Better Than Dead

I sometimes find myself fretting about my characters and disappointing my readers. Will they be disappointed, I ask myself, in a story where the freak protagonist remains a freak at the end, not magically transformed into someone more attuned to mainstream standards of beauty and social standing? Not young and strong and thin and accepted. A glorious transformation definitely takes place for this particular character I’m thinking about, but it’s all internal—with maybe a glimmer of hope at the end.

For me, as a reader, that’s all I ask: the potential for a better tomorrow. I’m not a fan of unrelieved realism and tragedy and probably would never write that kind of a story. When I was young, I thought it the only way to achieve High Art, but I don’t think that so much anymore. And I’m not so much interested in High Art, either. Just good writing.

This protagonist I’m thinking about is being punished for her sins. Not in the narrowly defined Judeo-Christian sense—as often marketed by fundamentalists and evangelicals. I don’t consider things like who is twanging who in whatever manner to be a sin, so long as everyone is a consenting adult. Sin is a word I reserve for things like murdering, cheating, manipulating, driving companies into bankruptcy, costing thousands of jobs, and the losing/looting of pension funds and properties. Fortunately, my protagonist is not a hedge fund manager or a corporate raider, so the reader may be able to find some sympathy for her.

I have a penchant for complex and not completely sympathetic characters, though. Sometimes that works out, sometimes not. They don’t always act with shining heroism and at times are a bit unstable. Or shitheads. Readers don’t always like them. That’s my fault some of the time (all the time?), because I haven’t written them with sufficient courage. I haven’t had the nerve or the foresight to take an unattractive character (or character trait) to its logical extension. I’ve tried to hedge my bets, gambling that I can charm my way past the unlikeable bits with no diminishment of heroism. I’m afraid to let the reader actively dislike the character even for a short time. You can’t really do that, I don’t think. When someone is being a shithead, you have to let them be one. You do run the risk of alienating some readers, of them putting the story down and never going back, but if you’ve set the story up right, they may stick with you for the rest of the ride to see how things work out.

Or maybe it’s a question of doing the best writing you can, the most interesting characters, and letting them find their audience. A risky stratagem, given the vagaries of the market, but the only honest way I know of approaching this. In real life human beings are often contradictory, selfish, stupid, and yet they’re not bad people. They have the potential for redemption. Those are the people I’m interested in seeing in fiction, too. Oh yeah, a good shiny-smiled hero or heroine is fun to read sometimes, but most of the time I like yellow-toothed protagonists better.

And maybe this, too, is a question of skill. Perhaps the reader can accept their contradictions, their mean streaks, their lashing out if the skill of execution is right. I know I’ve read characters like that and not thrown the book across the room. Take, for example, Chess Putnam in Stacia Kane’s wonderful Downside Ghosts series. Chess is a complete mess, makes stupid and self-destructive decisions, is her own worst enemy—and yet I love her and love reading about her even when I’m cringing hard at what she does. I keep pulling for her to snatch her backside out of the fires she throws it into time and again. She isn’t every reader’s cup of tea, but she’s mine, and wonderfully flawed and makes for compelling reading. So, the point is not to make characters that will be acceptable to every reader, but to make the writing compelling enough that readers can still find something to hold onto. Have I learned that lesson yet? I don’t know—or I know that I haven’t pulled it off all the time. I’m still working on it.

You can’t please all readers all the time. That I know for true. Some will accept the well-written shithead, some never will. That’s a matter of taste. As for the writer writing these complex people, it’s a matter of writing and revising and revising and revising and finding the balance.

Yes, that’s the truth, and the answer to my question, I suppose.

Random quote of the day:

“The kingdom is here, happening, unfolding, blooming, proliferating, even in the midst of doom and disaster. Just turn (that is what repent really means), turn and look from a different angle. Paradise is here, even now.”

—Elizabeth Cunningham, The Passion of Mary Magdalen

This is a remarkable book: earthy, reverent, irreverent, pagan, Christian, funny, moving. You can read my full review of it here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Boundaries must be blurred for the trickster to be seen.”

—George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal

This is a fascinating book. You can read my review of it here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I love crows. Yeah, I know. Crows are a hard sell to many people. But I’m fascinated by their intelligence, their creativity, and that look of presence when their eyes meet yours. So I was eager to read this book.

It surprised me when it arrived: it’s a thin volume, only 113 pages including the index, but unusually weighty because it’s lavishly illustrated (every other page) on high-quality, heavy paper and beautifully put together. It takes great advantage of the space between the covers, cramming in so much information that the weightiness of the book seemed as much from the information as the heavy paper. Using it, I was able to verify that, yes, that exceptionally large dominant crow that hangs around my house is indeed a crow and not a raven; and I was able to pick out the adolescent packs and understand their behavior better. Also what some of those screaming matches were about.

Ms. Savage covers the various mythologies concerning crows, the latest scientific research, as well as keen observations of crow behavior throughout the ages. I guarantee you’ll have a different appreciation of these wise guys once you’ve read this book.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Did you know—?

Crows are the only non-primates who make tools. Other critters use what they find around them as the occasional tool, but crows will actually take what they find a reshape them to accomplish tasks. They have complex social organizations and their own languages (topping 64,000 different calls). They love, they hate, they grieve, they practice deceit, as well as bravery, they reason, are tender and harsh. They hit all the standards we declare are solely-human characteristics. They’re not only as amazing as I always suspected they were—they’re more amazing.

An excerpt:

[Avian researcher Carolee Caffrey] was observing a nest through a spotting scope when the breeding pair returned to feed their nestlings, only to discover that their nest had been raided by a raptor in their absence. “In all my life, I’ve never heard such horrible, bloodcurdling screams as the crows made at that nest. The male flew away after a minute or two, but the female stayed behind and, for the next four hours (until Caffrey reluctantly left), tended a surviving but injured nestling by nuzzling it, picking up its neck, and preening the side of its head. All the while, the crow uttered mournful-sounding oohs.

Another, more lighthearted one:

Scientists wanted to test the reasoning ability of some captive crows so they devised a complex series of boxes, some of which had bait inside, many that were empty.

Hugin figured out the rule on the first morning of the trials…His companion Munin, by contrast, couldn’t even be bothered to look. Instead, as the dominant bird in a group, he preferred to bide his time until Hugin found the food; then he would muscle in a gobble up one or more of the tasty tidbits….Socially subordinate though he was, Hugin was no pushover. On the first afternoon of the experiment, he came up with a countermove. When Munin began to press in on him, Hugin would interrupt his foraging, fly over one of the unrewarded clusters, and start opening empty boxes. He kept at it, opening and opening, until Munin came to join him; then, as soon as he saw his rival nosing around the wrong cluster, Hugin would dash back to the rewarded boxes and take advantage of his head start to grab a few extra morsels.

Finished in July:

1.  The Heart of Faerie Oracle by Wendy and Brian Froud

A beautifully-illustrated oracle that uses Faerie to explore relationships: to others, to oneself, to the universe. Lovely and approachable.

2.  Demon Blood by Meljean Brook

I love this series and this is a worthy entry into it. Ms. Brook has really hit her stride.

3.  The Keys to D’Espérance by Chaz Brenchley (Subterranean Press chapbook)

A short, fantastical, compelling read that leaves as many mysteries as it solves, winding around itself like the spiral staircase at the center of the story. Beautiful writing and a beautiful raveling and unraveling of a character.

4.  In a Strange City by Laura Lippman

The writing is good, the characterizations are mostly excellent, the premise was interesting, BUT I found the plot so transparent that I guessed the whodunit quite early on and much of the whydunit. As a result, the ending was flat and not particularly inspiring. The other plot element I didn’t care for centered around the main character, Tess Monaghan, doing stupid things. I realize that part of this is because Tess is a risk-taker, but she displayed such stupidity in some places (for an otherwise smart woman) that I felt it was more about authorial convenience in advancing the plot than true characterization.

It’s really a shame, because I was excited by that premise: a mystery centering around the Poe Toaster, an anonymous man who for sixty years (until 2010) left roses and cognac on the grave of Edgar Allen Poe each January 19 (Poe’s birthday).

I will probably read something else by Ms. Lippman because, as I said, the writing and characters were mostly well-handled, but I think maybe I’ll try one of her stand-alones rather than another from the the Tess Monaghan series.

Begun in July:

1. Demon Blood by Meljean Brook
2. Blood Noir by Laurell K. Hamilton
3. The Keys to D’Espérance by Chaz Brenchley (chapbook)
4. A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin (aka Catherine Webb)

Continued Reading This Month:

1. Serpent in the Thorns by Jeri Westerson
2. Walkers Between the Worlds: The Western Mysteries from Shaman to Magus by Caitlin and John Matthews
3. Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History by Owen Davies

I had a hard time concentrating on reading during the first part of the month.  I kept picking up books and putting them down—not generally through any fault of the books themselves, just life and things.  So, I’ve only got two books to report on as finished this month:

Finished in May

1. and Falling, Fly by Skyler White

This is a different kind of paranormal romance, lushly written and densely plotted, with a distinct literary bent.  The story and worldbuilding are quite compelling—they drew me in and kept me reading. The characters, on the other hand, seemed rather flat through much of the first half of the book: representations of types rather than rounded people. But they found their feet about halfway through and grew some dimension.  The ultra-lush prose got in the way of the narrative at times, I thought, but when Ms. White settled down and just wrote her story, this was a great read.  I never thought of putting it down, so I’d say she did her job quite well.

1. Medicus by Ruth Downie

I loved this book. Told with heart and a great deal of humor, it had me buying the sequel before I’d even finished the first book.  Gaius Petreius Ruso, the hero of the story, is a doctor, known as a medicus, for the Twentieth Legion stationed in Deva (current day Chester) in Roman Britain ca 178 AD.  He’s a wonderful, well-rounded character: a man burdened with debt from his profligate farm family back in Gaul who is trying to earn a living as best he can and get the family out of trouble.  He’s a good man who tries earnestly to do the right thing, with maybe more curiosity than is politically expedient for him. He’s something of a schlemozzle—not the guy who’s always spilling the soup on people (the schlemiel) but the guy who is always having the soup spilled on him.  He can’t get a break.  Like the time he just wants to drown his sorrows with the few coin he’s got left in his purse, but on his way to the bar/brothel, he sees a native girl being badly mistreated by a slave trader.  She’s in bad shape—starved, beaten, her arm badly broken—but when she looks up at him with semi-comatose but beautiful eyes he uses the last of his money to buy her.  He comes to call her Tilla because he can’t pronounce her complex Celtic name, and nurses her back to health, but it’s always a close call as to who is the master and who the slave in this relationship.  Tilla is a beautiful force of nature.  She may have been beaten half to death, but she never really submitted to being a slave and lives for the day she can escape.  The interplay and growing relationship between Tilla and Ruso, the glimpse of the seedy side of the Roman empire, and Ruso’s attempts to solve the murder of two prostitutes—even though every official in town wants him to leave it alone—are the core of this book.  It’s well-written, well-researched, and endearingly entertaining.

Begun in May

1. Serpent in the Thorns by Jeri Westerson
2. and Falling, Fly by Skyler White
3. Terra Incognita by Ruth Downie
4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert – I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.  Too early to tell.

Continued Reading in May

1. Spider-Touched by Jory Strong
2. Yesterday’s Sky by Steven Forrest
3. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung
4. Notebooks, 1942-1951 by Albert Camus, tr. Justin O’Brien
5. Medicus by Ruth Downie