“I was just thinking: Frankenstein!”

Last week I attended a wonderful talk/ book discussion, “Reading like a Writer: Frankenstein,” which conjured Mary Shelley et al telling spooky stories around a fireplace on a rainy night in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. It must be the most famous party in literary history. (Conveniently, during our discussion, it was raining heavily, and we met at a haunted Victorian mansion.)

I just watched the latest episode of Doctor Who, at the end of which the Doctor said, “I was just thinking: Frankenstein!” My first thought: “Are they going to Geneva in 1816?!” After the credits, there was a brief preview, and it indeed looks like the Doctor and her friends are going to visit Lord Byron’s villa in Geneva on the night that Mary Shelley first started writing Frankenstein! If I had a TARDIS, that would be high on my list of times/places to visit.

Also, next month I’m going to see Manuel Cinema’s mixed media production of Frankenstein; it involves puppets and video and whatnot. It’s going to be amazing.

Maybe this year I’ll read some more books by and about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. I’m feeling so inclined….

Gideon the Ninth Has Invaded my Dreams

I keep having dreams apparently inspired by the novel Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. The dreams involve wandering corridors in a gigantic house or palace. But of course, that’s not terribly different from dreams I’ve had over the years.

I dreamed about a place with numerous people, in some sort of building. There was a nun–I think a Catholic nun (which must be Gideon-influenced) and there was someone wearing a bright blue plaid tam with a big red pompom on top.

But I was out on a terrace and turned away from the building for an instant. When I looked again, there were various people seated at these circular tables with cubbyholes, something like phone booths, and a plastic sort of shell that went down around them. The nun was one of these people, and she was wearing the tam.

Anti-Feminist Bullshit Day

Oh. My. Goddess. When the bar is only 1/8 of an inch above the floor, you should be able to get right over it. It’s not asking too much.

In a writers’ group this morning, one member, a white cisgender male in his sixties or seventies, shared a piece he’d written that listed off bullshit stereotypical descriptions of feminists. No, feminism is about dismantling patriarchy, rape culture, and systemic oppression such as misogyny and racism and gender binary. It’s not about hating men and wanting to have “test tube” babies. Patriarchal males are so narcissistic that even their made-up version of feminism is about them. (Since the 2016 election, I’ve repeatedly noticed patriarchal/misogynistic males wave narcissist red flags.)

As for bra-burners?! That was a misnomer invented by patriarchal mainstream media. Atlanta had a city ordinance against burning trash. Therefore the feminist protestors in question tossed oppressive, sexist things such as girdles and Ladie’s Home Journal into a trash can without actually burning them. Stop repeating a lie that has been repeatedly disproved… and read feminist books and blogs.

Later, I logged onto Facebook and visited a group that I usually enjoy. It’s for participants in National Novel Writing Month. But a female posted, asking if she must have “strong female characters” in her novel (because of something someone, maybe a friend, said) and if this is some “feminist agenda” or a requirement. She said she has a male protagonist and no “strong female characters.” Really? Not one single character in your entire novel can be described as a “strong female character”? She seems to think that because it’s medieval historical fiction, that she shouldn’t have to include strong female characters. This presumably means that her novel will have no major, three-dimensional female characters.

I was utterly flabbergasted, twice in one day (and I don’t even work in customer service anymore–heck, I’m somewhat reclusive nowadays). And I’m not going to read anything by her. Even Joss Whedon has no trouble creating strong female characters. It’s such a low bar. No doubt if she learned about the Bechtel Test, she’d have a heart attack or piss her pants or post about this “feminist agenda.”

Both situations reminded me of what a friend recently said in a feminist discussion: that people really hate us feminists. She’d dropped out of an atheist organization for this very reason. I’ve repeatedly observed that the only people with whom I enjoy socializing are feminists.

Yeah, and I’ll keep writing unabashedly feminist fiction. The funny thing is, this was a NaNoWriMo group, and my NaNoWriMo novel for this year is Feed Misogynists to Dragons, a novel so feminist that the title indicates it. I mean, it’s in your face. I’m going to soooooo wallow in the feminism of this novel and my “feminist agenda.”

Random Dreams

I dreamed I was visiting my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew in Phoenix. They were all walking with me down an urban street, and it was raining steadily. It looked more like Chicago, not Phoenix.

My brother stopped at the end of a concrete barrier on the meridian. It had a scooped-out, bowl-shaped end filled with rainwater. A cute talking fish, about the size of one of the larger coi at the chiropractor office, was splashing around in there. It was chatty and animated. He may have found it somewhere else and put it there. I knew the water would dry up, and the fish would die, so I decided to take it with us. Now I forget what I was carrying, but I guess it was a bowl. I managed to scoop up the talking, friendly fish and some water and take it…to an apartment or hotel room where we were staying.

I asked them about a container I could use, and my brother handed me a plastic basin, so I used that for the fish. I was thinking of placing it in a prominent place, the center of the coffee table, when I woke up to a bunch of noise from outside.

 

I don’t know if this was the same dream, but there was a couple with a baby boy, and they were maybe divorced. They set up an apartment just for the boy–actually, he was a toddler by now–and it had a room with dark burgundy walls. Observing the family in this room, like from an omniscient perspective, I was confused, because I didn’t think the kid was old enough to have his own apartment.

 

Before that, I kept having dreams set in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. Not nightmares: just quiet, domestic scenes, such as Serena Joy in her garden and Nick polishing the car. Scenes that I read just yesterday, when I started rereading the book.

Collecting Books by George Sand

Several of my books by George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) were published in the 1970s, a decade when second wave feminists wished to read George Sand and found it frustrating that they could read about her but couldn’t find her books. (People found her life scandalous, and misogynists insist on pretending that women are nothing but sexual objects–even a woman as brilliant as George Sand). Maybe Joanna Russ, author of How to Suppress Women’s Writing, sought books by George Sand. The main publishers of her work in English in North America were Shameless Hussy Press and Cassandra Press.

To this day, if you wish to find books by George Sand, you can’t find them in bookstores that only sell new books. Unless you shop on Amazon.com, you can only find them in libraries and used bookstores, even though she was a prolific author and wrote books that are still relevant to today’s society.

Circa 2000, I started searching for books by George Sand. I went to the public library and used interlibrary loan. I fell in love with her epic, historic, and romantic novel Consuelo and wanted my own copy. Since then, I’ve been collecting books by George Sand; some are antiques, and I found the majority at Powell’s City of Books. On Amazon.com, I eventually found print-on-demand (POD) copies of Consuelo and its sequel, The Countess of Rudelstadt, but I kept my antique copy of Consuelo.

Dismissiveness toward women’s experiences and perspectives of course are tied to dismissiveness toward women’s writing. This dismissiveness is, of course, a result of systemic misogyny.

Quandary about Querying

I should have gone back over Hauntings of Claverton Castle and The Vanquished and the Surviving and drastically cut down the word count after only about ten literary agent rejections, rather than after about thirty such rejections. Looking at information about literary agents, I find that they’ve already rejected one or both of those manuscripts, or at least that someone from their agency has, which is close enough (because if one agent of a specific agency rejects a manuscript, it’s normal for them to pass it on to other agents in the same office).

I had fooled myself that surely since some books, such as Twilight, were published despite their long word count, surely it was okay for each of these novels to be over 110,000 words. But no, I finally decided (while reading a book by a literary agent that reminded me of word count limits) that I should play it safe and cut down these two books. Each has at least one less chapter and quite a few removed scenes. I suspect that the word count was why some agents rejected them.

Today, after only a few hours of researching agents, I’m considering putting aside those two novels and waiting until an agent accepts another novel before I make another stab at Claverton Castle and Vanquished. After all, if you already have an agent, naturally that agent will be interested in some of your other work. True, if you jump around different genres like I do, you might need more than one agent…but that’s not an immediate issue for me. What’s immediate in my situation is this: do I go ahead and continue searching for agents for these two novels, or one of them, or do I set them aside for now and instead wait to contact an agent after my critique group has gone over the entirety of the WIP that I’m sharing with them? Or do I revise a certain novel I wrote during National Novel Writing Month that I think has a lot of publishing potential, and query agents about that novel (although I’d better share it with my critique group before I do that).

I think I’ll do this: continue revising a couple of WIPs, including the one I’m currently sharing with my critique group…and continue researching literary agents and pick out agents whom I haven’t queried yet about Claverton Castle or Vanquished, because surely there are still a few agents out there I haven’t queried but who are into supernatural and gothic historic fantasy. Or queer and supernatural gothic fiction. Surely I haven’t queried every such agent yet.

A Talking Ancestral Portrait

The following is a scene I removed from a dark fantasy novel, The Vanquished and the Surviving, because it’s not necessary for the plot, and because I’m currently cutting down the word count in order to increase my chances of getting accepted by an agent and a publisher. The novel is set in a slightly different Regency England, one with a lot of ghosts and demons.

*

After dinner, Vincent wandered about the house, with the two cats following him. The galleries and hallways seemed to echo with the absence of Nathaniel. Passing down a corridor and admiring ancestral paintings suspended from chains on either wall, Vincent didn’t dare visit Nathaniel’s bedroom or laboratory. He stopped in front of the paneled door and imagined the laboratory unused, looking as it did last time Nathaniel used it, with glass tubes, bottles, and vials, and the mysterious jars of whatever Nathaniel collected for his experiments. Vincent imagined glass beakers full of blue and purple fluid…and the fluid suddenly bubbling, coming to life, as though an invisible Nathaniel were experimenting and inventing.

Vincent inhaled as he backed slowly from the door. He yawned and knew he should retire for the night. One of the cats rubbed its cheek against the door frame, and the other rubbed against Vincent’s trouser leg.

Entering a long gallery lined with portraits of ancestors, Vincent yawned so fiercely that his eyes watered. He picked up his pace and headed toward his bedroom, when the cats both arched their backs and ran down the hallway. Vincent thought he saw someone moving to his right. He turned to look directly at his companion…and found himself peering up at the portrait of his maternal great-grandfather. He blinked and stared at the portrait.

Great-grandfather Augustus wore, Vincent surmised, the latest fashions in the 1780s. His black hair was curled and only lightly powdered. He wore an extraordinary embroidered, green silk suit with knee breeches and gold-buckled shoes. The old fellow was quite a dandy in his time. The portrait blinked.

Vincent stepped a little closer to gaze at his ancestor. “Ah, forgive me for staring. Great-grandfather, I presume?”

The portrait was life-size. Great-grandfather Augustus grasped the bottom edge of the ornate gold frame and leaned forward. The cats hissed and ran away. Augustus lifted his heretofore hidden lower limbs over the frame and stepped out onto the wood floor. He grasped his hands behind his back and bowed. “Yes, I’m your grandfather, on your mother’s side of the family.”

Vincent bowed in return, more deeply. “Oh, yes, that’s right. I suppose I should have known that without your telling me, but you see my other great-grandfather is also in this gallery.” Vincent glanced at other portraits, but when his venerable ancestor began speaking again, he focused his attention on the ghost.

Great-grandfather looked somewhat translucent. “You can’t have known me well. Nathaniel was the elder boy—if he were here, he would remember me.”

Vincent sighed. “Please forgive me. Regrettably, I’ve forgotten.”

“No matter, dear child. You were only two twelvemonths old when we met. I can’t expect you to recall it.”

“If memories fade so easily in the short time I have lived, what must it be like if one lives a hundred years?”

“La, more than a hundred, dear boy! What must it be like if one has been a ghost for quite some time?”

A Scene I Cut out of a Gothic Novel

Editing my queer and supernatural gothic novel, The Hauntings of Claverton Castle, I cut down the word count by 21,000 words. I figured my chances of getting an agent and getting the novel accepted by a publisher would be better if the novel wasn’t, um, about 127,000 words.

Below is a portion I removed from the novel.

*

After assessing the needs of the pantry and creating a shopping list, Charis Dunn, the housekeeper, took off her pinafore and prepared to head to town to purchase supplies. She reached into a canister in the pantry and pulled out money set aside for the household, and she tucked it into the reticule she kept in the same canister. She headed back to the servants’ hall and took her black, beribboned bonnet off a peg. As she tied it under her chin, she headed out the back door, the same door she thought an orphan like Miss Ponsonby should use.

In the village of Midsommer Norton, Charis walked down a muddy road. She passed shops in two-story stone structures on her left and the River Somer on her right. The mud sucked at her boots with a distasteful squishing sound, and often she had to pull her feet up forcefully to remove them from the mud. She would have taken the compact and lightweight Prendregast brougham, but Mr. Reginald was using it to call on friends, and she did not have the authority to take the barouche. Glancing up at a dark gray hovering cloud, she recalled Miss Ponsonby’s intrusive questions and grudgingly recalled her youthful beauty.

Charis had been alive more than long enough to know the contrast between how people—especially males—treated attractive girls of Miss Ponsonby’s age and how they treated women of her own advanced years. Before she had reached the age of forty, Charis had observed that those around her treated her with a strikingly different attitude than they had when she was young and comparatively pretty. At the thought of Miss Ponsonby, Charis smiled ruefully and acknowledged that compared to this striking golden-haired beauty her own prettiness had been nothing.

However, Charis’s youthful prettiness had been sufficient for her to attract the admiring eye of young men—and even older men—in the village, not to mention comments that she did not wish to hear. Some of those men and boys were so forward! They certainly, she thought, believed they were entitled to comment on her appearance as though she cared a fig what they thought of her. Knitting her brow, Charis remembered feeling ashamed of herself because, in a way, she did care what they thought; but she only cared in that she wished to be respected as much as any lady. They would not dare behave that way to a genteel girl like Miss Ponsonby.

Sometimes during her youth, when she went to the village of Midsomer Norton to purchase items for the kitchen as she was doing now, or to enjoy her day off, Charis walked past the shops and the pedestrians with her head bowed and wished she were invisible. If she were invisible, she thought, men would not have made unwelcome comments such as, “Oy, buxom hussy!” or, “Love, meet me at the Primrose Tavern for a drink.”

By her late thirties, content with her unmarried state, Charis walked past the store fronts on her day off and received no comments. Two youths passed her and looked straight through her; directly behind her, she knew, were two slender girls approximately the same age as the boys, who grinned and lifted their hats to the girls. This incident conjured memories of when young men treated her the same way and discomfited her. In her youth, she wished to be invisible, and now she was. As though to confirm her thoughts, a man in a cap and overalls pushed past her with a wheelbarrow full of coal and did not so much as glance her way.

Thoughts of her youth brought Charis back to when she was a lowly scullery maid at Claverton Castle. Charis pressed her lips tightly together. Sixteen-year-old Charis had most certainly not sat in the drawing room and entertained guests at the pianoforte. No, in the kitchen and the servants’ hall, she had fetched and carried and scrubbed pans and swept the ashes in the fireplaces. She wasn’t so much as a housemaid, like that girl, Jane, until she was over the age of twenty. But like Miss Ponsonby, she had been an orphan. Charis narrowed her eyes toward a shop window displaying fashion illustrations; they were a far cry from her sober black frock.

When the youthful Charis was not receiving impertinent remarks from men in the village, she was scrubbing away and working her fingers to the bone. A Sensitive who had the ability to levitate objects could have done the same work with a great deal of ease. As a young scullery maid, Charis had sometimes fantasized about having such a skill. She imagined being able to merely think of scrubbing the pots, and to immediately see a brush scrubbing them, faster than she scrubbed away, roughing up her hands. She had often feared a Sensitive joining Claverton Castle’s staff and ultimately acquiring her position. Then Charis would have been out on the streets.

With this thought, she yanked her right foot out of the mud with a loud squelch. She never lost her position, more than anything because the scullery maid had such a lowly position that it was scarcely heard of for one to be a Sensitive. Charis had always been struck by the irony: one of the most grueling and undesirable jobs that would have been nearly effortless with Sensitive powers was also one of the servant positions rarely held by a Sensitive.

Fortunately, Charis gradually progressed from scullery maid to the highest station she could reach, that of housekeeper. Years ago, she had the distinction of catching the eye of the lady, Mrs. Prendregast, and becoming the lady’s maid. The lady of the house enjoyed having Charis as her personal servant, helping her dress and style her hair. “Dunn, you have quite a talent for this kind of work. Who would have thought—you were wasted in the kitchen.”

“Well, Ma’am, I’m here now, so it’s nothing I care to fuss about,” Charis replied.

“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Prendregast said. “You’re so happy with your lot. That strikes me as an unusual trait.”

“Unusual, ma’am? It shouldn’t be, if you ask me.” The lady chuckled; Charis knit her brow, wondering what amused her. Mrs. Prendregast chuckled frequently, a trait she passed on to Master Reginald.

Charis worked as lady’s maid for Mrs. Prendregast for nearly ten twelvemonths, until the housekeeper died of heart failure. Mrs. Prendregast easily convinced Mr. Prendregast that Charis Dunn could do the job, at least in the interim. By then, Charis had witnessed the lady not chuckling as frequently, and staring into space as though lost in thought. She watched the ceiling a great deal and often lapsed into frowning silence and sighs. It was not long after Charis became housekeeper that Mrs. Prendregast died. Angry with grief, Mr. Prendregast demanded that servants refrain from talking about his wife or her sudden death.

Now Charis entered a dry goods shop and approached burlap sacks of flour. She selected a bag and exchanged glances with an apron-clad shopkeeper, who nodded and clomped across the floor toward her. Charis reflected that she could have done worse with her life, never mind that she was not genteel like Miss Ponsonby.

Charis sniffed at the thought of that girl, interrogating her about family secrets. Prying into such things was hardly a way to demonstrate gratitude to her entirely too hospitable host. Pampered and admired as that girl was, she was no real princess.

“Do you see that cab?” Charis nodded toward the large front shop window. The shopkeeper replied in the affirmative. “I need the flour in there. I’m not carrying it all the way back to Claverton Castle.”

“Yes, ma’am.” the shopkeeper handed back her change. Charis slipped it into her reticule and showed her back. Next, she must go to the street market for cheese and milk.

Second Rowanwick Witches Novel Published!

My new middle grade fantasy novel, Rowanwick Witches, Lesson 2: Gingerbread, is available for purchase on Amazon.com!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1727008189 

Aunt Amaryllis throws a Summer Solstice party with an eccentric assortment of old friends, all good witches. When her niece, Violet, asks if wicked witches exist, Aunt Amaryllis is offended. Meanwhile, Amaryllis’s old friend Wilhelmina invites them to come visit…in the Black Forest of Germany. Recalling the story of Hansel and Gretel, Violet begins to wonder if Aunt Amaryllis’s old friend isn’t as good as she claims….

 

 

Only Negative Feedback

Six years ago, I had begun to work with an editor of sorts, someone who decided to create an ebook website as a hobby. This editor accepted one novella and gave bizarre, verbally abusive feedback on a second manuscript, Woodland Castle. She wrote comments in all caps with exclamation points. She hadn’t done that on the first manuscript, although she had been very brusque and negative and made it sound like it was charity to publish my novella.

I was recently going through my hopelessly messy Yahoo inbox…and noticed an important email or two I hadn’t previously noticed. They came right after the devastating email from a friend who gave me feedback on the second draft of Woodland Castle. I thought she was my friend, one of the few people I really connected with in grad school, but her feedback on that novel, inspired by the Burning Times, was so devastating that I figured she had no respect for me and must assume I’m a terrible writer, based on that one manuscript.

She wrote the letter in a professional manner, so I didn’t think I could complain, but…I didn’t really think. My reaction toward the letter was shock and hurt and depression and shame and humiliation. Six years later, my not responding at all—not even after a week—seems insane, but at the time it apparently made sense to me. I climbed into my shell. I couldn’t think of any response, especially not any professional response; now I wish I’d given it about a week to come up with something.

Until then, I thought I was good at judging my own writing—normally it seemed like I could sense whether a story or novel is good and publishable, but since receiving her feedback, I’ve lost that certainty. All I can do is set manuscripts aside for a while and go back over them, revising them and making them much better. (Actually, I do have a great critique group, but we’re currently on hiatus.)

But clearly, I was a terrible judge of my rough novel, Woodland Castle. I felt like she punched me. Despite the professional style of her email, she had absolutely nothing good to say about the book and discouraged me from trying to get it published.

That wasn’t what I was expecting from her, especially after we discussed critique feedback. I don’t remember, but surely I described the kind of feedback I prefer: when I was an undergraduate, my favorite writing instructor was Joseph Schuster, who gave constructive feedback that inspired students to eagerly revise their stories; he acknowledge the good and the bad. I recall that she talked about how she regretted being so positive about someone’s ms that they were really encouraged and thought it was worth publishing when it actually wasn’t.

It was completely unexpected–I was accustomed to some positive feedback, not none…except with that ms, which had already received 100% negative (not to mention verbally abusive and unprofessional) feedback, from the Editor from Hell. That had happened recently; I must have still been shaken up by that, so that must have contributed to my not responding to her email.

More than anything, I didn’t reply because I had no words with which to reply. I was hurt, shocked, and depressed, and I crawled into my shell. I remember the email mentioned she wrote track changes (at least, she did on the first fifty pages). That was another thing: she gave up after only 50 pages, claiming it was too rough for feedback, and she even claimed it consisted of random scenes, even though the Editor from Hell was able to figure out that it was a heroic journey. (Granted, I added more scenes after the abusive feedback, so the novel was twice as long.)

Today I I noticed while cleaning up my inbox that she sent a couple more messages. The first one was probably the one with the track changes, unless that was attached to the original email. (I never looked over the track changes, the feedback that she put on the manuscript; I only read the completely negative email.) The second was probably asking me why I hadn’t responded. It wouldn’t make sense, but she may have even still expected me to be a reference for her, since originally she was going to critique the entire 200 pages, and I was going to write a recommendation for her. However, since her feedback was completely negative, I didn’t feel like writing any such recommendation, and since she wrote the ms off as so terrible that she stopped after 50 pages, I figured she no longer wanted the recommendation.

At the time, it made sense to me that I didn’t respond to her email because I was devastated and had no idea what to write (which no doubt anyone would say doesn’t make sense, because I’m a writer). Now in hindsight, six years later, my behavior seems crazy. So much for my communication skills. But I’m an INFJ, a feeling personality, and my reaction was entirely emotional, not thinking. Still, I wish I had replied–at least read the follow-up emails and responded to them–rather than not communicating at all. I never noticed the follow-up emails until now.

I just imagined writing her an email apologizing for not responding and for ignoring her other emails, but doing so would probably just open me up for attack. I fear that if I read those additional emails, I’ll only be opening old wounds.

By the way, since receiving her feedback, I’ve done absolutely no work on Woodland Castle. I haven’t even opened the manuscript and glanced at it. Negative feedback has probably ruined potential writing careers.