Becoming the Heroine I Want to Be in the World

As I settle into cleaning up the detritus from celebrating Christmas with my family, and turn my thoughts to clearing the mental decks for the new year, it’s interesting to see THE EDGE OF THE BLADE release today.

It’s unusual to have a book release so late in the year—kind of a vagary of traditional publishing schedules—but that’s not what’s on my mind so much. No, instead I’m thinking about the year ahead and the challenges it poses.

Usually my new year’s resolutions are all about me. What I want and need to change in my own life. The inevitable paring down of the diet to include fewer cookies, less wine and ... well, less food, full stop. There’s always my setting of writing and reading goals. This year I hope to wrestle some of the finances into obedience. 

But this year, I’m thinking about the larger world, too. One of the outcomes of the U.S. Presidential election is that I’ve had more conversations about politics in the last two months than I remember *ever* having. What’s going on here reflects what’s going on in the larger world, with frightening destruction by terrorist and totalitarian regimes—and the election of ultra-conservative governments in response to that fear.

A lot of my thoughts about what I want and need from the coming year have to do with how I will handle what may come.

So, it’s interesting to have Jepp’s book release right now.

Jepp isn’t a hero. Not exactly. She does what she needs to do in the moment. She is essentially fearless, has depthless confidence in her ability to fight off the worst to come at her—and she stands up for what is right. What she values most is simple and straightforward: the freedom to be who you are and do what you want to with your own life.

She’s a person who fights without hesitation for herself and for others.

It turns out to be fitting, then, that she’s essentially launching this new year for me. I want to recapture what living in her head was like. Having her courage, her confidence, yes, but also her fierce lust for life. She finds everyone beautiful. She enjoys every moment to the utmost. She loves, deeply and without shame or regret.

Maybe she is the hero I’d like to be. Wishing you all a peaceful and enriching end to the year. More, I’m wishing you all courage, fortitude and joy to carry into the new year.


  THE EDGE OF THE BLADE

A HAWK’S PLEDGE 

The Twelve Kingdoms rest uneasy under their new High Queen, reeling from civil war and unchecked magics. Few remember that other powers once tested their borders—until a troop of foreign warriors emerges with a challenge . . . 

 Jepp has been the heart of the queen’s elite guard, her Hawks, since long before war split her homeland. But the ease and grace that come to her naturally in fighting leathers disappears when battles turn to politics. When a scouting party arrives from far-away Dasnaria, bearing veiled threats and subtle bluffs, Jepp is happy to let her queen puzzle them out while she samples the pleasures of their prince’s bed.

But the cultural norms allow that a Dasnarian woman may be wife or bed-slave, never her own leader—and Jepp’s light use of Prince Kral has sparked a diplomatic crisis. Banished from court, she soon becomes the only envoy to Kral’s strange and dangerous country, with little to rely on but her wits, her knives—and the smolder of anger and attraction that burns between her and him . . .

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Sending Up the Librarian Trope

A week from today sees the release (finally!) of THE PAGES OF THE MIND and the concurrent release of my duet of novellas with Grace Draven, FOR CROWN AND KINGDOM.

Both the novella in the duology with Grace, THE CROWN OF THE QUEEN, and THE PAGES OF THE MIND novel are told from the point of view (POV) of Dafne Mailloux, mild-mannered spinster librarian who assisted the heroines on their epic journeys in the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy.

 Dafne was never meant to be a heroine, in more ways than one.

First of all, she was a secondary character, if that - and a surprise one. When the heroine of THE MARK OF THE TALA, Princess Andromeda (Andi), needed information, Dafne stepped up to point her to the correct scrolls. Then she turned out to be both wry and warm - and she told Andi something that no one else would. I expected her to stay in her library, but - to my surprise - she went along when Andi fled the castle to go into hiding.

Dafne continued to take her own path, in her gently stubborn style, carving her own destiny alongside my three princesses. She never quite did what I expected.

Nor did I expect her to be one of the most popular characters in the series.

From the beginning, readers asked me if Dafne would get her own book. The question surprised me at first, because I never saw Dafne as heroine material. Nor did she, for that matter. Dafne fully expected to continue to lead a quiet life of study, giving good scholarly advice, and manipulating politics from the safe shadows behind the throne.

I end up on a lot of panels discussing the "kickass heroine." There's a lot of reasons for this, that could probably be a book, but one thing about writing Dafne's story that gave me joy was redefining both "kickass" and the librarian trope.

Dafne isn't particularly shy - but she is retiring. The library and books offered safety to her when she was a child orphaned by war and raised by her conqueror. She has good reasons for keeping to the background. And, it turned out, a deep agenda I only realized once I got inside her head. Though Dafne ultimately goes on an academic's quest, she's forced into a different kind of heroism. She becomes kickass through necessity - and out of love.

But she doesn't radically change into an entirely different person. She doesn't learn to wield daggers like Jepp, or a sword like Ursula, or magic like Andi - or even Ami's weapon of choice, her devastating beauty. No, Dafne's skill is her incisive intelligence and long-earned knowledge.

She's a kickass librarian - and it's through being who she is that she discovers the real treasure.

Another Rant About Kickass Heroines

In keeping with the post Evey Brett wrote on Sunday, I’m still on my own kick about the problem with kickass heroines. This is something I’ve been grousing about since before my House of Arkhangel'sk trilogy came out. My Anazakia is not what I’d call a kickass heroine. She’s just a girl. She’s not a victim or a damsel in distress, and she’s not a badass who knows martial arts, who can wield a mean sword or a Browning, or whose ability to conjure up powerful magic through sexual ritual blows more than minds. Ahem. Like I said, she’s just a girl—one whom I tossed into a really shitty situation and made her find her way.

On my regular post on the Paranormal Romantics blog a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Buffy marathon I’ve been having this month, and how it’s made me think about the kickass heroine problem all over again. I used to think it was Buffy’s “fault,” that everyone was emulating this successful formula in urban fantasy, but as I’ve been watching it through from the beginning, I realized that she’s just a girl. Yes, she has special enhanced strength as the Chosen One and trains hard to be a fighting machine, but she’s a well-rounded female character with wonderful flaws, who gets beaten down again and again, but gets back up because she has to. She makes dumb decisions in relationships with guys. She makes the hard decisions, too. She tries to make it through college while raising her kid sister and fighting demons, and has to deal with crushing debt from medical bills after her mother’s death. She has a bratty sister and she’s mean to her as often as not, like sisters are.

My favorite Buffy character, though, is Anya. A former vengeance demon demoted to being human, she has to make her way through the confusing world she’s found herself in after a millennium of having unlimited power. What I love most about her is her blunt speech, which rather than being rude and abrasive, is actually painfully real and honest in a way that exposes her heart.

Watching the episode “The Body”—one of the most brilliant hours of television-making ever, which should have won every award there is, but was never nominated, because, y’know, it’s just spec-fic, and “girl” spec-fic at that (grrr, argh)—in which Buffy’s mother is found dead of an aneurism, it’s Anya who reduces me to desperate, wracking sobs every single time I see it. There are “feels” all the way through the episode, but Anya’s blunt statements about not understanding what’s expected of her in the face of her friend’s mother’s death are utterly heartbreaking. At first, everyone is appalled at her, wishing she’d shut up and do the polite thing, because they don’t know what’s expected either. But she responds with the most heart-wrenchingly honest speech I’ve ever seen about death and loss on television.

Anya isn’t kickass either, even though she’s been a vengeance demon for a thousand years. She’s just a girl (or woman, as the show goes on, lest anyone think I’m infantilizing adult women with the “girl” term). She isn’t overly sexualized, or hyper-masculinized, or imbued with impossible strength or improbable weakness. She isn’t ridiculously smart, or annoyingly stupid. She’s human. That was the true brilliance of Joss Whedon’s series: human characters, with human strengths and weaknesses. And a nearly 5:1 ratio of female to male characters, just for a change. ;)

It’s frustrating that so many years later, it seems like we have less screen time for women, let alone realistic women, than ever. It’s frustrating that the response to that inequity for many seems to have been to create impossible women, just to compete with the complete lack of normal ones. But it’s heartening that this is a discussion that doesn’t seem to be going away lately, despite the lack of support for equality that seems to permeate the SFF world in particular. I just wonder if those in the Old Guard of both film and publishing have noticed that a female-centric and female-positive show like Buffy, ten years after it left the stage, still has a huge number of male fans. Because the excuse is usually that “girl stuff” doesn’t sell. Maybe it just hasn’t occurred to them that “people stuff” does, and girls and women are actually people. So let’s keep telling them until they get it.