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  • Exploring the Land of Oz

    While I was AWP this last year, I found out about a new journal, the Fairy Tale Review, that publishes my kind of writing: reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, translations, and scholarly articles about fairy tales, and this year their call for submissions was looking for stories about the Land of Oz.

    I developed an idea, but to make sure it would work with the world that L. Frank Baum had created, I decided I should probably read all the novels of Oz, just to make sure I got all the history right. And guess how many there are…Baum alone wrote 14 Ozian novels (as well as some shorter bits) and then after his death, his publisher contracted with other authors to write several more. The scope of tales about Oz and its surrounding countries is extensive and deep. Baum’s tales include the list below:

    My favorite of all the stories was The Marvelous Land of Oz because we get to meet HM Wogglebug TE, a bug of unusual size and education who makes the worst puns I have ever heard. His traveling companions aren’t too fond of them either. But the whole thing is such an excellent farce of the culture and society surrounding education at that time that I couldn’t help but laugh.

    There was one book, however, that I found terrifying in its absurdity: The Tin Woodman of Oz. This is a tale where Nick Chopper is convinced to go find his beloved and offer himself again to her. However, there are horrific twists and turns that I’m sure to a child were delightful, but to an adult were almost too dark. Just imagine a man made of the glued together chopped up bits of two separate men who goes on to marry the woman that those two men had loved before becoming metal…shudder. I can see that done as a Saw worthy sequel…

    The books, for all that they are meant for a younger audience, are very entertaining and well worth the read, particularly if you’ve only ever read or seen the film made after the first book. They are much funnier, and incredibly intelligent parodies of American turn of the century culture, much as Flatland was to the Victorian culture.

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  • #WritingPrompt What would your wake look

    #WritingPrompt What would your wake look like? Or, what would the wake for your favorite character look like? Or your current character?

  • A Beautiful Death

    A few years ago, I had the pleasure to take a literature class with Ladette Randolph, author and publisher-in-residence at Emerson College. I admired her work then, and was excited to learn she had a new book out, Haven’s Wake. 

    Haven’s Wake is a unique novel that takes place over the course of two days and a handful of viewpoints, all surrounding the death of a Nebraskan Mennonite family patriarch. We get views of the preparation for the funeral from such varied people as his elderly wife with a martyr complex, his shunned son who now runs a lighting design company in Boston, and his granddaughter through his other son who collects the towns dirty little secrets. To tell you much more than this would spoil the story.

    What that story does, however, is to construct an incredible portrait of a splintered family, with all the sibling rivalries, trauma from days gone bye, and religious fervor you could wish for. Your heart breaks for this family while at the same time you find yourself rooting for one family member to stick it to another, then in the next chapter find yourself sympathizing with the one you just wanted to get their comeuppance. It is masterfully wrought, and I am not ashamed to say that I cried at the end.

    I highly suggest this novel for anyone who appreciates a good solid family drama, and isn’t afraid to feel some emotion, because there is no way to avoid it. Go out and find yourself a copy of this one today.

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  • #WritingPrompt Think back to your childh

    #WritingPrompt Think back to your childhood to the moment you knew you had to write stories. Write us that story.

  • Youth Literacy Day!

    Today is National Youth Literacy Day!

    Today, you should:

    Read a book to a child.

    Donate a book to a library.

    Explore 826, an organization dedicated to furthering writing and reading in inner city youth populations. Make a donation, volunteer, or answer one of their writing prompts!

    Develop a sinister looking device that remotely transmits the ability to read to the whole world.

    Okay, maybe this last one is a bit of a stretch, but look how easy it makes everything else look!

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  • #WritingPrompt Take one aspect of our te

    #WritingPrompt Take one aspect of our technology and write a story that extrapolates it to a logical, or illogical extreme.

  • Some Good Old Classic Sci-Fi

    I have to admit that when it comes to the good old classic sci-fi, I have some blind spots, and, until recently, Stanislaw Lem was one of them. When my friend heard that I had never read any of his work, he promptly sent The Cyberiad to my kindle and insisted I read it right away. I was not disappointed.

    The Cyberiad is a collection of short stories, one more of a novella, that have taken our technologically rich world and pushed it to its illogical extremes. There are two inventors (apparently mostly mechanical themselves) at the heart of the stories who are in constant, mostly friendly, competition in building robots and thinking machines and all sorts of devices to solve the problems of rulers and worlds.

    Now, while the stories themselves are engaging, it is the sardonic and caustic attitude of the telling that makes them such a treat. Not to mention the illustrations by Daniel Mróz. I guarantee you’ll be laughing your ass off while still not getting all the jokes. Well, maybe my father would, but he’s a physicist, and these jokes are of the same caliber as the highest brow XKCD mathematical puns.

    At the same time though, these stories really make you stop and think about what we are using our technology for today, whether we’re genuinely putting our knowledge and skills towards the best efforts or are we really just concerned with making better masturbatory machines. Literally, I’m not joking, there’s at least two stories involving machines like this, one meant to break a prince of his inappropriate infatuation and the other to so engage a ruler so as to prevent him from noticing that it was trying to kill him. And then there is the story about the two inventors creating a machine that writes poetry and how out of hand that gets as poets come from around the world to duel with it.

    I highly suggest picking this up to read at least one or two of the stories in it. It took me a little while to get through because its hard to read more than one of the stories at once, the complex and convoluted language tends to leave your brain spinning just a bit, but its totally worth the verbal vertigo.

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  • #WritingPrompt Quick! Your house is burn

    #WritingPrompt Quick! Your house is burning down, what non-animate object do you save and why?

  • My Kind of Fantasy

    If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a sucker for fantasy, and I blame it all on my father. He started me young with the speculative books, and I’ve never forgotten them. One of the series that I have had on my shelf as long as I can remember are the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede. Like, I have no idea where they actually came from, I’ve owned them that long. And they have had a profound influence on my taste in books and my style of writing.

    And the best part? I went back and re-read them just last month and they are still just as good as when I was reading them as a child. Do you know how hard that is to pull of as a YA author? Go on, I dare you to go re-read your favorites from before puberty. You’ll wince. But not these; the writing and the characters, and all of it are so vivid and excellently written that they withstand the scrutiny of an MFA wielding writer 25 years down the line. Now that’s just impressive.

    But back to the books themselves. They are the most delightful parody of classic fairy tales you could ever wish for. On her site, Ms. Wrede claims inspiration from the land of Oz and the “Fractured Fairy Tales” of Rocky and Bullwinkle. You can certainly feel it in the quirky and determined heroine Cimorene in the first book all the way through to our overly polite hero Daystar in the last book. They take every fairy tale trope and turn it over, shake it hard, set back upright and paint a new face on it.

    The reason I went back to these stories now was because I wanted to capture that feel of intelligent irreverence before going back to edit my own fantasy novel, Mark of the Storyteller. Ms. Wrede’s grasp of language, comedic timing, and knowledge of fairy tale lore is unique in her genre, and it is worth studying—and studying hard—before moving on to your own fairy tale parodies. Or for reading when you’re stuck sick in bed because it can always make you laugh, even when you have the majority of it memorized.

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  • What Would You do to be King?

    Rudyard Kipling has long been a favorite author of mine because of his Just So stories. They filled my childhood with wonder and I can still picture the animated version of “How the Elephant Got its Trunk” that I must have watched hundreds of times. Then when I was hunting for novellas for research on the form, I came across The Man Who Would be King. 

    Yes, a movie version of it came out in ’97. Yes, I was too young to actually watch it, but you can be sure I’m going to hunt it down now. ‘Cause…Sean Connery, how can you say no to that? But back to the novella…

    This story is structured like many adventure tales of the time: there is a narrator who is not at all an actual part of the story, but serves as a vehicle for the actual adventurers to expound upon their tale. This format worked great for The Time Machine, it doesn’t work so well with this one, unfortunately.

    Basically, you’ve got a reporter who ends up being nice to a couple of gentlemen down on their luck, watches them ride off, determined to make themselves kings in the Middle East, then watches one come back broken and nearly dead who tells him of the marvelous time they had wherein they did indeed become kings and then were betrayed by the desire for a woman. And I didn’t give one whit about the reporter, I wanted to be off gallivanting with the adventurers because they seemed like they were having so much more fun than the poor writer. The way in which the story was told kept the reader at arms length from the action, unlike the time machine where the story still managed to be immersive. And this story had such amazing potential, too! I could have been riveting.

    Someone obviously agreed with me on that front, so they made a movie. Which I’m now going to go watch, because if Connery gets into the same kind of trouble that these men did, its going to be amazing…

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