Auf Wiedersehen

Which I hope will be very soon. As Carolan mentioned, the Fantasy & Enchantment blog will soon merge with Beyond the Veil, where some really good fantasies lurk.

It's been a pleasure writing for you these past months, and I want to assure you the posts and links you've found useful won't disappear. A number of us will be posting our contributions on various journals. My blogs will soon find a home on MySpace page.

Meanwhile, I'm wracking my brain for ways to cause trouble in my new home. Just because we're changing venues doesn't mean we're changing all that much. ;-)

Cheers and and thanks for everything,

Jean Marie

The Most Dangerous Gift

Forget the Red Ryder BB gun guaranteed to "put your eye out kid". The Christmas gifts you have to watch out for are the ones that leave your eyes wide open.

On the first day of this Christmas, the Darling Spouse Person gave to me a copy of Stork Club, Ralph Blumenthal's account of the club that defined New York nightlife from the 1930s to the '60s. Better yet, in the p. 19 photograph of the club's Cub Room, the tall, lanky guy in the back of the picture looks a lot like my dad.

I grew up listening to Dad's stories of working at "the Stork" in the late 1930s and early '40s--of Hemingway's brawls, of stocking Walter Winchell's apartment with booze, of owner Sherman Billingsley's "calesthenics" with Ethel Merman in "the Gym". Dad said he started at the club switchboard with Victor Mature. Gertrude Stein loved them both so much she asked them to try out for the role of the spear carrier in her (then) new play. Dad blew it off. He wanted to make his career in the club business. But the role propelled Mature to stardom. Well, it got him cast in a lot of bad movies, at any rate.

Over the years, the DSP heard these stories so often, he could recite them by rote. So he was delighted to find a comprehensive history of the Stork Club complete with a juicy bibliography and lots of first-person anecdotes.

There was just one problem. The stories in the book seemed to run at a tangent to the ones we knew from my dad. Walter and Ethel and Damon Runyon were there. George Raft acted the part of the tough guy gangster my dad said he was. But Victor Mature and Gertrude Stein were nowhere to be found.

The DSP was apologetic. I was suspicious. In the early 1990s, I'd successfully pitched a book proposal based on my dad's Korean War experiences only to be forced to withdraw it. It turned out my dad borrowed some of his favorite war stories from movies and newspaper reports. To this day, I thank my writing stars I found out before the contracts were cut.

I hit the web. The weakest link in the story was Gertrude Stein. Somehow she didn't seem the type to go ga-ga for a couple of big strapping guys. Face it, Alice B. Toklas they weren't.

I quickly discovered Gerty Gerty Stein so rarely visited the U.S. during the '30s and '40s, her lone book tour, begun in October 1934, made national headlines. But there was no way my dad could've connected with her at the Stork Club while she was on the 1934 tour. He was still toiling away in a Lackawanna, NY, high school until the spring of 1935. I've got the diploma, pictures and clippings to prove it. In addition, the only Gertrude Stein stage production around in the late 1930s/early 1940s was Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, an avant-garde opera generally performed as a stage play. Hmmm, an opera so out there it can't be sung... Victor Mature was famous for doing anything for a laugh (witness Head), but my dad? I don't think so.

Plus, I couldn't find a whiff of a hint of a suggestion anywhere in Mature's Wikipedia entry, his IMDB bio or his major fan site of any connection to Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Lawrence, whose 1941 production of Lady in the Dark marked his Broadway debut (in pink leotards and a leopard loincloth, no less), yes. Gertrude Stein? Never.

Okay, so maybe my dad or I screwed up the name. Thirty years had passed from the time Dad worked in the Stork Club to the time he began telling me the stories, and there were grounds for confusion. After all, they were both Gertrudes, they were both short, and even though Gertrude Lawrence did frequent the Stork and adored a "big beautiful hunk of man", she was rumored to have enjoyed a lesbian adventure or two.

But as far as I can tell, Victor Mature was one Hollywood actor who never ever got anywhere near New York, much less the Stork Club, until after he was a star. He left his home in Louisville, KY, for California in 1935 and stayed there until he had several movies under his pelt--er, belt, including the infamous One Million B.C.

So how did he work his way into my dad's Stork Club stories--and why?

It couldn't have been to impress me. When I was growing up, I didn't know jack and cared even less about the celebrity names sprinkled through dad's stories. Gertrude Stein might as well have been Gertrude Lawrence for all I knew. The Broadway and movie stars he talked about were all old enough to be my grandparents. Many were already dead. He was my dad and, by definition marvelous, and it was kinda cool that he worked in a nightclub and knew people who used to be people. But that was it.

I don't think they served a professional purpose either. After the draft caught up with him in 1942, Dad went Army all the way. Affiliations, no matter how past tense, with a former bootlegger perennially in hot water with the unions weren't exactly the sort of thing to advance a career in military hospital administration.

Another weird thing is how much truth was mixed in with the blarney. Dad did work at the Stork. When I was growing up, the priest who got him the job--Father Vincent Donovan, brother of the founder of the C.I.A. (for somebody weaned on James Bond movies, The Avengers and Man from U.N.C.L.E. reruns, that defined cool)--visited us whenever he got the chance.

I can also verify Dad also rose to a fairly high position in the club hierarchy (though for obvious reasons I'm no longer certain he was the "celebrity manager" he claimed to be). As late as the 1980s, Dad's Rhode Island cousins still talked about the hand-tailored suits he bequeathed them when he left for boot camp. Billingsley paid well, but then as now, you had to be very close to the top of the food chain to afford a bespokee suit, much less a full wardrobe with custom-tailored shirts to match.

Maybe the tall tales had something to do with Dad's never-realised ambition to write. The brutal realities of his early life forced him to abandon his dreams of writing The Great American Novel long before he ever landed on the Stork's doorstep. But there was nothing to stop him from fictionalizing his own life, as pointless as the effort seems to me now.

With Dad and Mom both dead, I'll probably never know his reasons. But that won't stop me from turning over rocks and chasing down any promise of insight to support my guesses. It's what writers do.

Besides, in many ways, the quest is its own reward. It speaks directly to the development of myths and legends. For example, there's a lot of talk in connection with the hero stories of the ancient Greeks and the tales of King Arthur about the validity of oral tradition. Supposedly, culturally important stories can be accurately handed down from one generation to the next without benefit of pen, paper or pixels.

My and the SDP's experience with the details of my dad's stories (barring the whole Gertrude thing, of course) suggests they can. But what if the stories or the details are themselves nothing but fabrications? Suddenly we're in that very interesting place where history and fantasy collide.

Back in late 1930s New York with Tallulah Bankhead and Orson Welles ("of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin" not!), gangsters, spies and restaurateurs. Now if my plot hamsters can just figure out how to squeeze a dragon into the subway, I'm in business.

Cheers and grins,

Jean Marie

On the Second Blog of Christmas

The Fantasy & Enchantment Blog gives you two little mysteries in a single package.

Once a year in Abbots Bromley, a little village in England's West Midlands, twelve dancers set out from the St. Nicholas Church. Six of them carry reindeer antlers--three racks of black horns and three racks of white. The other six are stock figures from pantomime--Maid Marion (always played by a man in a dress), Hobby Horse, Fool, a boy with a bow and arrow (Cupid?), a boy with a triangle and a musician.


The twelve follow a fourteen-mile circuit from the church to Blithfield Hall and back again. At various sites along the way they stop to perform a winding circle dance. Finally, around 8 p.m., the dancers return the horns to the church and stay for Compline.


Mystery One is the is the origin of the dance. One theory says it originated in 1226 when the local lord granted certain villagers the right to hunt on his land. (This was a very big deal in the Middle Ages, as any fan of any version of Robin Hood can tell you.) But the year and the date of the original performance is subject to dispute. One group associates it with Barthelmy Fair (aka Bartholomew Fair), held in late August or early September, depending on your choice of calendar. Another tradition says it was originally performed at Christmas, which makes a lot of sense if St. Nicholas and reindeer equals Yule.


Mystery Two concerns the horns themselves. Radiocarbon dating puts their age at around 1065 A.D., about two hundred years before the grant but long after reindeer had disappeared from the England. They were probably imported from Scandanavia, but that doesn't explain why.


And if that doesn't get your plot bunnies hopping, you might try feeding them a couple of these links:


Wikipedia


Abbots Bromley Web Site


Abbots Bromley Horn Dance (created by one of the dancers)


Happy writing!

Monkeys...Why Did It Have To Be Monkeys?

Sometimes I wonder why people call what I write “fantasy”. The world out there is a lot stranger than anything my pitiful imagination could dream up.

For example, the current crime wave in northeast India has local police at a loss. Not because they don’t know the culprits behind the rash of home break-ins, and the thefts of mobile phones and soft drinks. They do. The problem is what to do with the the crooks. The laws on the books don’t apply to monkeys.

Yes, you read that right. Monkeys. Monkeys who slap around their pursuers and mug tourists for their eyeglasses. You could even call them murderers. The deputy mayor of Delhi fell to his death when a gang of monkeys jumped him on his balcony.

I suspect Indian law enforcement officials secretly wish they were dealing with a real gang. At least with a human gang you could identify the perps from their tats. Monkeys don't give police sketch artists a heck of a lot to work with. When the description for all the suspects comes down to “hairy”, how do you tell the good monkeys from the bad? And even if you did, there's not a lot you could do about it. The Hindu religion considers all monkeys sacred to the monkey god Hanuman. So the military solution is absolutely out.

My plot hamsters are wearing out their wheels on this one, folks. In my head, the monkeys aren’t sacred--at least not to Hanuman. They’re his minions. I’ll figure out why mobile phones are such a hot item later. The death of deputy mayor was either a tragic error or the result of something a lot more complicated than accident. The glasses are no problem. Hanuman broke his, and the tourist’s happened to be almost the right prescription. After all, it’s not like he can visit the optometrist.

Or can he? He’s a god after all. Who knows what forms he could take? He might even be kinda cute. And his ability to super-size his tail…

No, don’t go there. Stick to the plot. Why couldn’t Hanuman go to a doctor?

Maybe it has something to do with the fossil of an eight-foot-long sea scorpion discovered in Germany not long ago. In theory, Hanuman should be okay with that. Scorpions are part of Shiva’s bag of tricks, and Hanuman is one of Shiva’s many incarnations.

Wait, I’d better tread very carefully here. The way my plot hamsters work, they’ll have Hanuman conspiring to pump up the world’s oxygen levels to create an army of giant bugs. Worse yet, the cockroaches will probably develop some kind of rudimentary intelligence and strike out on their own--“strike” being the operative word here. Oh, ugh!

But bad as that scenario is, it can’t compare to something I saw for real in the Crystal City Underground Monday afternoon.

The Boeing Company has apparently decided it isn’t enough to be the world’s largest manufacturer of airplanes. After all, the market for their products is so limited. Only governments, multi-national corporations and a few select gazillionaires can ever hope to find a Boeing under their giant redwood Christmas tree. To be truly successful these days, a company’s gotta merchandise. Forget “A chicken in every pot”. That’s so Twentieth Century. Make it an airplane. Then you’ve really got something.

So they did. Sort of. John and Jane Everyperson can now purchase models of Boeing planes and other memorabilia through the Boeing Store web site, various traveling stores and over a dozen fixed locations in the US. The Crystal City, Virginia, store opened last week.

That’s not the scary part. I admit I never felt the need to take home a souvenir of the countless hours I've spent hurtling across the stratosphere in pressurized tin cans operating on physical laws so abstruse they might as well be magic. I’m usually so pathetically grateful to arrive at my destination with body parts and luggage intact, I bow down in the direction of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and kiss the concrete until my insides stop shaking. Afterwards, my goal is to get as far away from anything resembling a flying machine until my return trip forces me to defy the laws of gravity yet again. But hey, if people feel compelled to take home a mini-plane or a logo-emblazoned pen or even a rolling briefcase like the pilots use, far be it from me to criticize.

No, the scary part was the store’s centerpiece: a big, red, fully functional airline seat just like the ones inside a Boeing jet.

The horror! My left eye started to twitch and my head began jerk convulsively as I stared at the monstrosity. Forget waterboarding, airplane seats qualify as the most prevalent form of torture in the civilized world. No one is safe, either. First class, business class, steerage--I mean, economy class--it doesn’t matter. They strap us in and we’re trapped between the infinitely reclining seat in front of us and the rock hard headrest behind. Bands of roaming tray tables strive to bisect us and repeatedly slam against our unsuspecting thighs.

Worse yet, I seemed to be the only one to understand the nature of the evil in our midst. Grown men climbed all over the awful thing like it was some kind of forty-something playground. Hello, Mr. Middle-aged Executive. The Comfy Chair is not your friend. Sitting in it could kill you. It will suck you into the maw between its nubbly red cushions and never let you go.

But nobody cared. Mine was the voice crying in the wilderness--well, gibbering to myself while the Crystal City lunch crowd steered as far away from me as the limited space allowed.

Monster scorpions, sentient cockroaches and an army of evil airline seats together in a fiendish plot conceived by the simian brain of a Hindu god with an infinite number of primates with opposable thumbs at his disposal...

The weird part is it’s so close to reality it almost doesn’t count as fiction. But please, let's keep that our little secret. The plot hamsters think they're being so original, and it really doesn't do to upset them. The results could be downright ugly. Remember, myopic monkey gods and gargantuan sea scorpions are their idea of a good thing.

Cheers,

Jean Marie

Thirteen Pieces of Music to Get Your Fantasy Groove On

Sometimes the best fantasies have an instrumental track. Sometimes they have no words at all.

1. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade

2. Azam Ali, “In Other Worlds”

3. Cruxshadows, “Ariadne”

4. Cream, “Tales of Brave Ulysses”

5. Enya, “The Celts”

6. Fleetwood Mac, “Riannon”

7. Loreena McKennit, “The Bonny Swans”

8. Jethro Tull, “Mayhem Maybe”

9. Sting, “Synchronicity II”

10. Yoko Kanno, “Magic Sweets”

11. Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

12. Steve Vai, “Asian Sky”

13. Voltaire, “Zombie Prostitute”

Comedy? Tonight.

Twenty years ago, my dad developed an aortic aneurism. Hopelessly devoted to Mom, he ignored the symptoms while he nursed her through pneumonia. By the time he went into surgery, it was a life or death situation.


From the moment my dad was diagnosed until he was back on his feet, my reading habits underwent a radical shift. Suddenly, I couldn't handle the cutting edge literary fiction or nervy thrillers. I read one writer and one writer only: Georgette Heyer. For weeks, I read nothing but books I'd read in high school--Faro's Daughter, False Colours, Sylvester, Behold Here's Poison, Footsteps in the Dark...


Fast forward to the last two weeks, when I was tending Mom during what proved to be her final illness. What was I reading as I rubbed her hand, pretending not to cry as she struggled for breath? Smoke and Ashes by Tanya Huff.


The two writers might seem miles apart, but the differences are all external. The same things that drew me to Heyer--snappy dialogue, solid worldbuilding, big-hearted humor, romance and the all-important happy ending--also shine in Huff's writing. The characters face challenges, danger and intrigue, but you know the people you care about most will come out okay. It's a series, after all. They have to!


Life doesn't give you those kind of assurances. In fact, it's a terminal condition. Unless there's more to the fantasies I write than I realize, none of us get out of here alive.


The deeper my understanding of that truth grows, the more I crave the magic of fantasy and romance. I remember how embarrassed I was when Dad got sick. I felt like such a fraud--a pretend grown-up hiding behind a kid's books. Real grown-ups read epics and important fiction where everybody dies.


I know better now.

With that in mind, I want to share my own version of a Samhain blessing to all our readers--and to my fellow bloggers slogging through all the muck real life throws at us. It's not a prayer, exactly. It's a quote from one of my all-time favorite characters, Pseudolus, the lying-est, sloppiest, cheating-est slave in all Rome. Hey, who better to know what's important as we race to another shiny new year?


No royal curse.


No Trojan Horse.


And there's a happy ending, of course.


Goodness and badness,


Man in his madness.


This time it all turns out all right.


Tragedy tomorrow.


Comedy.


Comedy?


Comedy tonight.*




*From "Comedy Tonight", A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, music and book by Stephen Sondheim

Thursday Thirteen: 13 DragonCon Pics

After teasing you with all the good stuff to see and do at DragonCon 2007, you didn’t think I would just leave you hanging did you?

Well, yes, I am that mean. But you’re in luck. Becka, Bianca, Carolan, Dayna and Gia threatened to track me down and beat me with their books if I didn’t come back with pics. (They’re so mean!)

I didn’t manage to snag any photos of the celebs I mentioned in my last post unless you count a very badly focused shot of somebody who might be James Marsters toting a “Stunt Kisser” sign across the Buffy Horror Picture Show on Friday night, August 31. Was he or wasn’t he? Only the cast member playing Buffy knows for sure. All I can say is she took an awfully long time to come up for air. :D

1. Dragons were everywhere, of course. But to my mind one of the best was this Chinese parade dragon in the Exhibit Hall.

2. Costumes ranged from twin Goth cabaret chicks to Stargate System Lords. But this Medusa was one of my favorites. I particularly like what she did with her snakes.

3. Since its inauguration in 2002, the Saturday morning DragonCon parade has become one of everyone’s favorite events. It opens with bagpipes and ends with Stormtroopers. In between you can find representatives of everyone’s favorite fantasies—including those of the participants. Shown here are some of the folks who drum and dance at the nightly Drum Circles. Leading the contingent is Joshua, whose dancing has graced the DragonCon Masquerade for two years running. Dina, a fellow Masquerader, can be seen in the second row. She’s the one wearing a jacket over a brown top and playing zills.

4. If you think most of my fantasies involve fit guys, you’re right. Here’s the DragonCon Spartans. The tans were fake. The bods weren’t.

5. Writers parade too. This year, Sherrilyn Kenyon (centered, carrying the fan) temporarily abandoned the conference rooms and Exhibit Hall to lead the characters of her Dark Hunter novels onto the streets. I can’t help wondering how the sun-phobic Dark Hunters felt about that.

6. I included this just so you’d know what a dangerous writer you’re dealing with. I’m front and center in this scurvy crew of scalliwags, otherwise known as the crew of the good ship DragonCon Press Room: (top row from left) Randi, Leigh, Phyl, Mark and Dorie; (front row from left) me and Dave (a.k.a. Silent Bob). Although I no longer attend DragonCon with the sole intent of snagging interviews, the con’s media liaison staff lets me play dress-up with them. Maybe it’s my winning personality—or maybe it’s my way with weapons. Dave, true to his Masquerade alter ego, never uttered a peep, despite the angle of my sword.
7. I didn’t stay long enough at the Masquerade to photograph the prize-winning “Wallace and Grommet” team. (Things to do. Parties to crash.) But like Masquerade MC Kari Byron (far left) of Mythbusters, I was charmed by this hookah-smoking caterpillar. The fabric costume was entirely handmade—and worn by the seamstress who created it.

8. DragonCon is many festivals rolled into one. In addition to the gaming, media guests, movies and writers, it boasts several live concerts every night. This year the musical options ranged from perennial favorites Emerald Rose and Voltaire to newcomers (to DragonCon) Lost Boys and Last Dance. But for me, the musical highlight is always the Cruxshadows show following the Masquerade. Lead singer Rogue (pictured here in a rare moment of stillness) is the only person I know who can rock the Trojan War.

9. In addition to the Masquerade and concerts, Sunday night’s entertainment included a Pirate Gathering and a Secret Room rave with a pirate theme. The Ball featured live music from Three Quarter Ale and (reportedly) Voltaire, but I got better pictures from the Secret Room’s Pirate Rave. Where else could you see a guy in a kilt dancing with a Boxtrooper?

10. After the parties were…more parties. With bartenders who delivered. The big guy on the left carried his bar in a backpack, dispensing parrot-colored libations via a small hose.

11. Ruth Glick (Rebecca York) preceded me in the autograph area Monday afternoon. Unlike the media stars, bestselling writers like Ruth, Terry Brooks, John Ringo and DragonCon 2007 Guest of Honor David Weber sign and pose for free.

12. An unadvertised benefit of the DragonCon autographing sessions—for the writers that is. Joshua came to talk to psychic Chip Coffey and paranormal investigator Patty Starr, whose autograph session coincided with mine. But he graciously agreed to be photographed with swords…and me. You know, it’s hard to look endangered when you’re grinning like an idiot.

13. For me, this is always the saddest part of my annual DragonCon adventure—packing up and going home. Good thing there’s next year.

These and more shots can be found at my Flickr page. Eventually I'll caption them too. 'Til next year!

13 Reasons I Can't Wait For Dragon*Con

Eight more days to my favorite summer camp for wayward adults: Atlanta’s DragonCon. Yes, I’m counting the minutes. Here’s why:

13. The superior eye candy—James Marsters, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Shanks... (Oh yeah, they've got girls too—Vanessa Angel, Claudia Black, Lexa Doig, Gigi Edgley. Will they do?)

12. The chance to meet fellow Samhain writer Ally Blue.

11. More costumes per capita than anywhere in Georgia.

10. Concerts featuring the Cruxshadows, Emerald Rose, the Brobdignagian Bards, Voltaire and many, many more.

9. The DragonCon Parade.

8. Panels featuring fabulous writers like Kevin Anderson, Bob Asprin, Peter Beagle, Terry Brooks, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jody Lynn Nye and Margaret Weis.

7. Panels featuring meeeeeeee.

6. The Pirate Ball.

5. Going to the Pirate Ball in costume with the rest of the Press Room scalliwags.

4. Swordplay demonstrations by the Crossed Swords.

3. The Iron Artist face-off between Bill Stout and Tara McPherson.

2. The irresistible temptations of the Art Show, Exhibit Hall and Dealers Room.

1. Have I mentioned James Marsters and the Cruxshadows?

See you there!

See more Thursday Thirteens here!

Seriously, Dayna, It's All Good

Our very own Dayna Hart’s first novella for Samhain Publishing, “Go Between”, will hit the web in less than a week. She’s bouncing off walls. One of the blog buds asked if she had any fingernails yet, and Dayna shot back, “Nails? Forget nails, I’m down to the joints.”

I was no help at all, of course. I tried to think of a single thing that could possibly be bad about having a new ebook release (with a great cover, no less) and failed utterly. I’ve said it before, and I think the time has come to say it again in public: it’s all good. Really.

Publishing is a lot like cooking spaghetti. A publisher works up a business model and hires editors, who buy stories they like which fit the publisher’s specs. Over the course of a year, the editors buy lots of stories. (Samhain alone publishes between five and ten novels and novellas a week.) They boil ‘em up--er, edit them, throw them at the wall--I mean, the reading public and applaud when something sticks.

Sometimes it’s serendipity. The right book hits at the right time, and an unknown author turns into J.K. Rowling. More often the progress is a slow build. Each book attracts two fans, who tell two of their friends about the next book, and so on and so on. Hard as it is to wait this one out, this scenario can be just as rewarding as the overnight sensation. Consider Nora Roberts’ career.
In either case, there aren’t any short cuts. Promotion helps, but it’s only to a point. Yes, these days reclusive writers are the exception as opposed to the rule. Yes, chats, excerpts, ads and convention appearances help. Signings and contests too--though to a much lesser extent. (I once ran a contest which had fewer participants than it did prizes. I never even shipped the grand prize. The winner neglected to provide a snail mail address.) But realistically, without a massive budget, there are only so many people a writer can reach.

Even a big budget is no guarantee of sales. To increase the return on their investment, New York publishers promote the heck out of all the titles they paid big advances for. But an ad in The New York Times won’t make a bestseller out of the literary equivalent of a sow’s ear. As the editor of a review site for eight years, I know for a fact the objects of some of the most expensive saturation ad campaigns of the past ten years sank without a trace.

Reviews help a little. Ahem, ALL reviews help a little. The most fascinating thing about the process is bad reviews help as much as good ones. I track the sales of With Nine You Get Vanyr through Publishers Marketplace, and every time a review appears, there’s a visible jump in sales.

In late July, I noticed a bump in sales and couldn’t figure it out. Sunday morning, for the first time in about two months, I decided to Google for reviews. Lo and behold, on July 21, just before my sales started to rise, Raph Koster panned Vanyr as a Mary Sue. He even said it was like watching a “trainwreck” (sic). That’s the nicest thing he could've done for me. Seriously. Within five days, my Amazon sales tripled. The sad part is he’ll never believe my thank you note.

I also discovered something far better for the ego, if not for the pocketbook. Vanyr has been added to the New England Science Fiction Association’s database of recursive science fiction.

I didn’t know what recursive science fiction was either until I rummaged around the site. The short version is SF or fantasy which uses SF/fantasy fandom or any other element of science fiction or fantasy literature or related media as a major plot point. WooHoo, I’m part of a catalogued sub-genre, along with people like Mercedes Lackey, Fritz Leiber, Sharyn McCrumb, Fred Saberhagen, James Tiptree and Roger Zelazny.

Like I said, Dayna, it’s all good.

Thirteen Ways to Leave Your Fantasy Lover

Thirteen Ways to Leave Your Fantasy Lover This is a public service announcement for all fantasy and paranormal romance heroines and heroes. We realize you believe you’ve found your Happily Ever After with the (insert supernatural species here) of your wildest dreams. However, we at the Paranormal Extended Romance Protection Society (PERPS, for short) know that not all human/other relationships perform as advertised. (If they did, we wouldn’t have sequels, now would we?) With that in mind, the governing bodies of PERPS prepared the following handy guide for ending unwonted relationships with a person or persons of Otherworld origins: 1. Vampire - Stake the heart. (The wooden kind is best. Steak on the heart only makes them more amorous.) 2. Werewolf - Shoot with silver. (A sterling dinner fork may be used as a projectile, but make sure the tines are pointed away from you. Do not use knives, except per 5. below. The blades are invariably cold steel.) 3. Selkie - Burn the pelt. (The order is crucial here. Pelting with Burns will only compound the problem. Robert will want to write a poem about it, and George is simply too nice.) 4. Angel - Tear off wings. (Practice on flies and work your way up.) 5. Fairy/Elf - Cold iron on the pillow. (Preferably the skillet you used to bash the fae’s head in.) 6. Devil - Douse with holy water. (Bathtubs with tile surrounds are ideal for containing the combustion but require large quantities of blessed water for optimum performance--which can be difficult to procure beforehand, given this subject’s well-deserved reputation for paranoia.) 7. Dragonslayer - Feed to dragon. (Serve raw.) 8. Enchanted Beast - Trash the rose garden. (If you choose to pursue a chemical solution, avoid commercial preparations that target only the weeds.) 9. Dragon - Feed him/her a fire extinguisher. (Also serve raw.) 10. Merman - Surround the bed with dehumidifiers. (Remove all moisturizers from vicinity beforehand.) 11. Frog Prince - Introduce him to the cook. (A nice butter sauce is always a good choice.) 12. Gold-spinning Dwarf - Announce his/her on The View. (Remember to obtain free samples for producers and hosts before filming.) 13. Change the Locks - The governing bodies of PERPS neglected this critical step. That’s why they’re bodies… Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Judging Books By Their Covers

What do editors talk about when nobody’s around? If they’re anything like Paula Guran (editor of Juno Books) and me (former editor of Crescent Blues) they talk art, specifically cover art.

Granted, with any kind of fiction, the words between the covers ultimately determine whether a book rises up the bestseller charts, falls into the remainder bins or hangs around forever to plague generations of defenseless high school students. But it takes years to become a classic on word of mouth and only an instant for a buyer to pick up or discard a book based on visual impressions.

A good cover provides a snapshot of the contents. Dragons and pointy-eared types typify high fantasy. Urban fantasy covers come in dark blues, grays and reds -- with a generous dash of man titty or bun-age if they’re shooting for the erotic market. Other genres show their colors in similar ways. Who can forget the cartoon-style covers used on a decade’s worth of comic romances? Cozy mystery covers feature pets or inviting interiors, while thrillers showcase empty street scenes with lots of shadows.

A striking cover draws the reader’s eye, inviting the reader to pick up the book, check out the back cover, maybe scan a few pages. In the absence of a major review or personal recommendation, the lure of the cover is a book’s single most important selling point. Michael Whelan’s art, for example, is credited with boosting more than a few writers’ careers. Rowena’s art is closely associated with Anne McCaffrey. Charles De Lint and Jacqueline Carey both benefited from cover art by John Jude Palencar. Stephanie Pui-Moon Law’s covers helped make visual sense of the complex world Catherine Asaro created in her Aronsdale romantic fantasies. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman swear by Larry Elmore.

Covers are a major selling point for booksellers too -- and they’re even pickier than readers. Their cover commandments come down to a list of no-s. No white covers -- they get dirty too fast. No step-backs or cut-outs -- they tear. No sealed packaging -- people won’t buy the book once the cellophane’s torn. A bad cover (by their definition) won’t necessarily prevent a bookseller from ordering a book. But it will work against re-orders and increase the number of returns -- something writers and publishers would really like to prevent.

Covers do more than just define a book, however. They also make an important statement about the publisher. A professional looking cover equates in readers’, booksellers’ and distributors’ eyes to a professional publisher. Nothing -- not even bad editing -- says “amateur” as fast as the dead mannequin stare of an un-retouched Poser(TM) image.

At the American Library Association conference Paula and I were congratulating ourselves on having lucked out in the cover department. Timothy Lantz has done fabulous work for Juno, while Samhain Publishing artist Anne Cain gave With Nine You Get Vanyr a cover equally attractive to men and women. This is the second time I’ve been blessed with cover magic. My nonfiction book, Illumina: The Art of J.P. Targete, featured J.P. Targete's fabulous painting of a woman turning into a cat. Women take one look at the cover and immediately want to know where they can buy the model’s dress. Men want to buy the model a drink. But regardless of gender, once somebody sees the cover, the book is halfway to the cash register.

Not only that, the way J.P. finessed the transformation of woman to cat became a model for the metamorphoses in Vanyr. For me, that’s the best part of the whole deal. Cover and book become part of a larger conversation between writers, artists and our audiences. Inspiration flows in all directions. Artists draw from our word paintings and, in turn, give us ideas for more stories, which hopefully inspire readers and viewers to become creators themselves.

J.P. saw this firsthand when Ace Books commissioned him to paint the cover for Douglas Niles’ The Circle at Center, the first book in Doug’s Seven Circles Trilogy. J.P. took the guidelines provided by Ace’s art department and created a luminous, magical landscape people by the non-human races described in the publisher’s material. The cover was an instant hit and won him a Chesley, the highest award presented by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.

There was just one (not really) problem. Aside from the woman who is the painting’s focus, Doug didn’t recognize any of his characters in the creatures J.P. painted. But he liked J.P.’s critters so well, he used them as the basis of a new race, which played a key role in the final book of the trilogy.

Now that’s what I call a positive feedback loop.

[P.S. The lovely painting, which I can't seem to figure out a way to write a cutline for is Shared Dreams, (c) Anne Cain, 2007, coming soon to the WardSmith web site. But you saw it here first.]

From Sanbao to Sinbad: China’s Contribution to the Arabian Nights

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and lays eggs like a duck, why do some people insist on telling you it’s a turkey?

No, this isn’t a political rant. I post very few of those, and never here. This has to do with my love-hate relationship with academia, specifically academic tunnel-vision. For every scholar like Adrienne Mayor, who actually reads what ancient and medieval writers wrote, there seem to be a thousand who are more interested in pedantry than possibility.

Case in point: Sinbad--he of the Seven Voyages, not the stand-up comedian.

Everybody knows the basic outline of Sinbad’s story. Starting from nothing, a young man becomes a wealthy and respected merchant after seven fabulous voyages take him to the ends of the earth--with a lot of stops for gold, girls and monsters along the way.

The accounts of the individual voyages show a variety of influences, from Greek mythology to Islamic theology garbled accounts of African and Asian fauna. But according to all “serious” scholars, the origin of the name Sinbad and why he had seven voyages (and not three or nine or fifteen like other Arabian Nights’ tales) is “lost in the mists of time”.

Of course, doesn’t stop scholars from trying to sell etymologies based on the old name of the Indus River, the Persian word for “region” and lots of specious Sanskrit. Not to mention lengthy articles on the mystical significance of the number seven. (Lesson to remember: whenever a scholar drags out the Sanskrit and numeric symbolism, run. He or she is trying to sell you the post-doctoral equivalent of land in the Florida swamps.)

This is where the duck quacks in. In 2005, “China’s Great Armada”, a National Geographic article by Frank Viviano, suggested the great Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He might have been one of the prototypes for the character of Sinbad.

At first the idea seems absurd. Then the facts roll in. Despite the name (which was given to him by a grateful emperor after he reached adulthood), Zheng He was not Chinese. He was a Central Asian Muslim captured and enslaved as a child by the Chinese army, who rose on his own merits to become one of the principal advisors of Emperor Yongle.

Zheng He’s main claim to fame are the seven voyages he undertook in his emperor’s service, voyages which sent him--like Sinbad--to the fabulous lands of Sumatra, Java, India, Ceylon and East Africa. These voyages were designed to “show the flag” and obtain treasure through trade and diplomatic maneuvering, not conquest. The main object of the sixth voyage, for example, was to secure that rare and most fantastical animal, the ultimate harbinger of peace and prosperity in Chinese folklore of the time, a.k.a. the giraffe.

Zheng He also used the voyages to spread Chinese culture in all its stunning diversity. He commissioned statues of Buddha and the Taoist goddess of the sea. He served as a benefactor to Chinese Muslims, settling large communities in major ports of call along all his routes. His adventures so captivated so many people he remained a folk hero to Chinese communities throughout Asia even after he slipped from the rolls of most official histories. You couldn’t ask for a more fertile breeding ground for legends and tall tales. Think of all the other popular heroes you never read about in school--Robin Hood and King Arthur, for example.

But oddly enough--other than the fact he made seven voyages--the best, most telling connection to Sinbad is Zheng He’s original name. In Pinyin, the simplified Chinese phonetic alphabet, it is rendered "Ma Sanbao".

Roll “Sanbao” around your mouth a couple times. Next, imagine a transcontinental game of telephone, where everybody’s doing their best to repeat the same word but nobody has quite the same set of phonics.

The idea that over time names slip and slide into something which only faintly resembles the original is a well-known literary phenomenon. It’s one of the things that make it so difficult to parse out the historical bases of the Arthurian legends. For example, one of the few touchstones of Dark Age British history is the man Gildas and Bede call Ambrosius Aurelianus. He plays a major role in all the Arthurian legends, but unless you understand how the early Welsh mangled--er, transmitted Latin names, you might night recognize him. They call him “Emrys”.

Sanbao. Sinbad. Starts to look a lot better, doesn’t it?

But…but…Sinbad lives in Baghdad during the time of the great caliph Haroun al-Rashid! So does nearly everyone else in the Arabian Nights--including characters based on real people who lived in entirely different centuries. The Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid was the Camelot of the medieval Arabian world. If it was fantasy, it had to be set there. No other place or time would do.

What about the roc and the Cyclops mentioned in Sinbad’s Third Voyage? I didn’t say Zheng He was the only model for Sinbad, just that he’s the most compelling and provides the best historical precedent for the Seven Voyage structure.

The great compendiums of folklore and legendary material--such as the Arabian Nights, the Brothers Grimm and the Matter of Britain--seldom derive from a single literary or oral source. They are the distillations of popular culture. The stories they encompass are constantly evolving and moving back and forth between literary and oral traditions.

Terri Windling’s "Folkroots" feature in the August 2007 Realms of Fantasy shows how this plays out in the story of Rapunzel. In the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm presented the story as a German folk tale. But in fact, the current form of the story derives from “Persinette”, an adult fairy tale written by Charlotte-Rose de la Force in late 17th century Paris.

According to Daniel Beaumont, the same forces were at work in the creation of the Arabian Nights. His introduction to Slave of Desire: Sex, Death, and Love in the 1001 Arabian Nights cites several examples of fables being transformed into fictions which are later quoted as “true events”, which happened to someone with a distant connection to the writer. (Urban legends, anyone? There really isn’t anything new anywhere under the sun.)

In addition, the story of Sinbad’s Seven Voyages doesn't appear to have been part of the earliest versions of the Arabian Nights. Most importantly for the Ma Sanbao/Sinbad connection, it doesn’t appear in the 14th century manuscript which leading Arabian Nights' scholars consider the definitive medieval version of the collection.

But then few of the best stories do. Certainly not the ones (like the story of Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp) which display a distinct Chinese connection. Those stories don’t appear in Arabian Nights’ manuscripts until the 16th or 17th centuries--more than enough time for storytellers to embroider the original source material almost beyond recognition.

So why is it only the non-academic writers who admit the connection? Why does the theory appear to have no credibility among serious academics? Where is the scholar--or student or demented amateur with way too much time on their hands--to run all the tantalizing bits of evidence to the ground? Won’t somebody please take up the challenge of identifying all the ingredients in the glorious stew, how Zheng He’s treasure fleet--complete with concubines and Chinese marines--took a left turn at some medieval Arabic version of Albuquerque and wound up sailing with Odysseus?

I want to read it, dang it. I don’t want to have to go out there and write it myself.

Though the part about the Chinese marines and the concubines shows definite promise. Maybe on the island that’s also a whale…

Additional references (from Wikipedia):

Arabian Nights

Sinbad

Zheng He

Trade Show Magic

Long ago in a continent far, far away, my mother took me to the Frankfurt Book Fair. For a greedy reader like me, it was Hell. All those miles and aisles of books spread out before me like water, water everywhere and nary a tome for sale.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't understand it. And I drove my mother crazy whining, "But why can't we buy them?"

Her explanations of "floor samples" and "demonstration copies", which could be ordered (in bulk) but not owned because they hadn't been printed yet, didn't make sense. How could the books not be printed yet? They were there, on the shelves, printed and bound and everything.

She might've had an easier time trying to explain the principles behind quantum physics. Or magic, because her explanation turned the books into fairy gifts, phantom objects made of twigs and leaves, which only appeared to be real. Why else would apparently rational grown-ups pay the business-suited sharpers running the booths fantastic sums in Deutschmarks and dollars, then walk away empty-handed--and happy about it? The people paying the money must be under some kind of magic spell. They'd been deceived into buying something that didn't exist because, as everyone kept telling me over and over, none of the books on the shelves were for sale. Still, the salespeople seemed to be making a heck of a lot of money selling the books that didn't exist and weren't for sale.

I pondered this for a few minutes. Mom relaxed. She should've known better. Nothing is potentially more hazardous to a parent's position in the world than a thoughtful child.

After I'd been quiet so long my mom forgot why I'd been fussing in the first place, I opined loudly, in both English and German, this completely legal shell game was infinitely better than the ones my uncles took me to see in Atlantic City and I wanted a piece of it now. Fortunately for both of us, one of the booksellers came to Mom’s rescue by bribing me--er, presenting me a beautifully illustrated book on the Maori. I didn't know the Maori from beans, but the pictures were gorgeous enough to distract me from my pursuit of ultimate riches through the sale of books that didn’t exist and weren’t for sale.

Instead a new monster took up residence in my warped little brain. It whispered in my mind's ear the magic words that make all the women in my family sit up and take notice--and were probably the reason my mom finagled her way into a closed trade show in the first place.

Free Stuff, the monster cooed.

I've been a trade show junkie ever since.

This year, thanks to my brand spanking new RWA Published Author Network membership, I got the opportunity sign copies of With Nine You Get Vanyr at the American Library Association's (ALA's) annual conference. The conference, which ran from June 23-26, was held in the Washington DC Convention Center, home to last year's Book Expo America (BEA).

Although the center's conference rooms were all booked and the center's three-block-long exhibit space was filled to capacity, the ALA conference gave off a very different vibe than BEA's desperate marketing frenzy. Partially it was the lay-out. Aisles were wider. People cruising the displays had the option of strolling, stopping for a chat or snagging a soft pretzel from one of the carts making the rounds.

Google, Ingram, Demco and a few other tech service outfits mounted expansive displays, but they were the exceptions. Publisher stalls were smaller and simpler than they'd been at the 2006 BEA. Simon and Schuster, for example, occupied only a quarter of a single aisle. Harlequin's booth didn't take up too much more floor space than some of the stalls occupied by the independent presses. Inviting arrangements of reading chairs and whimsically upholstered children's furniture (care to recline in a padded notebook?) interrupted the booths at convenient intervals.

But the more relaxed atmosphere owed a lot to the crowd. As Wildside publisher Sean Wallace said, "ALA is all about readers."

The attending librarians came to look at books, not just for their libraries but also for themselves. The publishers sought to oblige them. There were some giveaways, but not enough to stress about. Most of the books and educational DVDs were for sale at half price or less to anyone attending the show (even stray Vanyr signers). Or free after a certain time on the last day.

Books and DVDs weren't the only things for sale either. I saw South American knits and marbled scarves, writer-themed umbrellas, hand cream, jewelry and the ever-popular book bags--which sold despite the fact that a lot of exhibitors were giving them away.

A purveyor of traditional music CDs and DVDs brought in a country fiddler to serenade the crowd. I caught up with the fiddler as he was launching into a reel. A little boy no older than four stood at the man's feet. The child stared, enraptured, as the fiddle dipped and swayed in the fiddler's hands. Music spilled from the strings in sparkling, almost visible, waves.

When the reel spun to rest and the small crowd's applause broke the spell, the little boy blinked and jerked his head like someone waking from a charmed sleep. Watching the child's reactions, I understood why people said the Devil was a fiddler. The little boy was enthralled as surely as anyone captured by a sorcerer's magic spell.

We tend to dismiss fantasy as an escape, the outgrowth of super-heated imaginations inalterably opposed to the boring world of monthly bills, interchangeable offices, annoying bosses and rush hour traffic. How can the extraordinary possibly co-exist with the cash register? Yet there in the middle of book sales and CD racks, right in front of who knows how many rational, responsible, tax-paying grown-ups, a fiddler bewitched a child--and the rest of us right along with him.

Not only that, they were selling those books that didn't exist too. I was standing in the booth when it happened, just like I did in Germany all those years ago.

Who says fairy gifts aren't real?

Who Says You Can't Teach An Old Myth New Tricks

Move over Indiana Jones, I’ve found a new hero. Only Adrienne Mayor isn’t the kind of hero who slays monsters. Instead, she brings them to life, overturning a lot of what we thought we knew about the ancient Greece and Rome along the way.

Most modern historians and students of mythology dismissed the fabulous creatures described by Homer and other ancient writers as the products of overheated imaginations, too much wine or bad grain. At best, they were considered metaphors for whirlpools or thunderstorms or other natural phenomena the ancients probably understood almost as well as the average non-scientific American.

Mayor, like Heinrich Schliemann (the discoverer of Troy) before her, took a different tack. She wondered if the legends might be telling it straight. The accounts of giant bones uncovered at the sites of legendary battles during the height of the Greek and Roman eras were too numerous, too full of detail and simply too boring to dismiss. The same applied to reports of the remains of gigantic heroes venerated at ancient temples.

Then there was the peculiar depiction of “The Monster of Troy” on a Corinthian vase painted around 550 B.C. Most of the vase is decorated in the beautiful, stylized black on red figures familiar to lovers of classical Greek art. In comparison, the “monster” is white and ungainly, and hangs at an odd angle from its supposed lair. Mayor wondered if, instead of a living creature emerging from a cave, it might be an early depiction of a fossilized skull embedded in a cliff face.

To test her theories, Mayor tracked down the scant remains of the temple caches. Working with paleontologists who specialize in mainland Greece and islands of the Aegean Sea, she developed a model of what kinds of fossils the ancients might have found. She also identified some of the places where they would’ve found them--places which remain rich sources of fossils even today.

Mayor realized the fossils of prehistoric mammals found on a number of Greek islands could be mistaken for the remains of misshapen, bipedal giants. After all, one mammalian thigh bone--or spine or rib or hip bone--looks pretty much like another, regardless of size. The skulls of mammoths and mastodons don’t have eyes in the front. They boast a single center-front opening where the trunk would be attached in a living animal. If you tilt the skull so the pits where the tusks are attached become the “jawline” and assemble the rest of the skeleton as if it walked on two feet, you’ve got a perfect model for Homer’s monstrous, one-eyed Cyclops.

In addition, Mayor’s research uncovered connections between ancient descriptions of griffins and the remains of Protoceratops dinosaurs discovered by ancient gold prospectors in central Asia. The Monster of Troy turned out to be a rendering of a large prehistoric mammal’s skull so exact modern paleontologists had no trouble identifying the species.

What makes Mayor’s odyssey through Greek mythology even more strange and wonderful is her background. She isn’t an archaeologist or anthropologist or even a paleontologist. She’s a late-blooming folklorist who worked most of her professional life as a printmaker and copy editor. She doesn’t have any advanced degrees and didn’t even consider writing a book until she was over fifty. Yet she’s now a visiting scholar at Stanford University with publication credits most tenured professors would envy. She’s even got her very own episode of the History Channel’s History’s Mysteries, "Ancient Monster Hunters".

Talk about a role model for the ages. Mayors is living my favorite Robert Browning line: “The best is yet be.” Not to mention sending my plot bunnies into overdrive.

For more information, check out:

Adrienne Mayor's Stanford Page

Adrienne Mayor's Home Page

Adrienne Mayor's Wiki

New York Times Feature on Adrienne Mayor

Girl Power Times Three

courtesy of Jean Marie Ward

If numbers have power, three qualifies as the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. Everybody knows about the Three Kings and the Three Stooges--not to mention “Three strikes, you’re out”. But did you know it’s a power number for women--especially sisters? And these are women you don’t want to mess with.

1. Three Sisters (play by Chekov)
2. Three Graces (Greek & Roman Mythology)
3. Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash--the three main food crops of the Native American tribes in New England, which can be grown together for the benefit of all)
4. Three Sisters Islands (three islands in the Potomac River near Washington, DC)
5. Three Norns (Norse mythology)
6. The Three Sisters (three Irish rivers, all arising in the mountains of County Tipperary, which flow into the sea in the same bay southwest of Waterford)
7. Three Fates (Greek & Roman Mythology)
8. Drei Schwestern (a group of three mountains forming a natural boundary between Lichtenstein and Austria)
9. Three Witches (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)
10. Three Sisters (a single mountain with three peaks near Fernie in British Columbia)
11. Three Furies (Greek & Roman Mythology)
12. Three Gorgons (Greek & Roman Mythology)
13. Tri Sestry (a volcano in the Kuril Islands in Russia)

Shifters Through the Ages

Change is magic. Magic is change--and we can’t get enough of it. The shift can be as mundane as the sleight of hand which changes a magician’s handkerchief into a bouquet of silk flowers or as extreme as a transformation from man to dragon and back again.

Samhain Publishing’s recent open call for stories about cat shifters only reinforces the point. Voluntary shapeshifters are a staple of epic and urban fantasy. Even Dracula did his bit (pun intended), transforming on occasion from man to mist, wolf and bat.

This fascination with shapeshifters has a long literary history. In classical mythology, the gods routinely take the shape of other people to pursue their affairs. Zeus, the head of the Greek pantheon, was the pro from Dover when it came to pretending to be someone else to achieve his amorous goals. At one point he even turned himself into the goddess Artemis to get close to Callisto, the female object of his then current affections.

He wasn’t the only one. Britain’s King Arthur owes his existence to a human variation on this ploy. His mother Ygraine claimed she only slept with Uther Pendragon--while she was still married to his rival Gorlois--because she thought she was sleeping with her husband. And people bought it too.

To be fair, they also accepted it when Danae said Zeus impregnated her in the form of a shower of gold. At least the grown-ups did. I suspect her son Perseus had a lot harder time of it. Can you imagine trying to explain to your buds that your absent dad was “a golden shower”? Is it any surprise the kid grew up tough? I bet they called him “Percy” too.

More familiar--and undoubtedly more attractive--to today’s readers of shapeshifter romances are Zeus’s other guises. On various occasions, he transformed into an eagle, a swan and a bull. His brother Poseidon took the form of a horse and a ram.

Our culture’s somewhat disapproving view of these transformations is colored by modern notions of morality. The Greeks and Romans, however, didn’t apply the same standards to their gods they applied to themselves.

To a large degree, Zeus and Poseidon owed their position at the top of the divine food chain to their extraordinary potency. Their ability to sire offspring in a multitude of forms was seen as a reflection of their ability to ensure the fertility of the land and the sea. In contrast, their brother Hades, the lord of the dead, displayed no transformative power. He achieved his ends through stealth (he possessed a helmet which allowed him to turn invisible) and brute force. He also sired no children.

The animals Zeus and Poseidon chose for their transformations were significant too. Horses, cattle and sheep were the “noble” animals which formed the basis of civilization as the Greeks and Romans understood it. The horse offered mobility and a strategic advantage on ancient battlefields. Cattle drove plows, fertilized fields and provided the finest meat. Sheep provided clothing and meat.

The birds reflected Graeco-Roman political and spiritual aspirations. Eagles make their nests in the highest crags--mountains like Olympus, the gods’ supposed home. In addition, the eagle’s ferocity provided a compelling symbol of military might. Rome made the eagle its emblem, and for over four hundred years small figures of eagles topped all legionary flags. Swans were seen as symbols of personal nobility and sacrifice because they were believed to mate for life.

In contrast, the wolves and big cats beloved of urban fantasies were shunned in classical mythology. The Greek werewolf myth is a cautionary tale about Lycaon, a lawless tyrant with no respect for god or man. Lycaon attempted trick the gods into eating human flesh. Some sources said he served them his dismembered son at a banquet in their honor. Others claimed he sacrificed a child on one of Zeus’s altars. For his crimes, Zeus transformed Lycaon and his sons into wolves--the symbol of everything destructive to Greek civilization.

This curse further threatened anyone who participated in the rituals held at Lycaon’s altar. The affected person could only regain their humanity if they abstained from eating human flesh for a period of nine years--something the Greeks obviously considered beyond a wolf’s ability. No self-respecting Greek hero was ever suckled by a she-wolf, for example. That was left to the Romans, who everyone knew were just a toga (and a few thousand legions) away from being barbarians themselves.

Lycaon’s daughter escaped being transformed into a wolf, because she was a companion (or priestess) of Artemis and presumably not a party to her father’s atrocities. But that didn’t mean she got off scot-free.

Lycaon’s daughter was the same Callisto Zeus wooed in the guise of Artemis. This little adventure didn’t set well with either Artemis (who felt Callisto belonged to her) or Zeus’s wife Hera (who felt the same way about Zeus). So Zeus transformed Callisto into a bear, ostensibly for her protection. But you got to wonder about that when both Hera and Artemis immediately declared open season on bears and shot her dead.

The moral of Callisto’s story is it didn’t pay to transform into a wolf, bear, big cat or any other large predator in classical mythology. Most medieval legends cast them as villains or victims too, presumably for the same reasons the Greeks did. Wolves, bears, wild boars and lynxes were agents of chaos. They killed people and destroyed livestock. They were also the totems of the barbarian tribes--from the Picts and Scoti to Viking berserkers--who pillaged and plundered the struggling outposts of Christian civilization.

The one notable exception can be found in Marie de France’s poem Bisclavret. Bisclavret is a French nobleman who turns into a wolf three days a week. Seeking to take a lover, his unfaithful wife traps him in wolf form. But virtue (and vice) will out, and she is foiled when the wolf is befriended by the king. Bisclavret, however, is a remarkably passive hero. Other than behaving in a manner atypical of a wolf (he doesn’t humans for the most part) he takes no action on his own behalf. He’s a victim in the sense he can’t save himself. That job is left to the king and his ministers.

It took the Industrial Revolution to make heroes of predatory shapeshifters. In part this was because they posed no longer much of a threat. Wolves had been eradicated from most of civilized Europe and North America. Lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) represented a danger only if they escaped from a zoo.

The allure of Dracula probably helped. So did the folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and others in the nineteenth century, which portrayed various wild animals as potential helpers of the hero. My personal favorite was “Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf”, in which the rather dim Ivan succeeds in winning the matched set of princess and kingdom entirely due to the cunning of the wolf, who turns out to be an enchanted prince.

I always thought the wolf prince’s bride would have a lot more fun than Ivan’s trophy wife. Certainly she’d never be bored. From the number of sexy werewolves, dragons and other predatory shifters currently occupying bookstore shelves, it appears a lot of people agree with me.

Panel discussions at several recent conventions suggest there may be other factors at work as well. Predatory shapeshifters don’t have to play by the rules of polite society. They can get away with all the Uber Alpha Male behavior most romance heroes abandoned sometime in the 1990s, simply because they can overpower any human butt-kicking chick. This makes the heroine’s ultimate victory through the power of love that much more delicious.

I agree there’s something intensely satisfying about watching “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” play out in a well-written story. Part of it is the natural desire to see right vanquish might. But I also think part of the attraction of these shifters is their comforting badness. Face it, the cities we live in and the worlds we create in our fantasies tend to be very scary places. Who would you want guarding your back when the flit hits the shan--a nice noble swan, a wolf with a trickster’s brain or a dragon who can reduce the villains to crispy critters?

Then there’s the magic of the change itself. If our heroes and heroines represent what we wish to be, what do all these shapeshifter stories say about us? Could they represent our desire to transform physically ourselves--perhaps laying the groundwork for the day when genetic manipulation becomes a real possibility? Or are they metaphors for a spiritual transformation? Or both?

I couldn’t begin to say. I’m having too much fun watching the writing magicians pull rabbits--and wolves and tigers and dragons--from their storytelling hats. And I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

Please allow me to introduce myself...

I’m a baaaad girl.

I signed up for the Fantasy & Enchantment Blog weeks ago. I nagged my fellow Samhellions into letting me in the door. I nagged them into posting Anne Cain’s gorgeous cover for my book. Then what did I do?

I vanished into the writing hole, that’s what.

Bad Jean Marie.

Well, no more. I’m back, and I plan to be a lot badder. Consider me the wild card in the F&E deck. I write comic fantasy strongly influenced by popular culture. My first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with the late Teri Smith, explored what would happen to a stultifying, Renaissance-style world where magic worked if you imported nine fanfic writers who thought they knew everything about it. My current WIP looks at the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and you know, the way I write it (from her point of view) it’s a comedy. Sex, death and rock-n-roll--what more could anybody ask?

I love dragons and great clothes and magicians and world-altering battles of good and evil, but I come at all of them from a slightly skewed angle. This blog showcases some of the best fantasy romance writers Samhain has to offer. They are our resident experts on everything from Celtic mythology and dragons to medieval witchcraft. They know their stuff, and most of the time I’ll leave the discussion of those topics in their capable hands.

I plan to bring you the other side of the fantasy coin. For example, everybody knows about the Hydra, the Minotaur and other A-list monsters of Greek mythology. But have you ever heard about the Melinoe? Did you know that Eros isn’t really a god at all, much less the son of Aphrodite (or Venus)? Depending on which source you read, he’s either the oldest of the Titans or the oldest sentient being in the universe. How cool is that for someone who believes in romance?

Then there’s the stuff that comes from other mythologies. The youkai--or demons--of Japanese legends are the personification of natural forces and natural-born shifters. They combine facets devils and shifters, and according to one popular theory, the reason we don’t hear about them anymore is they have figured out how to pass as human.

There are a million stories in the naked fantasy city. I hope to be your guide to the ones a little off the beaten track. They glitter just as brightly as the ones you know.