A to Z Theme Reveal

Hello! I'm Elizabeth, and I write fiction. There's a (mostly up to date) list of stuff I've written here, if you're interested.

I've done A to Z to varying levels of success in past years, but this year I decided I would actually, you know, use this space to bring my fiction to the foreground. So I've written a story, a complete arc that I'll tell throughout the month. For each day of the challenge, I'm going to release a new, very short, chapter. It's all first person, from the point of view of someone using this space to communicate to her online audience.

In other words, a different voice, with a different set of experiences, will be taking over this blog for the month of April. My plan is to answer all comments in that voice for the month, so...in a way this is hello? And goodbye. I hope you enjoy it! I can't wait to visit yours and see what you're doing.

Robert Eggers' The Witch

This isn't a review site, so I'm not going to, uh, review The Witch. I do want to talk about it from a craft perspective, however, because it was absolutely fricking stunning, and deserves all the support, and a bunch of awards. All the awards. 

I could talk about a great deal that I absolutely loved about this film. I think, as a (former) Renaissance scholar, I'm fairly obligated to like it? From the dialogue, which emulates Jacobean English in a very authentic sounding way, to the old school Renaissance witchery, it was so far up my street, it opened my front door, offered me a cup of warm goat's milk, and is now my roommate. I could say a lot about its incredible aesthetic and the familiarity of the woods where it was filmed and the way those woods are now super super creepy to me. Yay! I would also praise its lack of jump scares and the way the fears it evoked were so essential to the experience of being human, it barely required its supernatural elements.

But I want to talk about its characters, or rather, about how it drew those characters. 

It would be easy, in a film that featured a Puritan family cast out of its New England settlement (for being too Puritan? Not Puritan enough? the answer is unclear, and does not matter to the story), to fall back on lazy stereotypes. It would be easy, super easy, especially in the context of a film about women and their power (or lack thereof), to make the father a thundering, Bible-thumping patriarchal monster, and the son a little monster in training. It would be easy to make the teenage girl petulant and hungry for something different, and the mother a powerless wreck. 

The Witch never, never allows itself to be lazy. 

It never forgets that before whatever else they are, its characters are human beings with close, loving bonds to each other. It never forgets that above all else, these are people in trouble, caught in a terrible situation that might have, at one point, been of their own making, but has gone far, far beyond that, into something completely obscene.

Instead of a thundering, Bible-thumping monster dad, we have a man who is trying to hold his family together, trying and failing, disastrously so, to make their farm work. He's as scared as anyone else about what's happening, and it shows. The older son is as caring and earnest as any of the other characters, even as he's clearly conflicted about the white lies that circulate all around him, and his budding sexual interest in his older sister. The teenage daughter--and our point of view character--struggles for autonomy even as she plans to fight to stay with her family, and, eventually, struggles to be believed. Everyone in this film has multiple motivations running simultaneously, and, with each new development, as the trouble deepens, each one of them ticks over into a new mode of being, more desperate and frightened than they were before. 

Never--and if you know horror movies, you know how hard this is to pull off--never do they lose their humanity. Even when it might be better for them if they could. This film hurts as much as it frightens. That's saying something. 

I can't say enough about how wonderful The Witch is. As a study in finely drawn characters (the finest), it's worth having a look. 

WRiTE CLUB

I've often sighed audibly and lamented the fact that there are not enough opportunities for writers to just...fight each other. To battle it out in the pit, UFC style. If the end of the world as we know it would mean that someone would instantly erect the Thunderdome, I would be all for it.

In the meantime,

THERE'S WRiTE CLUB.

It's a really cool thing, and has been going on for a while, and is only getting cooler. Follow #writeclub2016 for updates!

"The Bird Marriage" at Enchanted Conversation

Saint Valentine is weird.

First of all, that should be "Saint Valentines." There were a lot of them. At least eleven, apparently, one of whom might have been martyred for marrying couples in the Christian tradition.

The association between Valentine's Day and romantic love is something that a lot of people trace back to Chaucer's Parlement of Foules (Parliament of Fowls), in which he wrote that Valentine's Day is when birds choose their mates. Some people have argued that this statement hearkens back to some deep cultural tradition. It's entirely possible he made it up.

Chaucer, pictured here pointing at some other stuff he made up. 

Valentine's Day overlaps with the Roman feast of Lupercalia, a celebration involving purification, fertility, ritual sacrifice, nudity, and, as far as I understand it, at least a bit of spanking. (*That might be a misinterpretation but it sounds more fun than lining up to be swatted by fresh goat and dog hides.*)

I adore the idea of modern traditions that overlap with and only barely obscure pagan origins, and I even more powerfully adore the idea that there are beings that somehow still lurk in the shadows, pushing us along at these festive times of year, helping this sorry old world roll forward.

So, I wrote a story about bird marriages, dark incantations, and spells involving candy hearts. It's also about what happens after the happily ever after.

If you'd like, you can read it here: "The Bird Marriage" at Enchanted Conversation, as well as the other fabulous stories from their February Valentine issue.

In the Name of Resurrecting this Blog, I

...signed up for April A to Z. This bodes well:

Greetings, People of Earth

2015 has been interesting. My business grew by leaps and bounds. There was one significant family health crisis, happily resolved. The amazing Dave and I bought a house in one of the most bizarrely competitive markets in Canada, and moved into said house. (As I write this, Box Mountain still stands.) I wrote. I wrote a lot of long form stuff. I edited some of it. I didn't edit some...other parts of it.

And I drifted a bit, but that always happens. I met a lot of creative types. I thought a lot about craft. I thought a lot about where I want to go with this writing thing. I wondered why it's so hard to finish a long form project. I wondered how you all were doing!

So I'm here in this space again, to say howdy (HOWDY) and to also say that I'm planning to play Write1Sub1 this year. I've been outside of the short story space for a while and I miss it! In the name of warming up, I wrote and subbed a drabble to Alban Lake's Great Lake Drabble Contest (Confessions of a Shapeshifter). 

*whispering into your ear* join me....

I've also got my eye on the hilariously titled No Shit, There I Was anthology...because yes. They want short (2k-7500 words) speculative fiction that starts with that line. Forever endeared to me because the guidelines include the phrase "salty language is okay." Oh sing the song of my heart. They're offering pro rates. DL 6 January. 

I hope whatever your plans are for 2016, they're shaping up well. I plan to stop by all of yours to see how you are, but please don't hesitate to drop a comment and let me know immediately!

Trunking It

So I woke up in a cold sweat this morning, heart pounding, only to realize it had been approximately a thousand years since I last dropped by here and said something. 

Okay I didn't. But I have been thinking about all of you and imagine my joy and bliss to see that so many of you are still vigorously or at least semi-vigorously posting on your bloggity blogs. 

In the last mumbly-joe months I've been continuing my project of getting old stuff off my hard drive and out into the world, an effort that has sometimes meant putting in some time trying to compensate for old bad habits, and I've been trying to get serious about finishing a novel project or two. My regular business (teaching Tai Chi and Qigong) has somewhat taken off in a way that isn't looking like it will slow down any time soon, so that's been sucking down some time. 

Currently I'm working on a superhero story and trying to finish one about genetically altered sheep women. 

How about you??