I read Arm of the Sphinx

 This week's novel is Arm of the Sphinx, the sequel to Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft.

Senlin and his band of misfits have taken an airship and become mediocre pirates, who only take 10% of their victim's cargo, just enough for them to keep the ship serviced and the crew fed.  They're trying to get to the ringdom (or level) of the Tower of Babel where Senlin's wife probably is, but since they're unable to go there directly, they attempt to get there from the abandoned, spider-filled forest of a ringdom above, which is now home to a small rebellion, trying to disrupt the tower.

This second book keeps going with the same level of wonders as the first book.  Each new ringdom they visit continues to be novel and fascinating and frightening and strange.  And even though previously visited ringdoms are spoken of as less marvelous, they're still plenty scary.  The word hasn't gotten dull once it's better understood either by the characters or the reader.

For example: it turns out the painting from the first book is part of a set.  This move could make the world feel smaller, since we now understand the mystery of that component, and instead of one part being a huge ordeal, now a larger whole is the same level of huge ordeal.  But instead, the set of paintings is really cool, and although this revelation that it's part of a set ties up mysteries from the first book, it presents its own set of mysteries and promises new, diverse adventures.

What did change between this book and the last was that the point of view was expanded from just Senlin to the whole crew.  I was surprised by this move at the beginning, but by the end, I was so invested in all the characters that I wanted to hear what they were up to and what they thought of everything.  Most of these characters are women, which I bring up because for a series that started from the 3rd person limited view of a middle-aged white dude, expanding it out to include mostly women is pretty neat.  It's also neat that the three main women are so different from each other, while all being flawed in different ways and sympathetic in different ways.  This should be the norm, but I'm still pleased.

I especially love Edith.  I want more books about Edith. 

More on Selkies

Season1, Episode 8  "The Seal Woman"

Selkies appear in Scotch, Irish, and Scandinavian traditions.  They are seals that can shed their skin to look/become/reveal a human.  Occasionally, they shed their skin and sunbathe naked on the beach.  If you can steal a selkie's skin and hide it, she'll belong to you and be your devoted wife forever.  Of course, she'll spend this time sad and aloof and staring out at the sea, but she'll still diligently make you dinner and knit sweaters and all that good stuff, so no worries!  However, if she ever finds her skin, nothing will stop her from reclaiming it and heading straight back to the ocean.
Every retelling will at this point say "even if the selkie has had human children!  She will abandon them for the sea!"  And then we all clutch our pearls, because she should have stayed for the children.  (If I was writing this, she'd turn the children into seals and they'd all abandon the husband en mass, but maybe that's not a thing selkies can do and they know their babies are better off on land where they can breathe.)

These stories are similar to stories of swan maidens (a swan who turn into a woman at night to bathe, and if a man steals her unattended feather cloak, she'll be forced to be his wife) or other animal wife stories, which range from buffalo to rabbit to fox to crane wives and can be found all around the world.  Wanting an animal wife is a thing.  I recommend Ursula Vernon's short story "Jackalope Wives."  Selkies often get conflated with mermaids to the point where in some traditions they're interchangeable.  This happens a lot with mermaids, who we know in the US as half-human-half-fish but in other traditions are half-human-half-any-and-all sea-creatures or even half-human-half-bird-who-lives-near-water.

Reports vary on if and how often seal-wives return to visit the families they left behind on land.  Some say once they hit the water, they're gone and will never return.  Some say a seal will pop its head out of the sea to watch over her children, but never gets too close.  And some say they can return every seven years or when the tide is just right.

There are male selkies, but these stories are less about forcing the selkie into situations they aren't happy with and more about seal-men seducing human-women who are unhappy with their lives into having a tryst on the beach.  Maybe this is because human women are less interested in entrapping a dude to be their sad sex slave.  But that's just my hypothesis.

Human children born of selkie mothers sometimes have webbing between their fingers (which are easily trimmed back with scissors).  In actuality, this anomaly runs in families, and so the story of the seal-wife could have arisen as a way to explain this.  "I have webbed fingers because my grandma was a seal."

My favorite selkie story is the exceptional film "The Secret of Roan Inish" from 1994, about a little girl from an Irish family with a selkie ancestor and her baby brother who's being raised by seals.  But on reading other stories about selkies, there turns out to be a theme that doesn't set off any alarm bells if you hear one story, but starts to get uncomfortable after the third of fourth: they all have the guilty husband or the abandoned children or some disapproving outsider as the focal character, and the selkie's thoughts on all this are rarely taken into account.  Maybe this is because the selkie is naturally alien.  Her foreignness and her failings at fitting in are recurring themes, so maybe it'd be too strange to have a seal's point of view.  But I was itching for a story about what the selkie is going through being stuck in a relationship she didn't choose, a relationship where the power dynamics are completely unbalanced.  This seems a very relatable situation; abused women often face severe obstacles to leaving.  So that was the direction I went in for "The Seal Woman."

I read The Sun is Also a Star

 This week's novel is The Sun is Also a Star, contemporary YA by Nicola Yoon.  This one was a Goodreads Choice nominee for YA fiction in 2016, and it's been sitting on my to-read list for a while.

Natasha is into science and facts, and she's going to be deported back to Jamaica this evening.  Daniel believes in fate and poetry, but his Korean parents want him to go to Yale and be a doctor or else.  Daniel believes fate introduced him to Natasha, and Natasha does not have time to fall in love because she has twelve hours to figure out how to stay in the country.

The thing that grabbed me most about this book was how Natasha loves science.  She loves talking about stars and parallel universes and black holes.  She's into the flashy, fun stuff that high school science nerds love.  She's into the stuff that entices you in: the beautiful false-color pictures of nebulae and looking smart while you explain everything you know about quarks.  I relate so hard to where she is in her relationship with science--the shiny honeymoon phase.  She hasn't figured out that there's a disconnect between what makes kids into science and the daily work of scientists.  Natasha talks about how she wants to be a data scientist because it's practical, but I bet she has not yet run a single Monte Carlo simulation.  She probably thinks Schrodinger's equation looks "elegant" and hasn't had to actually crank out those integrals yet.  Not that Monte Carlos aren't great, they're just disconnected from the stuff NASA PR shows to get people excited about space.  This part of Natasha felt real, and it made me nostalgic.

The way the book is structured is also pretty neat.  The chapters are all very short, usually less that three pages.  Mostly they alternate between Natasha's POV and Daniel's POV.  But then it will mix it up with a 3rd person essay about the history of how black hair-care stores came to be owned mostly by Koreans or the etymology of the word "irie."  These widen the story up to give some context, to make the story broader, but, partitioned off in their own short chapters, they never feel like info dumps.  Also, every so often, there will be a chapter from a side character's POV.  At one point, early in the story, Natasha is nearly hit by a car.  The next chapter is from the driver's POV and explains why he was driving recklessly.  It's not given as an excuse, but as an explanation.  Every seemingly insignificant character who affects Natasha or Daniel's lives have lives of their own that they don't guess or even think about. 

These do a lot of work to point out that no one is putting themselves in each other's shoes.  No one is thinking about what Natasha's going through.  No one's thinking that maybe the security guard is having a bad day.  When these chapters pop up, it's always a little jarring.  Wait, that guy has a backstory? 

But it also it works with the theme of destiny and a million tiny variables working to bring Natasha and Daniel together.  Daniel goes on about fate a lot, much to Natasha's annoyance, and Natasha talks about how the variables are all chance.  These side chapters don't really answer which one of them is right, but they could be used as evidence for both of them.  They met because she was nearly hit by a car, because the driver was drinking, because his teenage daughter died.

The Stories They Tell: The Legend of Katrina Van Tassel

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 4: The Stories The Tell

Episode 1: The Legend of Katrina Van Tassel


For more: Background Information

The blog: Twenty Percent True
Twitter: @CaryAndTheHits
Facebook: facebook.com/twentypercenttrue


Music by Komiku

More on the Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a literary fairy tale, which means the story wasn't a folktale until someone wrote it down.  This means this story--unlike most legends and folklore--can be attributed to a single person: Washington Irving.  It's about 40 pages long and in the public domain, so you can easily check it out for yourself. 

This is one of those stories that has seeped into cultural consciousnesses.  I'd seen some of the movies.  I watched a season of the Sleepy Hollow TV show.  But I don't think I'd read the original short story until recently.

Here's how it goes:

Ichabod Crane is the school teacher in a little town called Sleepy Hollow.  He's read "several books quite through."  He decides he's going to marry Katrina Van Tassel, the richest girl in town and one of his music students.  It's telling that there is a two page meditation on all the ways Ichabod will cook up and eat all of the livestock once he owns the Van Tassel farm, but there is no description of Katrina except that she's "blooming," "ripe," and "plump." Ichabod is big on food, which I appreciate, but there's a time and a place, bro.  However!  Katrina is already dating a guy named Brom Bones, who's the leader of his rowdy posse, and beloved by the whole town for his boys-will-be-rowdy ways.  Ichabod goes to a party at Katrina's house, where he eats all the food, dances, tells a ghost story, and then asks Katrina to marry him.  (There's this weird racist bit while he's dancing, where all the black people look in through the windows to watch him dance, but the dance is described in such a way to make it sound like he's flailing around, and the black people's reactions are written so you could read it as them being blown away by how great it is, or by them being in awe of how much of a fool he looks.  I choose to read it as the later, even though that's still not a great look, Washington Irving.)  Apparently, Katrina turns Ichabod down.  I say "apparently" because:

"What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know. Something, however, I fear me, must have gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no very great interval, with an air quite desolate and chapfallen. Oh, these women! these women! Could that girl have been playing off any of her coquettish tricks? Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival? Heaven only knows, not I!"

Katrina showing personality and agency does not get screen time.  I wish it had, because it sounds like it was a pretty epic take-down.  So Ichabod leaves, heading home on the scrawniest of borrowed horses, when the Headless Horseman rides out of the dark and chases him!  That's right, the Headless Horseman, although described earlier, doesn't appear until the very end.  The saddle falls off Ichabod's horse, then Ichabod falls off Ichabod's horse.  The Horseman throws its disembodied head at Ichabod, and he takes off into the night, never to be seen again.  The next day, when the borrowed horse returns to its person without a saddle or Ichabod, they go out looking for him and find the trampled saddle near a smushed pumpkin and Ichabod's hat.  Katrina and Brom Bones get married, and it's heavily implied that Brom Bones impersonated the Headless Horseman to scare Ichabod out of town.

The things that struck me the most in this story were how much Ichabod is a Nice Guy™.  He thinks Katrina should marry him just because he's there and not rowdy like her boyfriend.  This ties into the other part that struck me: how much of a non-entity Katrina is.  There's this trope called the sexy lamp, where if you can replace the female love interest with a desirable lamp that the hero will fight for, your story is flawed.  Ichabod wants that lamp.  Someone might have to stop him from eating the lamp.  And she's shown this way even though she expresses herself and turns down Ichabod's proposal.  Clearly she had a personality and agency, but Ichabod or the narrator didn't care enough about it to talk about it.  I wanted to write a story where she was given her time to shine.

Sexy Lamp

 

I was also struck by Brom Bones pretending to be the Headless Horseman.  I knew that was part of the story, but what interested me was that he does that AFTER Katrina has turned down Ichabod.  In the logic of the story, Brom Bones has already "won."  It's a different situation than if he had scared Ichabod off while Katrina was making up her mind or before Ichabod asked or after she had said yes.  My 2019 understanding of this is that Ichabod upset Katrina with his unwanted marriage proposal and his storming out after being rejected, and Brom Bones decided that kind of behavior couldn't stand.  It's kind of sweet.  But it's still Bones taking vengeance on Katrina's behalf.  Did she know?  Did she approve?  Did she wish she's done it herself?

My desire to rewrite this story was the driving force behind this season, and I started to look for other stories from folklore where women weren't given their chance to shine.

I read Cuckoo Song

 This week's novel is Cuckoo Song, YA fantasy by Frances Hardinge.  I'm a Hardinge fan (The Lie Tree, Face Like Glass), and I'm slowly working through her novels.

Triss wakes up after falling into a river with most of her memories missing.  Her parents assure her that she's just a sickly person and she'll be well again if she just rests, but she's also overwhelmed by hunger that has her eating all of the food in the house and then rotten apples off the ground and then inanimate objects.  She's also seeing things as all her dolls come to life and try to stab her.  Her angry and terrified sister is convinced that she's not the real Triss, a prospect that grows more concerning as it becomes more certain. 

I really liked the family dynamics in this book.  Triss's older brother died in the war, and her parents have reacted to their grief and helplessness in how they treat their two daughters: protective and infantilizing, but also dismissive and blaming.  The reader gets a sense of what's happening and that the brother's death is the epicenter of the family well before Triss is able to articulate it.  Sometimes being that far ahead of the characters can feel irritating, as if the characters are too stupid.  But here it made sense that Triss wouldn't be able to see the relationships from inside it, and it made sense that as she distanced herself from her family, she was able to see them clearly.  There's also a cathartic moment (which is a theme in Hardinge's work) where Triss is able to articulate not just that it's happening, but also that it's wrong.

This is a book about fairies, and it uses fairy tropes and conventions, which you may know is usually not something I enjoy.  But this story never assumes that I have prior knowledge of fairies or how their society works or all the tricks to dealing with them.  It never names them as such, and the reader learns about them as Triss learns about them, so we have a nice gateway into things being explained. It's gotten me thinking that sometimes I bounce off a story about fairies because there is so much lore around them and creatures like them, lore from from different countries and different eras, and there's not a "standard" set of rules.  There are overlapping rules and stories that contradict each other and stories that don't fit together.  It's what I love about folklore: the many iterations and metamorphoses.  So any story that assumes I'm familiar with just one set of fairy tropes and that I'll know where the boundaries are between true-in-this-story and not-true-in-this-story without it being spelled out is making a pretty big assumption about the folklore I've been exposed to.  And that assumption shows that either they haven't done their research to know there's more to fairies, or they're assuming that, well, of course everyone will assume this is the Gaelic version.  And then if you want to get silly, it's also making an implicit statement about what's a "real" fairy, which is kind of ridiculous.  These are issues you have to navigate if you deal with any kind of folklore, it's just that fairies have a big, sprawling history that make them more difficult to navigate than some other monsters.

The Power of Writing Letters to Yourself

My writing group this week talked about submissions and ways to feel good about yourself through the rejection.  For the most part, I'm pretty good about rejection.  What people like is subjective, etc.  Maybe they'd already agreed to publish someone else's story, which is completely inferior, but also about weasels, and they can't have two weasel stories, and even though it's the hardest decision they've ever made, they need to do the right thing and not call this first writer to tell them that, actually, they've found a better story about weasels, so... 

But then sometimes I get my hopes up, and let myself get crushed, and then it's work to get rolling again.  So the writing group time was timely and invigorating.

My friend running the group talked about a Sara Connell lecture she went to recently.  A lot of it sounded like The Secret and just a bit too silly for me.  For example, we wrote acceptance letters to ourselves, to visualize what it would look like, and now that letter is going to come, and it's going to look just exactly the same.  Here's an except from mine: "We offer $0.08 per word, so please fill out and return the attached tax documents within 5 business days."  I had just finished sending out 1099s.  I don't think this happens in acceptance letters, but, now that I've poured my good vibes into it, it will! 

We were also supposed to pick a future goal and talk about it as though it had already happened.  Even in a goofy exercise with my writing group, lying about my accomplishments felt gross.  "Why yes, I do have two PhDs from Oxford and cancer.  It's sad.  But also inspirational.  Don't you feel inspired by me?  And also I sent you those tax documents last week.  Did you not get them?  Did they get caught in your spam filter?  No?  G-mail must have eaten them, because I definitely sent them.  Arg!  Let me try again, but this time with a special computer-savvy step that only I know about to make sure it goes through.  Did that work?  Yeah, because I'm great at computers." 

See?  That got out of control real fast.

Some of the tricks, however, I found really helpful.  There was one called "writing a love letter to yourself," which includes five things you like about the thing you're going to submit.  The love letter part sounds silly, but a bulleted list of five things that are good about a story was mind opening.  Yes, this story is good.  It's worth submitting it and submitting it and submitting it, because it's going to find a home.  It's going to find a home for these reasons.  Keep trying.  That was helpful.

Another suggestion was to aim for 100 submissions rather than 100 rejections.  That way it puts the focus on the process you can control, rather than on the part where you fail.  I usually aim for 100 rejections, but I heard this and now I'll never go back.  I like to think about my rejections (submissions) as pokemon.  You gotta catch them all.  When you get to a second round, your pokemon evolves.  While querying my novel, I kept track of which pokemon I'd caught, and I realized that I should start up again with this new round of sending stories to literary magazines.  Let me show you my Pokemans.

I read Senlin Ascends

This week's novel is Senlin Ascends, fantasy by Josiah Bancroft.

Senlin and his wife, Marya, travel on their honeymoon to the Towel of Babel, an engineering marvel and center for culture and advancement.  No one knows how many levels there are, stacked on top of each other, and each level is like its own kingdom. They've heard stories about the marvels of the tower all their lives.  However, when they get there they find that it's full of miscreants and con-artists, tyrants and systems designed to entrap you.  Also as soon as they get there, Marya and Senlin get separated, and Senlin must make his way up to tower to find her.

The thing I liked most about this one was how Senlin's bright eyed expectations and the realities were juxtaposed.  Each chapter starts with an excerpt from Senlin's guidebook, which makes the tower sound fun and quirky.  But then once you get into the chapter, the tower turns out to be terrifying.  For example, there's a marketplace at the base of the tower, and the book describes it as a place where you can buy all sorts of exotic wonders and have fun haggling.  In fact, it's a maze that changes every day, chunks from the sides of the tower fall and smoosh people, airships fall from the sky and are then scavenged for parts, and then there are the pickpockets and thefts and kidnappings.  People walk around tied together with rope so they don't get separated.

I liked how in the beginning, Senlin clings to the guidebook and his belief in the stories that the Tower is amazing.  He thinks maybe he's just had some bad luck or that the tower will get better as he goes along.  But over time he realizes that the guidebook, his ideas, and he himself are wrong, and he has to come to grips with that.  And it's neat how his distancing himself is paralleled with how ridiculous the guidebook's bad advice and uninformed descriptions at the beginning of the chapters sound, as the reader sees that it's more and more out of touch with reality.

I enjoyed it a lot.  The worldbuilding is atmospheric and pervasive.  And each new level of the Tower is new and interesting and refreshing as he travels, without feeling jarring.  They fit together in nice ways and there's always some consistency around to hold the book together.