. This is particularly the case because that first impulse to write this story was prompted by a friend I have known since that very class. It was her helpful phone that turned ‘varifocal’ into ‘verifcation’. We went to the same girls’ grammar school, so in my mind’s eye, the class I’m recalling is entirely female.

Then there’s the Twilight angle which you’ll see in the story. Again, I’m drawing on my own experiences going into schools these days and teaching creative writing. It’s invariably a dreamy-eyed girl who askes me if I’ve read Twilight. (To which my answer is always,’No, I haven’t got round to it yet, but I do read Kelley Armstrong and Patricia Briggs and now you’ve read all the Twilight books, why not give them a try’.) So once again, in that particular paragraph, my writerly subconsious is full of girls.

The key thing here is that while the longer answer is very illuminating, the shorter answer is the one that counts. Because there is no good reason why this line should only refer to girls. In fact, changing the word to ‘pupils’ actively improves the story in several subtle ways.

So there you go. A real-life, real-time example of the editing process and what it contributes to the books we read. Isn’t that great?

Yesterday I remarked online that I keep finding I’m peering over my glasses or shoving them up on my head for close work now. Assorted pals put up their hands, admitting to their bi-, tri and varifocal lenses these days. One long-standing friend was caught out by her helpful phone which declared she now wears ‘verification’ glasses. The consensus was those sounded a lot more interesting than the usual opticians’ offerings.

As is the way of writers, I found myself thinking idly, doing the washing up and on the school run this morning. So here you are.

Insight

She entered the classroom, put her handbag on the desk and opened it, taking out her glasses case. ‘Good morning, everyone. Settle down please.’
11JW did as she asked, with greater or lesser alacrity.
Swapping her everyday glasses for the ones in the case, Maeve reached for the textbook and opened it. ‘Keats, please. St Agnes Eve.’
‘New specs, Miss?’ Amy looked up from the front row.
Maeve smiled. ‘They’re verification lenses.’
Sitting next to Amy, Emma laughed. ‘You mean varifocals, Miss.’
‘Do I?’ Maeve smiled again before looking up to survey the class. ‘Well, now, I hope everyone has read the poem and made some notes after last time. Who wants to start today’s discussion?’
‘Oh, Miss, it was so romantic. Like Twilight.’ Becky propped her chin on her hand, eyes dreamy.
‘Romantic?’ In the row behind Becky, Josh laughed lewdly. ‘It’s all about some bloke sneaking in to a girl’s bedroom to give her one.’
As the other boys sniggered though, Maeve saw the silver thread of yearning stretch from the centre of Josh’s chest to hover, stopping just short of caressing Natalie’s exuberant, black curls.
‘Do you think that sort of coarseness will improve your chances with a girl, Josh?’ she asked mildly.
As the boys subsided, abashed, Maeve nodded, satisfied. ‘Though you do have a point, Josh, and we’ll consider that when we reach that part of the poem. Becky’s also raised an interesting question. Where do we draw the line between romantic pursuit and stalking? Why do some remarkably old-fashioned ideas persist in modern literature?’
That prompted a lively debate between the Twihards and the rest. Maeve let it run for a few minutes, noting which pupils could now usefully be directed towards reading Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey.
‘So—’ she raised her voice to reclaim the class’s attention ‘—let’s get back to Keats. Oliver, you haven’t had anything to say so far. Did you do your homework?’
‘Yes, Miss,’ he said defensively. ‘Just didn’t like it.’
He was lying, obviously. Maeve could see the tell-tale crackles of black suffusing his aura.
‘Appreciating literature is just as much about understanding why we don’t like a piece of work,’ she said sternly. ‘I will expect you to set out all your reasons with relevant quotes in your essay. Vicky, bring your phone to me.’
‘What?’ Vicky looked up, aghast. ‘Miss?’
‘Your phone, Vicky.’ Maeve held out her open hand.
Blushing furiously, Vicky heaved herself out of her seat and slouched to the front of the class. She handed over the phone with an exaggerated sigh.
Maeve noted the furtive shuffling of the others who had imagined they could keep their phones unseen in their laps beneath the tabletops. Doubtless they could, when they were dealing with other teachers who couldn’t see right through the tables.
‘Thank you. Collect it from the office at the end of the day.’ She smiled at the rest of the class. ‘Now, let’s start with the poem’s first stanza.’
The rest of the lesson proceeded according to plan and by the time the bell rang, Maeve was well satisfied with the class’s contributions.
‘Thank you, everyone, and I will expect your essays first thing on Friday.’ She closed her text book with a sharp slap as the teenagers began leaving their seats and hauling their bags up from the floor.
‘Sarah, one moment.’ Maeve raised her hand to command the girl’s attention. ‘You’ve got a free now, I believe? Could you take this note to Miss Williams in the library for me, please?’
‘Yes, Miss, of course.’ Sarah tried to hide her relief.
Maeve handed the envelope to the girl, walking to the classroom door with her. ‘What are you three waiting for?’ She looked sternly at Jade, Tasha and Jenna who were loitering in the corridor. ‘Get to your next lesson!’
Maeve stood in the doorway, her expression expectant, until the vicious trio retreated. The acid green tendrils of their spite which had been coiling around Sarah all through the class shrivelled as they departed. They were bullies but they weren’t stupid. They wouldn’t risk cornering this week’s chosen victim when she was running an errand for a teacher.
‘I’ll go and start work on my essay, Miss.’ Sarah turned in the other direction, heading for sanctuary in the library.
As 9FW surged noisily through the double doors at the end of the corridor, Maeve smiled, satisfied.
She knew that Jade, Tasha and Jenna called her an old witch behind her back. What the girls didn’t know, of course, was they were perfectly correct. Though not an old witch. Maeve was merely a middle-aged one, and perfectly capable of taking the necessary measures when her third eye’s vision started to feel the passing years’ effects.

*Edited to change ‘girls’ to ‘pupils’… analysis and explanation to follow in the next blog post.

This morning I am particularly taken with this review of The Thief’s Gamble over at Fantasy Review Barn. Not because it’s a gushing outpouring of praise – it gives the book three and a half stars. Fair enough, everyone’s entitled to their opinion and the reviewer here has read the book thoroughly and thoughtfully.

What really makes me smile is reading “I was fine with the generic feel of it, but be aware that no new ground was broken here.” and ” It hits all the nice fantasy tropes, and doesn’t see any reason to bend them, break them, or subvert them.”

Okay, that’s the view of this book by a new reader in 2013. Back in 1999, the reviews said things like “pleasing to find a female lead who’s properly representative rather than the usual tepid mix of heroine and victim.” and ” a beautifully drawn world with a rich history, interesting and realistic characters and a plot that drags you along at breakneck speed.”, “What’s different and interesting about this book is what Ms McKenna does with it.” And more besides.

So why am I smiling? Because this shows just how far the epic fantasy genre has grown and developed in this past decade and more. Readers are used to so much more in terms of realism and depth of plot and characterisation, more complex themes and subtext.

Not that this should come as any particular surprise to fans of our genre. I’m currently assessing four debut novels for my next Albedo One review column. To be specific, I’m reading The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, The Heir of Night by Helen Lowe, Earth Girl by Janet Edwards and Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl by David Barnett. Time and again, while reading, I have noted down some instance of an interesting new take on what have become standard, even over-worn plot or character elements since I started writing myself.

I think this is really great.

Right, I had better get on with some writing on my current projects.

(Meantime of course, if you’re curious to read The Thief’s Gamble for yourself, you can now get it in your preferred ebook format from your ebook retailer of choice. This message brought to you by the Jules Convention Travel Fund)

I’ve just posted a piece on the EightSquared Blog thinking about the distinctive depth and breadth of programming at SF conventions, compared to the more typical lit fest.

You can find it by clicking here.

Incidentally, I hope to blog as usual here rather than just posting links, but as I’m sure you appreciate, between now and Eastercon, I am going to be pretty busy. In a good way.

If you want to offer your own perspectives, you can do that here or on the EightSquared blog as you prefer.

Right back to the To Do List. This morning? An updated introduction for the ebook of The Swordsman’s Oath…

……over on the EightSquared/Eastercon 2013 blog, details of our costume event and some thoughts about costuming in fandom generally. Plus photos of a giant samurai rabbit, and me dressed up as a space admiral, together with my close protection detail.

As regular readers will know, I rarely blog between Christmas and New Year. As well as the holiday season, we have a slew of family birthdays from 20th December onwards so it’s a very busy time of year. This year however, I did write a guest blog for Jonathan Green, who’s been running a Kickstarter to fund a book celebrating thirty years and exploring the history of Fighting Fantasy Game Books. I’m thrilled to say the project is now funded – but there’s still time to get involved, and there are some great rewards up for grabs here.

And while you’re thinking about it, here’s that blog post, to explain why I’m backing this particular project.

I encountered Fighting Fantasy gamebooks not too long after they first appeared. I’d gone up to university in 1983 and that’s where I’d discovered Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller, Aftermath, Toon, Heroes, Car Wars and other tabletop role-playing games which instantly appealed to my lifelong love of fantasy and science-fiction. Such gaming offered me a whole new interactive and participatory way of engaging with such stories. After all those books which I’d read, wanting to slap some sense into the hero who persisted in doing something so dumb that surely only an moron would go ahead. Now I could shout across the table to stop the idiot paladin about to open the grim portal or ominously rune-engraved box. I could be the one suspiciously interrogating the apparently helpful peasant giving directions to the dragon’s den. Now I could be the one rolling a critical fumble and getting skewered by a kobold. (As with just about everyone playing AD&D in that era, our group played a highly personalised and modified version of the rules).

I have wondered since why SF&F meshes so well with table top gaming. I think it’s because speculative fiction invites engagement with the narrative to a far greater extent than other fictions. SF&F isn’t reflecting the world as we know it, offering us insights into the reality we inhabit. It’s constantly asking us to imagine ourselves somewhere else, where the rules we think we know don’t necessarily apply, whether those are the laws of physics or society. The eternal question of SF&F is ‘what if…?’ That wish to step through the barrier of the pages and participate directly in the stories ourselves naturally follows. Indeed, portal fantasy has been a staple of the genre since Alice first fell down the rabbit hole and Lucy entered the wardrobe. Who would have imagined that a handful of weird-shaped dice could satisfy that longing?

Which was great as long as I was at university. But come the end of term time, I had to go home and in those long-ago pre-Internet days, there was no way of finding like-minded souls back in Dorset. How could I continue that direct participation in story-weaving that I’d got so used to enjoying?

Fan fiction? That was also something I’d encountered for the first time at university, through the dubious medium of a much-copied photo-copy of ‘Spock in Manacles’… Setting aside the literary merits of that particular work, I was familiar with the motivation behind fan-fiction. More than once, during a particularly tedious English lesson discussing the Romantic Poets, I would stare out of the window and indulge in a light reverie about Blake’s Seven, mentally writing myself into an episode never to be seen outside my own head. The thing is though, such episodes weren’t particularly satisfying and not only because I still had such vast amounts to learn about characterisation, pacing, exposition and all the other facets of writing craft. The main problem was, there were never any surprises. I knew what was hidden behind the curtain or in the talking box because I’d thought it up in the first place. All in all, I found such indulgent daydreams as unsatisfying as playing chess against myself.

Then someone lent me a copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I forget who it was but I’m pretty sure they were in the same fix as me outside of term time. Now we had a solution! Solo gaming within a system that played fair in the sense of punishing stupidity as well as rewarding intelligent thinking and still with the added edge of unpredictable dice rolls landing you in no-win situations. Because game systems should be fair but as the Goblin King reminds us in Labyrinth, real life simply isn’t. Which was great, because the endless variations and possibilities meant you could play the book time and again. Even once you’d won, you could go back and see where the roads not taken might have led.

I love the way these books endured despite the arrival of computer games. I remember playing early attempts at those and being very unimpressed, both by the quality of the writing and plotting and by the inadequacies of the graphics. Fighting fantasy game books offered far superior game play for a good long while as well as the fabulous pictures inside my own head, spun off the wonderful cover art and the line drawings inside. It’s only in recent years that computer games have come anywhere near matching such visuals, never mind such intricate storytelling and replayability.

So of course I’m backing this project. I am intrigued to learn more about the history of these books. How the idea first originated, how they came to be published and who was involved in their creation and development and why. Quite apart from anything else, I bet I’m not the only one currently writing epic fantasy fiction with such fond memories of flipping through an increasingly creased paperback, pencil between teeth and dice ready to hand.

You might want to settle down with a cup of tea and a mince pie, since this does run rather long, even though these are only the briefest of the stories I could tell…

I’ve been knitting for my new nephew this year. I like to knit and sorting out needles and wool always makes me think of my Great Aunty Ivy, eldest of my maternal grandmother’s sisters, who taught me to knit and crochet when I was about nine. When she died, all her needles, hooks and the Singer sewing machine that had been a wedding present to her in 1919 came to me. It still has the instructions including notes on the correct needles to use for whalebone and an attachment for goffering the frills for maids’ caps.

Ivy hadn’t been expected to live to be married, having had a life-threatening goitre requiring a drastic operation in 1917. Gynae complications meant she could never have children and then she was widowed in the early 1950s, when her husband had a brain haemorrhage. But you just have to get on with life, she told me. So she did, robust in her opinions and in her vegetarianism, a staunch advocate of that since the 1920s. Woe betide anyone foolish enough to dismiss a meat-free diet as hippy faddishness in her hearing.

Born in 1900, she was, as she liked to tell us when she visited my grandparents at Christmas, the last Victorian in the family. Not that she had much time for ‘Victorian values’. I remember, one summer visit in my early teens, as we sat knitting together, her making some remarkably forthright enquiries as to what I knew about the facts of life. Once she was satisfied that I was properly informed, she told me about the day she and Betty, her other sister, had needed to reassure my startled grandmother returning from a bike ride with a bloodstained skirt. Ivy had only recently learned the full facts herself, on her wedding night when her husband had found himself patiently explaining what he was trying to do with and to her. None of the women of that generation had any objection to me, my siblings and cousins co-habiting before marriage. Very sensible, they called it, out of their husbands’ hearing.

The last conversation I had with Aunty Ivy, not long before her death, included her asking me all about the boyfriend I was living with, since he had been invited to my grandparents’ 80th birthday party, mostly so my Grandmother could meet/inspect him. Ivy, at 88, had been too frail to attend. Apparently the report was sufficiently favourable that they had decided between them he would make an excellent husband. They weren’t wrong. We’ve been married since 1989.

I’ve been thinking on my Grandmother today as I do some Christmas baking. A recent newspaper article agonising about how to bake a decent chocolate cake baffled me. I was taught to make a sponge mix with one quarter of the flour by weight replaced with cocoa powder. Job done. I’ve also made mince pies today, using the pastry recipe my Grandma taught me; half fat to flour, fat consisting of half butter* and half lard*. They always come out beautifully.

(*goat butter since I can’t eat cow’s milk and Cookeen if vegetarians are expected)

Grandma worked in ladies’ fashions at Bourne & Hollingsworth, Selfridges and lastly at Harrods in London before the Second World War. She was there during the Abdication Crisis, when the shop girls regularly overheard the Countess of Wherever discussing the scandalous details of Edward’s infatuation with Wallis Simpson with Lady Whosit in the changing rooms. When the first reports appeared in the foreign press, all the staff were summoned to a meeting where they were told if anything appeared in the British newspapers, they would all be sacked, regardless of whether or not such tale-telling could be traced back to the shop. My Grandmother was quietly unimpressed by bombastic male authority, I realised, even when Grandpa was laying down the law as he tended to on a fairly regular basis.

Though Grandma and her neighbour did listen to the ARP warden who told them off for going out and stamping on incendiaries in WWII, to put them out before the flames took hold. Air raids were a constant threat as she lived on the South Coast with twin baby girls and a husband away doing air traffic control for the USAAF. One particularly bad night, she couldn’t face going down to the shelter for the third or fourth time so she simply got under the bed with both babies and the dog. That’s where she discovered my Grandfather’s tobacco ration from the Americans, which he was drawing even though he didn’t smoke. Remembering cigarettes were supposed to calm the nerves, she broke open a packet of Lucky Strike and lit up. Because you just had to get on with things. There was no point in making a fuss.

When I make my mince pies, I used the pressed steel tins we got from my husband’s grandmother. Well greased, things never stick to them and the pastry is never soggy on the bottom. Steel, not stainless steel, mark you. So they need to be washed promptly and then put in the cooling oven to dry.

I met Nan when I was living here during a year’s medical leave from university. That was a tough year for all sorts of reasons and I used to go and see her when I needed some company. She was calm and quiet and welcoming and we talked about days gone by in the Cotswolds and her life in service as a daily cook to a local wealthy family and what was on the telly and oh, all sorts of things. She and my husband and his brother were all very close since she had helped see them through the tragically early death of their mother from cancer. In one of his last conversations with her, she told my husband ‘you should marry that girl’. He told her that he would, even before he’d asked me. Like my Aunty Ivy, Nan could see we were right for each other long before we were certain.

I have had to replace the basin for the Christmas pudding this year. Nan’s has developed an ominous crack so we’ll use it for fruit from now on. When I was younger, family Christmas puddings always came from my step-father’s mother. Granny was the eldest of nine born on a Lincolnshire farm just before the First World War. Her mother died young so she pretty much raised her brothers and sisters. She still found time to help out her neighbours though, particularly the ‘city girl’ a local gamekeeper married. Other locals were inclined to look on with disapproval. Granny called round to see how the new bride was getting on – and found her in tears, trying to pluck a hare. So Granny helped her skin and cook it, and kept an eye on her thereafter. Right into her latter years, Granny was quite capable of stopping to wring a pheasant’s neck when she saw a car clip one and leave it injured by the side of the road. And take it home for Sunday lunch.

She trained as a nurse and worked ‘on the District’ all her professional life, with that same blend of compassion and practicality, driving her Morris Minor all round South Yorkshire. She spent the Second World War nursing the wounded as well as raising her young son with her husband away serving as a radio operator on Lancaster bombers. Just getting on with it.

Meantime, my Granny McKenna was getting on with things in Plymouth, all through the air raids while her husband worked as a fitter in the Royal Dockyards and she raised three children including one hospitalised with osteomyelitis after breaking his leg. The doctors wanted to amputate but Granny wouldn’t let them, insisting that she would nurse my uncle through the bone infection and she succeeded. She did all this while wearing a fearsome back brace of leather and steel which fascinated me and my brother as young children. As a young woman just over from Ireland, she’d been hit by a brewery dray and when she’d recovered consciousness, she walked to the hospital with a broken ankle and several fractured vertebrae.

She’d come over to England to be as a priest’s housekeeper, initially working at the De La Salle teacher training college in London. An orphan from the Magdalene Laundries, that’s what she’d been trained up to do with her life. Except she met my grandfather who was working as a groundsman at the college and that was that. In her sixties, when she applied for her first passport, Granny McKenna discovered that the details the nuns had supplied about her original name, age and birth date were all incorrect. So she simply celebrated two birthdays for the rest of her life. There was no point making a fuss. Incidentally, she needed a passport to go on a parish trip to Lourdes. Not on her own account, you understand. She was going as a helper for those unfortunate souls who needed such a blessing.

These are my foremothers and I always find myself remembering them with admiration and affection at Christmas.

You will recall that I set readers a challenge a few weeks ago, to ask me for a sentence from a book I haven’t written yet. The results are here and they’re very well worth reading.

What I particularly love is the way that these readers’ familiarity with my writing sees them asking many of the same questions which I was asking myself as I wrote Defiant Peaks. Indeed, they touch on several of the characters and plot-asides which they’ll find mentioned in that book. And that’s as much as I’ll say to avoid spoilers.

Apart from CE Murphy who sets me one of those out-of-genre challenges which we writers love throwing at each other.

And apart from Adrianne, who came up with an idea firmly rooted in the Tales of Einarinn that has simply never occured to me – and yet, as soon as I read it, it made such perfect sense. Of course that would happen! (And what would happen next? Oh, I’d love to find out…)

So on that basis, Adrianne is the overall winner. That said I had such fun doing this that I reckon everyone deserves a book. Adrianne can have more than one to mark her achievement.

So we’ll sort that out via email, and meantime, I must now resist the temptation to start writing another short story collection to follow up on all these ideas. Including the space-chameleons.

There’s clearly something in the air again. This past week has seen some excellent posts challenging those hide-bound readers who want their epic fantasy to stick to outdated straight, white, male-driven narratives, arguing in their ignorance that this is historically accurate whereas narratives including women with autonomy and agency are political correctness gone mad.

In case you missed one or more of these, here are some links – and if you’ve seen one I missed, please flag it up.

Scott Lynch responds to a critical reader – “God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms.” You’re picking up the sarcasm there? Good. Read the whole thing, it’s awesome.

Foz Meadows offers “PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical”

prompted by –

Tansy Rayner Roberts “Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That.”

Cheryl Morgan rounds up those same links and adds a few pertinent thoughts of her own.

For the sake of completeness, I’ll also link back to my own piece for Bad Reputation on the problematic representation of women in fantasy

Mind you, does anyone else find it tiresome that we still – men and women alike – have to keep pointing out these self-evident truths to the wilfully blinkered?

So let’s work on making it impossible for those types to deny women’s interest in and involvement with epic fantasy fiction and gaming without physically shutting their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears while chanting “la-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you”.

Here’s a good place to start. Jonathan Green is running a Kickstarter “You are the Hero” to fund writing a history, indeed a celebration of, 30 Years of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. As you’ll see from the page, he plans on interviewing a broad range of chaps to ensure a comprehensive exploration of these ground-breaking gaming books.

Um, yes. Chaps. Everyone man jack of the writers, artists and other creative types listed. You won’t be surprised to learn that I have genially queried this – and I’m sure you’ll be as pleased as me to learn that Jonathan is extremely keen to find more of the likes of me, who played through these books just as avidly as our brothers back in the day. I’m just as interested to find out how many of us there might be.

So if you are a fighting fantasy fan of the female persuasion, do let me know. If you’re happy for me to pass on your detail to Jonathan, do say so. Clearly whether or not he contacts you will be up to him; it’s his project and I can’t speak for what material he might need. But we can at least ensure he has such resources to hand.

I thoroughly enjoyed doing this interview with SFX’s Alasdair Stuart, discussing all sorts of things from the early days of my writing career to the way my books have developed and how I arrived at The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. He asked some really interesting questions so hopefully you’ll find the answers offer you something new to think about too.

Click here to read the full interview