RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
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In one of those multidimensional feats common to writers of Magical Things, I’m in two places at once today – over at the Here Be Magic blog, talking about faking sincerity, and at the Paranormal Romantics blog, giving a little sneak peek at a prequel story to The Twelve Kingdoms, which I’m going to give away for free in my first Newsletter.
Which you can sign up for right here on the homepage! Just saying…
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I love this pic of David as a pirate, from a few years ago. He’s the one channeling Johnny Depp.
Yesterday, David went to sell one of his guns. He has a number of them, that he’s collected over the years. Having grown up in northern Wyoming, he learned to hunt and fish and shoot guns as a matter of course. He has fun with them and is very knowledgeable, very skilled. However, since we moved to Santa Fe, NM, he never hunts and rarely has the opportunity for target practice. So he decided to sell a gun he really only kept for interest, one he enjoyed but never shoots – an automatic rifle.
He took it, in its case, to a gun store that offers consignment in town. Reputable place that follows all the laws for holding times, etc. It happens to be located in a mall.
It hit him, as he walked into the mall, carrying the rifle in its case that not one person looked at him sideways. No security guards stopped him to ask why he was carrying a gun. People, he figured, rightly assumed that he was headed to the gun store.
And yet.
It was funny, he told me, having a different perspective now than the one he grew up with, to realize that he could have stopped, taken the gun out, loaded and fired at the people shopping. We know this kind of thing has happened, right? Yet there would have been absolutely nothing to stop him.
Now, David is one of the gentlest, most nurturing men I’ve ever known – he’s a healer, a Doctor of Oriental Medicine – and so he would never do such a thing. It bothered him quite a bit, that no one questioned him walking into the mall with a rifle.
I’m not sure what the answer is here. David and I are both children of the Rocky Mountain West. We’re accustomed to open spaces, people who smile easily, a laid-back lifestyle. I don’t want security guards in the malls.
And yet…
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I’m over at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers blog today, talking about how it feels to wrap up a trilogy and meeting one of my literary heroes.
//You can pre-order print here:
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//I’m over at Word Whores today, talking about how sidekicks get to be like barnacles on a sailing ship. (The metaphor works – seriously!)
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I’m still having fun raiding my mother’s former laptop for photos I never had copies of. She had this one of me and David framed and it’s always been one of my favorites. Now I have it in digital, too!
Yesterday I posted to the Contemporary Romance Cafe blog about The Rocky Road to Publication – which, naturally, included a riff on the Irish folksong. It amused a few people, but I think mostly no one knew what a shillelagh is, for example.
For those who did not grow up with a grandfather who took his blackthorn shillelagh on walks after dinner, it’s pronounced shi-LAY-lee. I know – Celtic spellings are weird. Speaking of which, please say Keltic, not Seltic. The Boston team is wrong. I don’t know how that came to be, but they’re just… WRONG.
At any rate, my grandfather, Pat McGee, boldly embraced the image of the Irishman – to the eye-rolling of some family members. He was born in Pottawatomie Indian Territory in 1906, a year before Oklahoma officially became a state. His parents, both also born in the US to Irish immigrant parents, named him Raymond Ivor, but he always went by “Pat.” Much more Irish – and not unlike the Paddy of the song, a standard nickname for any Irishman. Some of the family took his Irishness with a particular lump of salt because he used it, too, as a justification for drinking to excess. St. Patrick’s Day could get ugly. And Christmas. And, well, lots of occasions when my mother and her sisters were growing up.
Some of it was going on still when I was a girl, but I was largely oblivious. I loved my Papa to no end and those after-dinner walks in the golden light of evening loom large in my memory. To me, the fact that he had a blackthorn shillelagh and called it that, wasn’t a foible, but an emblem. I totally bought the schtick.
For me, it was real.
When he left my grandmother to live with the woman he’d been having an affair with all the years of their marriage – more Irish shenanigans – he took the shillelagh with him. Cirrhosis got him out in California. My grandmother held firm and refused his request to come home, so he died out there. I was a teenager at the time and respected how hard it all was on my mother, aunts and grandmother. Only years and years later, when I set out to write down my memories of him, did I wonder what happened to his shillelagh. Probably the girlfriend’s family disposed of it. She had died, too, by the time I tried to find out and no one seemed to know.
I think about it still. If I made my life a novel, it would be the thing I kept of his. I’d take it when I went for walks and remember that very flawed man who was a father to me after my own died. Who was probably a better father to me than he was to his daughters. Who instilled in me a love of books and Omar Khayyam and smooth Irish whiskey. Who taught me to pay attention to how a horse’s hoof really looks before I tried to draw it.
Who showed me that carrying a shillelagh can also be magic.
//Jeffe will be attending the Coastal Magic Convention
February 5-8, 2015
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Fun preview post of the Coastal Magic Convention, which I’ll be attending!
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This last weekend I attended Bubonicon for the first time. It’s a local, fan-run convention for sci-fi and fantasy. Apparently they started out46 years ago with six people and had worked their way up to something like 800 this year. They treated me very well and I’m glad I went.
The SFF community, however, is very different than the romance one. Having been at RWA the week before, I found the contrast marked. Never I found a more supportive, generous and non-competitive community than the romance writers. So much so, that I’d forgotten that not all writers are like this. Don’t get me wrong – the Bubonicon staff and fans were amazing. Some of the featured writers were, too. More of them were than weren’t. I got to sit and have a drink with SFWA president Steven Gould (author of Jumper) and his wife, Laura J Mixon, who also writes as MJ Locke. They made time to introduce me to their daughters and are really wonderful people. I hadn’t known Laura or her work before, but we were on a panel together and she’s so smart and amazing.
A couple of authors, however, were less generous and pulled serious attitude on me. I’m sorry to say they were older women, more established than I in fantasy writing and full of teh bitchee. One, sadly, is a writer I’ve been reading for a long time and I now regret having a bad experience with. They very much reminded me of being in grad school and the way the older women scientists singled me out. One, for example, gave my essay a C and my male classmate an A. I looked at his, to see what I missed. Not finding it, I asked her. She said that she graded me more stringently because women had to work harder to succeed in science. Seriously. She said this with a straight face.
That, however, was the 80s and I’d really thought we’d put that shit behind us.
*Deep Cleansing Breath*
The best part of the weekend, however, was meeting and listening to Stephen R. Donaldson, pictured above. I’ve always had a mixed relationship with his books. I hated the Thomas Covenant books (and I’m not alone in that, I know – possibly the most unlikable hero ever), but I loved the Mordant’s Need books. Even hating Thomas Covenant, I read anyway, recognizing the brilliance of the writing and storytelling. Those books were tremendously formative for me, especially finding in Mordant’s Need a heroine like Terisa at a time when the dense fantasies all seemed to feature male protagonists. I’d had no idea Stephen lives in Albuquerque and I was thrilled at the prospect of hearing what he had to say (on ending an epic series – right up my alley) and I was also nervous. As with above, sometimes meeting heroes can be more disappointing than anything.
You guys – he was amazing. So thoughtful. So genuine and not full of ego. I sat with writing buddy Darynda Jones, who is deep into her Charley Davidson series and was also blown away by what he had to say. I’m going to be a tease because I was so rapt that I didn’t take notes and I can’t quite reconstruct what hit me so profoundly. Except that he talked about how finishing a series left him hollow and in this state where he couldn’t even celebrate because he felt so removed from the world.
Exactly how I’ve felt. Remarkable for me to feel both that sense of connection with one of my writing heroes and that I might be doing things “right.”
I’m hoping to invite him to visit our local chapter and speak there. If he does, I promise to take notes this time!
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I’m over at Word Whores today, talking abut subplots (not my forte) and rambling a bit more on accessing other points-of-view.