Dragons, Zombies and Aliens
:
The Blog
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Blogging is tough.
Well, that's not entirely true. Successful blogging is tough. You need to come up with, write, and edit at least one blog post a week. You have to promote on social media. Put together and send out a newsletter. Keep the rest of your website updated. Connect with guest bloggers, or other blogs where you can be the guest blogger. And this is in addition to the rest of your life: family, friends, hobbies, a "real" job (or two), maybe even school. So how to bloggers stay on top of it all? The key is organization. And I can hear my entire family laughing even as I write this. At first glance, I am one of the least organized people out there. But that's not entirely true. I'm messy , for sure. All my crap gets everywhere, I never do chores, and I have a bad habit of procrastination. But I love making calendars and schedules, and I've found ways to cheat my procrastination. This is mostly done by creating little deadlines. For example, I usually make one YouTube video a month. I break that entire process down: one week for making a script, one week for recording it, two weeks for editing. I tell myself "I have to have this one part done by Saturday the 9th," which means it gets done on Saturday. But hey, it works, because I'm not rushing the entire process at the last minute. Now, organization is a little different for everybody. What works for me might not work for you. So I'm just going to talk about the three things that are critical to my personal success as a blogger and hope that it proves helpful to you. #1: A Monthly Calendar
I've tried every type of planner and calendar out there. Bullet journals, school planners, iCal, and I cannot for the life of me stick with them for more than a few weeks. Mostly because they're too narrow. They focus on day-to-day tasks, and that's stuff that I can keep in my head. There's no need for me to write it down, so I don't, and the planner ends up collecting dust.
But I cannot keep more than a few days' worth of tasks in my noggin. Which is why the monthly calendar is ideal for me. I like being able to see what I'm going to be writing about at a glance. The posts I do on this website, my BitchShelf column at Luna Station Quarterly, YouTube, Patreon, and any short stories/novellas/novel due dates I have, all of them are right there. I tend to plan out everything a month in advance, and have at least a vague idea of what's going to happen next month. It saves me a lot of time and headache. I know what all the deadlines are, I know at a glance when I need to promote what, and since almost everything is in pencil I can erase whatever I need and rework it. #2: A Journal
A writer without a journal is like the Doctor without their TARDIS. They just can't work without it.
Journals are important for idea-keeping. A possible new blog post popped in your head during your day job? Write it down and then get back to work. Someone suggested a new TV show you might want to watch and review for your blog? Whip out your list and add it. Found a different blogger's post to be really inspiring and/or awful? Write down the topic so you can do it better. Seriously, take this journal with you everywhere . (It didn't work for me, but check out "bullet journaling" on YouTube. If you do it right, then you get this journal and your calendar in one place.) Eventually, you'll have a whole backlog of ideas that you can go to when it's time to plan next month's posts. Most of my blogging ideas tend to revolve around writing tips, since book reviews are self-explanatory, and I post at least one Writing Tip article a month. It's hard looking at that blank space and thinking, Shit. What the hell am I going to write about this time? But it's a lot easier if you have a ready-made list of ideas to get you started. #3: Accountability
I don't know about you guys, but unless I have someone or something holding me accountable, the thing I want to do almost never gets done.
Accountability has many different forms. For most writers, it's a terrifying creature known as the editor. Editors give hard deadlines, and if writers don't meet them, it's a shit storm. But bloggers don't usually have editors. Most bloggers, like me, are solo. There is no one person, no authority figure, holding us accountable if we post a day late, or even skip the whole week. Except your readers. Once your readers get used to a certain pattern from you (in my case, a blog post every Friday and a guest post/interview every Wednesday), they will wonder if you don't stick to it. One of the biggest "secrets" to a successful blog is consistency. If you're not consistent, you will lose readers. One thing that I do that keeps me accountable to my readers as well as help me stay organized is I post my monthly schedule to my patrons over on Patreon . Two days from the time this post goes live, I will tell my patrons exactly what's going to happen in August: who the guest bloggers will be, what the regular posts will be about, what the YouTube video is about, as well as any short stories or novellas that get published that month, too. This way, if I fail to post on time, my most critical readers, the ones who financially support me, will know. And that's an excellent kick in the pants.
What tools do you use to stay organized? Let us know in the comments!
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Hi readers! I'm Jacqui Greaves, and I am thrilled to be handed the reins to
Dragons, Zombies and Aliens
for today. I’m going to take you on a journey to explore the weird parts of my brain that produce my works of sexy science fiction and fantasy. So, if you're under 18, now would be a good time to go and do something else.
I started writing about five years ago after careers in childcare (short-lived and miserable), marine biology, science management, and deer farming. I've published several short stories, two novellas, and a novel (more about that later). Some are science fiction and others are fantasy, but most are weird combinations of the two. What they all have in common in sex. Often very explicit sex. To be specific, by sex I mean the physical act of sex, not the emotional state of intimacy. In writing sex I’m describing actions, sensations and influences, not feelings. This is why I've stopped saying I write erotica, because there's such a strong association between erotica and romance. I don't write romance, and my works seldom have happy endings. I also don't call what I write porn, because it's not exploitative. Unlike in most porn, the sex I write is part of the narrative, but is not the story. Sometimes I describe what I write as Lusterature, but really I just write explicit sex. When I started writing I didn't set out to write sex. I wanted to write fantasy and science fiction, the types of stories I like to read. Despite my efforts the sex just crept in, so I let it stay. Why? Well that’s a fine question, and I’m glad you asked! Because, while there are some people who don’t (yes, asexuals, I acknowledge you), lots of us engage in, think about or hanker after sex pretty much daily--more for some, less for others. There’s a strong biological imperative to engage in sex, and as humans many of us start to experiment with it earlier than we’d like to admit. For most of us, sex is, and should be, an enjoyable experience without shame. But that isn’t always the case, and for me, as a writer, that’s great. By adding sex into the mix of my speculative fiction I can explore a whole suite of character traits and behaviours that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day. It permits me a wider vocabulary and an additional range of sensations and senses to describe. Sex brings with it, its own joys, disappointments, dangers and delights. When mixed into a speculative world, it adds a richness and depth, even an element of reality if you will. So then, what differentiates good sex writing from bad sex writing? F or starters, sex has to be anatomically and physically possible. It “might” be possible to fuck someone in the arse and suck their clitoris at the same time…but it’s highly unlikely! A scene like that would most likely make you stop reading while you tried to imagine how it could be achieved, but the aim of the writer is to keep you reading. Anything that makes you stop is bad. I once read a scene where the male twisted the woman’s boobs like doorknobs (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture). It just made me wince, roll my eyes and stop reading. Unlike other genres, Science Fiction gives the writer opportunities to stretch what is anatomically possible with the introduction of aliens. The short story, "Spar" by KIJ Johnson, is an award-winning example of great interspecies sex with seemingly incompatible anatomies. The opening line alone tells us so much: “In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.” (Honestly, do yourself a favour and read the full story, here’s the link: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/johnson_10_09/ ) Overuse of clichés and euphemisms are also sure signs of poor sex writing. If you read a cock/penis described as a beaver cleaver, love truncheon, or towering pillar of manhood, my advice is to hurl that book away. Unless it’s a parody, in which case giggle on! Having said that, readers of fantasy are often more accepting of highly descriptive language. As an example, G.R.R. Martin uses more florid descriptors of body parts than I would, but he gets away with it because we expect it of him. As for any scene in a story or novel, a sex scene must have a purpose. It should reveal something about the plot, characters, or their relationships. Sex can be used to explore power dynamics, reveal secrets, show attitudes, and define moral frameworks. And, unlike other story elements, sex can be used to arouse the reader. This is the magic of sex. Gods of Fire
Gods of Fire
is my first full length novel. A historical fantasy, it centers around Guillaume, an elf of mixed race.
Sentenced to death as an infant by his grandfather then abandoned by his mother, Guillaume grows up with no idea of who or what he is. All he understands is that he has a voracious sexual appetite and the power to render himself irresistible to any woman he desires. His life is thrown into turmoil when his full powers are revealed in a violent display of fire and murder. Forced to leave the only home he has known, Guillaume sets forth to unravel the mystery of his heritage. His quest takes him through France and deep into Africa. As his powers grow, only his lifelong companion, Smoke, can help him control the depraved primal urges that threaten to overwhelm him. When Smoke loses her influence, it’s not only the lives of those close to him that are threatened. Can the world survive the ancient being that Guillaume becomes? Gods of Fire is on sale at most of your favourite online bookstores via Books2Read. https://books2read.com/godsoffire/
About Jacqui Greaves
Jacqui has lived an adventure-filled life, spanning a range of careers and countries. She’s wrangled kindergarten children, driven buses, researched humpback whales, spoken at the United Nations, visited Antarctica, farmed deer and, most recently, written strange and sexy fiction. A New Zealander, currently living by the beach in Melbourne but on the move back to NZ, Jacqui has two novella’s published in the PNRLust Anthologies and several short stories in online publications. Gods of Fire is her first full length novel. Connect Twitter: @JacquiG_Author Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008782507874 Website: https://www.jacquigreaves-author.com/ Oathbringer , Book 3 of The Stormlight Archive , by Brandon Sanderson
No spoilers!
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(Book 2.5 of
The Stormlight Archive
.
Book 1 is The Way of Kings . Book 2 is Words of Radiance . ) Three years ago, Lift asked a goddess to stop her from growing older--a wish she believed was granted. Now, in Edgedancer , the barely teenage nascent Knight Radiant finds that time stands still for no one. Although the young Azish emperor granted her safe haven from an executioner she knows only as Darkness, court life is suffocating the free-spirited Lift, who can't help heading to Yeddaw when she hears the relentless Darkness is there hunting people like her with budding powers. The downtrodden in Yeddaw have no champion, and Lift knows she must seize this awesome responsibility. |
No Spoilers (Promise!)
"Novella" my ass. This thing is 250 pages.
Unlike all the other books in The Stormlight Archive, Edgedancer is a huge departure from form in that it focuses exclusively on one character, with no detours or side-stories. It's actually kind of nice. Simple in a way this series isn't. And the character Sanderson chose--Lift--is phenomenal. She's extremely whacky, impulsive, and doesn't care about any kind of rules or structure. But she's also kind and compassionate, doing her best to keep people safe even as she goes to great lengths not to get attached to anything or anyone.
If you're reading The Stormlight Archive and are wondering who the hell this Lift character is, she's the thief who can turn Slick, has an obsession with food, and her spren Wyndle is the one that's made out of vines. If you're still drawing a blank, the short story that she first appeared in in Words of Radiance --where she helps a bunch of other thieves break into the Azish palace and ends up accidentally making one of them the new emperor--acts as the prologue to Edgedancer , so you get a nice refresher.
That's one of the things that's a downside to Sanderson's work. This series is incredible, the world-building is insane, and there's so much going on. Too much. More than once I've come across a name or place or concept that we've seen before, and it's supposed to be this big reveal, but I'll be drawing a complete blank because the thing was last seen a thousand pages ago and I have no idea what's going on. When book four comes out, I'm probably going to have to re-read the first three books to have half a chance of keeping everything straight.
Also in Edgedancer , Sanderson touches on mental health. Lift gets some food at an orphanage in the city of Yeddaw and befriends one of the other kids, who has a cognitive disability because of head trauma (i.e. head smacked bad, make brain sad). This is something I've noticed Sanderson doing more and more of, which is really good. Mostly. So far, every physical disability that's popped up--lack of limbs, paralysis, head trauma, etc.--has been fixed via magic. That's kind of a bummer, because we have people running on walls and flying and whatnot, and I would've loved to see a guy in a tricked-out wheelchair doing that, or a deaf bridgeman teaching everyone sign language so all the Windrunners can communicate in the sky, or someone with chronic pain calling the shots at a war meeting. Stuff like that. But no; magic glowing light fixes all that before it can become plot-relevant.
However, mental health has been handled better and more realistically; that is, it doesn't get a quick fix like a missing limb in this world. Kaladin still has seasonal depression, which is a pretty big deal considering the fact that he's one of the main characters. One of the men of Bridge Four is revealed to be an addict who keeps falling off the wagon. Shallan...probably should be more messed up than she is, but her development in light of her abusive family life is pretty true to form.
Anyway. Back to Edgedancer . According to Sanderson, this was more of a fun side-quest than anything else, as he loves the character of Lift and wanted to explore her more in depth. But in the main series, she barely pops up, and when she does it's after most of her character development. So basically, this was an author just having fun showing us the backstory of a minor character in a great series. And it shows. It's probably not critical to read this book to understand the series as a whole, but it's definitely worth the read.
Unlike all the other books in The Stormlight Archive, Edgedancer is a huge departure from form in that it focuses exclusively on one character, with no detours or side-stories. It's actually kind of nice. Simple in a way this series isn't. And the character Sanderson chose--Lift--is phenomenal. She's extremely whacky, impulsive, and doesn't care about any kind of rules or structure. But she's also kind and compassionate, doing her best to keep people safe even as she goes to great lengths not to get attached to anything or anyone.
If you're reading The Stormlight Archive and are wondering who the hell this Lift character is, she's the thief who can turn Slick, has an obsession with food, and her spren Wyndle is the one that's made out of vines. If you're still drawing a blank, the short story that she first appeared in in Words of Radiance --where she helps a bunch of other thieves break into the Azish palace and ends up accidentally making one of them the new emperor--acts as the prologue to Edgedancer , so you get a nice refresher.
That's one of the things that's a downside to Sanderson's work. This series is incredible, the world-building is insane, and there's so much going on. Too much. More than once I've come across a name or place or concept that we've seen before, and it's supposed to be this big reveal, but I'll be drawing a complete blank because the thing was last seen a thousand pages ago and I have no idea what's going on. When book four comes out, I'm probably going to have to re-read the first three books to have half a chance of keeping everything straight.
Also in Edgedancer , Sanderson touches on mental health. Lift gets some food at an orphanage in the city of Yeddaw and befriends one of the other kids, who has a cognitive disability because of head trauma (i.e. head smacked bad, make brain sad). This is something I've noticed Sanderson doing more and more of, which is really good. Mostly. So far, every physical disability that's popped up--lack of limbs, paralysis, head trauma, etc.--has been fixed via magic. That's kind of a bummer, because we have people running on walls and flying and whatnot, and I would've loved to see a guy in a tricked-out wheelchair doing that, or a deaf bridgeman teaching everyone sign language so all the Windrunners can communicate in the sky, or someone with chronic pain calling the shots at a war meeting. Stuff like that. But no; magic glowing light fixes all that before it can become plot-relevant.
However, mental health has been handled better and more realistically; that is, it doesn't get a quick fix like a missing limb in this world. Kaladin still has seasonal depression, which is a pretty big deal considering the fact that he's one of the main characters. One of the men of Bridge Four is revealed to be an addict who keeps falling off the wagon. Shallan...probably should be more messed up than she is, but her development in light of her abusive family life is pretty true to form.
Anyway. Back to Edgedancer . According to Sanderson, this was more of a fun side-quest than anything else, as he loves the character of Lift and wanted to explore her more in depth. But in the main series, she barely pops up, and when she does it's after most of her character development. So basically, this was an author just having fun showing us the backstory of a minor character in a great series. And it shows. It's probably not critical to read this book to understand the series as a whole, but it's definitely worth the read.
Last month, I reviewed the grimdark historical fantasy book
The Wolf in the Whale
, which combines Inuit and Norse mythology and stars a gender non-binary character. This week, I got to interview the author, Jordanna Max Brodsky.
Interview with Jordanna Max Brodsky
You’ve written a lot of stories based on ancient mythology. What inspired your interest in that?
Like so many people, my first exposure to mythology came with D’Aulaires Greek Myths when I was a kid. One of the last pages shows a nighttime scene of broken columns and toppled statues and reads, “All things must come to an end. So too did the reign of the Olympians.” I always found that heartbreaking. But the beauty of writing is that you can create the world you want, not the one you have, so I decided to imagine a universe in which the gods hadn’t all died out after all. That became the Olympus Bound series.
Once you start writing about mythology, it’s hard to stop. Most fantasy authors have to construct their worlds from scratch, but myth provides settings, costumes, ancient languages, poetry, legends, and religions. I didn’t need to invent places like Nunavut or Iceland or Athens—I could actually visit them. Yet, myths that exist in so many different versions that there’s plenty of room to find your own stories as well.
The gods themselves, whether or Inuit or Norse or Greek, are quite different from our amorphous modern conceptions of the divine. They’re capable of supernatural feats but still profoundly human: full of rage, despair, love, jealousy, and laughter. It’s a fascinating paradox, the same one that draws us to superhero movies. At the same time, there’s a reason humanity has retold myths for so long. They touch on themes as compelling today as they were a thousand years ago: loyalty and betrayal, metamorphoses and murder, family and exile.
Can you tell us about what you’re currently working on?
I’m experiencing an authorial evolution. The Olympus Bound series is contemporary fantasy, a Percy-Jackson-for-adults thriller about the Greek goddess Artemis in the modern day. The Wolf in the Whale moved into historical fantasy, exploring both Inuit and Norse myth in their ancient context. Now I’m embarking on my first purely historical fiction project, with no fantasy in sight. But I’m still focusing on the challenges that women face when they defy their culture’s norms. The new book is set during the Civil War, and it follows an Irish immigrant who disguises her gender to enlist in the Union Army. It’s inspired by the true stories of hundreds of women who did the same thing, the vast majority of whom have been forgotten by history.
There are unfortunately very, very few SFF stories that star a trans/non-binary character. Was making Omat, the main character in The Wolf in the Whale , trans/non-binary a conscious decision to combat this, or was it just a natural happenstance?
Omat’s gender was actually one of the reasons I chose to write about Inuit culture in the first place. In the historical record, most of the conflicts during the Viking expeditions to North America occurred between Norsemen and the Beothuk Indians. There’s only a brief reference in one saga to a group who were likely Inuit. But that one evocative verse led me to start researching Inuit culture, and as soon as I learned about their conception of what scholars call the “Third Sex,” I knew I had my protagonist. It’s an identity that is not exactly the same as what we call transgender. Instead, Inuit children in traditional culture possess the name-soul of an ancestor. In rare occasions, the child was then raised in that ancestor’s gender, even if it didn’t correlate to their biological sex. This is something decided at birth by the shaman and the community, not an understanding that the child themselves comes to at some point later in life.
To me, The Wolf in the Whale is more a story about an individual who wants to defy gender roles—the same way strong women have been doing forever—than it is about being specifically transgender. Perhaps gender non-binary is a more appropriate term for my protagonist, as Omat definitely lives in both genders, but it, too, implies a modern conception that isn’t entirely applicable to this ancient story. At the end of the day, I simply hope that The Wolf in the Whale can serve as yet another reminder that our understanding of gender and sexuality is infinitely varied and constantly evolving.
Inuit and Norse mythology are two things that usually don’t mix. Why did you decide to bring them together in The Wolf in the Whale ?
I’m always fascinated by the forgotten moments in history. Too often, we only learn the same few fundamental stories in school—America’s founding myths, you might say—and we forget that other cultures lived in this land long before our own. Few people even remember that the Norse “discovered” America five hundred years before Columbus. Even fewer know that one of the leaders of those Norse expeditions was a woman—Leif Eriksson’s sister, Freydis Eriksdottir. And almost no one talks about the fact that the Norse settlement eventually failed in part because the indigenous people, including Inuit hunters, successfully fought them off.
Once I knew I wanted to write about the Norse and the Inuit, pairing their mythologies seemed only natural. Because both cultures evolved in similar maritime Arctic environments, their stories have some striking similarities. Both see the Sun as female and the Moon as male, an inversion of the Classical tropes. And both are full of ravens, wolves, and sea monsters. One fought with iron, the other with bone and slate, but these two parallel cultures make both well-matched adversaries and surprising allies.
You’ve done a lot of traveling in order to research for your stories. What are some of the favorite places you’ve visited?
For pure, unadulterated pleasure, I’d have to pick Crete, which I visited when researching Artemis’s ancient sacred sites for The Immortals and the Olympus Bound series. It’s hard to beat crystalline lagoons, pine-scented gorges, and the original Labyrinth.
But for sheer awe, I’d go with Nunavut in subarctic Canada, where I traveled last year for The Wolf in the Whale . Granted, the temperature was near forty below with the wind chill, but watching the Northern Lights shimmer overhead in a psychedelic ballet of orange and purple and green made me forget the cold. I learned things on that trip that I didn’t realize I didn’t know. The Internet can show you how to construct an iglu, but it’s not until I actually snowmobiled onto the sea ice to build one with an Inuit elder that I appreciated the view from inside—like a perfect spiraled sea shell, with each snow block limned in sunlight. I’d watched half a dozen videos on lighting a traditional Inuit oil lamp, but never smelled the nutty, soothing scent of the burning moss wick, nor known the pleasure of staring into the steady mountain peaks of flame.
The Wolf in the Whale examines sexual violence, but not just from the survivor’s side, it also explores the guilt and impact of the perpetrators of sexual violence. Why is that?
I know many readers would prefer not to read about sexual violence, and I completely respect that position. For this particular book, however, I wanted to acknowledge that sexual violence was (and is) very much a part of many women’s lives—especially in the medieval world when their bodies and rights were even less valued than they are today. The fundamental Inuit myth I explore in the book—the formation of the Sun and the Moon—centers on an incestuous rape, so sexual violence necessarily plays a role in the larger story.
When creating my male Viking protagonist, I definitely toyed with the idea of making him a pure soul who completely defied the stereotype of a raping marauder. But it simply didn’t ring true. Not all Norsemen were Vikings (a point I make clear in the book), but those that were certainly showed little mercy to the villages they attacked. They regularly took women as slaves and concubines. To ignore that fact was to ignore reality. So I decided the more interesting choice was to try to understand how a culture can teach a man to be a predator—and then to explore how he can come back from that.
If you could have one (real life) skill that you don’t currently have, what would it be? Why? How would you use it?
The ability to type for more than two hours at a time. Since writing my thesis in college, I’ve been plagued by tendonitis in my hands and wrists, making typing for long periods quite painful. I would write far faster if I could write for longer each day. So a note for aspiring authors: get yourself an ergonomic typing setup and keep stretching! You don’t want to wind up like me!
Who in your life has truly inspired you?
Juliet Marillier. Her Daughter of the Forest is what made me become a writer in the first place. I found that book so profoundly engrossing and emotionally gut-wrenching that I knew I had to try my hand at creating a world that could do the same for other readers.
What creature is better: dragons, zombies, or aliens?
Definitely aliens. Dragons and zombies, I’m afraid, just don’t exist. The fact that aliens actually might makes them infinitely more fascinating to me. I prefer to work reality into my fantasy. Also, since there’s nothing to say that aliens can’t take the form of zombies or dragons, you can have your cake and eat it too!
Like so many people, my first exposure to mythology came with D’Aulaires Greek Myths when I was a kid. One of the last pages shows a nighttime scene of broken columns and toppled statues and reads, “All things must come to an end. So too did the reign of the Olympians.” I always found that heartbreaking. But the beauty of writing is that you can create the world you want, not the one you have, so I decided to imagine a universe in which the gods hadn’t all died out after all. That became the Olympus Bound series.
Once you start writing about mythology, it’s hard to stop. Most fantasy authors have to construct their worlds from scratch, but myth provides settings, costumes, ancient languages, poetry, legends, and religions. I didn’t need to invent places like Nunavut or Iceland or Athens—I could actually visit them. Yet, myths that exist in so many different versions that there’s plenty of room to find your own stories as well.
The gods themselves, whether or Inuit or Norse or Greek, are quite different from our amorphous modern conceptions of the divine. They’re capable of supernatural feats but still profoundly human: full of rage, despair, love, jealousy, and laughter. It’s a fascinating paradox, the same one that draws us to superhero movies. At the same time, there’s a reason humanity has retold myths for so long. They touch on themes as compelling today as they were a thousand years ago: loyalty and betrayal, metamorphoses and murder, family and exile.
Can you tell us about what you’re currently working on?
I’m experiencing an authorial evolution. The Olympus Bound series is contemporary fantasy, a Percy-Jackson-for-adults thriller about the Greek goddess Artemis in the modern day. The Wolf in the Whale moved into historical fantasy, exploring both Inuit and Norse myth in their ancient context. Now I’m embarking on my first purely historical fiction project, with no fantasy in sight. But I’m still focusing on the challenges that women face when they defy their culture’s norms. The new book is set during the Civil War, and it follows an Irish immigrant who disguises her gender to enlist in the Union Army. It’s inspired by the true stories of hundreds of women who did the same thing, the vast majority of whom have been forgotten by history.
There are unfortunately very, very few SFF stories that star a trans/non-binary character. Was making Omat, the main character in The Wolf in the Whale , trans/non-binary a conscious decision to combat this, or was it just a natural happenstance?
Omat’s gender was actually one of the reasons I chose to write about Inuit culture in the first place. In the historical record, most of the conflicts during the Viking expeditions to North America occurred between Norsemen and the Beothuk Indians. There’s only a brief reference in one saga to a group who were likely Inuit. But that one evocative verse led me to start researching Inuit culture, and as soon as I learned about their conception of what scholars call the “Third Sex,” I knew I had my protagonist. It’s an identity that is not exactly the same as what we call transgender. Instead, Inuit children in traditional culture possess the name-soul of an ancestor. In rare occasions, the child was then raised in that ancestor’s gender, even if it didn’t correlate to their biological sex. This is something decided at birth by the shaman and the community, not an understanding that the child themselves comes to at some point later in life.
To me, The Wolf in the Whale is more a story about an individual who wants to defy gender roles—the same way strong women have been doing forever—than it is about being specifically transgender. Perhaps gender non-binary is a more appropriate term for my protagonist, as Omat definitely lives in both genders, but it, too, implies a modern conception that isn’t entirely applicable to this ancient story. At the end of the day, I simply hope that The Wolf in the Whale can serve as yet another reminder that our understanding of gender and sexuality is infinitely varied and constantly evolving.
Inuit and Norse mythology are two things that usually don’t mix. Why did you decide to bring them together in The Wolf in the Whale ?
I’m always fascinated by the forgotten moments in history. Too often, we only learn the same few fundamental stories in school—America’s founding myths, you might say—and we forget that other cultures lived in this land long before our own. Few people even remember that the Norse “discovered” America five hundred years before Columbus. Even fewer know that one of the leaders of those Norse expeditions was a woman—Leif Eriksson’s sister, Freydis Eriksdottir. And almost no one talks about the fact that the Norse settlement eventually failed in part because the indigenous people, including Inuit hunters, successfully fought them off.
Once I knew I wanted to write about the Norse and the Inuit, pairing their mythologies seemed only natural. Because both cultures evolved in similar maritime Arctic environments, their stories have some striking similarities. Both see the Sun as female and the Moon as male, an inversion of the Classical tropes. And both are full of ravens, wolves, and sea monsters. One fought with iron, the other with bone and slate, but these two parallel cultures make both well-matched adversaries and surprising allies.
You’ve done a lot of traveling in order to research for your stories. What are some of the favorite places you’ve visited?
For pure, unadulterated pleasure, I’d have to pick Crete, which I visited when researching Artemis’s ancient sacred sites for The Immortals and the Olympus Bound series. It’s hard to beat crystalline lagoons, pine-scented gorges, and the original Labyrinth.
But for sheer awe, I’d go with Nunavut in subarctic Canada, where I traveled last year for The Wolf in the Whale . Granted, the temperature was near forty below with the wind chill, but watching the Northern Lights shimmer overhead in a psychedelic ballet of orange and purple and green made me forget the cold. I learned things on that trip that I didn’t realize I didn’t know. The Internet can show you how to construct an iglu, but it’s not until I actually snowmobiled onto the sea ice to build one with an Inuit elder that I appreciated the view from inside—like a perfect spiraled sea shell, with each snow block limned in sunlight. I’d watched half a dozen videos on lighting a traditional Inuit oil lamp, but never smelled the nutty, soothing scent of the burning moss wick, nor known the pleasure of staring into the steady mountain peaks of flame.
The Wolf in the Whale examines sexual violence, but not just from the survivor’s side, it also explores the guilt and impact of the perpetrators of sexual violence. Why is that?
I know many readers would prefer not to read about sexual violence, and I completely respect that position. For this particular book, however, I wanted to acknowledge that sexual violence was (and is) very much a part of many women’s lives—especially in the medieval world when their bodies and rights were even less valued than they are today. The fundamental Inuit myth I explore in the book—the formation of the Sun and the Moon—centers on an incestuous rape, so sexual violence necessarily plays a role in the larger story.
When creating my male Viking protagonist, I definitely toyed with the idea of making him a pure soul who completely defied the stereotype of a raping marauder. But it simply didn’t ring true. Not all Norsemen were Vikings (a point I make clear in the book), but those that were certainly showed little mercy to the villages they attacked. They regularly took women as slaves and concubines. To ignore that fact was to ignore reality. So I decided the more interesting choice was to try to understand how a culture can teach a man to be a predator—and then to explore how he can come back from that.
If you could have one (real life) skill that you don’t currently have, what would it be? Why? How would you use it?
The ability to type for more than two hours at a time. Since writing my thesis in college, I’ve been plagued by tendonitis in my hands and wrists, making typing for long periods quite painful. I would write far faster if I could write for longer each day. So a note for aspiring authors: get yourself an ergonomic typing setup and keep stretching! You don’t want to wind up like me!
Who in your life has truly inspired you?
Juliet Marillier. Her Daughter of the Forest is what made me become a writer in the first place. I found that book so profoundly engrossing and emotionally gut-wrenching that I knew I had to try my hand at creating a world that could do the same for other readers.
What creature is better: dragons, zombies, or aliens?
Definitely aliens. Dragons and zombies, I’m afraid, just don’t exist. The fact that aliens actually might makes them infinitely more fascinating to me. I prefer to work reality into my fantasy. Also, since there’s nothing to say that aliens can’t take the form of zombies or dragons, you can have your cake and eat it too!
A big thank-you to Jordanna for coming onto my blog for this interview! Check out
my review
for her book
The Wolf in the Whale
. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm adding the Olympus Bound series to my Amazon wish list.
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The first Dragons, Zombies and Aliens blog was started in 2015. Somewhere between college coursework, paying rent with door-to-door sales, and keeping up with my sorority sisters, I wrote reviews, rants and commentaries on books, TV shows, and movies. Now, this blog has moved, improved, and the sky's the limit!
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