First thing: I will be signing at the University Bookstore, on University Way in Seattle on Friday, January 18, at 7pm. Along with the uber-fabulous Richelle Mead! There will probably be a whole contingent of urban fantasy authors in the audience, a la Mark Henry and Kat Richardson (at least, I’ve heard they’re going to be at the party) and a swell time will be had by all. (If you’re going to be there and I haven’t mentioned you, my apologies. I don’t know WHAT exactly will happen or WHO exactly will be there, always a recipe for a great party.)
I just need to get the oil changed in the car today before I drive up to Seattle on Friday morning. Jiffy Lube will hold my hand all through this process, I’m sure. They’re always amused by how frightened I am of the whole thing. “No ma’am, no car has ever exploded while we’ve done this. They don’t pay us enough to make them explode.”
But enough of that. Writing. I’m writing today.
All right. I’ve got the protagonist in the dungeon chained to the wall. He’s noble, so the cell’s clean at least, no visible rats, and the chains haven’t started to rub yet. I’ve got all sorts of fun planned for him–a visit from his parents, a visit from his wife, the sudden reversal of fortune and a devil’s bargain…
…so why, in the name of all that’s holy, am I staring at steampunk pretties like this (this is pretty much the mental image I have of Saul in the Kismet series, except without the Edwardian stuff, which defeats the whole “steampunk” thing he’s got going on but hey, it’s my fantasy life, dammit) and this (photo on the far right? the Selkie and I have agreed this is Delgado, of the Society series.)
A writer can look at things like these for a loooooooooooong time. (A girl can look for even looooooooongerrrrrrr.) I see echoes of the characters inside my head in lots of Web stuff and even on the streets. It all goes into that little well in my head, the one that I draw images from. Sometimes I wonder, like Humbert Humbert, if my casting these people/images in fantasies (that I write down instead of trying out play out in real life) harms them in some nebulous way. But then, I’m not Humbert, so I think I’m pretty safe.
I think this is the reason why the Internet is such a fabulous boon for writers. We get to look at all sorts of things that feed our Muses to the brim, and that is a wondrous thing. From the comfort of my home I can surf the Uffizi even, or the Louvre. This to me is pretty much made of awesome.
But I need that dungeon. I need to chain this character up and make him hurt, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to hurt him if I keep staring at the PRETTIES, omg the pretties.
*sigh* It’s hell, this writing life. Heh.
Hope your day has similarly pleasant frustration, my ducks.
Morning, everyone. I’m sipping at some coffee and making various morning faces–not because of the coffee, just because it’s morning. The weather report says it will be drier today than yesterday, thank God.
There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this. First I’ll take it from an author’s point of view, because that’s where I spend most of my time. Being a writer is tough, and so is being an author. You labor over a book, sometimes for months, sometimes for a year or more, go through the masochism of submitting it around, it finally gets taken, and then there’s revisions. If you’re not a quivering wreck by the end of the process, you haven’t been paying attention. Then someone pans your book, gives it a bad review on Amazon, or slaps the cover up on a website and OMG snarks it! AFTER YOU DID ALL THAT OMG WORK! JESUS!
Chill out. You are not going to write a book that pleases everybody. It’s just not possible. Snark, bad reviews, and pans do have a valuable purpose in the ecosystem of the Interwebs. View them as free advertising or as rain (as in, can’t change the weather) and LET IT GO. Queenly disdain and silence is the road to take when it comes to bad Internet or Amazon reviews. Don’t believe me? Two words: Anne Rice. I love Ms. Rice’s early work, but her famous imbroglio of a response to some Amazon reviewers has ensured I probably won’t ever buy a book of hers again unless I can find it used in trade paper. Contrast that with Nora Roberts, who isn’t normally my cuppa tea to read, but who is so classy, especially in Internet brouhahas, that I can see paying full price for her books, no problem. And I have, with the Three Sisters Island trilogy.
We’ve moved from being an author to being a consumer here. As an avid consumer of the printed word, I read reviews and snark to amuse myself. I’m very rarely guided by Internet reviews unless the site I’m reading has evolved a good track record with me. Example: I read Smart Bitches pretty religiously, as you can probably tell, but Candy and Sarah’s tastes when it comes to reading are very different than mine, and I rarely pick up any book either of them recommends unless it sounds like, from the plot synopsis, I would enjoy it. (Case in point was Anne Stuart’s Black Ice, which I read as a direct result of a Smart Bitches review, and enjoyed even though it isn’t my usual fare.) The negativity or positivity of the review, funny as it may be and as much as I may enjoy it, doesn’t really enter into it. (I’m more likely to pick up a book I see reviewed in The Economist, because I’m a boring little geekhead.) I’m more likely to stop reading a particular author if s/he responds with reckless idiocy to negative reviews, no matter how much I love that particular author’s books.
But I never, ever, make the mistake of thinking that negative reviews of books I love are directed personally at me, the consumer. You cannot take everything (or even most things, or in reality ANYTHING) on the Internet personally. An author can’t take bad reviews or cover snark personally, a consumer can’t take in-jokes on a particular site about an author some people can’t stand personally, and publishers, if they know what’s good for them, should confine themselves to being friggin’ thankful their product is getting free advertising, positive OR negative.
Too many people take the Internet too personally. It’s like high school, an artificial terrarium where the heat and moisture are kept on high and things are forced to a boil by hormones, daily contact, and sheer human f!ckw!ttery (always in abundance.) The Internet, as much as we love it (and as much as, I admit, it is my lifeline to a lot of my friends in different parts of the world) IS NOT REAL LIFE.
This is not to say that Internet stalking/bad stuff doesn’t go on. It does. I’ve been stalked, I’ve had my inbox filled with hate mail, and I’ve had people try to personally insult/attack me to draw me out. Sometimes it’s hard to take my own damn advice and ignore or take the high road. That’s a whole different issue, and one I’m NOT addressing here.
The other side of this polyhedron issue is the bookstore worker. I’ve spent a lot of my working life in bookstores, one way or another. (Can’t seem to get away from the damn places.) I’ll ask indie bookstore employees what they thought of a particular book, or I’ll look at “recommend tags” on the shelf, especially at Powell’s. I don’t do that so much at chain stores, because chain bookstore employees seem too harried much of the time. You’re always overworked and underpaid in a bookstore gig, but corporate chain stores don’t give their employees much time or room to do what sells a book best–talking to customers about it. A bookstore employee shrugging and saying, “I thought that was too wordy, but you might want to give it a go if you like _____” carries more weight with me than an Internet review ever will.
Part of being a bookstore employee is being asked for recommendations, and it’s usually a game of Twenty Questions. We take our bookses seriously, so we assume you do, and we want to know what you like before we start recommending. I’ll seriously ask someone at least ten questions about the books they like and why they like them before I’ll venture a recommend, and by and large customers seem overjoyed with the personal attention.
When I review a book here, on my weblog, I’m stating my opinion, on the technical aspects of the work, on the artistic value I feel the work has, the emotional effect it had on me, what I liked and didn’t like. Now, I have to be careful because I’m in publishing. If I didn’t like a book, or couldn’t finish reading it, I’ll very rarely say so here because this blog, as personal as it is, is also a public face. (I think a lot of authors forget that.) And one does not lightly foul one’s coworkers’ nest in an industry as closed and incestuous as publishing. I’m much more likely just to keep my trap shut and just review the books I loved, or that surprised me, or that really moved me.
A site meant only for review, like, say, Smart Bitches, can say why they didn’t like a book with abandon, because they are consumers and giving a consumers’ POV. Which is just as necessary a part of the internet ecosystem as the squeeing fansites. One should not confuse the two. And let’s face it, not everyone is going to enjoy the Smart Bitches brand of humor, or even the profanity. I happen to enjoy both in the context of the site, because to me it’s very well done.
But if you don’t? Close your damn browser. Don’t go back, and most especially don’t go there and yell in the comments “OMG U R MEAN GIRLZ U INSULTD MY AUTHORZ AND I HATE U!” It just makes you look bad. Just like going on an author’s website/fan forum and hurling personal attacks at the author or his/her books. It’s inappropriate in the venue and idiotic to boot. If you feel compelled to vent your spleen and talk about how you hate Smart Bitches reviews/a certain author’s books, get your own damn blog and publish your feelings there. If you do it with snark, pizzaz, proper grammar, and a healthy dose of proportion, you might get a following comparable to the Smart Bitches.
If you’re still stuck in high school and just want to vent your spleen, you’re only going to get trolls and other oddfellows stuck in high school. That’s just the way it works.
Far and away the best thing to do if you don’t like what you’re reading on the Internet, if it’s making you angry, if you just want to reach through the screen and throttle the person who wrote what you don’t agree with…
…is to shut your damn browser and go do something else. All sorts of Internet kerfuffle could be avoided by just that simple step. Just don’t take the Internet personally. It’s a vast bubbling sea of opinion, with occasional rocks of brilliance and actual content that your browser may beach on and bookmark, that you may return to after surfing waves of dreck. Getting upset at the dreck for being dreck, or mistaking the sea of faceless dreck as something directed at YOU PERSONALLY, is a fool’s game. Even those rocks of brilliance and content may not agree with your personal hobbyhorses, opinions, and tastes. That’s life.
Good Monday, everyone. It’s chill and quiet here, with thin fog breathing between houses and streetlamps in the distance. That’s one thing about fog–how you know it is surrounding you too, but it seems you’re in a clear bubble walled by vapor. Another thing is how quiet even thin fog makes everything, a species of quiet different than the subaudible static of snowfall. I like fog.
For those of you needing an ebook version of To Hell And Back, this is the only one I’ve found. Several people have emailed me asking about an ebook edition of the fifth Valentine book, but I have no control over it and there doesn’t appear to even be a Kindle one yet. If you, dear Reader, find more ebook versions (not pirated versions, which are a whole different ball of wax) please let me know so I can link to them too, and my Readers who like ebooks can have a choice.
The Smart Bitches are catching a lot of flak for breaking this story, but since our mainstream media seems to have deserted us for a sea of Rupert Murdoch’s money, bloggers and citizen journalists are stepping into the gap. If the SBs were men there probably wouldn’t be the huge blather about how they’re Being Mean, and if they were working for AP or something nobody would think twice about them doing research and breaking a story. But since they’re bloggers, female, and unapologetic about what they think, a lot of people are throwing them unnecessary flak. Don’t get me started on THAT dynamic, dear Reader. We’d be here all week.
If Edwards has some explanation for the passages lifted wholesale from research books, I’d love to hear it. I myself didn’t realize that the historical Republic of Gilead in the Valentine books was a nod to The Handmaid’s Tale–a book that changed my consciousness in high school–until I paged through an copy of the finished fifth book. In the heat of creation the name “Gilead” came out for a theocratic regime Dante Valentine mentions in passing when she talks about history–so I know how sometimes research can crawl and creep into your book. If you’re like me and have a steady pace of reading about a book a day, sometimes less depending on childcare and errands, there’s a lot of stuff knocking around in your head. It’s fuel and furniture for the creative drive.
But whole passages so distinct in tone and texture from the author’s own prose that it alerts a reader, who with five minutes of Googling finds evidence of egregious wholesale lifting? I might have been willing to listen to an explanation and a mea culpa, if Edwards honestly didn’t know that you’re supposed to attribute sources. I’ve done my best to be honest about where my source material came from, and when one writes fiction one reads nonfiction source work and uses it to inform one’s worldbuilding, but doesn’t dump whole frigging chunks of it into the book. Still…I’d be willing to listen to an explanation.
But lifting from a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, another artist’s work of fiction? Bad author. No cookie. Not another cent from me, if I ever bought your books in the first place.
Which brings up something else the Smart Bitches pointed out: if you’re thinking of boycotting Signet or Penguin because one of their authors boo-boo’d bigtime, it’s more harmful than helpful. They explain why here. Boycott Edwards all you want, but boycotting the publisher does nothing but hurt innocent authors who have no connection with the scandal. And that is part of why publishing is a pretty effed-up business to try to make a living in as an artist, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. I just wanted to mention the SB’s post about boycotting and how it actually works in publishing as evidence that they’re not out there just to make a sensationalist buck. (Which is pretty hard to do in the blogosphere anyway, Drudge notwithstanding.)
Ah, enough blathering. You’re probably bored with the whole thing, and I don’t blame you. I’m keeping up with it because I’m in publishing, I write paranormal romance, and this scandal touches on issues that concern me deeply on a daily basis. But in case you’re not so deeply concerned, I present Corvus Corax, the phattest Germen dudelsackers around. These peeps are like Andre Rieu on acid or something, and I am bookmarking their YouTube stuff as Musecrack for when I write Jill Kismet’s circus book.
But I won’t plagiarize their entire act, I promise. Heh.*
There now. Wasn’t that worth getting up out of bed for?
* Yeah, I know. Mean cracks about the scandal reflect badly on me. But Jeez Louise, I am just looking at this stuff and shaking my head, going how stupid can you BE?
My weekly post is up at The Midnight Hour. It’s about those images and thematic elements that sneak into a writer’s work, and the importance of looking at them hard enough to use them consciously. Oh, and clowns.
Fantasy Book Critic has a Best of 2007/Looking Forward to 2008 post up, where authors talk about the best books they read in 2007 and the books they’re looking forward to in 2008. Authors as diverse as R.A. Salvatore and Karen Miller, not to mention Modesitt and Resnick, have participated. Not to mention Yours Truly.
My Orbit editor has recommended I read Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, and there is (drums please) a NEW PEREZ-REVERTE BOOK OUT! The Painter of Battles was just released, and I’ve snapped up my copy. We all know what a big, huge, tremenjous Perez-Reverte fan I am.
On a different note, I’m getting a lot of email from peeps who need the fifth Valentine book in ebook form. I haven’t been able to find it. If anyone has, can you drop a comment or drop me an email so I can link to it? It’s my understanding that ebooks take a month or so after the paper release, but I could be wrong.
Happy weekend, dear Reader. I suspect I’ll be deep in the wilds of Tristan’s book later today, and may even have something new to add to it…
Because, you know, with PN Elrod editing, and Jim Butcher and Kelley Armstrong and a host of other too-cool-for-words compadres, we have an anthology made of awesome.
Excuse me. You could just about knock me over with a feather right now. This DEFINITELY calls for champagne. If you hear a wild yelling from my corner of the globe, don’t worry. That’s me howling with joy.
Did I mention today how much I love this job?
I was going to read and revise Hedgewitch Queen, then dive into The Left-Hand Consort. But Tristan wants his story told NOW, and devil take the hindmost. So today it’s pruning those five “noodle” chapters and then plunging on ahead. I wonder if I can get him into a prison cell in the next two chapters? Maybe then I can shut him up and go back to revising Hedgewitch.
*sigh* All right. Coffee is the first order of the day, then seeing what sort of swashbuckling trouble I can get my obsessive, morally-”flexible”, married Captain of the Guard into.
I love this job. Even if the characters don’t bloody cooperate.
In other words, pre-coffee. I suspect this post will get more coherent the more caffeine I imbibe.
Back to my swashbuckling. I think I’m going to switch things around a bit–work in the mornings, and answering email etc. in the afternoon. I need to get Hedgewitch Queen revised and Tristan’s story started. I have five chapters of Tris’s story, but they need severe pruning since they were just “noodling”–me fumbling along, thinking about the character and trying to get to know him.
Today, however, is a busy day. There’s a class to be dropped and one to be added. It’s kind of funny–the UnSullen One was excited about taking a Women’s Studies class. He came home from the first one shaking his head and handed me the syllabus. “The woman’s like an evangelical Christian,” he says, “only it’s women.”
“Fanatic of a different stripe, eh?” I scan the syllabus, and something catches my eye. On the “style sheet” for how the instructor wants papers done, I count no less than six errors, including one that curdles my nurnie. On possessives ending in s, she wants just an apostrophe. For example: the car belonging to Elvis? Elvis’ car.
This is so wrong I don’t even know WHERE to begin. Even a cursory reading of Strunk & White lets you know it’s Elvis’s car. Standard usage nowadays is the apostrophe and the extra s.
The UnSullen One doesn’t wince when I explode. “Yeah, I saw that too. She says since she’s helped publish a book, she knows all about this.” He pauses. “I just kept my mouth shut.”
“Bitch please!” I rant. “Helped publish? What the hell does that mean? This sort of sh!te is the reason people don’t take women’s studies seriously! Bad enough that she wants to be a frocking Monty Python I’m being repressed! skit, but to pull improper possessives–”
“Can I drop it?” he asks. “Please?”
Needless to say, I gave my blessing. Now, I encouraged him to take the women’s studies class in the first place. The local community college, however, seems to have a high share of “professors” who have an axe to grind, not to mention improper grammar and punctuation. The English class he took to get into Running Start? That teacher was gunning for a women’s studies class and tried to inflict that on her students instead of sentence structure.
I do think women’s studies classes are important, but when one has fanatics teaching them, well, the whole point of the exercise is lost. Reverse inequality in the classroom does not foster a true sense of egalitarianism outside. Unfortunately, with women’s studies seen as bastard children of academia for those who have the leisure to pursue them instead of integral parts of a curriculum designed to foster inclusiveness in the cradle of critical thinking…
That’s the problem with institutional inequality. It breeds fanatical behavior on both sides–those who benefit want the status quo kept and kept hard, consciously or unconsciously, and those who are marginalized find it easy to retreat into fanaticism just to keep their fire burning against the crushing weight of said inequality.
I suppose I should find it funny that I might have counseled him to stick with the class if it hadn’t been for the punctuation errors on the style sheet, if only for the valuable experience of learning how to deal with a teacher who isn’t interested in the students learning so much as interested in forcing his or her own pet issue down the throat of impressionable youngsters. And I really do think a women’s studies course would be a good thing for the UnSullen One.
I suppose we’ll have to go back to discussing economic inequality at home, and reading things like A Doll’s House, Sleeping With The Enemy, and Queen of the South, no to mention The Yellow Wallpaper and Jacob Have I Loved and The Great Cosmic Mother.
Cranky. I have a year-old manuscript to read, and of course, whenever one reads something more than a few months old, one should be cringing. Otherwise one is not growing as a writer.
I have to read this ms to get myself back into the world so I can write the second half of the fantasy opus, The Left-Hand Consort. It’ll never sell, fantasy isn’t selling now and besides, who wants my ancien regime French coming of age tale with sorcery, peasant magic, and shifting loyalties?
But the Muse wants this book finished. The character–Tristan d’Arcenne–is burning a hole in my head and wants out NOW. So, um, that vacation I was going to take between Jill book? Nope, not going to happen. I’m going to be working on a fantasy novel. Velvet and rapiers and horses, heavy infantry and siege engines, Court sorcery and intrigue.
Damn. I’m going to have to read more Dumas. And more Brust.
And I’m cranky. Feeling distinctly unappreciated at home. You know, I hold down a career, wash the clothes, feed everyone, keep the kitchen from imploding, home school two children and provide intensive therapy and support to a third. Could I JUST ONCE have a day where the whole weight of the world wasn’t on my shoulders? Could I leave the house by myself for a couple hours and not come back to a complete and utter frocking nuclear explosion of a mess?
Apparently I’m not taking enough time for myself, because when I start feeling this resentful, taken-for-granted, and just plain nasty, it means I need an hour or so just to myself. So, probably tonight, it’s out to the trakc no matter WHAT the weather’s like, and I’m going to walk off this crankiness.
Until then, it’s time to keep a Grip of Steel on my temper. Hell hath no fury like a woman who’s got deadlines, yo.
Hope your day is turning out kinder and gentler than mine, my dears.
I’m feeling extraordinarily antisocial today. I suppose in less electronic times I’d be a hermit, which would be hard on the kids. If I had kids. No, I’m not blaming the fact that I have children on Teh Interwebs. I’m just noting that, like Bukowski, I consider solitude a necessity, and have to arrange to get it in bite-size chunks. My idea of solitude has grown to include the wee ones, in any case.
Yesterday I left the house and the Prince and Princess in the care of the Muffin, and popped down to Borders with the last two issues of The Economist. I was looking forward to some time reading about policy and world events (I also picked up the most recent Foreign Affairs because, well, I’m direly behind in my understanding of China’s geopolitical stature and internal affairs. And I also wanted to read the article about the furore over the artificial constraints on the yen.)
But did I get to read? Erm, not so much. I settled down with a gingerbread latte and a bagel and was immediately deluged with requests from other people who wandered in after I did that I give up half my table. I picked a slightly bigger table because I like to spread magazines out and make notes in my journal or on scrap paper while I read them, just like history books. I was a bit peeved that anyone who seems older than I am automatically assumes they can make a request without uttering that magic word “please” and furthermore, have me hop to obey. Just because I have a nose ring doesn’t mean you can order me around, peeps.
I know the way I dress is unconventional and I am prepared for this sort of behavior. So the first few people who asked for my table got told, “Nope.” They were quite put out, especially when a nice older lady said, “Excuse me, ma’am? May we take that table please, and one of the chairs? The other half of our party just arrived.”
To which I replied, “Sure. No problem.” And ignored the seething from the cowboy-hat-clad dictator who had simply assumed he could take my table, with his overblown and hairspray-lacquered wife in tow. Who got disabused of the notion when I said, quietly and politely, “What do you think you’re doing? Didn’t your mother teach you better?”
Besides, Mr. Cowboy Hat, a gentleman takes his hat off inside a building. My grandfather taught me that. I suppose you didn’t get the memo.
You see how antisocial I was feeling. It didn’t help that twenty minutes later, a flurry of cell phone calls ensued. Apparently, when I said, “Call me Saturday morning if you want to stay an extra night and be picked up on Sunday, or I’m going to assume you have a ride home” was translated to Someone Else as “Call me Sunday when it’s convenient for you and I’ll drop everything and pick you up.”
Cue annoyance. Temporary annoyance, but annoyance nonetheless. I barely even got to finish my %&$#ing coffee.
Today I even unplugged the phone. I hate the damn thing anyway. Well, maybe “hate” is a strong word. I’m phobic of the phone. Scared of it. You might even say terrified.
But enough of my bitching. I know why I’m in this mood. Because I just finished Redemption Alley and did a quick revise on it, then sent it to the Beta Reader, who will give it the torture it needs to become a Real Book instead of a steaming pile of doo. I don’t think I’ve had enough time to lay on the floor and let my brain recover. The snap-back after each book is pronounced, especially the Kismet books, which are so hard on me emotionally.
Speaking of books…over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books a froufrou is heating up. Seems there are several long passages in Cassie Edwards romance novels that appear to be taken verbatim from other books. Scandalous. This also brings home something I’ve noticed quite a lot lately–that the old-fashioned investigative journalism we think journalism is all about has taken a vacation from newspapers and television and is now in the hands of bloggers, who the established MSM (mainstream media) marginalizes because of the direct threat they represent. There’s a fair amount of bad muckraking in blogs too, but that is flash-in-the-pan compared to the blog who provide excellent service and information, whose writers dig for the evidence and present it to the reading public.
God bless ‘em.
Anyway, I’m retreating inside my shell today. Last night the UnSullen Teen and I watched The Big Lebowski (the Teen had never seen it) and L.A. Confidential, which I’d never seen either. Spacey and Pearce were good, but Russell Crowe can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag. I kept expecting to see him in a secutor’s uniform. Heh. Also watched last night with the kids was The Monster Squad, which I loved when I was the Princess’s age. Everyone under 10 was delighted with the film. I was nostalgic. The UnSullen one tried to hide his laughter–I guess it’s not cool to like movies a 32-year-old hack feels nostalgic over.
Heh.
Happy Monday, all. Hope you’re feeling a little less think-skinned and raw than I am today. I’m just glad I don’t have to show up in an office.
Good morning. Or I should say, good afternoon, since during any break from schoolwork we tend to get up later and later in the day. I suppose my night owl tendencies are rubbing off on the kids, or maybe it’s genetic. The Princess is heading toward puberty and sleeping in, but the Little Prince is so much a morning person his clock resets much slower than the rest of ours. Eh, maybe I’ll have to wait until he hits his teenager years.
I got another piece of amusing hate mail today. Now really, I expected some trouble with the subject matter I write on, and titling the first book Working For The Devil was hardly guaranteed to be a peaceful choice. But could people at least do their research before frothing at me?
My portrait of Lucifer borrows from a few traditions, not the least of which is the Gnostic and Grail traditions that show Lucifer as a green-eyed, possibly liberating angel, with an emerald set in his forehead. That emerald is intimately connected with the Grail tradition (is it annoyingly hilarious that I’m only enjoying reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail these past few days? I think I was too young the first time I blazed through it.) It also borrows heavily from S. Jason Black and Christopher Hyatt’s work and to a lesser extent, from legends of the Nephilim–the original rebels, you might say. And Cathar theology, the idea that the world is flesh trapping a spark of spirit, held a significant place in early drafts, but didn’t survive the challenges to such duality inherent on a polytheistic worldview.
The thing that irritates me is people writing me to tell me I’m “wrong” about the Devil. *sigh* I did a lot of research and reimagining. If you don’t like my version of Lucifer, fine. I’m okay with that. But don’t presume to tell me I’m “wrong” based on current fact-and-research-free evangelical Protestant cant. I’m drawing on a rich array of sources to reimagine what demons might be in a non-Christian setting, what demons originally were conceived of as, etc. It might surprise people whose only research into the idea of Lucifer is televangelist horsepuckey to know that the “adversary” was originally a Judaic theme, the angel who functions as the Left Hand of God to test the faith of mortals. The term “demon” comes from the Greek “daemon”, a guiding spirit that accompanies a man through his days. (Philip Pullman, notably, references this in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy.)
Still, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. I was ready for this sort of reaction the instant I realized what sort of themes I was dealing with. It just irritates me when people tell me I’m “wrong” without bothering to do any research themselves. I suppose it’s a knee-jerk reaction springing from what they’re culturally comfortable with and unwilling to look beyond. I understand, and understanding breeds compassion–I just hate being told I’m “wrong” when the person mouthing off clearly hasn’t read any of the source material.
The core assumption I take issue with is that I haven’t researched Christianity. Which is obviously not true. I began a period of intensively researching all major world religions when I was about twelve, and I still follow that interest today, two decades later. I did my best to read the source materials and the holy books, as a part of my own spiritual process of figuring out what exactly I believed. (Note: still an ongoing process.) As a result, I found out pretty early that much of what I’d been raised to view as “Christianity” was really an accretion of political and economic compromises masquerading as dogma, springing from the Catholic Church’s (long-term and briefly, historically speaking, successful) attempt to grab temporal and financial as well as spiritual power. Reading about the Gnostic Gospels, Arianism and the Nicene Creed, the Cathar “heresy” and the history of Byzantium and the Fourth Crusade (just to name a few subjects) opened my eyes to a number of issues still reverberating in Christianity today.
One might guess, correctly, that I have little use for the blind faith in the sects of Christianity–Catholic, Orthodox, OR Protestant–enjoying a lot of popular support today. Nor do I have much use for the current popular form of Islam, mostly because of its attitude (mostly as an echo of social forces, since the Koran takes a different view) toward women’s rights and scholarship/science. Other “world religions” have their drawbacks as well. Most organized religions seem to exist for one reason: to financially fleece their faithful and provide a thought-free refuge from the scary unpredictability of the world. Providing pre-digested pap to one’s followers in order to blind their capacity for critical thought and empty their pockets has never struck me as a mark of “spirituality” or even of a developed ethical framework.
One can, in my treatment of fanaticism and the Republic of Gilead, discern a lot of my attitudes toward the current theocratic trend in America today. One can even discern my feelings toward “gnosis” or personal experience of the divine rather than church-mediated contact with the numinous. But don’t presume to tell me I haven’t done my research. I thought long and hard about each aspect of the “Devil” I utilized. I may be guilty of drawing the wrong conclusions, but it’s not for lack of thought OR research. And really, once one gets into issues like this, who can judge what the “wrong” conclusions are? Taking a page from the Montague Summers playbook won’t help your case if you honestly expect me to take you seriously.
And you needn’t worry about my soul. It’s just fine where it is. I welcome responses to the books as art, and I welcome thoughts on the reimaging I did and my utilization of these long deep strands in Western thought and history.
But don’t serve up some Revelations-laden tripe you got off TCN and expect me to be impressed or even to respond. You don’t like my version of Lucifer? Fine. Write your own, or read someone else’s version. There’s a lot of them out there. Almost as many as there are versions of God out there. Feel free to pick your own. I actively encourage such behavior.
