Alternate title, “On the Beach” or “Translator and Author Hang Out.” 😀

Marion Drolsbach, as those who’ve been following will know, is a book translator (English to Dutch) and we first met when she was translating The Heir of Night.

Like Photo #8, the locale is the wild beach environment of Birdlings’ Flat and this shot was taken by Marion’s husband, Malcolm.

I kind of like the black and white. Hope you do, too! 😉

“Hold on a minute, mate”, you may be thinking — isn’t your Supernatural Underground theme for 2023 the “Band of Brothers”?

If you are thinking that, then you’re quite right: it is! But as I assert in Supernatural Underground’s 1 June post, “…my premise, of course, is that the bromance is both integral to, and a natural extension of, the “band of brothers” in Fantasy.”

The rest, dear readers, is history. The bromance is, indeed, the subject of this month’s post. From Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in which bromances abound, to m’own The Wall of Night series; or Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan to T Frohock’s Los Nefilim, Fantasy literature features bromances galore.

I’m just celebrating a few of ’em on the SU — but to find out more, click on:

From “Band of Brothers” — to Bromance

And if you have some favourite examples, please do share with a comment, either here or on the SU post. 😀

Yes, it is 1 June (I know, already!), so yes, I will have the next post in the “Band of Brothers” series appearing on Supernatural Underground later today. (The SU runs on US Eastern Standard Time, currently about 16 hours behind NZ time.)

While you’re waiting, here are two great Supernatural Underground posts to check out:

“Listen With Your Heart” and Other Great Mentor Lines” — penned by Amanda Arista

“Environment — More Than Meets The Eye” by Kim Falconer

Back soon!

Having received a query on Good Reads, I thought I’d highlight that there have been a couple of The Wall Of Night #4 progress updates so far this year. The first was a“still writing, not finished yet” update on January 30, but the more significant two were:

Real News — 27 April: in which I advised that the go-to-whoa narrative arc for the story (and the series — woohoo!) was complete

Revision Ho — 1 May: in which the revision process officially began!

At one level, each represents just one more step in the journey of a thousand miles (and considerably more than 1000 words), but I think we can probably agree they’re significant steps.

At this stage, all I can add by way of additional news is that the revision has gotten off to a positive start, so all digits pretzelled that the positive continues.

For the record, updates will always appear under About My Books and About What I’m Doing, themselves located under Categories in the far-right-hand sidebar of the blog.

I shall do my best to keep them coming around every 3-4 months, or otherwise when there is News of Note to report. On which occasions, the heraldic fanfares shall not be stinted. 😀

The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist’s Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood — in alphabetical order, by name, of course!

Well, were crossing the “great plains of M” for some time, but the landscape has finally changed and we’re now traversing “N” 😀 — & today’s character is from The Gathering of the Lost!

—

Naia: caretaker of the Guild of Heralds’ townhouse in the River city of Ij.

Naia shook her head. She was a slight woman with short, grizzled hair and the trace of an Enkot burr in her voice. “Now that,” she said firmly, “would not do at all. You know you’ll be expected to mingle.” Handing over the gilt-edged cards, her expression grew troubled. “You will be careful, won’t you?”

~ from © The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall Of Night Book Two – Chapter 1, The Road to Ij

Last week, I celebrated Mother’s Day with a refeatured post on Mothers As Main Characters in Fantasy & SciFi.

I also mentioned that I could think of very few characters in SFF where “being a mother is central, not peripheral, to her [the character’s] part in the story.”

In the meantime, I’ve caught up with Sweet Tooth Season 2 on Netflix, and it struck me that Aimee Eden has to qualify as one of the great mothers of SFF.

A quick review of t’interwebs suggests she may not be a character in the original graphic novel series (Vertigo, published by DC), but she certainly rocks the Netflix show.

Most of you will know the Sweet Tooth story: of a post-apocalyptic world where the human population has been decimated by a pandemic (“the Sick.”) All children are now born hybrid, part human, part animal — think centaur or faun.

Aimee is one of the main characters in Seasons 1 and 2. She is not a birth mother, but has fostered a group of hybrid children, whom she has rescued from abandonment and protected from the Last Men, a group bent on their extermination.

Eventually, the Last Men track the kids down and capture them, but Aimee is unswerving in her determination to get them back. The one thing that’s clear throughout is Aimee’s love for and dedication to her kids.

When forced to flee their home, she reassures the children that, “This is just bricks and concrete. Home is wherever we’re all together.”

And when Aimee eventually contracts the Sick, she refuses a potential medication that has been generated by using one of her kids, Roy, as a guinea pig. He was, she tells another character, an eight year old boy who loved soccer and she would rather die herself than benefit from a medication he was murdered to create.

So I hope you agree that the character of Aimee ticks the boxes from last weeks post, ie:

i) She’s a central character

ii) Being a mother is central to her role in the story

iii) And it’s definitely a spec-fic (SFF) story. 😀

Over the past year, I’ve been reprising a Daughter of Blood (and by extension The Wall Of Night) Q&A series that featured in 2019.

In doing so, I’ve been struck all over again by the degree to which the readers’ questions rock – and today we’re rocking on with Tom’s Question.

Tom: Your blog and Twitter peg you as a foodie, but it doesn’t come through in Daughter Of Blood and your other books. Not like the feasts in “Harry Potter”. Why is that?

I am a foodie, so you’ve definitely pegged me right there. 😀 And the feats of feast-dom in Harry Potter are certainly stupendous. When it comes to The Wall Of Night, though, the story has to be about the characters and the world they live in. In this case, it’s not a story centered on food and drink: for example, unlike Joanne Harris’s early novels, Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. So the references to food and drink have to derive from and support the story being told, in the same way lembas bread supports The Lord Of The Rings’ story and the Hogwarts feasts support the story being told in Harry Potter.

In WALL such references are fleeting but I hope aid the worldbuilding and /or scene setting. For example, in The Heir of Night’s Feast of Returning, early in the book, Malian is eating (or not eating, in fact) “a piece of dried fruit”, as opposed to fresh fruit—a small detail but consistent with the Wall environment. In The Gathering of the Lost, though, in the more clement if not less dangerous environment of Ij, Haimyr the Golden offers the heralds white wine from Emer and candied fruit—an echo of the refreshments offered in fairytales. Later, in the wild country of Northern Emer, a starving, exhausted Carick thinks a stale pie tastes marvelous. In other words, food is present in the series as the circumstances of the story dictate: a supporting actor rather than a player in its own right. I feel that being a foodie, though, helps me to choose the details that count.

Previous Thursday Q&A Refeatures:

2022:
March 31 — #1 Phoebe’s Question on Book Planning

April 21 — #2 Sam’s Question on Deleted Scenes

April 28 — #3 Sandy’s Question on Characters That Take Charge

May 19 — #4 Lindsay’s Question on Research

June 23 — #5 Chris’s Question on Tirael & “What Would Have Happened If…”

June 30 — #6 Rosie’s Question on the Web of Mayanne

September 8 — #7 Jason’s Question on Weapons & Names

October 6 — #8 Robin’s Question on Tuckerization Characters

November 24 — #9 Josh’s Question on Whether I Have A Favourite Moment in Daughter of Blood

December 15 — #10 Shannon’s Question re Sections or Characters that were Hard to Write

2023
March 30 — #11 Jenny’s Question re Inspiration and Keeping Going

Yesterday, May 14, being Mother’s Day here in NZ, I thought I’d repost a 2016 post featuring “Mothers as Main Characters” in fantasy and science fiction literature.

The post was sparked by a preceding post on Jessica, the mother of Paul Atreides in the science fiction classic, Dune, but also a main character in her own right:

About Jessica in “Dune” – and Why She’s Still Kickass After 50 Years

As mentioned in that post, I still consider Jessica to be one of the most kickass female characters in SFF and “still one of the very few (I know: 50 years later!) where being a mother is central, not peripheral, to her part in the story.”

The follow up post was where I put on my thinking cap to come up with some other candidates – not unlike my current post on Supernatural Underground where I had to think long and hard to come up with some “bands of sisters” contenders. ICYMI, that post is here:

Celebrating the “Band of Sisters” in Speculative Fiction

Returning to Mother’s Day, here’s the gist of the Mothers As Main Characters post:

“I have by no means read all the available fiction in SFF, but I still had to put on my thinking cap when it came to “Great Mums of SFF.” So although I am going to suggest a few more contenders now, I am hoping you may be able to help me out with a few more names and books.

Just to be clear, here are the criteria:

— the character doesn’t have to be the main character in the book but does have to be a central character with major page time.

— being a mother has to be central in some way to the character’s role in the story, rather than a background fact that otherwise doesn’t really affect the character’s arc. (For example, this would rule out Mara in the Empire series, where motherhood is not really a significant part of her arc: imho.)

— the character can appear in any form of SFF: from magic realism, through paranormal and steampunk to epic fantasy; from near future dystopia through space opera to hard Sci Fi. The book can also appear in Junior, YA, or adult SFF.

OK, here’s the rest of my little list, besides Jessica:

• Briar Wilkes in Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker — Briar is the main character in the book and enters a zombie infested Seattle to rescue her son. (See cover above.)

• Rosala de Garsenc and Signy de Barbentain in Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song For Arbonne — both are prominent characters in the story.  Signy is Countess of Arbonne and her relationship with her daughters, one living, one dead, plays an important part in shaping her character and role in the story. Rosala flees her husband and her country in the late stages of pregnancy because her father-in-law has threatened to take her baby and because she does not want her child raised to emulate his cruelty and megalomania.

• Jenny Waynest in Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane — Jenny is a wizard and the main character in the book; she has two sons and although they don’t play a large part in the story directly, part of what Jenny struggles with as a character is how to reconcile being a wizard as well as a mother.

• Teia in Elspeth Cooper’s The Wild Hunt quartet, is pregnant through much of the first two books and a new mother by the end of the third book (the fourth — not unlike mine 😉 — is forthcoming), so motherhood is unarguably central to her arc and gives it additional interest, imo. (See cover below right.)

• Catelyn Tully and Cersei Lannister in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (aka A Game Of Thrones after the first book) are both women whose love and concern for their children (chiefly Catelyn) as well as their ambition for them (chiefly Cersei) are central to their character arcs in the story.

• Rayvan in David Gemmell’s The King Beyond the Gate scrapes in as both a sufficiently prominent secondary character and also because, as a widow with adult children, it is her concern for them as well as their community and wider issues of justice that drive her to becme a rebel and leader in the wider world.

• Morgaine is the central character in Marion Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and the mother of Mordred (Gwydion), which shapes (or twists) both her arc and the “Matter of Britain” story. (See cover below right.)

• Vianne Rocher in Chocolat — since I have included magic realism in the Fantasy pantheon (as I believe it is) Vianne Rocher’s motherhood to Anouk is a key aspect of the book and she therefore belongs on this list.”

Reader Suggestions:

Readers suggestions in the Comments on the original post included:

• Ista, from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Curse of Chalion, but particularly the sequel, The Paladin of Souls.
• Kate Daniels, from Ilona Andrews’ series of the same name.
• Isana from Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher; also Charity Carpenter, Susan Rodriguez, and Mab in the Dresden Files.
• The Reverend Mother in Robin LaFevers’ Mortal Heart.

Marion Drolsbach, as those who’ve been following will know, is a book translator (English to Dutch) and we first met when she was translating The Heir of Night into Dutch.

The majority of the photos were taken at the mouth of a Canterbury braided river and by Marion herself. Today’s photo was taken by her husband, on an ocean beach called Birdlings’ Flat that separates a local lake, Waiwera (Lake Forsyth) from the southern ocean.

Every time I see that sky I think: wow, I bet readers would love to see that – with the added bonus of featuring Marion (on the left) and myself (right) awa’ off in the vasty distance. 😀 Quite aside from that, I do feel that the photo gives an amazing sense of the aloneness and immensity of a landscape that is predominantly ocean and sky.

In the most recent post in this series I mentioned Canterbury’s braided rivers influencing the Telimbras in The Wall of Night series.

Similarly, Birdling’s Flat has appeared directly in my poem titled birdlings flat and influenced the setting of my short story, The Spit.

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”

~ Jack Kerouac

To be honest, I’m of two minds regarding this quote.

My first reaction was “Yes, of course!”, because if we’re afraid to step outside the norm and try the new, or give too much weight to the opinions of others over our own, then we’ll probably never achieve anything beyond that norm.

On the other hand, I do find it can help, especially when contemplating Big Life Decisions and Leaps of Faith to seek—and even heed!—the wisdom of others who may have experience of major life changes or taken such leaps themselves.

While this probably doesn’t equate to trends and fads, or even popular opinion, my point is that we should always keep an open mind to experiences and viewpoints beyond our own.

One helpful visitor, leaning on the back of my chair as I typed this post, opined that maybe Kerouac just meant creative accomplishment. We then discussed whether—even if that were so—the same principle wouldn’t also apply to any major life endeavour, and decided that it would.

Yet even when it comes to creative accomplishment alone, I can’t help reflecting on Shakespeare’s plays and how the Elizabethans (allegedly) didn’t value originality in the same way we do now. So at the time Shakespeare was penning his Romeo and Juliet, we’ve reason to believe other playwrights were putting on very similar—if not the same—production. They may even have called their plays “Romeo and Juliet”, too.

Shakespeare, in that case, was very much in tune with the trend and popular opinion—but what he made of it, with his Romeo and Juliet, was unquestionably great and has endured the test of time.

So like Tolkien’s elves, I am saying “both yes and no” to Jack Kerouac’s quote—and having had my buck each way, can now knuckle down to the writing week. 😀