Today’s interview guest is a newcomer to the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, Retta Bodhaine. She is a fantasy fiction writer from Metro-Atlanta and founder of Write Brain Artistry, LLC. Relatively new to publishing, she can recently be seen in the web based literary magazine Violet Windows, for her short story There Will Come Soft Ringtones, and on ShortFictionBreak.com for her short story, White Chips. Her most recent project, Dani’s Inferno, focuses on an all-female adventure through Hell in a comedic script produced for the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company. A preview of the work is set to show in ARTC’s Halloween Production, ARTC’s Inferno on October 29^th and 30^th at the Hapeville Performing Arts Center.

Retta is a Renaissance woman and has many various hobbies. She enjoys the great outdoors, photography, crafting, homesteading and above all else exploring and adventuring. She spends her life collecting experiences and getting to know as many of the individuals who cross her path as possible. She always talks to strangers and people watches often. These traits combined with her imaginative nature, nurtured her soul into that of a story teller. She enjoys stories in all their forms, but her preferred media is the written word.

Q: Describe the work you’re doing with the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company.

Right now I’m helping to produce, direct, write and market our October show called ARTC’s Inferno. It’s a production of Lovecraft and Halloween themed short scripts and episodes. It’s my first time producing or directing and the more experienced members of ARTC are showing me the ropes. I’ve really enjoyed learning all the new aspects. As a producer or director, you get to talk to everyone about their concerns and what things they feel are important to being able to do their jobs well. It’s a good way to learn about all of the moving parts in detail.

Q: What drew you to ARTC? What’s your favorite part of working with the company?

Wonder and love of the spoken word was cultivated in me as an infant. My mother is an avid reader, and she knew that she wanted to pass this attribute onto her children. Her first step in accomplishing this goal was to read out loud to us every night at bed time. Fascination with her cadence and tones metamorphosed into shared mental adventures. My mind has always been a curious and creative one, and it began to create its own epics. I’ve been putting them into writing ever since.

After my mother came my elementary school librarian, who introduced my favorite book to me by reading it aloud to my class. Her skills with dialect were beyond anything I had experienced before. It added something fantastic to the story and, without consciously being aware of it, I learned about voice acting. Then in fifth grade the traveling story teller Carmen Deedy visited our school. She was talented and energetic but she was also Hispanic and female like me. It was when I first learned that an adult could be a story teller as a profession, and because she was one, I dared to hope that one day I could be one too.

I found The Atlanta Radio Theatre Company at DragonCon. It was all the things I loved in one place. They were local and they wanted and encouraged people to get involved! I started going to the meetings and I found that it feels like going to a mini-con every Wednesday. The people are all fantastic, talented, unique and willing to share their lives and their love of radio drama. They’re willing to share all of the expertise and train me on their equipment. They help me make my work better and give me the opportunity to see it brought to life! Every Wednesday I leave the meeting feeling blessed and energized.

If I had to name my favorite thing about working with ARTC, I’d have to say it’s the feeling of belonging and community, but if you’re asking about my favorite aspect of creating Radio Dramas (aside from writing them) I’d have to say (so far) it’s been Foley. I like getting to play around designing the sound effects and then seeing how those touches compliment the voice actor’s abilities.

Q: As a writer, what do you hope readers/listeners will get out of your work? What are some elements you like to include?

My core beliefs tend to be the themes of my work. They are things like:

1. All our actions have consequences.
2. Each choice we make sets us on a path to make more choices in the same vein.

• The teachings of twelve step programs are wise.

1. Both the individual and humanity are more powerful than we realize.
2. Everyone should endeavor to live a life where they like themselves.
3. The rules of reality are set around cycles, patterns and balance.

As you can probably tell based on my beliefs, I tend to look at the big picture in my writings. I ask a lot of “what if” questions and play around with mythology and belief systems. I try to be respectful of what I think are the important things while being tongue-in-cheek about nearly everything else. I hope that most people who read my work are imbued with hope and the determination to live life on purpose. My goal is to give them that feeling while entertaining them.

Q: Who are some of your favorite / most influential writers?

John Finnemore, in my opinion, is a comedic and narrative genius. He takes flawed characters who, by all rights, should just be annoying, and makes his audience identify with and care about them. Then he puts them through absurd situations without breaking the audience’s ability to believe what he’s presenting to them, and he connects those absurd situations to form a cohesive and well planned narrative. He does plenty of research and makes sure to be technically correct in his details. He also uses a variety of references and keeps a blog to help people understand his more obscure or personal Easter eggs. That being said, the thing I admire most about him is his ability to end the story when it’s over. He doesn’t drag out a narrative because it’s popular, instead he does what’s best for the quality of the story.

Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mr. Tom and Kristen Randal’s The Only Alien On the Planet were very influential to me while growing up. They both tackled the darker aspects of abuse without losing their overall message of hope.

Joss Whedon’s ability to make believable, well-rounded characters and run his audience through the gambit of emotions has always been awe inspiring to me. I also respect that he is not afraid to pull the trigger and make the hard choices, if the story requires him to.

Patricia Briggs’s Mercedes Thompson character is one of the best written modern female characters I’ve come across. Her ability to be both strong and real in a fantasy world is inspiring and refreshing to see. I also like that all of her supporting characters each feel like they lead their own lives outside of what we see on the page. It’s a great series to see how all of our relationships are important and contribute to who we are.

John Irving has a wonderful ability to paint all of his characters as “just people.” There are no good and bad labels, just people trying to live their lives, and dealing with the consequences of their actions as best they can.

Q: What’s your favorite part of being a writer? What aspects do you find a challenge?

I think that humans act like amplifiers for each other’s emotions, and that’s why shared experiences (like conventions or concerts) feel so epic. If I weren’t a writer, I would still come up with stories in my head for me. My favorite part of being a writer is getting to share worlds and ideas I love with others who might love them too, to achieve the shared experience feeling.

I mostly write the way I speak as a first draft and then try to go back and clean it up. As a result, a lot of my character’s express their sentiments in my voice. One of the challenges I’m working on overcoming is giving each of my characters their own individual voice. A second challenge is the showing rather than telling aspect. I have a tendency to front load and to give more information than is required because I think all the nuances really help, but, mostly, it’s overwhelming. Lastly, I find that my stories are very character driven. I prefer this, but I have to work to keep myself focused on my plot and theme to make sure that what I’m writing furthers my end goal.

Q: What would you like to see more of in sci-fi/fantasy?

I’d love to see more collaborative works with authors of different backgrounds who can bring quality and responsible diversity to the table.

I’d also like to see well rounded main characters who have important platonic relationships, and break the mold when it comes to determining their life path and defining individual success.

Q: What would you like to see less of in sci-fi/fantasy?

1. Formulaic writing.
2. One dimensional characters, both main and supporting. In life no one is just a plot device for someone else, and good writing should reflect that.
3. Overly convenient solutions to plot holes. Every time I think about this, it brings to mind a scene from Thank You for Smoking where they want to have movie stars smoking on a space station, and someone points out that fire and oxygen rich environments don’t mix. Then the Hollywood producer answers, “But it’s an easy fix. One line of dialogue. ‘Thank God we invented the… you know, whatever device,” and they move on. I don’t think it’s possible for a single author to catch every single potential plot hole in all of their writing, but this attitude should be the very rare exception that’s applied to only non-essential details.

October is upon us once more. It’s time for me to indulge my fondness for classic horror films and the actors who appeared in them. Boris Karloff, he of the deep sepulchre British-accented voice who brought such dimension to characters like the three thousand year old resurrected High Priest Imhotep in The Mummy (1932) and the murderous Cabman Gray in The Body Snatcher (1945), will forever be my favorite, but Vincent Price, with his debonair swagger and devilish wink in the eye, runs a very close second. When he’s on screen, he holds our gaze, and when he speaks — his baritone voice being as resonant as Karloff’s — we can’t help but hang on his every word. Like Karloff, he was often much better than the movies he starred/featured in, yet his presence alone could make them watchable. Now to highlight four of my favorite Price performances.

In The House of Seven Gables (1940), made at a time long before he’d achieved horror icon status, when Hollywood wasn’t quite sure what to do with him, he played one of his few unambiguously sympathetic heroes. The movie itself is an enjoyable melodrama, as long as you don’t expect scrupulous fidelity to the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel on which it is only loosely based. As Clifford Pyncheon, in love with his cousin Hepzibah (Margaret Lindsay) and framed for murder by his dastardly younger brother Jaffrey (George Sanders), Price gets a chance to age from a dashing lover full of youthful vigor and humor, so charming that he engages our rooting interest almost immediately, to a weary, disillusioned parolee trying to take hold of what remains of his life. He’s convincing throughout, showing himself to be one of the few young actors who could offer a nuanced portrayal of middle age. This performance alone should have convinced Hollywood it had a star on its hands. Alas, he had to wait a little longer before he won the fame he deserved.

By 1950 he still hadn’t become horror movie royalty, but he’d settled for the most part into villainous roles. He played them with relish, a delicious leer in his wonderful voice. In Champagne for Caesar, a comedy which lampoons the TV quiz show craze, he plays Burnbridge Waters, a soap company magnate conspiring to thwart a genius (Ronald Colman) who keeps winning too much money on the game show the company sponsors. While Colman plays his hero role with a light, deft touch, Price is a succulent honey-baked ham, sailing hilariously over the top whether he’s ascending to a “higher plane” where he supposedly gets his brilliant ideas, or contemplating drowning his troublesome foe in a huge vat of bubbling soapy water. He’s so much fun to watch that I can’t help liking him just a little, nefarious as he is.

NPR’s Glen Weldon calls The Masque of the Red Death (1964) the closest director Roger Corman ever came to making an actual good movie. I get where he’s coming from, but I don’t think his assessment is entirely fair, since by horror movie standards this is a good movie. By this time Price was well established as a horror star, and he had already made several films with Corman based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. House of Usher, The Pit and The Pendulum, Tales of Terror, and The Raven (a comedy co-starring Karloff and Peter Lorre) are all worth a look, but this one, which talks back to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal with its hooded, card-playing Red Death, is the best, with superior plotting and art direction and, of course, superior acting by Price, who plays the sadistic Satanist Prince Propsero, a tyrant who pursues pleasure at the expense of both village peasants and his own “friends.” Many of Price’s protagonists in the Poe/Corman films are troubled men, or at least a little bothered by the situations in which they’re caught, but his Prospero enjoys being evil, and the touch of humor he brings to the table makes him all the more frightening.

One of Price’s most appealing traits, as a person and as an actor, was his willingness to take himself less than seriously, and (save perhaps in his narration for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”) nowhere was this more in evidence than in his guest appearance on The Muppet Show. To be honest, I’m such a classic Muppet fan that any performer who guest-starred on the original show wins Cool Points with me, but what Price fan would not want to see him transform at the stroke of midnight into an orchestra leader (“Too cruel! Too inhuman!”), display shock when Kermit the Frog is able to turn into a vampire without years of training in the actor’s craft, and play the organ and sing a spooky cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend”? A bonus: the episode shows him interacting with Uncle Deadly, who’s pretty much his Muppet doppelganger.

So this month let us distract ourselves from depressing election news and carve out a little space of time to spend with Vincent Price.

When I first fell in love with Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, at a morning screening with my husband on Christmas Eve 2015, I wasn’t ready to blog about it. The reason is obvious: everybody else was writing about it. For a while it seemed as if anyone with even a glancing interest in pop or geek culture had something to say about it. Many called it a return to glorious form for the Star Wars franchise; others called it a mediocre rehash of the first film. Many praised the movie for putting a female lead character front and center, while others dismissed the character as a “Mary Sue.” With all the back-and-forthing, I wasn’t sure I could find anything to say that wasn’t already being said.

Well, now the hype has died down, and my husband and I just rewatched the movie on Blu-Ray so it’s fresh in my memory once again. I’m ready to put in my two cents, even if it’s been said before. Just what do I love about Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens?

1. Rey. Big shocker, right?

A subset of Star Wars fans have been suggesting that this heroine could, and even should, venture into the Dark Side in subsequent movies, as if a villainess is somehow more welcome and believable than a magnificent light-saber-wielding female Jedi on the side of the Light. (After all, we’ve already seen so many of the latter. *sarcasm*) If the franchise really wants to lose me forever, this is what will happen with Rey. But I’m assured it’s at least highly unlikely, because the first trait we see her exhibit is one that Anakin Skywalker, the series’ template for Fallen Hero, never really displays in the prequels: kindness. I’ve read that our hearts are measured by how we treat those who can do nothing for us, and Rey’s first noteworthy act is to save the lost droid BB-8 from a vicious trader who wants to sell him for parts. She has no reason to think she’ll profit from this rescue, but she does it because it’s the right thing to do. She may try to dissuade him from following her, but droids in the Star Wars universe are often shrewd judges of character, and BB-8 knows he has found a good-hearted and loyal protector in Rey. Even with all the awesome things she does later in the film, this sign of a big heart impresses me most.

2. Maz Katana.

Since their beginning, the Star Wars films have featured some weird and wonderful nonhumans, from droids to Wookiees to Hutts. But how many of them, until this film, have been female? Luke Skywalker’s Tauntaun? The Twi’lek dancer devoured by Jabba the Hutt’s pet monster? They’re so short-lived they really shouldn’t count. All the rest have been male. But now we have the small, wizened, crafty but wise Maz Katana. Though her screen time is brief, Maz fills the mentor role that female characters in sci-fi and fantasy get to play all too rarely, dispensing sound advice to Rey, Finn, and even Han Solo. Yet despite her size, she comes across as someone who could totally kick the butt of anyone who crossed her. One of my favorite things about her is that she could have been written as male. She just happens to be female. Beautiful.

3. Finn.

Many of the same critics who dubbed Rey a “Mary Sue” also decried Finn for being a “weakling” who gets knocked out at the climax — as if that were all he does. But how weak is he, really, when he chooses to abandon the only life he’s ever known in order to do the right thing, when he has no idea how that choice will turn out? How weak is he, when he knows darn well he’s not powerful enough to defeat Kylo Ren, but he chooses to challenge him anyway? True, he’s tempted to flee to safety at certain points (as well he might be, when he knows better than anyone what the villainous First Order is capable of), but the more frightened he is, the braver he shows himself to be when he stands with his friends. He could run away. But he doesn’t. That’s awesome. (Also, it’s through him we learn there are people under those Stormtrooper helmets. To me that makes them a lot more interesting than a troop of soulless clones could ever be.)

4. Diversity in tertiary characters.

Who we see in the background matters, and in this movie we see plenty of male and female, white and non-white, human and nonhuman, among the Resistance, the First Order, and barkeep Maz’s clientele. We didn’t see anything quite like this in the original trilogy or the prequels. I’m calling it progress.

5. The return of Han Solo.

I’m not sure what more I can say on this point, other than Harrison Ford still has it. He may look older and more weather-beaten, but his tough, roguish voice has hardly changed at all.

6. Leia’s title upgrade.

“Princess” is a title a woman is given rather than one she earns, a title linked to gender, and a title somewhat at odds with our concepts of badassery. But “General” — now that’s a badass word, one that speaks of achievement, one that a man or a woman could earn. Thankfully, we don’t just hear Leia being called “General”; we also see her acting as one, exercising authority with grit and wisdom. Considering all the problematic depictions of women in charge that persistently pop up in all genres of fiction, it’s a pleasure to see a female leader portrayed as competent, respected, and good-natured, even if she would have benefited from just a bit more screen time. Hopefully we’ll see more of her in the sequels.

With The Force Awakens, Star Wars has returned in strength. Now I just have to cross my fingers in hope that they can keep it up.

TV Tropes notes a common dichotomy between two distinct types of heroines in fiction: the Tomboy and the Girly-Girl. It’s not quite an unfavorite trope of mine, but I do find it problematic, as it measures female characters’ personalities against a masculine norm: how “like a man” are they or aren’t they? Jo March, heroine of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (and one of my favorite characters from children’s literature) is a classic tomboy because she enjoys masculine pursuits and likes dressing up in trousers to play the male lead in the theatricals she and her sisters perform. Her sister Amy, by contrast, is the girly-girl with stereotypically feminine concerns like appearance and fashion and social standing. Nearly every reader of Alcott’s novel comes away admiring Jo and feeling impatient with Amy. In this as in most stories, the tomboy is drawn as more admirable and sympathetic — the “strong female character,” as opposed to the more passive and shallow girly-girl.

I admit I share the general preference. I always appreciate heroines with a touch of the tomboy about them, particularly in fantasy fiction. Tomboys, with their preference for trousers over skirts, are more mobile, more physically active and vigorous, which makes them better suited to participate in the action and adventure of the typical fantasy novel, while girly-girls, with their restrictive clothing and physical fragility, tend by practical necessity to occupy the periphery of such stories. In relation to male characters, the tomboy is often the ally, the respected comrade-in-arms, while the girly-girl is the distant love interest, the girl worth fighting for, the Ideal rather than the real. What female reader wouldn’t rather see herself as an active participant in a story’s most pivotal events than as a bystanding object of worship? (Wait — don’t answer that.)

Another point in the tomboy’s favor: tomboys defy rules. Few things win our sympathy more quickly than rebellion against unreasonable authority, including restrictive gender rules designed to extinguish any spark of individualism lurking in a woman’s heart and mind. These gender roles, as I’ve noted before, appear ad nauseum in second-world fantasy, despite the freedom novelists have to build their worlds from the ground up; accordingly, the genre needs tomboys who look out for ways to overcome or circumvent those wearisome “women-can’t-do-X” prescriptions. Tomboys are fighting for their chance to be who they are. Who wouldn’t root for that?

Yet tomboys can be easy characters to get wrong in a crucial way. With her embrace of individuality over convention, the tomboy can be a rewarding feminist heroine, but because she gravitates toward masculine interests and pursuits, in the hands of a less astute writer she opens the door to the anti-feminist “Not Like Other Girls” trope. Even talented writers can be guilty of this, as the first example that leaps to my mind is Arya Stark, the popular tomboy character from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, who scornfully dismisses all conventionally feminine girls and women as “stupid.” At least in Arya’s case, the wider narrative does not affirm this sweeping dismissal, but such statements are common ones for tomboy heroines to make. In too many stories where they feature, more feminine characters appear as one-dimensional foils, either feather-witted, catty, or both, completely deserving of the tomboy’s disdain. The more aligned to the masculine a girl or woman is, the “better” she is — more courageous, more competent. Not exactly the most feminist of messages.

The tomboy heroines I appreciate most are the ones who befriend other women, including (sometimes especially) the “girly” ones. I’ve mentioned Starhawk, the warrior heroine of Barbara Hambly’s Sun Wolf and Starhawk series, as a favorite, both because she’s an unquestioned badass and because she lifts other women, the feminine Fawn (her romantic rival) in The Ladies of Mandrigyn and the more tomboyish Tazey in The Witches of Wenshar; in both cases, her friendship helps these women discover something extraordinary in themselves. Maia, the heroine of Todd Lockwood’s The Summer Dragon, which I’m currently reading, has all the usual tomboy earmarks: she wears trousers, she strides into danger rather than flinching or hanging back from it, and she’s an excellent shot with a bow and arrow. Her closest ties are to those within her family circle, yet the one person who never doubts or underestimates her is her gentler, more soft-spoken (more “feminine”) sister-in-law, Jhem. Accordingly, Maia loves and trusts her. No hint of “Not Like Other Girls” here.

We all know the tomboy can be awesome, but what about the girly-girl? Is she, by her very nature, doomed to be always the damsel, never the heroine? That may be the most obvious route to take with her, but every now and then a girly-girl can surprise us with unexpected badassery.

I met with such a character in a recent read, Brandon Sanderson’s The Alloy of Law, the first of a sequel series, of sorts, to his original Mistborn trilogy. The heroine of the first trilogy is a tomboy in every sense, including, alas, “Not Like Other Girls.” (Sanderson has since expressed regret at not creating more female characters for her to interact with.) On the surface, Lady Marasi Colms, chief among the heroines of the second series, could not be more different. She says of herself that she likes wearing dresses, she likes living in the city because of its conveniences, and she doesn’t mind leaving the dangerous work to the men. Really this last one is the only part I’d have issues with, but if there were nothing more to her, she would indeed be what another female character calls her — an “ornament.”

Yet Marasi, as it turns out, has her own ways of being awesome. She has an interest and extensive knowledge in criminal justice, providing useful information when it’s most needed. She’s a crack shot with a rifle, and with this skill she saves male characters’ lives more than once. And despite her claim that she’s fine with letting the menfolk take the big risks, she accompanies the male heroes into danger because she feels a responsibility to do so (a woman of honor, this one), and each time they offer to leave her behind in a place of safety, she refuses, staying at their side, determined to be of use even though she doubts her abilities. In the end — Spoiler Alert — she strikes the decisive blow against the villain. As to how she does it… read the book. It’s really good.

Marasi is the heroine you don’t see coming, an example of what a girly-girl can be if she and her story are written well. Other girly-girl heroines I admire include Sorcha, Liadan, and Fainne, the heroines of Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest, Son of the Shadows, and Child of the Prophecy respectively; the young apprentice sorceress Isabeau in Kate Forsyth’s Witches of Eileanan series (with her twin sister Iseult filling the tomboy role); and Beatrice Barahal, the girly-girl to her cousin Cat’s tomboy in Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker Trilogy.

I admire all these ladies, for showing their readers there is more than one way to be a heroine.

Today’s guest is author Michael J. Allen. He is the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller YA space opera Scion of Conquered Earth, its best-selling sequel Stolen Lives and the contemporary southern fantasy Murder in Wizards Wood. All titles are available in hardback, paperback, kindle, epub, ibook and nook, order them anywhere in galaxies where quality books are sold.

Originally from Oregon, Michael J. Allen is a pluviophile masquerading as a vampire IT professional in rural Georgia. Warped from youth by the likes of Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams, Gene Wilder and Danny Kaye, his sense of humor leads to occasional surrender, communicable insanity, a sweet tooth and periodic launch into nonsensical song. He loves books, movies, the occasional video game, playing with his Labradors – Myth and Magesty. He knows almost nothing about music.

A recovering Game Master, he gave up running RPG’s for writing because the players didn’t play out the story in his head like book characters would – we know how that worked out.

Suddenly fresh out of teenagers, he spends his days writing in restaurants, people watching and warring over keyboard control with the voices in his head.

1.   Describe your work. What will readers find and enjoy as they explore your writing? What are you proudest of?

a.       The stories that scribble out from my keyboard are varied and broad, but whether its YA Space opera, Western-style Fantasy, or more traditional Science Fiction/Fantasy readers will always find truth within the wonder. They’ll find people, not caricature. Protagonists are as flawed as you or me. Antagonists struggle with hard choices to do what they feel is right or necessary even if it seems horrible from the outside.

b.      I enjoy moments of pride when I can take something known and make it new, offer a reader the opportunity to look at things in a new light and embrace new possibilities.

2. What’s your favorite part of being a writer?

I love the sharing. I got hooked on writing when my friends sat around a living room discussing how the chapter made them feel and arguing with one another over who did what and why. To share and make an emotional impact, to brighten their day and maybe distract them from other troubles, that’s what makes writing incredible.

3. What aspect of being a writer do you struggle with?

Ugly truth. I find my characters in bad situations where ugly realities have become necessary on the page. I’m often uncomfortable with writing the horrors that humans inflict upon one another, but I believe it’s a writer’s duty to his/her readers to tell the story with truth – though perhaps not always in every gruesome detail. A writer should never cheat their readers by changing what happens to make the story’s reality a bit more Disney.  Joel Rosenberg taught me that as a reader with his Guardians of the Flame series. Unscrupulous, selfish people did horrid things to characters I loved. I hated it. I threw his books away only to buy them again years later to learn how Joel had invoked an emotional response that lingered years later. He’d shown me what truly would’ve happened in that horrid situation. Joel’s adherence to the story’s reality, the truth of humanity without a candy coating had opened my eyes to the importance of not cheating my reader with easy lies. I imagine there are readers who get turned off by some of those ugly truths just as there are readers who’re driven away by a writer lying about war reality or humanity’s darkness. It’s oh so very hard to face that at the keyboard some days, but I’ll dutifully give my readers believable stories grounded in truth before I tell them that bad people only want to treat them to a spa day.

4. Who are some of your favorite writers, and how have they influenced your work?

There are so many. Every book I’ve ever read has shaped and inspired my writing. Roger Zelazny showed me how big a world could be with his Amber Series. Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera books expanded my horizons where it came to my thinking about magic. Brandon Sanderson taught me by book and by online lessons how to ground magic systems in logic that keeps them balanced and believable. Terry Pratchett taught me not to take myself too seriously. Ann Crispin abused me horribly in order to forge me into someone who could become a writer people wanted to read. Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton showed me that cultural politics offered intrigue as good or better and slogging through war zones and later Mercedes and Larry Dixon kept me from giving up writing. Every pro I’ve ever interacted with has been so generous with their wisdom, beacons of hope to guide me toward ultimately getting published.

5. What would you like to see more of in sci-fi and fantasy fiction?

My name on their cover pages? Diversity. More diverse points of view or organizational structures. SF/F writers expand thinking with their stories. They open minds to new ideas. We need a fresh infusion of open mindedness in society and writers can present those ideas in ways that don’t automatically get our collective hackles raised. At the same time, new ideas must be integral to the story and painted with all the heavy-handedness of a butterfly’s kiss. It’s not our job to tell readers WHAT to think. It’s our job to help teach them HOW to think for themselves then offer them new perspectives that open their eyes/minds to possibilities they might not otherwise have considered.

6. Conversely, what would you like to see less of in sci-fi and fantasy fiction?

Same old, same old. Where magic and the vastness of space are involved, there’s no reason to fall into the Hollywood reboot trap. I know they say there are only five original stories retold in different ways, but each writer tells it in a new voice. I’d like to see new, mind blowing ideas that open my eyes to things I’ve never considered and landscapes I’ve never imagined. I want writers to leave me wondering, “Why didn’t I come up with that?”

Aside from the acceptance/lack thereof of the concept of “collateral damage,” a key distinction between heroes and villains in traditional fantasy involves power. The villain has power, of some shape or form, from the story’s beginning; said villain’s gross abuse of this power motivates the hero to act. The hero, however, has to discover his or her power as the story progresses. That power may or may not be magical, or equal to the villain’s. But in the end, the power to save and protect must triumph over the power to destroy and exploit. In traditional fantasy, that is. We’re not talking about grimdark now.

In the Reddit discussion thread I’ve cited before, asking male readers if they would read a book with a female protagonist, one poster said he wouldn’t because he could never imagine a female character powerful enough to fill the role of hero — but then he added that female sidekicks were always welcome, and he positively loved to read about female villains. So evidently a woman with the power to destroy and exploit is well within the scope of this poster’s imagination, yet a woman with the power to save and protect is not? Just how common is this imaginative limit?

More common, I’m afraid, than I want to believe. I have only to think of issues I’ve covered previously here. Why are female villains so often described as tall? Why do we see so few heroic female dragons? The answer to both questions may well be the same: an instinctive distrust of female power. If a woman is physically large, she skews our perceptions of bigness as masculine and smallness as feminine, and her power is evident the moment we look at her. We’re not quite at ease with the idea that a woman might be so obvious a match for a man in physical strength; even when a heroine can overcome a male opponent in a fight, somehow we still feel better if she’s tiny, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Melinda May. As for dragons, what fantasy creature has more raw power? What could do more damage if it weren’t somehow on our side? If we imagine such a powerful being as Good, our tendency would be to imagine it as male. It’s easier for some reason to think of that power in a female as destructive.

The groundwork for our suspicion of female power has been laid by early tales in which sorceresses are scheming villains and goddesses are dangerous femme fatales and, despite progress, we can still see the effects. Nowadays female mages are a little more likely to be presented as good, but we still get stories in which magical power automatically renders female characters evil (e.g. Robert Newcomb’s The Fifth Sorceress) or at least more prone to corruption than a man would be (e.g. Joseph Delaney’s Spook’s Apprentice series). Female authority figures still tend to be written in the “God Save Us From the Queen!” mold. One of the most notable signs of our willingness to accept women with a great deal of power as villains rather than as heroes is the debate over whether we should see a female Doctor Who. (Outgoing) show runner Steven Moffat and a massive number of the classic Sci-Fi show’s fans are dead set against the idea that the Doctor, an incredibly powerful and complex hero, might regenerate into a woman. But the Master, the Doctor’s evil-to-the-core nemesis, can become a woman without any objections. “Woman + Power = Evil” — that’s still the equation we’re comfortable with.

The news is not all bad. Ursula LeGuin’s “weak is women’s magic/ wicked is women’s magic” ethos from A Wizard of Earthsea is moving further and further out of date (LeGuin herself has rejected it) thanks to the popularity of such heroic female magic users as Granny Weatherwax (Pratchett’s Discworld), Vin (Sanderson’s Mistborn), and Hermione (Harry Potter). On a lighter note, superhero teams are likelier to include female members even on the big screen and, after a cancellation scare, Supergirl, in all her Kryptonian awesomeness, will be soaring across our television screens for a second season (albeit on another network).

I want to take heart from these positive signs. Yet when 2016 gives nasty psychopath Harley Quinn a major big-screen role while a nobly heroic Wonder Woman gets only a cameo in a movie that, reportedly, nobody liked, the first solo films for female superheroes are over a year away, and the DC Animated Universe hasn’t released a heroine-positive movie since Superman/Batman: Apocalypse (a Supergirl story, though you’d never know it by the title) while in a more recent offering Wonder Woman and the Amazons are evil villains for most of the running time, I can’t help seeing how much further we have to go.

Another year, and another DragonCon has come and gone. The four-day celebration of all things geeky and wonderful, where everyone attending can play dress-up without shame and where waiting in line to see a favorite author, artist, or actor is made bearable by the spontaneous conversations we start with the people around us who obviously love the same things we love, has to come to an end sometime. But we’re left with the bittersweet consolation that the glorious time of year will come around again. (My husband and I have already booked our room for next year.)

Now the moment comes to take stock of the delights of this year’s DragonCon, and they are many.

Hearing Brandon Sanderson.

Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive (beginning with The Way of Kings) is, along with Django Wexler’s The Shadow Campaigns (beginning with The Thousand Names), my favorite fantasy series currently ongoing, so I was thrilled beyond words to learn Sanderson would be coming to this year’s DragonCon. I got to see him twice — once at an hour-long Q & A, and again for a reading in which he gave us all a welcome Spoiler-free taste of the third Stormlight book, Oathbringer, due to enter the world at large in the fall of 2017 (sigh…).  Meeting our heroes is always a risky proposition. They may start to talk and diminish themselves in our eyes with every word they speak, until we wish we’d been content for them to live only in our heads. I’m happy to say I came away from my distant encounter with Mr. Sanderson liking him even more than before.

He reads with such vigorous energy, his passion for the story coming through, that we can’t help but be caught up in the words and the world. Yet my favorite moment came towards the end of the reading, when he took a question about whether he thought about how readers might respond to his characters — whether, for instance, a girl might read about the magical assassin Vin from the first Mistborn trilogy and think, “I want to be her.” He answered yes, he thinks about it all the time, since he remembers the fantasy he loved as a young fan, works by Barbara Hambly, Anne McCaffrey, and Melanie Rawn, and how he saw parts of himself in them. (The joy I felt at hearing one of fantasy’s most successful male authors cite three women as influences falls squarely in the “shouldn’t-matter-but-it-does” department.) He seeks to write the sorts of books he loved and wanted to see as a reader, in the hope that he might be someone else’s Hambly, McCaffrey, or Rawn. He writes aspirational fiction. No wonder I like his work.

Now, if only Mr. Sanderson would return next year, and Django Wexler would also come, and Kate Elliott and Kate Forsyth as well, I might have the perfect DragonCon, or close to it.

Performing with the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company.

I’ve been acting with ARTC since 2004, but this year was special. The Comics Track sponsored our performance of an adaptation (by author and scriptwriter Brad Strickland) of Bill Holbrook‘s Kevin & Kell: The Great Bird Conspiracy, a story of the anthropomorphic animals of Domain (think Zootopia), where large mutant rabbit Kevin and wolf Kell make their marriage work with tolerance and understanding and their family includes Kell’s son Rudy (by her first marriage), who can’t track worth a darn despite being a wolf, and Kevin’s brainy adopted hedgehog daughter Lindesfarne. I got to play Catherine Aura, a vulture school administrator who’s a bit more than she seems; I gave her my best imperious English accent.

Shortly after the performance, my husband and I went to Artist’s Alley, where it so happened that Holbrook himself was signing and selling books. He made a point of telling me how much he enjoyed the show and all our performances, and that I got Catherine exactly right. He signed my Kevin & Kell comic and drew a little picture of Catherine as a special compliment. Praise from the author himself! That makes me glow inside.

Listening to ARTC perform my new script.

The Goblins and the Golden Rose marks the seventh audio drama I’ve written that ARTC has performed at DragonCon, its biggest venue of the year. It’s the story of a young goblin who loses her human husband to the beautiful but evil Fey Queen, an older goblin who seeks to help her win him back, and the widowed human metalworker who gets caught up in it all. Once again I experienced the delight of hearing my characters come to life in some ways I hadn’t even thought of. My work with this talented group of people has been a blessing in more ways than I can count.

ARTC has many fans who make a point of attending our DragonCon shows, and we win new fans every year. This year, some of those fans even bought copies of Atterwald and Nightmare Lullaby!

Being on a panel for the Writers Track.

Nancy Knight, head publisher of Gilded Dragonfly Books and coordinator of DragonCon’s Writers Track, gave me an opportunity to discuss “Writing YA Science Fiction and Fantasy for Today’s Savvy Readers,” along with author and map-builder Catherine Scully. We got to talk about what makes YA special (for me: optimism), how we write scary scenes, and how we choose our protagonists (for me: I ask myself, “What do I want to see, that I’m not seeing?”), among other things. I love attending panels on compelling subjects and asking questions of authors I admire, but being the one answering the questions gives me that little extra rush. It feeds my hope that one day, I just might be for some young reader what Hambly, McCaffrey, and Rawn were for Sanderson.

And everything else…

Dining. The food is always good, if a little expensive, at the restaurants around DragonCon.  I tried Gus’s Fried Chicken on a recommendation from the team at Marie, Let’s Eat.  I learned that the portions are bigger than I thought, but my husband was able to help me out in that department (he ate there before last year).  We also saw Joey Fatone at Fire of Brazil holding court.

Panel-ing. Two of my favorites this year were an American Sci-Fi Media Track discussion of CBS’s Supergirl and a presentation on the “Superhero Cartoons” of yore, led by our friend Darius Washington of the Animation Track.

Observing cosplay. Some of my favorite cosplays are ones I don’t recognize, like the woman in the ruby Renaissance gown and the mask and head-dress decked with bird-of-paradise plumage. But I believe I was most charmed by the woman dressed as Alexander Hamilton (from the musical Hamilton, of course) carrying two black cardboard tablets on which the Ten Duel Commandments were inscribed.

Shopping. I always worry I may enjoy this one a little too much, but I did manage to limit myself to three books only from Larry Smith Bookseller. The fourth Shadow Campaigns book, The Guns of Empire, is now mine.

Farewell, Dragon Con. We’ll be back.

Last weekend my husband and I saw my favorite movie of the summer, and one I would recommend with all my heart to any and all fantasy lovers: Laika Animation Studios’ Kubo and the Two Strings. This movie stands out like an oasis of color and light against the shadowy gray landscape that is 2016 summer cinema. Some of the reasons are obvious even to those who haven’t seen it. It’s not a remake or reboot of anything. It’s not a sequel to anything. It’s not a showcase for already-known characters. It offers what no other mainstream summer release seems to have bothered with at all: the thrill of discovery, an exciting journey into an unfamiliar world. Then, when we actually see the film, we find a joyous (though not always happy) affirmation of the power of the Creative Force — music, stories — and the transformative strength of love. I can’t think of any other movie this summer that so successfully hits both those notes. If you’re reading this blog, chances are very good you will like this movie. If you haven’t seen it already, please go. It deserves to be a hit.

Yet as much as I loved this movie — and my love grew upon reflection, in the hours and days after I saw it — I couldn’t dismiss a tiny wrinkle of regret that the hero was, like at least eighty percent of the heroes in all family films made since the 1970s, a boy. Laika’s first big movie, Coraline, did present proof that an American animated movie about a girl who wasn’t a Disney princess could succeed at the box office, but since then, in ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, they’ve followed in lock-step the male lead pattern of animated films in general, with female characters cast as vengeful villainesses, shallow bimbette sisters, and unpleasantly shrewish sidekicks, all foils for the good-hearted, brave, and unorthodox boy heroes. Kubo does improve upon its immediate predecessors in that Charlize Theron’s Monkey character is given more dimension than sidekicks usually get (though I can’t say too much about her for fear of Spoilers), and it helps that she’s a total badass in battle. But still, she’s not the day-saver, the difference-maker. That responsibility is left, as per usual, to the boy.

“Why couldn’t Kubo have been a girl instead?” is not entirely rhetorical, since nothing in plot or even personality demands the character be male. Masculinity isn’t a prevailing theme. There’s no love interest. The character embodies no traits traditionally perceived as male, like physical strength and aggression (interestingly, Monkey gets those). The most I can figure is that the writers decided that in feudal Japan, a little girl couldn’t have earned money as a storyteller — but then, in feudal Japan, malevolent forces didn’t sail down from the heavens to cause mayhem, either. It’s a fantasy. It could have worked. And if the writers had just taken that tiny step and made the character female, she would have joined my pantheon of favorite fantasy heroines of all time, for she would have embodied the very characteristics I love most to see in female guise: creativity, courage, and love. I probably would have seen the movie three times by now.

Now for the tough question: why does it matter? Why couldn’t I enjoy Kubo just as much as a boy? Truthfully, it shouldn’t matter at all — and perhaps it wouldn’t, if three or four more animated or at least family-film female leads were out there at the same time, in movies just as good if not better than Kubo. Yet as long as female leads are so vastly outnumbered by male leads in animated films, and as long as those female leads are so specifically gendered in ways that Kubo is not (that is, assigned plots and traits that dictate the lead could only have been female), I will regret the lack and ponder what could have been.

Nonetheless, Kubo and the Two Strings remains a bright spot in a summer full of film and TV disappointments (for me). What’s wrong out there?

No real feminist triumphs — particularly compared with last summer, in which we saw Mad Max: Fury Road, Inside Out, Trainwreck, Far From the Madding Crowd, and Testament of Youth. What have we this year? Well, Ghostbusters. My husband and I both enjoyed this reboot, and a lot of our friends did too, but on the whole, response to Paul Feig’s movie has been tepid, and we probably won’t see a sequel. The success of a Fury Road or an Inside Out or a Trainwreck, which might have made Hollywood big shots sit up and take notice, is conspicuous by its absence this year.

Too many dead female TV characters. Two separate shows I watched to the bitter (and I do mean bitter) end — shows I won’t name, to avoid Spoilers — featured powerful female characters sacrificing their lives for the sake of a group of mostly male characters. While I did like both the characters in question, I can’t be happy with the equation of female heroism with death/annihilation, particularly when my interest in the female survivors is mild at best.

Third time not the charm for the Captain America series. I did like Captain America: Civil War, particularly any moment involving Black Panther, who has presence to burn and whose solo outing I eagerly anticipate. Yet the first two Captain America movies stood out for me as offering the most satisfying depictions of women I’d seen in any superhero movie other than The Incredibles — Peggy Carter in the first film, Black Widow in the second. So I couldn’t help feeling let down that in the third film, while Black Panther and Spiderman got a chance to shine, Black Widow and Scarlet Witch had little more than walk-on parts. Scarlett Johannson made the most of her few moments, but the writers haven’t figured out what to do with Elizabeth Olsen. In the end, the ladies proved irrelevant, never getting to make the difference that even Ant-Man did in five minutes of screen time. In this movie summer, if you want a heroine, and Ghostbusters isn’t your thing, your best bet is Pixar’s Finding Dory.

The scarcity of heart. One of the more unusual films of the year has been Love and Friendship, a witty and skillfully made adaptation of a novella from early in Jane Austen’s career. It’s an amusing film, and I would recommend it, but despite the title, there’s precious little love or friendship in evidence. The female lead is an amoral schemer, and the closest thing we get to a “good” female character is a passive, whimpering drip with whom it’s hard to sympathize. On the surface it couldn’t be more different from squalid, dark-hued action-fests like Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad, yet they have one crucial similarity at their core: an overall tone of heartlessness. These movies ask us to watch with fascination the antics of their characters, but we’re never called upon to make an emotional investment. We watch, we laugh, we snicker, we gasp, but we don’t care. Has caring really gone so far out of fashion? I don’t think I want to know.

Maybe things will get better at the movies as the year goes on. In the meantime, I have many lovely books to read.

To my regret I can’t remember exactly where and how I first learned about Goodreads.com, but over the past few years it has become my biggest Internet time-suck, by far. I may love Facebook, since I have plenty of fun, smart Facebook friends who fill my Feed with intriguing nuggets, but I swear I spend twice the time on Goodreads that I do on FB. It’s like the world’s largest library, a playground full of all the books in the world. I can’t say it’s done wonders for my productivity, but I’ve learned a great deal from it, not only about what books are out there but about how readers respond to them.

So, what do I love about Goodreads?

Lists point me toward the kinds of books I most enjoy.

Since my greatest literary affection is for second-world (epic, historical… really, anything but contemporary) fantasy in which heroines play active and significant roles — “cool heroines doing cool stuff,” I like to say in my vernacular — I browse through lists like “Best ‘Strong Female’ Fantasy Novels,” “Best Heroine in a Fantasy Book,” and “Kick-Butt Heroines” on a regular basis, to see if any new titles have turned up or whether certain titles may have moved up or down the lists. Before I click that wonderful “Want to Read” button, I take the time to read at least two pages of reviews with care, since after all, readers’ definitions of “strong female” or “best heroine” may differ; for example, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, known for its bland, featureless, incompetent female lead (I won’t use the word “heroine” in reference to her), turns up consistently on lists like this even when the lists’ originators specifically request that it not be added. All the same, the lists, imperfect as they might be, give me a place to start looking, and the reviews give me an idea of whether the stories and their characters will earn my rooting interests.

I learn about the existence of books I would never find on the shelves at Barnes & Noble.

I credit Goodreads for my purchase of a Kindle three years ago. In one of my browses I came across a title that peaked my interest, Scriber by Ben S. Dobson. I read the description — an introverted scholar is swept along on an adventure by a troop of diverse warrior women — together with the reviews, and I concluded that the book would very much be “my thing.” But it was only available as an e-book. In order to read it, I would need a device.

I’m happy to declare the price of my Kindle was money well spent. Scriber turned out to be as good as I thought it would be, and since then I’ve read and enjoyed quite a few books I would never have found were it not for Goodreads: Andrea K. Host’s Stained Glass Monsters, …And All the Stars, and The Pyramids of London; Vera Nazarian’s Cobweb Bride and Lords of Rainbow; Insitar Khanani’s Sunbolt; T.O. Munro’s Lady of the Helm; Patrick Weekes’ The Palace Job; and Karin Rita Gastreich’s Eolyn and High Maga, just to name a few. Right now I’m engrossed in Steven Poore’s The Heir to the North, in which the heroine distinguishes herself in a way I always love to see, as a storyteller. For this one, too, I owe Goodreads my thanks.

I learn what not to read.

“Life’s too short to read bad books,” the saying goes, but of course how do we know they’re bad if we don’t read them first? A better saying, though a bit more cumbersome, is, “Life’s too short to read books you know in advance won’t give you what you’re looking for,” since after all, we all go to fiction in search of different things. The “Not Interested” button can be as useful as the “Want to Read” button, and Goodreads reviews help me make informed decisions.

Some signs I consider dealbreakers (won’t read it, no way, no how) include: 1) when multiple reviews complain about the depiction of women in the book (e.g. “this book was great, except for the female characters”); 2) when even reviewers who loved the book can’t manage to say a single positive word about the main female character, usually the male protagonist’s love interest; 3) when multiple reviewers note the almost total absence of women from the book; 4) when the book has no female reviewers; 5) and, of course, when complaints pile up about sloppy editing, inconsistencies in characterization and world-building, and ham-fisted style.

Some signs that make me question seriously whether a book is for me, and lead me to prioritize scores of other books ahead of them, include: 1) when I notice a gender-based polarity in response to the book — as in, when all four- or five-star reviews are posted by men while women are posting one- and two-star reviews, or vice versa (the books I like best tend to appeal to a broad readership); 2) when after looking through two pages, I’ve come across not one review that mentions a female character by name. This last one, I admit, is tricky, because in fantasy, female names aren’t always so easy to recognize. Only a couple of days ago I exiled a book to my Not-Interested pile before discovering that “Scoop,” one of the main protagonists, was not the boy I’d assumed, but was instead a girl with an odd nickname.

I learn that as a writer, I need not let bad reviews crush my spirit.

We all know that some books are quite simply and inescapably bad, and any book with almost across-the-board negative reviews is best avoided, unless you’re fond of hate-reading (which I’m not). But we also know that two or more people can read the same book and come away with wildly different, even opposite impressions. I’ve seen many a merciless, scathing one-star review of a book on which I’ve bestowed a four- or even five-star blessing. These reviews can help me thicken my skin — I don’t want to be the writer who posts indignant responses to bad reviews — and help me see that as long as my work is not universally loathed, it doesn’t matter if it’s not universally loved.

The benefits I derive from Goodreads keep it a part of my life and routine, but I know I need to budget the time I spend there. I can stop reading reviews any time I want. Really.

(Um, well…)

To the observer of current fiction in its various forms, one thing seems apparent: the hero is out, and the anti-hero is in. Movies and novels in particular are more keen than ever to delve into the darkest sides of human nature without coming up for air, and it’s done in the name of honesty, of a “realism” that allows no room for such rose-colored naivete as belief in a hero. We’re all scum at heart, these stories say, so why not face it and give up trying to be more? I wrote in an earlier post that acceptance of “collateral damage” — the idea that innocent lives can and should be sacrificed to achieve some goal supposedly greater than the well-being of a few (thousand) individuals — is a distinguishing characteristic of a villain. When even Superman himself is okay with bulldozing over bystanders who get in the way of his battle with an enemy, we know we’re living in an age when heroism in fiction is hardly welcome, let alone valued.

Stories of anti-heroes and villain protagonists are obviously very popular with a lot of people; why else would the poorly-reviewed Suicide Squad, in which villains are the protagonists and no one at all is an actual hero, do well in its opening weekend? Yet this is a train I can’t bring myself to board. I’m still afflicted with rose-colored naivete. I still like heroes, protagonists who aren’t just as screwed up as I am (and thereby remind me of how screwed up I am) but instead are better than I am (and thereby offer the hope that I too might be better). I hold to the belief that what I term “aspirational fiction” still has a place, and that place should not be confined to children’s and young-adult literature and film.

The all darkness, all the time focus is sold as “realism,” but how realistic is it? We all know human beings are capable of great evil as well as petty cruelty, and for evidence we never have to look further than the evening news. It’s also true that darkness, what Stephen King calls the “potential lyncher,” exists in some measure in almost everyone. We can all recall plenty of times when we’ve been at our worst, when we’ve given in to selfishness, anger, intolerance, suspicion, jealousy. But for all that, human beings are also capable of great good — kindness, love, friendship, loyalty, courage, generosity, empathy. Focusing only on the darkest aspects of human nature is as unrealistic as denying that darkness would be. If the potential lyncher exists in all of us, so does the potential hero, and we do ourselves no favors when we deny that hero’s existence.

(True, Joss Whedon’s Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog does lampoon this idea when he has the arrogant “hero” Captain Hammer sing, “Everyone’s a Hero in Their Own Way,” but bear in mind that Whedon’s work as a whole shows the value of heroes, giving us flawed men and women who manage to tap into their better natures and do great good.)

It’s to this potential hero that the best aspirational fiction speaks, while at the same time not ignoring the darkness. I can recall a friend of mine, when I spoke of my desire to see more female heroes on the big screen, ask me, “Aren’t you a little old to be looking for role models?” Sadly I never managed a satisfactory answer to this question. “This isn’t about role models,” I tried to tell her, but I was wrong. The real answer to her question is No. I’m not too old for role models. Nobody is. We may “come of age,” as it were, only once, but after that we don’t stop changing. Our natures are in constant flux throughout our lives, as we continue to face fresh challenges and discover new facets of ourselves and the world. Why shouldn’t we look to fiction for a little inspiration, even if we’re fortysomething or older? Role models aren’t there to be emulated to the point of imitation. Rather, they offer possibilities of what we as human beings might be and do. Do we really outgrow that?

So, what constitutes a hero? Different definitions exist, but here are a few attributes that, for me, mark a character as heroic.

Heroes are not concerned solely with their own survival. They help and rescue others as well.

Heroes have a keen awareness of right, wrong, and justice. As one of my favorite heroes, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, sings in the musical that bears her name, “When it’s not right, you’ve got to put it right.”

Heroes form relationships. They have friends and loved ones whom they would fight and even die to protect. Even if they’re cynical and broken inside, like Marvel’s Jessica Jones, they can show empathy and kindness.

Heroes accept responsibility, and when they fail, they don’t blame others.

Heroes understand what Spencer Tracy describes in Judgment at Nuremberg as “the value of a single human being.”

On a recent episode of NPR’s podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, in which Suicide Squad was under discussion, Glen Weldon, who “writes about books and comic books for the NPR website,” noted the generally accepted theory that we love anti-heroes because they are “realistic,” and refuted it thus: “We embrace the anti-hero because we lack the courage to embrace the hero.” My applause at these words could have been heard in the next six counties (and deafened my husband while he was driving us- sorry, honey). He summed up in that simple sentence why I never had any interest in that particular DC movie even before the reviews started coming in, and why I’ve been slow to try out fantasy novels termed “grimdark.” He said what I just then realized I’d always been thinking. Embracing the hero is risky, partly because the hero isn’t always (or even often) “cool,” but mostly because heroes, and the aspirational fiction of which they are a part, demand something of us. They reach for our better selves, and at their best they shake us out of the passive apathy we may find so safe. We don’t have to be content with Things As They Are. We can do better. We can be better.