May 2015 has been a pretty good month for women in the movies. We’ve seen the release of a number of films with female characters in central roles. There’s Far From the Madding Crowd, which I’m going to see this very afternoon with my husband for our seventh wedding anniversary (and yes, he does want to see it, but I’m going to have to see SPECTRE with him opening night). There’s Pitch Perfect 2, which I have no interest in seeing (it’s not really my genre) but which boasts a range of female characters and a female director. There’s Tomorrowland, which I may wait and see at the dollar theater thanks to lukewarm reviews, but yet again, female lead. Then there’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which I have seen, a cinematic fist-pump which features not just one exceptional Charlize Theron but women, lots of women, in kick-butt roles. This last film represents a triumph I have been waiting for: a critical success which shows women in major roles, from a genre that usually ignores or marginalizes them: the science fiction action-adventure film.

Here’s the trailer:

But one woman’s triumph is, apparently, another man’s tragedy. Mad Max: Fury Road has roused the ire of “men’s rights activists” because it blurs the gender lines they cherish — or rather, it blows those lines away. They’re not upset about Far From the Madding Crowd or Pitch Perfect 2, which they can safely dismiss as “chick flicks” they wouldn’t want to see in any case. (See this article for a good look at that “chick flicks” designation.) No, their rage is directed at Mad Max because it presents feminine incursion into a “masculine” cinematic space. “Get your girl cooties out of our post-apocalyptic road chase movie!” For these activists, this movie poses a threat where the other ones do not.

I can’t take them too seriously, fierce their rhetoric might be. They’re a small minority compared with the men who appreciate intense and well-filmed action movies and actually enjoy seeing a hot Charlize Theron being a major badass. To me, the fulminators come across as little boys who don’t want to share. In innumerable action and sci-fi films, men are the driving force, the only capable and powerful characters. A Smurfette may be included, but she’s very obviously a token, and more often than not a piece of distressed-damsel eye candy designed to titillate the male audience rather than to attract a female one. Yet let one or two movies come along in which women get a substantial share of the action, and it’s Oh, no! Circle the wagons! How can we stop “them” from taking over? Even when they hold fifty marbles, they can’t stand our having one.

Just how much of a threat does the film in question represent? Are women taking over action and sci-fi films? Will we soon find ourselves unable to distinguish between “chick flick” and “guy movie”? To answer this question, I examine four trailers I saw before Mad Max: Fury Road started to roll.

1. Jurassic World

Here we have the tough dinosaur-hunter male protagonist played by Chris Pratt, whose macho badassery is in now way challenged or compromised (in the trailer, at least) by Bryce Dallas Howard’s uptight-scientist Smurfette. Apparently the movie’s only important female character apart from the marauding uber-dinosaur who must be destroyed, Howard’s character apparently exists to express the Wrong Idea, to be subsequently corrected by the tougher, wiser he-man hunter. The Jurassic franchise has never been especially friendly to girls and women (in the second film, the female lead is a screamer, and in the third film, she’s a moron- although Laura Dern’s ever so brief cameo is welcome), but at least in the first film, one of the kids embroiled in the adventure was a girl. In this one, both are boys.

2. The new Transporter film

Are there women in this movie? I don’t remember any in the trailer. This movie promises to be a strong shot of testosterone.

3. The Last Witch Hunter

So, Vin Diesel vs. evil witches. A red-haired woman (Rose Leslie, formerly of Game of Thrones) is hanging around, but I don’t think we hear her speak in the trailer. It’s pretty safe to say Dudes Rule in this one.

4. San Andreas

The trailer for the new Dwayne Johnson movie immediately follows the one for the new Vin Diesel movie, aggravating my tendency to get these two actors confused.  (I just have to remember that Vin Diesel was never a professional wrestler.) This trailer does show a few women, generally running from things, calling for help, or showing off “Michael Bay Wear” (tank top, booty shorts). At least this time around, pretty much everyone is in distress, not just the damsels. But the movie is clearly Johnson’s story. It doesn’t look like any powerful heroines will bring their girl cooties to this party.

Those are just a few due out this summer. Others include Entourage, Ted 2, Magic Mike XXL, Ant-Man, Pixels, Pan, the remake of Vacation, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, and The Man from UNCLE — all guy-centric. A few due out in the fall are No Escape, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, The Jungle Book, SPECTRE, The Martian, The Good Dinosaur, and Kung Fu Panda 3 — some promising to be good, others not so good.  However, each of these films features male protagonists.  The best that girls and women can hope for is a halfway significant supporting role. (At least we’ll get another marble in the form of the final Hunger Games movie, and the upcoming Spy — if action comedies are to your taste — and Terminator: Genisys may be two more, if only they’re well-reviewed.) And lest we forget, previously in 2015 we’ve seen Taken 3, Paddington, The Wedding Ringer, Blackhat, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie: Sponge Out of Water, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, McFarland USA, Focus, Chappie, Unfinished Business, and Run All Night — all movies with male protagonists.

(My husband reminded me that we are getting a Peanuts move in November.  While the protagonists may be Charlie Brown and/or Snoopy, most of the female characters created by Charles Schulz will be represented.  I cannot say “all” because there’s been no confirmation of the little red-haired girl.  However, I had to remind him that the females in the strip are mostly jerks.)

In all honesty, I cannot forget Jupiter Ascending.  But as this Honest Trailer points out, this wasn’t exactly a boon for women seeking active heroines in sci-fi films.

All this serves as evidence that the Big Screen is not an estrogen-poisoned wasteland that leaves male moviegoers without stories in which to engage or male heroes with which to identify, and it isn’t likely to become so. Boys, you still have your fifty marbles. It really won’t destroy you to let us have one, or even four or five.

A word or two about these Unfavorite Tropes blogs:

A friend of mine who’s been following this series warned me that if I kept listing unfavorite tropes, I would soon run out of things to read. This friend has a point. If each of my unfavorite tropes counted as an automatic deal-breaker, I probably would end up with nothing to read. I’ve mentioned it before and it bears repeating: tropes I dislike may find their way into many books that are, taken as a whole, well worth reading. I may come away from these books loving them, yet still taking some issue with individual tropes. So this series still has a little life left in it, though it’s starting to wind down.

The latest:

Faux Action Girl.

A couple of years ago, Hollywood released two fantasy-adventure films, Jack the Giant-Slayer and Snow White and the Huntsman. The trailers for both films featured shots of the female leads sporting gleaming suits of armor and battle gear. Resplendent in this martial get-up, they looked like warrior women, but the images covered up the truth that neither of them actually does any fighting. The most that the heroine of Jack manages to accomplish is to get in trouble repeatedly and get rescued by the titular hero. The heroine of Snow White, though brave, serves primarily as a figurehead for fighting men to follow. They offer fine visual examples of the Faux Action Girl, a female character who looks tough and may even talk tough, but concealed under that surface veneer of capability is an old-fashioned distressed damsel.

My biggest quarrel with the Faux Action Girl trope, aside from its cheating me out of an actual active and competent heroine, is that it seems to insult our intelligence. Are the writers who create such characters counting on our not noticing the bungler hidden in the suit of armor? Do they imagine that if the damsel is dressed in heroine’s clothing, we will accept her as a heroine and not question whether what we’re being told about her matches what we actually see her do?

The trope is particularly disheartening when we see it employed by those we think would know better. The heroine of Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, for example, is capable and innovative, and her story is enormously engaging. Meyer obviously knows how to create a heroine worth rooting for. Yet the sequel hits us with a Faux Action Girl. The titular heroine of Scarlet packs a pistol and carries herself with determination. Yet a closer look at her reveals a screw-up in perpetual need of rescue, a bitter disappointment after the dynamic Cinder. Peter Jackson added the character of Tauriel to his trilogy The Hobbit because he wasn’t content with the dudes-only nature of the source novel, and in the second film, The Desolation of Smaug, she’s a powerful force, a welcome addition (for me, at least). Yet in the final film, The Battle of the Five Armies, we see her disintegrate from Action Girl to Faux Action Girl, unable to strike a blow when it matters and needing two different male heroes to rescue her. This, after the splendid depiction of genuine Action Girl Eowyn in his earlier Award-winning adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

Sometimes a plot may demand some of my other Unfavorite Tropes — say, God Save Us From the Queen! or Babies Ever After or even the much-loathed (by me) Smurfette Principle. But are Faux Action Girls deliberate creations, or evidence of misguided writing? We all know that in order to come across as believable, a heroine needs to make the occasional mistake, but some writers may be so keen to avoid the accusations of “too perfect” and “Mary Sue” that they forget to let her get something right once in a while, and thus, Faux Action Girls may be born.

6. Female Misogynist

I hadn’t intended to address this one so soon. I’d planned to save it for a few posts down the road. But now and then a real-life incident burrows its way into my thoughts and forces me to change my creative direction. In this case, my Muse took the form of an uncomfortable Facebook experience.

Like many fans of fantasy and adventure, my friends and I have been discussing Avengers: Age of Ultron, and specifically breaking down the strengths and flaws in the character of Black Widow. A good friend posted an article on the subject, and the discussion was friendly at first. I pointed out that the root of the controversy surrounding Black Widow is the despicable Smurfette Principle, possibly my least favorite Trope in existence and one I’ve previously blogged about. I included a link to “I Hate Strong Female Characters” to emphasize my point.

Then one of my friend’s Facebook friends, reacting to the title of my link, posted that she hates almost every single female character and always finds a male character onto whom to latch in any story she reads or sees. While I found this sentiment a little disturbing, I took it as yet more commentary on the slipshod job too many writers do with their female characters, and how few are really worth identifying with. I was ready to shrug my shoulders and sigh, “Tell me something I don’t know, already,” when a braver soul than I replied to this poster directly, stating, “This is sad. You must hate women.” I had so not been ready to draw that conclusion.

Yet the poster’s response was swift and strong: she does hate women, because girls and women have treated her like crap, and this experience has shown her that only guys can be trusted, only guys make decent friends. I read her words and felt her hatred reach through the computer screen to slap me in the face. How should I have reacted to this? Should I beg forgiveness for the sin of having been born with two X chromosomes? I posted nothing, since I doubted strongly that such an attitude could be reasoned with. Very rarely can hatred be talked away.

A person who has been repeatedly bullied and betrayed deserves compassion. Perhaps that should have been my first response. This woman’s abusers probably internalized the cultural suggestion that women are each other’s natural enemies, and any “friendship” between two women — even relationships within families — will inevitably end with a knife in the back. Having swallowed this prescription, they passed it onto her, and thus the vicious circle spins on and on. Why are we women conditioned to hate and mistrust each other? Why do so many of us fall for that conditioning?

The Female Misogynist trope is a corollary of the Smurfette Principle. Such a woman belongs in a man’s world and surrounds herself exclusively with male mentors, friends, and lovers because she sees herself as having nothing in common with other women. Just like the male misogynist, she sees other women as a great big “They” who are All The Same, a hivemind with a single dark heart. This vast “They” is a threat because one of “Them” might just attract the attention of one of her worshipful male supporters. Competition is one of the things a Female Misogynist cannot tolerate. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake is one of the best-known examples of the trope, as the TV Tropes entry points out. Because she’s the protagonist and we’re meant to see her as heroic, her stories depict her misogyny as justified.

If reason could reach her, I might tell this friend-of-a-Facebook-friend that her hatred is a snake that eats its own tail. If you expect the very worst of the women you meet, surprise! That’s exactly what you’ll get. No matter how badly others may hurt us, we hurt ourselves even worse when we allow our justifiable anger at those specific people who have injured us to broaden into an unjustifiable hatred of an entire group. I’m sorry for what you have suffered, by I am not going to apologize for my two X chromosomes. I am responsible for my actions alone, and those actions do not include hurting you. In the words of Depeche Mode, “I’ve never even met you, so what could I have done?”

In my own reading and writing, if the Female Misogynist appears, her contempt and mistrust would be clearly presented as a bad thing, a flaw that a decent character would sooner or later grow beyond. I enjoy stories in which characters learn to overcome and eventually abandon their prejudices. But if the prejudice is presented as something to which the character rightfully clings, I say, “No.”

Here is a Goodreads list for those seeking more positive depictions of relationships between women.

The following is the beginning sequence of “Sybilla diSante and the Sepia World,” published in 2014 by Gilded Dragonfly Books in the collection Haunting Tales of Spirit Lake. It’s my first successful short story and my first ever publication. Needless to say, I am very proud.

The night before my parents were killed in a car accident I dreamed of a huge baby buggy smashing through the window of the twentieth floor of a high rise.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a great talker. My custom has always been to observe, listen, and hold my thoughts inside. People call me “unknowable,” and I can’t say they’re wrong. After the accident I hugged my silence more closely than ever, but in a strange moment when I thought my heart would turn inside out if I didn’t speak, I told Ethan Chance about my dream. Ethan was my closest friend, because among all the kids my age, seventeen, only he shared my passion for black-and-white movies. Even when I don’t care to talk about my feelings or my views on society and politics, I can enjoy a good conversation about Casablanca or Metropolis.

He listened as I described the shattering window and the buggy disappearing over the ledge. Then he told me in an awed hush, “You’re psychic.”

I laughed him off but cringed inside. I might like to tell myself stories about ghosts and imagine that the wall separating past from present from future might be frayed in spots, but to suggest I might be psychic was to drag those gossamer daydreams into the bitter cold realm of reality. I didn’t want to be psychic. If I’d somehow prophesied my parents’ deaths, then the right word from me might have saved them. This I couldn’t bear to think. So I changed the subject very quickly to Dr. Strangelove.

Yet in the days that followed I started to wonder whether my sweet-natured cinephile friend might have cursed me, or if my Creek grandmother had been right when she told me that gifts can be born from grief. My sense of sight began to play tricks. When I walked alone on the edge of the wood that bordered Spirit Lake I would spy a ripple in the air, such as we sometimes see in the thick heat of a summer day. It looked like a curtain moving, and I thought I could glimpse a shadow-scape beyond the lush trees and glassy lake, a scene with the sepia shade of a nineteenth-century photograph. People moved through it in the garb of long ago, going through the motions of working and chatting with each other and not paying me the slightest heed.

Curious? This and other tales of mystery can be found in Haunting Tales of Spirit Lake, available from Amazon.com in Kindle and in print.

5. God Save Us From the Queen!

Sometimes, even books I enjoy very much include one or more of my Unfavorite Tropes. A good case in point is Cinder, the first book of the Lunar Chronicles, a popular YA science fiction fairytale retelling series by Marissa Meyer. As one might guess from the title, this novel offers Meyer’s take on the Cinderella myth, yet this Cinderella is a cyborg mechanic, a competent hard worker who takes pride in what she can accomplish, unafflicted with the subservience we see in many Cinderellas. Also unlike most Cinderellas, she has female allies, among them a wisecracking but ever loyal AI. Moreover, this Cinderella saves Prince Charming’s life. I won’t give details, lest Spoilers persuade anyone away from the book. It’s well worth a read. Yet even as I enjoyed it, I ran against a trope that makes me cringe.

This first volume sets up the conflict the whole series will cover, the struggle between the heroic Earthlings and the despicable Lunar invaders. Earthlings are as one might expect, salt of the earth. Lunars are dangerously beautiful aliens with dangerous powers of mental manipulation, who in general should be trusted no further than you could throw your average spaceship. Earth’s supreme ruler, the one who must protect the people from the world-devouring Lunars’ atrocities, is a stalwart, upright Emperor, father of the Prince Charming Kai. His advisers are all men. The Council of Rulers under him is made up of men, with the single exception of the silly figurehead “Queen Camilla.” The Emperor’s consort, Kai’s mother, is long dead and not even an afterthought in the minds of father or son; it’s as if she did her job and produced a male heir and then died to get out of the way of the male bonding. On the side of Good, there is not one single solitary woman of power.

Luna, by contrast, is an Evil Matriarchy. Not only is the current Queen a loathsome, venomous woman with designs on both galactic domination and Kai’s hand in marriage, but all the preceding Queens have been similarly evil. Her advisers are women, and likewise evil. Here we have a classic case of “God Save Us From the Queen!” — or, in equation form, “Woman + Power = Evil.”

I have some hope that Meyer may be setting up this equation for the purpose of overturning it in future books in the series, though in the second book, which I liked much less than the first, it remains firmly entrenched. Yet I strongly suspect a good many authors who use this trope are working from an unconscious association of female power with malevolence, fed by centuries of myth and legend and generations of pop culture: the evil witch-queens Morgause, Morgan le Fay, and Nimue from the stories of King Arthur; the wickedly ambitious Queen Medb, mortal enemy of the Irish hero Cuchulain in the Celtic epic The Tain; the countless evil Queens and witches of fairy tales, so horrifyingly visualized in Disney’s Snow White. Female power has traditionally been presented as destructive, with the message, spoken or unspoken, that authority belongs in the hands of men, since apparently only they have the strength of will to resist the tendency of power to corrupt.

Not every writer who employs the “God Save Us From the Queen!” trope is being deliberately anti-feminist. Sometimes the story demands it, so that even an avowedly feminist writer like Mercedes Lackey must employ it (in The Black Swan and One Good Knight). I’ve used the trope myself, in The Challenges of Brave Ragnar, a comic fantasy series of radio plays I wrote for the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company; the story needed a tyrannical monarch, and I wrote the character as female solely to give our wonderful ARTC actresses a shot at the role. The trouble comes when sympathetic female authority figures are so hard to find.

Some would say that authority figures, male or female, are usually villains, the good guys being those who defy that authority. But where are the female counterparts to M*A*S*H‘s wry, wise Colonel Potter? Or Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s dour but good-hearted Captain Holt? Or Blue Bloods‘ honorable and uncompromising Frank Reagan? Or the brave male commanders of science fiction television, Captains Kirk and Picard and Sisko and Archer, Captain Sheridan, Commander Adama, Captain Mal Reynolds, and the Doctor himself? My friends might point to Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager when I make this protest, but she is only one drop in an ocean of malicious queens, tyrannical “harridan” commanders, and shrewish, short-sighted boss ladies, the sort for whom the term “ball-breaker” — a term that points up the view of female power as unnatural and oppressive — was invented.

When I come across a book that subverts the usual “Woman + Power = Evil” equation, I cherish it. I recently finished reading one such book: Joan D. Vinge’s The Summer Queen. This book is the successor to her earlier The Snow Queen, which employs my unfavorite trope out of necessity, being a compelling sci-fi retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale. But the courageous heroine Moon Dawntreader who defies the corrupt authority in the first book must be the authority in the second. Moon is a complex character who makes mistakes and often finds herself on shaky ground. Yet she is a principled ruler who won’t back down from a challenge, who will persuade and negotiate whenever possible but can and will kick butt if the need should arise. While I’ve seen sympathetic female authority figures in a few other novels, so far only Moon has served as a protagonist, which means the reader gets her point of view, and through it a detailed look at the complexities of power and how difficult it can be to wield, especially for a decent person like her. Even when we see her at her most flawed, we’re never given reason to doubt her devotion to the physical and spiritual well-being of her people.

What would I love to see in speculative fiction? A few more Moon Dawntreaders.

3. Babies Ever After, or Babies Make Everything Better.

True Confession: when God was handing out maternal instinct, I must have been taking a bathroom break. In my earliest childhood I had fun playing with chubby-faced cherub dolls that sighed and cried and spoke. I enjoyed giving them names and personalities. Yet sometime in my late teens I came to realize I was imagining fictional characters, not future children. The idea of a living child dependent on me for health and safety and moral guidance struck me then, as it strikes me now, as more than faintly terrifying, a responsibility for which I am not cut out.

This does not make me a bad person, shirking my duty to the human race. Yet neither does it make me a good person, a freer and more enlightened feminist than my friends and relatives with children. In an excellent blog posted on Fantasy Cafe, Michelle Sagara explains why she finds it difficult to write romance: her daydreams have always revolved around being a superhero, not a girlfriend/wife, but she does not view herself as somehow superior because of this. Likewise, while I’ve always had my share of dreams about romance and marriage, I have never really daydreamed about motherhood. That’s why the Babies Ever After trope would be difficult for me to write. It does not spring from any generalized dislike of motherhood or children.

Children I can write about. When I finished Atterwald I was pleased to see that Ricarda’s youngsters, Hulbert and Adelyte, turned out as well as they did. They’re smart and energetic and observant, the sort of children I would enjoy being around. Yet while my heroine, Nichtel, plays with them and bonds with them, her affection for them does not segue naturally into a desire for children of her own. She never thinks explicitly that she does not want children, as does the heroine of Kristin Cashore’s Graceling. Readers who want to imagine her as a happy mother a few years down the road might do so easily enough. Daydreams of motherhood simply don’t come up in the timespan covered by the novel. I can’t stress enough that its absence is not meant as a political statement. It’s simply a sign of the limits of my own imagination.

My response to the Babies Ever After trope as a reader is a bit more complicated. Some of my very favorite characters in literature are children: young Jane Eyre, telling off her cruel aunt and standing up for her best friend at school; young Anne Shirley, letting her capacious imagination lead her into all kinds of mischief; young Jo March, galloping through the world, a hotheaded daydreamer; Scout Finch, questioning the people and events around her and taking no guff from anyone; and Harry Potter and his friends, repeatedly saving their world with only minor assistance from adults. There’s nothing anti-child about my reading. But is there something anti-motherhood? How many mother’s stories do I find compelling?

My problem, I realize, isn’t with the “Babies” part of the trope as much as with the “Ever After” part, the idea that motherhood signals the end of the adventure, and the part of the personality that took interest and action in the world beyond the back yard either goes to sleep or ceases to exist altogether. There are “mother stories” I enjoy, the ones that show a mom can take action in the wider world while still being a loving, caring mom. Holly Lisle’s Arhel Trilogy is worthy of note. In the last two volumes, Bones of the Past and Mind of the Magic, heroine Faia fights the forces of evil and saves her friends and all her people, all while being the single mother of a very precocious toddler. Patricia C. Wrede’s Caught in Crystal features a more mature single mother, Kayl, with two children, one teen and one preteen. Kayl had wanted to leave adventuring behind but gets swept back into danger. Her youngsters take part in the new adventure and get to witness their mother being a first-class badass.

I may not be maternal, but I don’t expect other women to be like me, and indeed I’m glad for all the women who are not like me. These are the women who write stories about mothers that I can enjoy, the ones who understand through experience that motherhood doesn’t have to be the End of the Story.

4. Ordinary High School Student

My response to this trope isn’t very complicated at all. I’ve been through the American high school, and it’s not a place I’m eager to revisit. I may have been interested in American-high-school stories back when I was there, back when John Hughes was directing movies like The Breakfast Club. But now, as a fortysomething adult, I find a contemporary American high school setting has no appeal for me at all. I may relish a well-written YA fantasy, but only if high-school angst is left out of the plot, or at least kept to a bare minimum. The only modern-day school I want to read about is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, because 1) it’s magical, and 2) it’s British.

Yet my main objection to the trope is the word “ordinary,” at least as many writers seem to define it. All too often, “ordinary” is simply code for “has no hobbies, interests, or ambitions before the Call to Adventure comes along”; the Ordinary High School Student is a blank slate awaiting definition through adventure (usually if a boy) or romance (usually if a girl). I don’t see how anyone with any kind of inner life can fit this concept of “ordinary.” I would much rather see a young protagonist with interests and ambitions and maybe an actual skill or two, confronted with a situation that could change his/her picture of the future. These “ordinary” blank-slate types, after all, don’t seem to have much to lose.

Interested people are more interesting people, whatever their age.

Coming Soon: Part 3

Hello, everybody.  This is Matt, Nan’s husband.  While Nan is hard at work on her latest writings, I thought I’d share Nan’s latest YouTube video!

As you may know, we have two pets that we call “four-legged children.”  Most businesses tend to not approve of us bringing our furry animals into their establishments.  But, every now and then, pets are allowed to accompany their humans for a day of fun.  One such event, the Georgia Renaissance Festival, allows humans to bring their dogs and cats (and, this year, pot-bellied pigs) on “Pet-Friendly Weekend.”  Last weekend was such a “pet-friendly” weekend.  So, naturally, we took advantage of the situation by bringing our cavachin Winnie with us.

This isn’t Winnie’s first visit to GARF.  We brought her last year and she had a great time.  We saw lots of performers at the festival, including Barely Balanced and the Tortuga Twins.  Even Hey Nunnie Nunnie, everyone’s favorite singing nuns, gave Winnie a blessing.  But the true highlight of last year’s trip to GARF was seeing Winnie react to my eating of a turkey leg.

Long considered a standard of Ren Fair food, the turkey leg has given me much culinary delight since I started attending GARF in 1997.  But last year, the experience was enjoyed even more by Winnie Dog.  Her tail started to wag, her eyes popped out of their sockets, and she got up on her hind legs begging for something, anything, from that bone with all that meat on it.  (She did get some pieces that fell on the ground.  But we cannot confirm if any of those pieces even reached the ground!)

This year, we decided to see if we could replicate the experience.  Alas, while Winnie didn’t go into raging begging, she did manage to keep her attention on that turkey leg and wonder why more of it wasn’t falling on the ground, or why her Daddy didn’t share even more of the succulent treat that is the GARF turkey leg.

Recorded on April 26, 2015, at the Georgia Renaissance Festival, here’s Winnie “BoogerBean” Ceccato watching with rapt attention…

So, do we need to bring Winnie back next year?  Let us know in the comments!  And thanks for reading!

“Hope Caudle wore a black wool gown in mourning for herself.

She’d died when she was twelve, that dreadful year the smallpox had cast its cold, vicious shadow over Cupid’s Bow. That community was too small for any death to go unremarked, particularly that of a raven-haired, dark-eyed beauty whose gift for singing and guitar-playing had brightened many a local occasion. But that year her death was merely one of many, and the town had its hands so full of battling the relentless disease that no one noticed her body never made it to the churchyard. Her mother and sisters laid her to rest in their back yard, a private ceremony in the dark of night. They’d mumbled solemn words over a mound of fresh-turned earth, their heads hanging and their hands crossed over their hearts, as was proper.

Seven years later the mound was covered with grass, with no wooden cross or symbol to mark it. No one but the mother and sisters knew the grave was there, and they never spoke of it, or of Hope, to any of their neighbors, as if they meant her to disappear from the townsfolk’s minds as she had disappeared from the earth. But one reminder lingered, wandering the house in her plain, coarse gown, putting her hand to any chore her golden lily sisters didn’t care to do — which meant anything involving mop, broom, scrubbing brush, or cooking pot. Hard work was all the ghost was good for, with her face so repulsively scarred. Everyone had been so sure Hope Caudle would grow into the town’s most beautiful woman.”

These are the opening paragraphs from “Neighbor Haint,” my short story published in Gilded Dragonfly Books‘ newest anthology, Finding Love’s Magic. Care to see the rest of it? The collection is now available on Kindle through Amazon.com for the sale price of $2.99, for one day only, Friday, May 24, 2015.

Finding Love’s Magic is available on Kindle at Amazon.com! Gilded Dragonfly Books is encouraging all interested readers to purchase their Kindle copy on Friday, 4/24/2015. I know I’ll be purchasing mine! Take a trip to Cupid’s Bow, a small town quite close to Savannah, Georgia’s most romantic city, and see what surprises love has in store.

One of the things I enjoy most about reading and writing for the GDB anthologies is the strong note of optimism that pervades them. The stories are warm and sweet without being cloying, rich in sentiment and sympathy without lapsing into sentimentality and bathos. I point to my contributions for Haunting Tales of Spirit Lake and A Stone Mountain Christmas with a great deal of pride. Finding Love’s Magic promises to be the sweetest of all of them, and I take special pride in “Neighbor Haint.”

Fiction enthusiasts, beware: TV Tropes.org will lure you in and hold you with its vast catalog of tropes and its numerous examples of each. The homepage takes care to make clear the distinction between a trope and a cliche. While cliches are hackneyed repetitions, evidence of a faltering imagination, tropes are patterns, and the site sheds light on the infinite number of forms these patterns might take. It’s a dangerous site for anyone interested in the power of Story. It will take up hours of your life. Trust me. I know.

TV Tropes is as useful as Goodreads in pointing me toward books I might want to read, and conversely, pointing me away from those I might (for now) wish to avoid. It also gets me thinking about how different tropes may turn up in my work as a writer. I benefit from being aware of them, since I don’t want certain ones to work their way into my stories unconsciously.

I’ve been building a short list of tropes I’m inclined to shun, as reader or writer or both — unless, of course, they should prove an inseparable part of a story that demands to be told. (The mind should always be open to exceptions, after all.) Before I begin, I should make clear that the presence or absence of such tropes does not indicate whether a story is, in general, worth reading. Many excellent stories have employed my unfavorite tropes, and by no means do I suggest my readers should automatically avoid them.

1. The Smurfette Principle

This trope is most often found in action-adventure, thriller, science fiction, and fantasy. In its most common form, it’s the inclusion of just one sympathetic female character in a cast dominated by men. If you think this sort of thing is found only in testosterone-driven stories with male protagonists, you’d be wrong. Plenty of female authors surround their female protagonists entirely with male characters. Much is made of the position of Elena in Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten as the only female werewolf in her pack and indeed, in the world. Since she interacts almost exclusively with her pack, she doesn’t have much of a chance to exchange words with another female character. In Patricia Briggs’ Masques, heroine Aralorn exchanges (very few) words with exactly one female character in the novel’s entirety — a child who subsequently disappears from the narrative. Why Armstrong, Briggs, and other female writers seem so keen on isolating their heroines from all other women is best known only to them, but this isolation is a sticking point for me.

A sub-type of the Smurfette Principle might be called “Exceptional Woman Syndrome,” in which other female characters do appear, but only as two-dimensional contrasts designed to highlight the heroine’s awesomeness. In Gail Carriger’s entertaining historical fantasy Soulless, for example, we have the smart, unconventional protagonist, Alexia, and them we have her shallow, stupid, cringingly conventional mother, stepsisters, and “best friend.” The mother and stepsisters are blatantly unsympathetic, but why such a smart woman as Alexia would choose to spend time in the company of a drooling moron like Ivy Hisselpenny is perhaps the story’s greatest mystery (along with why Alexia’s father would have been attracted to her mother in the first place). The absence of anything like mutual respect from this “friendship” actually makes Alexia a little less sympathetic than she might be. Perhaps this was Carriger’s intention? The heroine is supposed to be soulless, after all…

I find the Smurfette Principle bothersome for two main reasons. First, the only woman in the cast, the sole representative of her gender, is often loaded down with so much of what the writer might term “strength” that she doesn’t get the chance to be interesting or complicated; she’s less a believable person than a collection of PC traits. A fine blog with an attention-getting title, “I Hate Strong Female Characters,” points out this problem.

Second, having a heroine interact primarily or exclusively with men furthers the anti-feminist notion that only men truly matter in a woman’s life. Nearly all relationships are drawn as potential romances, unless the male character is significantly older than the female lead (and even then it’s often not much of a stumbling block). No matter how strong she supposedly is, she lives for love/sex or she doesn’t live at all. Universal heterosexuality is also implied here.

Surely a woman’s life can be wide and complex enough to hold room for all kinds of relationships, and surely some of those relationships can be with other women. In Atterwald, my heroine Nichtel first learns about love from her foster-mother, Ricarda, a capable heroine in her own right. Even though they’re apart for many pages, Nichtel’s relationship with Ricarda is a significant force in her life throughout. In all the novels I have planned for the foreseeable future, I intend to have at least one female character matter to the heroine, and to free the heroine from the need to carry the Burden of Awesome on her shoulders alone.

2. Cast Full of Pretty Boys

I define this as the phenomenon of a book, movie, or TV show gaining a huge female fanbase even though its female characters are few, underdeveloped and/or unsympathetic, because hey! Hot guys! A review I read once on Goodreads encapsulates the problem I have with this phenomenon. The female reviewer questioned the introduction of a girl character in the second book of a boys’ adventure series, when the first book had no female characters at all. Was the girl added so girls would read the book? Then it was pointless, the reviewer said, because “girls want to read about guys.”

This strikes me as sad, not because I can’t see any value in any book with an all-male cast — hey, I loved The Hobbit, though I admit I still like to imagine Bilbo and at least one of the dwarves as female — but because I find it a regrettable commentary on the way girls are written in a lot of middle-grade and young-adult fiction. As I noted in a previous blog, too many writers peg adventure stories as “for boys,” while love stories are “for girls.” Young female readers with a taste for adventure probably do “want to read about guys.” If girls in action-driven stories were better written, and served more of a purpose in the plot, then those readers might enjoy reading about girls as well.

For my own part, I’ve lost my taste for stories where girls and women are left out of the adventure, no matter how hot the guys are, unless there is a sound reason for leaving them out — for instance, a historical military setting. Of course I enjoy reading and watching a hot guy in action, but only if there is a capable, courageous, and root-worthy gal working alongside him. I try to imagine myself writing a story in which women linger in the background (if they’re there at all) while a cast of exceptionally attractive men dominates the scene, and my imagination won’t reach that far. Since as a reader I have no interest in those stories, why would I write them?

Coming Soon: Part II