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Today I’m delighted to welcome fantasy author S. Jae-Jones! Wintersong, her New York Times bestselling debut novel just released earlier this year, is a young adult book starring a composer determined to free her sister from the clutches of the Goblin King (and will be followed by a companion novel, which is scheduled for release in 2018!). Her blog features some fantastic pieces on its origin and some of her inspirations, and you can read an excerpt from Wintersong on the Griffin Teen website.

Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones

The Albatross

Every day, I write with an albatross about my neck.

Most of the time, I don’t notice its weight, but whenever I speak of my book, I can feel it hanging there, transforming from an albatross to the elephant in the room everyone is too polite to discuss. I smile, I nod, I continue as though I don’t feel it there, sitting as heavy as denial upon my chest as I answer questions, sign books, and pose for pictures.

I am an American writer of Asian descent.

The first time I truly felt the weight of my albatross was at the launch party for Wintersong. After a successful panel with my fellow young adult fantasy authors Roshani Chokshi and Marie Lu, we opened up the floor to questions. We gave answers both earnest and glib to those who asked us where we got our inspiration, how we came to be published, what our writing process was like, until we got to the final question of the evening. A young woman—a teenager—raised her hand and asked, “How does being Asian influence your writing?”

And I had no answer, earnest or glib.

Like the three of us, this teenager was also of Asian descent. I watched her face, shining with hope and eagerness as Roshani and Marie gave their answers. The albatross about my neck stirred, flapping its wings and fanning the flames of my guilt. Roshani spoke of the tales of both her Indian and Filipino heritage she read about as a child, while Marie told an amazing story about witnessing the events of Tiananmen Square as a little girl and how that influenced the dystopian world of her novel, Legend.

I had nothing to say.

My debut novel has no overtly Asian elements. It was inspired by Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, and the myth of the Erl-king. It is set in late 18th century Bavaria and in a Germanic-influenced fantasy world populated with goblins and Lorelei. It is also the most personal and most me book I have ever written.

Those who know me know how I am a lover of all things dark, gothic, and Romantic (with a capital R). Percy Bysshe Shelley, Phantom of the Opera, German-language musicals, Flowers in the Attic, Jacques Cocteau films, Jane Eyre, Crimson Peak, Ann Radcliffe (with whom I share a birthday). I have an aesthetic, as the kids say, and I live that aesthetic to the hilt in the fashion choices I make, the movies I consume, and the books I read and write. It is a distinctly European aesthetic.

It is also mine.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti The Phantom of the Opera

I am the first generation born in America on my mother’s side. My mother is also the person responsible for my aesthetic. She passed her childhood favorites on to me: Pollyanna, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Austen. We spent long weekends marathoning BBC’s Pride & Prejudice with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. She confessed that her very first literary crush was Gilbert Blythe. Her major was English. She made sure I was fed a steady diet of literature and Korean food, feeding my brain as much as my heart.

What she never did was make me feel inadequate.

No, like the ancient mariner of Coleridge’s poem, this albatross is a burden of my own making. American identity is an incredibly fraught and complicated subject, especially as it is both intensely personal and unavoidably political. Where you belong, who claims you, what you claim, what you honor, what you absorb, some of these are choices you make, but others are foisted upon you by others. I thought I had resolved my sense of identity years ago, only to find myself litigating it over and over again.

Write what you know.

I wrote what I knew in my debut novel. I knew my love of classical music, of underworld stories, of sibling relationships, of all things creepy and unsettling. I am goth. I wrote my goth identity into a book. That was the easy part.

The hard part was defending it.

Publishing is a business of managing expectations. I was an acquiring editor at a Big 5 imprint before I became a writer, so I knew very well how to manage business expectations when it came to advances, royalties, print runs, etc. I can divorce my sense of worth from any number of zeroes, my personal self from my artistic output. I am not my book. Except when I am.

I could manage my own expectations, but what I did not expect was managing everyone else’s. The expectations carried by my face and my name. The cover apparently doesn’t match the insides. I feel guilty about that. Guilty, and afraid.

Writing fantasy when you are a non-white American writer can be like stepping through a minefield. If you don’t write from a non-white tradition, are you failing the identity you’ve claimed and that has claimed you? If you do write from the tradition of your ancestors, what if you get it wrong? English is my first language. It is the language in which I speak, think, and write. Korean is my milk tongue. I speak it badly, and with an American accent. Would I write Korean fantasy with one as well? The guilt comes from fear, and fear feeds the guilt.

If I wrote realistic contemporary fiction, would my guilt be less? If I wrote what I knew in a realistic way, I would write about a girl with a Korean mother and a white father, tennis clubs and cotillion, California sunshine and New York City skyscrapers. But my life is as much a fantasy for readers as my debut. I am a first-generation Asian-American, but the trappings of my life do not fit in with the typical narrative of immigrant children. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, where there is a sizeable Asian population, many of whom have been in America for generations. I grew up with a lot of mixed-race families, where the tension between the Old World and the New was not necessarily a clash of ideals, but one of amiable and occasionally intense negotiation. I have no charming and palatably exotic anecdotes of my mother misunderstanding some aspect of American culture I can relate on panels. I have no inspirational stories to give about overcoming or defying parental pressure to become a lawyer or a doctor. My parents encouraged my artistic pursuits and even offered to support me financially if I decided to become an animator or a writer. In short, I have no way to “prove” how my being Asian influences my writing, in either my life or in my work.

But perhaps I am looking at it through the looking glass, and right is left and left is right. Perhaps it is my writing that influences every part of me being Asian. I cannot parse and partition parts of myself for mainstream consumption, or even for other Asian-Americans. Every book I write explores some part of me. My love of classical music was the seed from which Wintersong sprang, but my love of classical music came from my mother. Writing this book helped me better understand me, how everything I am grows from a rich bed of influences, including all those piano lessons I took like a good little Asian girl.

I still write with an albatross about my neck, but book after book, story after story, I write it into freedom.

S. Jae-Jones S. Jae-Jones (called JJ) is an artist, an adrenaline junkie, and the NYT bestselling author of WINTERSONG (Thomas Dunne 2017). When not obsessing over books, she can be found jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, co-hosting the Pub(lishing) Crawl podcast, or playing dress-up. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in North Carolina, as well as many other places on the internet, including Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and her blog.

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Today I’m delighted to welcome Danya! She’s a librarian and a speculative fiction fan who writes book reviews on her excellent website, Fine Print. I really enjoy reading her thoughts on books and appreciate the way she dissects the books she reads—plus she has fantastic taste, as you can see from her coverage of Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. ButlerSeraphina by Rachel Hartman, The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo Hunter, and Monstress Volume One by Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda!

Fine Print

The Menstrual Menace: Periods in Fantasy Novels

As a dedicated reader and reviewer of fantasy novels, especially those that feature women in prominent roles, I’ve often wondered: what’s up with the representation of menstrual periods in fantasy fiction? We read descriptions of characters covered in grime, authors mention the stink of the road, and stories reference hunger pangs from limited rations as part of daily life in many fantasy novels, so the relative absence of periods shouldn’t be dismissed as unimportant. Even more troubling is that when periods are mentioned in fantasy novels, they’re often linked to some extreme element of the magic system or the threat of sexual violence.

Although not all women menstruate and not all those who menstruate identify as women, menstruation plays an important role in the lives of real-life women and, when mentioned, in the lives of female characters in fantasy novels. Whether you’re looking at things from a biological perspective or a social one, the first menses is a significant and meaningful event for a young woman in fantasy: it can determine whether she’s of marriageable age, signify the awakening of her magic, and more often than not, menstrual periods coincide with dark and distressing aspects of the fantasy world.

Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey Fire by Kristin Cashore

I recently read Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey, a retelling of and prequel to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest that explores the relationship between Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban. In a very disturbing series of chapters, Prospero refuses to tell his daughter Miranda, raised in isolation on a desert island without any other women, what to expect when she “becomes a woman” and she’s thus totally blindsided by the pain and inconvenience her menses bring. Prospero then collects Miranda’s blood-soaked, makeshift sanitary cloths to use as a key ingredient in his shadowy alchemical works. Let’s just say that her menstrual blood isn’t exactly being used to conjure puppies and rainbows.

Similarly, Kristin Cashore’s YA fantasy novel Fire presents menstruation as an extreme complicating factor for the protagonist, inextricably linked to violence and magic. Fantastical creatures called Monsters are drawn to the smell of half-human, half-Monster Fire’s blood, flocking to her in violent hordes. Whenever she’s on her period she must either be hidden away inside fortified walls or she has to be escorted by a fleet of armed guards to prevent her from being killed. So while Fire’s period is acknowledged—an important aspect of the story for many of the book’s fans, including myself—it’s not presented as a routine part of life as a young woman, but rather as an event that can literally get you killed.

First Test by Tamora Pierce Page by Tamora Pierce Squire by Tamora Pierce Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce

Although Miranda and Caliban and Fire are only two examples of novels that discuss periods, they’re pretty typical representations of how menstruation is incorporated into fantasy…if it’s incorporated at all. Those fantasy authors who do make an effort to present menstrual periods as noteworthy events without turning it into an overblown issue are the exception in my experience, not the rule. Tamora Pierce, who addresses menstruation in all of her Tortall universe books, takes an admirable approach to the topic in the Protector of the Small quartet: the protagonist Kel and her friend Lalasa discuss what to expect and how to deal with her first period when it arrives. Personally, I wish more fantasy authors took such an evenhanded approach to the topic of menstruation and would address it for what it is: a simple, if inconvenient, fact of life for many women.

Danya of Fine Print Danya is a librarian and blogger from Ontario, Canada. She is the founder of Fine Print, a book review site where she shares her love of fantasy novels, kick ass ladies, and romance…not necessarily in that order. You can find her on Twitter as @danyafineprint.

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Today I am thrilled to welcome New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger! Her immensely entertaining Parasol Protectorate series, a comedy of manners set during an alternate Victorian era populated by werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural beings, follows the adventures of Alexia Tarabotti—who literally has no soul. Though this series is now complete, she’s expanded the world through other books, including those in Custard Protocol, an ongoing series set after the Parasol Protectorate; Supernatural Society, stand alone LGBTQ romance novellas; Finishing School, a young adult quartet; and more.

Imprudence by Gail Carriger Soulless by Gail Carriger

Got Queer Characters In Your Fantasy? Blame Mercedes Lackey

You know what I get asked a lot?

Why do you include gay characters in your books?

I find the question confusing. Like, Gail, why do you include food in your books? Or descriptions of dresses? Or fragment sentences? It’s part of my DNA as a writer. My world view. My world.

But that also seems to trivialize the whole darn thing.

I guess what I’m really being asked is…

Why did it never occur to you not to?

And to that I say: Blame Mercedes Lackey.

Back when I was first transitioning into reading adult books, it was pretty natural to cross from children’s fantasy (there was no YA as a category back then) into adult fantasy via Mercedes Lackey. (I still hold that Arrows is, in fact, YA. It simply has never been packaged that way. Silly marketing.)

For me that transition went pretty smoothly because, well… her books featured girls and soul bonded horses. I’ve always been one of those super girly girls (aside from being totally not squeamish about bugs and food and dirt and climbing anything that will stand still long enough for me to get up it and… where was I?) Oh yes, so child Gail began reading adult books because white horses with purple eyes on cover. Duh.

Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey Knights of Ghosts and Shadows by Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon

Mercedes Lackey always inhabits her work with gay and lesbian characters. They are not always central characters, as they are in the Last Herald Mage series, but they are always there. (Keep reading Lackey and you end up with poly relationships. Gail, age 14 thought Knight of Ghosts and Shadows had the most romantic ending of any book EVER, and kinda still does.) All these relationships are presented in a supportive light. Which made perfect sense to child Gail with all her Berkeley and San Francisco poet, artist, dancer, musician aunties and uncles (and uncles who were also aunties).

Since then as a grown up professional authorbeast, I’m lucky enough to have socialized with Mercedes on a few occasions. She is just as warm and wonderful as you might hope. I’m afraid when I first met her, my author buddy Lauren Harris and I rather fan-girled all over her. Almost entirely because we wanted to impress upon her the fact that her books were so important because they gave us a model of fantasy that included alternate sexuality. As she went to pains to point out, there were other genre authors doing this before her. But those authors were generally less accessible to young women readers. Her books were/are important because in them queer wasn’t a big deal. It just was. And so when Lauren and I began to write it just was for us, too. In Lackey’s books queer was normal.

And normalization is a powerful instrument of change.

Gail Carriger
Photo Credit: J. Daniel Sawyer
Gail Carriger writes comedies of manners mixed with paranormal romance. Her steampunk books include the Parasol Protectorate, Custard Protocol, and Supernatural Society series for adults, and the Finishing School series for young adults. (All of them contain queer characters in a myriad of forms.) She is published in many languages and has over a dozen NYT bestsellers. She was once an archaeologist and is overly fond of shoes, octopuses, and tea.

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Thanks to last week’s guests, April is off to a great start! It’s time to announce the guests for this week, but first, here are last week’s articles in case you missed any of them:

And now, I’m excited to announce this week’s schedule of guest posts, beginning tomorrow.

Women in SF&F Month 2017 Guests

April 10: Gail Carriger (Parasol Protectorate, Finishing School, The Custard Protocol)
April 11: Danya (Fine Print)
April 12: S. Jae-Jones (Wintersong)
April 13: Yangsze Choo (The Ghost Bride)
April 14: Kat Howard (Roses and Rot, An Unkindness of Magicians—coming Fall 2017)

Since the beginning of 2016, I have been reading and reviewing one book a month based on the results of a poll on PatreonAll of these monthly reviews can be viewed here.

The April theme is Tiptree Award-recognized science fiction (written by women since it is Women in SF&F Month, after all!). As stated on their website, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award is “an award encouraging the exploration and expansion of gender.” There’s a handy database for viewing and searching the books that have won the award or been selected for the Honor List or Long List.

When I scoured my bookshelves for applicable books, I didn’t find that many Tiptree Award winners, especially considering I’ve already reviewed some of those I do have. However, I found several that had received honors so this month’s selections were books that received a Special Honor or a place on the Honors List:

The April book is…

Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler

As the acclaimed Patternist science fiction series begins, two immortals meet in the long-ago past—and mankind’s destiny is changed forever.

For a thousand years, Doro has cultivated a small African village, carefully breeding its people in search of seemingly unattainable perfection. He survives through the centuries by stealing the bodies of others, a technique he has so thoroughly mastered that nothing on Earth can kill him. But when a gang of New World slavers destroys his village, ruining his grand experiment, Doro is forced to go west and begin anew.

He meets Anyanwu, a centuries-old woman whose means of immortality are as kind as his are cruel. She is a shapeshifter, capable of healing with a kiss, and she recognizes Doro as a tyrant. Though many humans have tried to kill them, these two demi-gods have never before met a rival. Now they begin a struggle that will last centuries and permanently alter the nature of humanity.

Hugo and Nebula award–winning author Octavia E. Butler’s sweeping cross-century epic places her “among the best of contemporary SF writers” (Houston Chronicle).

My version of the book is in the Patternist omnibus, but I’m planning to review the first book on its own since it sounds as though the individual novels are not very closely connected. I’m really looking forward to reading Wild Seed this month!

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Today I’m thrilled to welcome science fiction and fantasy author Cassandra Rose Clarke! Her latest novel, the space opera Star’s End, was just released late last month. She has also written The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, a Philip K. Dick Award finalist; Our Lady of the Ice, a RT Reviewer’s Choice Award finalist in the Science Fiction category; Magic of Blood and Sea, which contains both The Assassin’s Curse and The Pirate’s Wish; and more, including several short stories.

Star's End by Cassandra Rose Clarke Magic of Blood and Sea by Cassandra Rose Clarke

As a child, I was aggressively girlie. I went through a period when I refused to wear anything but dresses. My bedroom was painted pink at my insistence.  I hoarded Lisa Frank school supplies. I turned my nose up at what I considered “boy things,” like sports. (That being said, plenty of my interests, like Lego and shark documentaries, would have been called “boy things” by lots of people. Frankly, I just classified them as “girl things” because I, the girliest girl you could imagine, liked them.)

I was also a voracious reader. As you might expect, I had little to no interest in “boy books” (except for the ones I did, such as My Side of the Mountain, but again, I would never have considered it a “boy book,” because there is no logic when it comes to gendering objects or interests). Instead, I sought out any book that featured a girl as its main character. I devoured Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and Lurlene McDaniel books at a relentless speed, swapping out each cheap paperback I read with a new stack from the local used bookstore. As an adult, I recognize that many of my childhood favorites were pretty dubious in the feminist department—the Wakefield twins and their “perfect size six” (now four) bodies being a prime example—but as a kid most of it just washed over me. I wanted to read about girls. I didn’t care what they were doing. I just wanted girls. And here were books about girls.

I also loved horror. Horror writers like RL Stine, Christopher Pike, and, a little later, Stephen King are the writers I credit the most with sparking my interest in genre fiction. When I began tentatively writing out my own stories, they, without fail, ripped off one of two writers: Lurlene McDaniel if I was feeling weepy and RL Stine if I was not. I loved the weirdness of horror, the shivery feeling that someone’s watching you as you tear through the pages, the slow build of tension as you try to make it to the end. In elementary school, I didn’t read fantasy, and I rarely read science fiction. But I read a ton of horror.

Why? Well, the answer’s pretty obvious: girls. Horror books were just as likely to have girls as their main character as they were boys, something I didn’t realize at the time could be true of science fiction and fantasy. With horror, I could fill my craving for weird stuff with my love of reading about girls doing things, even if it was just running from a monster. Remember, I wasn’t picky about what my girl characters were up to. I just wanted to read about them. One of my absolute favorite books of this time period was a ghost story that’s also a close examination of the relationship between two sisters; I’m talking, of course, about Wait Till Helen Comes. I’m not sure there was ever a more perfect book for nine-year-old me to read.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

In junior high, the kids in my seventh-grade GT classes all became obsessed with A Wrinkle in Time. It was one of those weird fads that sweeps through junior highs like a fast-moving plague. Two months earlier we’d all been whacking each other with slap bracelets; now we were tearing through Madeleine L’Engle. A Wrinkle in Time is the first book I remember reading that was both science fiction and about a girl. A girl who described herself as painfully ordinary and plain next to her mother, a girl who thought she didn’t have any true talents. What seventh grader, regardless of gender, doesn’t think that way about themself, deep down? I read through the entire series that year, marveling at the science fictional wonder of it all, and connecting deeply with Meg Murray as she grew from an awkward girl to a sophisticated, brilliant woman—giving me hope for myself.

Discovering A Wrinkle in Time threw open the floodgates. I began watching The X-Files religiously, utterly in awe of Dana Scully. I read through the Big Dystopias and discovered Margaret Atwood in high school; my life hasn’t been the same since.  The Star Wars prequels were released and I fell in love with Padmé Amidala, a terribly written character who nonetheless spoke to me as a fifteen-year-old girl who had come to see Episode One with her high school’s Latin Club (seriously). Here was a girl my age in my beloved Star Wars, a girl who could rule an entire planet while wearing the GREATEST DRESSES OF ALL TIME. Even now, more than fifteen years later, Padmé remains one of my favorite science fiction characters—not so much the character as written, but the promise of what she could be, the aggressively girlie, fashion-conscious, Rebellion-founding politician who fights for democracy in the galaxy.

Padmé Amidala

I feel like so many of the literacy narratives I’ve read about women and genre fiction move in a particular direction: reading about boys because the “girl books” weren’t interesting. But I came at it backwards, like I do most things. The “girl books” were most interesting to me because they were about girls. Science fiction and fantasy had to at least gesture at gender parity before they grabbed my interest. And once I found those lady-centered gems, I was hooked.

Cassandra Rose Clarke Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a pair of local colleges. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. Her work has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award, and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her latest novel is Star’s End, out now from Saga Press.