your silence

your silence
flattened me, a stone
on my chest.

all through dinner
the rest of us laughed
and gossiped

but you brooded
and hatched thoughts
of poison.

Love Is a Triangle

Rick or Vic?

“Under stress, two people tend to draw in a third. They stabilize the system by forming a coalition of two in relation to the third. The basic unit of an emotional system is a triangle.” — Monica McGolderick, Genograms

Does ever great love story actually involve three people?

I’ve been wondering this as I work on the outline for a romance. Originally, I envisioned the conflict as coming from the opposing motives of the hero and heroine. But I feel as though perhaps a third charcter, now on the periphery, might move in to create a love triangle.

What do you think? Is there more tension when there is a serious second contender for the hero or heroine’s heart? Clearly, the love triangle has the power to generate interest above and beyond the simple romance, or it wouldn’t be such a tried and true plot device….

Ed or Jake?

Then again, Romeo and Juliette was not a love triangle. Jessica Rabbit was not actually playing patty-cake on Roger. The conflict came from just two sides, and that was enough to cause suffient mayhem. I hate to set up a love triangle merely to be formulaic.

It seems also that in the best love triangles, the two choices mean something, beyond the obvious. Rick and Victor in Casablanca represent different attitudes towards involvement in the war, which is why, no matter how much Elsa loves Rick, it’s right that she goes with Victor. (Please don’t whine about spoilers if you didn’t know this. Please.) Likewise, Jacob and Edward are totally different personalities, and bring out a different aspect of Bella. James Bond always has two female flings, the good girl and the naughty vixen; usually one is blond or redhead and the other is a brunette so you won’t be confused by their otherwise identically vapid personalities.

It would be fairly boring if the love triangle offered the chooser the option of two guys/gals who were pretty much alike. It would be like Bond having to chose between two redheads in the same movie. What would he do with himself?

My point is, if there is a triangle, it should have a deeper meaning than just another pretty face. It shouldn’t be, “Well, I could marry this guy and live in suburbia with five kids, or that guy and live in suburbia with five kids,” it should be “Well, I could marry this guy and save the free world or marry that guy and defect to Burma.”

Who we choose to love should impact the fate of the whole world. At least in fiction.

Happy Valentines Day!

Publishing, One More Bastian of Male Chauvanist Pigs (Apparently)

In 1903… a disgruntled sorcerer in eastern New Guinea announced that within three days he was turning every man in the village into a woman, and every woman into a man.


The men were panic stricken, New Guinea being such a male dominated society, but, as the investigating white magistrate observed, “the women viewed the threat with supreme complacency.”*

Laura Miller, over on Salon, chips away at the issue of why there aren’t more female authors.

Franklin, who was chagrined to find that only 33 percent of the books she reviewed last year were by women, concluded that “magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year. The question now becomes why more books by women are not getting published.” Since publishing a book tends to burnish the reputation of a reviewer or essayist (just as publishing well-received reviews and essays in journals can lead to a book contract), the two situations are certainly intertwined.


…The imbalance in books published is indeed a puzzle; book publishers, like any other business, want to make money, and multiple surveys indicate that women buy and read far more books than men do. (This fact has long been established within the book business, but since some Salon readers have questioned it in the past, please see the National Endowment for the Arts “Reading at Risk” report.) If women were only — or even primarily — interested in books by women, the logic of the marketplace would dictate that publishers should release more titles by female authors.

And here’s where we have to get anecdotal. There’s really no hard data on how many books by male authors are read by women readers and vice versa, nor are we likely to ever see any. But try this: Ask six bookish friends — three men and three women — to list their favorite authors or favorite books, without explaining your motivation. Then see how many male authors the women list and whether the men list any female authors at all.

A couple of researchers at Queen Mary College in London did something along these lines in 2005. They asked “100 academics, critics and writers” to discuss the books they’d read most recently. According to the Guardian, “four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer.” When it comes to gender, women do seem to read more omnivorously than men. Publishers can assume that a book written by a man will sell to both men and women, but a book by a woman is a less reliable bet.

So not much has changed since 1903… men still freak out imagining themselves as women, but women are complacent about the reverse.


The only thing I can’t figure out is if this study included geenre romance books. As far as I can tell, those are reviewed by most “serious” reviewers (fantasy and sf aren’t either, with some notable exceptions), and I think most of the authors in that genre are female. Interestingly, when male romance authors usually use a female pen name–a fact that seems to imply female readers are looking for female authors.


There’s still the issue of why a genre of predominantly female interest would be considered unsuitable for serious consideration…..


*(hat tip to Laura Anne Gilman, who posted that on Facebook.)


**I am really annoyed with Blogger’s new formatting. 

A Talk and Booksigning with Deborah Harkness

I attended a talk by Deborah Harkness last night at USC, the university where she teaches. It was the release day for her novel A Discovery of Witches and the first book signing in what’s likely to be a whirlwind tour. She’s already a bestselling novelist.

A lot of profs from the history department were there, as well as grad students and undergrads. Syrie James, the author of Dracula, My Love and Nocturne was also there, but not too many other novelists that I know of. (If you know otherwise, correct me.) The talk was held in Doheny Library and books lined the room where she spoke, so it was a fairly rarified academic atmosphere…the perfect background, given the book. Nonetheless, I resisted, as long as possible, the urge to geek out and take notes. I mean, she’s used to students taking notes when she give lectures, but I figured she probably didn’t want note takers during her novel reading. My resolve lasted all of fifteen minutes. Then I broke down and took notes, mostly because I already knew I wanted to blog about it, and also because Deb is damn funny.

She began by explaining the bare bones of the novel to those who hadn’t read an ARC or (like me) downloaded it on their kindle and finished it in one sitting before the talk.

“My character is 33 and has tenure at Yale…that’s how you can tell it’s a fairytale…” The audience laughed uproariously. “…and this is the last time I’ll be able to use that joke,” she added, “because no one else will get it.” (We laughed even harder.)

She read some sections aloud and talked a bit about why she wrote a novel. She didn’t plan it; it just happened. The Twilight craze was going strong in 2008 and she wondered what vampires would do for a living. “They can’ all be private investigators.”

But academia would be perfect for vampires. “You could spend 600 years on a research project and really get somewhere!” (Which is probably about how long it’s going to take me to get my PhD at this rate, by the way. But I digress.) Or, they could build their portfolio.

“Just as you don’t know the point of your paper until you write the last paragraph,” she said, to more laughter from the academics in the audience, she didn’t know what her themes were until she had written the novel. She had a couple aspirations for the book. She hoped to make academic life sexy. A major theme that evolved (inside joke, since evolution is a big theme) was the balance between science and history, logic and magic. Diana and Matthew represent the alchemical process, the marriage of opposites that gives rise to the Philosopher’s Stone, to novelty and eternity.

Another amusing bon mot was when she mentioned that her novel was publicly graded in a national magazine … and received a B+.  “Students and former students of mine may remember all the lectures I gave that a B+ is a fine grade, a sign of future potential…. Well, I don’t promise to never give that lecture again, but now I know how it feels. Just be glad your grades are not published in a national magazine!”

I probably laughed WAY too loud at that one. Er, yes, I did get a B+ in her class, and I did hear that lecture. I have to say, however, that her book is a million times better than my class papers. Which just goes to show something I’ve always known, that grading novels is a ridiculous conceit. Novels can be judged; I don’t believe they can be graded.

(Oooo, wouldn’t it be great if you could submit a novel for a history class, though? I know, you’re thinking, “Hello, moron, isn’t that called an MFA program?” To which my answer is: “They don’t study history in MFA programs.” I want to study history, I just think it would be more interesting, sometimes, to write about it as fiction. Ah, well.)

Deb noted that her experience of studying how various historical figures had build their concept of the world helped her with the novelist’s task of world-building. I thought that was a fascinating insight, a connection I’ve made intuitively, but never analyzed before.

During the question and answer period, a prof of modern history asked her, “What’s wrong with getting over magic? I like the modern world. I’m going to come out in favor of disenchantment.”

Deb answered that magic represents “limitless potential” and we need a little magic in modern life, we need faith in limitless potential.

Indeed.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

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