Making And Breaking The Rules Of Fantasy

I'll admit right now that I am a one, maybe two genre guy, depending on how closely related you consider Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Yes, I'll read other genres, and it's even possible I'll write other genres down the line, but this is where my heart is.  Fantasy, especially.

When they say "write what you know," this is what I go to.  It's true that I've never dealt with daemons, travelled strange and fantastic lands or wielded mighty magics, but if there's one genre I know inside and out, this is it.  I know the rules of Fantasy instinctively, the same way I know when a Chinook* is rolling in.  And the biggest rule is?  There are no rules.

Ok, that's a lie.  There are lots of rules, and they're different if you're talking about High Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy or Urban Fantasy.  Good and evil are more black and white (or at least you know which side a character/creature ought to be on,) magic and fantastic creatures abound, and chances are someone has a Destiny.  The fun part is, even within these rules, you get to reinvent the world each time.  In fact, that's pretty much the point.  While there's only so much you can change about a certain "race" or "species" and still have it be recognizable, you get to take it and make it your own, with your own rules.  For example, there are certain things that make a faerie a faerie or it isn't a faerie, but that can range from sweet Victorian flower fairies, through Tinkerbell right to something downright malicious like Jenny-Greenteeth.  Don't like what came before?  Reinvent it.

Vampire stories are notorious for having a different set of rules for every author, and while each reader has eir own preference, we can (usually) recognize that it is a vampire when you tell us so.  As long as we have drinks blood + immortal/unnaturally long-lived, we'll go "yep, that's a vampire all right," even if the rest of the details get changed faster than topics in an ADD conversation (though some of us still draw the line at sparkles.  I mean, seriously!  He's a vampire, not a disco-ball.)  The upshot of this is, in Fantasy you get to change the rules.  A lot.

One thing you can't do is break your own rules.  Once you've established a magic system in your universe, you have to stick with it.  Your trolls turn to stone in the daylight?  You can't have one suddenly take a noonday stroll.  Your vampires are allergic to garlic?  They probably won't be going out for Italian.  Whatever else you do, you have to keep up an internal logic or the reader with think you have no idea what you're doing.  Keep that in mind when you're doing your world building; consistency is key.

If you're writing a Fantasy story, how well are you sticking to your own rules?  Think I'm full of crap here?  Tell me why.  I'll never learn otherwise.

*For those who don't live just west of the foothills of the Rockies, a Chinook is a warm wind that comes in from the Pacific Ocean, over the mountains, and is known to raise the temperature above freezing in winter.  Also known to cause nasty headaches from the pressure changes.

What's In A Name? Part II

This part, for some reason, seemed to me like it was going to be something strange and frightening: getting fingerprinted.  I'm not sure why I thought this, but I kept picturing Big Intimidating Cops that would glare suspiciously at me, trying to determine what heinous crime I must have committed.  What can I say?  I'm a writer.  I have an over-active imagination.

The reality was actually very different.  It was in a small office in a public building downtown with two bored looking officials, a woman and an older man.  The man was processing someone else, so it was the woman who helped me.  It was pretty much the basic show ID, give address, (current) legal name, yadda yadda, then have picture taken.  When she was entering it all into the computer, she actually debated whether she could mark me as M under gender rather than F, but was afraid that would screw up the paper work and cause the whole thing to be rejected.  As much as I would have liked it if she could, I had to agree.  Just the fact that she considered it meant a fair bit to me.  Then I made sure it was all today's version of correct, and signed.  At some point in here I did pay my $30.00 fee, confusing her with the relative orientation of my debit card (I love my bank, vertical card design and all.)  

Next came the part that I was actually pretty excited about: the fingerprinting itself.  By this time the other guy who was there for fingerprinting had left.  The man who had been helping him had already set up the ink pad and such the way he liked it, so he did the actual printing.  It went pretty quickly and easily.  Ink and roll each finger, all fingers together, thumbs, done.  I'm honestly not sure whether I'm relived or disappointed that the ink came off my fingers so easily, but it did and there it is.  He folded up the sheet and handed it to me in an envelope.  And that was it, I was done.

So now I have a very official sheet with my fingerprints on it, waiting to be brought back to the registration agency with the rest of my paperwork.  It's actually pretty neat to look at - comparing the swirls on the fingers of my left hand with those on my right - I'm actually thinking of scanning a copy just for myself.  The artist in me can't resist, really.

What's In A Name? Part I

So I am finally going through the process of legally changing my name and I thought, what the hell.  Let's blog about it.  Because even with all of its bureaucracy, or perhaps because of it, it can be a pretty interesting process.  This is of course how it happens in Alberta.  I don't know how much is different elsewhere.

It all starts with the Application for Name Change forms that I picked up at a local Registration agency.  They come bound in this book which is pretty neat, but also a little weird.  Not only do I now have the forms to change my own name, but also the forms to change my children's or my spouse's names, if I had any and thought this was something I wanted to do.  Now, I understand situations where one would want to change a child's name, adoption and what-not, but a spouse?  I don't know about you, but even if my hypothetical spouse and I decided together that we would change eir name, I'd be a hell of a lot more comfortable if e did it emself.  But I digress.

In case I didn't already know this, the front of the application tells me this isn't going to be free.  It's not even going to be cheap, really, which is part of why I've had to wait so long.

Fees for Name Changes:

Registry Agents will collect:

• a government fee of $120.00.
• a service fee, which may vary (I was quoted anywhere from $190.00 to something upwards of $200.)
• a fingerprint processing fee of $25.00, on behalf of the RCMP in Ottawa as payment for the criminal record check.

Local Law Enforcement Agencies:

• may charge a fee for fingerprinting ($30.00 in this case.)  Payment is made directly to the local law enforcement agency.

So that's... $375.00, or thereabouts.  And that's not including whatever the Notary Public may charge for affirming the affidavit at the end.  Way to make it easy on us, yeah?  Still.  Hoops.  Sometimes you have to jump through them, and sometimes they'll make you pay out the nose for the privilege.

And that's step one: getting the application.  Tomorrow I'll tell you all about the fingerprinting.

Also, just a quick FYI.  No, I will not tell you my original/old/"real" name.  I'm pretty open about the process of transitioning, more so than most people in my situation, but this is one of the few questions I won't answer.  The last thing I want to do is give more people the opportunity to call me by the wrong name.  Thank you.

Getting Comfortable With Being In Transition

And I don't just mean the big obvious one, though that's something I've had to get comfortable with too.  I mean the whole big transition that is life, that thing we all do every day or else we become some stagnant, stale shell of a human being.

When I was a kid, I thought that all I had to do was figure out who I was, and that's who I'd be.  Forever.  Nothing else, and nothing less.  I'd grow up, find a few words to describe myself, and that would be that.  One thing I've had to come to terms with is the fact that that is never going to happen.  Who I am today?  Really not who I was yesterday.  Tomorrow?  Well, I'll be someone else again, won't I?

I don't mean every transition I go through is as big and life-changing as the one from trying to be female to finally being male.  Sometimes it's as simple as reading an insightful blog post, or engaging with new people on Twitter.  Or in real life even.  That happens too, on occasion.  If who I am is the sum of my experiences, then with every moment I'm in transition from being someone who hasn't experienced something to someone who has.

This also means that I have to update who I think I am at almost every turn.  I thought I was someone who was only romantically interested in people of a specific gender or type until I realized it wasn't that simple, not for me anyway.  I thought of myself as someone who hated kids and would never have any or want to until I met my niece.  And the big one?  Perhaps bigger than all the rest, even THE big one?

I thought I was always and forever an Artist before anything else.  That was the pinnacle of my identity, the one thing that I had always been and would always be no matter what else changed, I was an Artist and I would paint/draw/make jewellery until the day I died of some bizarre cancer or heavy metal poisoning from my work.  I believed this until I looked up one day and realized I was becoming a Writer.

I looked at what I had drawn or made in the past week, the past month.  Nothing.  I mean literally.  I hadn't made a damn thing the whole time, not so much as a doodle.  I looked at what I had been doing instead.  When I wasn't writing, I was reading about writing.  I was talking about writing, and I was on my way to someplace where I would be writing.  (Or I was at my day job, but even there I was thinking about writing.)  That's when I realized that I was watching my own transition from Artist with a little writing on the side, to Writer with a little art on the side.

I can't say that I was entirely happy about this.  I mean, I'd put how many years into that identity?  I now owe how much in student loans because of it?  And what will my Grandma think?  I was always the Artist in the family, one of her kind.  I felt like I was betraying a core part of me.  But that didn't stop the transition.  Because even though I was mourning the Artist, I was celebrating the Writer.  You see, the big difference between the two has been commitment.  I have actually been able to commit to one writing project, my novel, far longer and more consistently than any body of art I've undertaken.  And I've realized, that I'd much rather be productive and prolific at something that I love than be sporadic and occasionally brilliant at something that I love.

Sample Sunday: A Discussion of Self in Carl's Café

Obviously, some things have changed since I first wrote this.  I'd be surprised if it hadn't, seeing as this comes from that same 2007/2008 era as Friday's flash piece, and in fact appears on the page just before it in the notebook.  Does it mean that what I wrote then is now completely untrue?  No, not really.  It was true at the time, and I think I needed it to work through who I was and get to who I am.  The fact that I chose to do this through a fictionalized encounter with myself is also unsurprising, given my tendency in the past to use a fantasy world for both escapism and self-discovery.

Anyway, I've done more than enough babbling here about 'what it all means' and other self analysis.  I'll let you get on with actually reading it now.

A Discussion of Self in Carl's Café

"I'm not like other guys," he said.  "Then again, most other guys aren't perfectly happy living in a woman's body."

He laughed then.  "Hell, why shouldn't I be?  I mean, I get to live the 'lesbian fantasy' to its most satisfying fullness.  But seriously.  A man in a woman's body who's not about to do anything about it at all.  Am I being a coward?  Not taking the risk, not making the commitment to become 'who I am?'"  He shrugged.  "Maybe.  But I'm really only a part of who I am, aren't I?" 

He smiled at me and finished his coffee.  As he left, I smiled and nodded to myself.  What he'd said was true.

Friday Flash: And the Mysteries Knew Me

Going through an old notebook, I found this little piece.  I'd say it's circa 2008, though possibly as early as late '07.  I was a bit spotty with dating my work in here.  Uncertain time-line aside, I do remember that it was one of those things I wrote in a torrential flood of inspiration and then had no idea what I was going to do with it, especially since I didn't know about flash as a writing style at the time.  So I'm posting it here, with a little on-the-spot editing and a new title.

And the Mysteries Knew Me

She sat with me all the while, singing the songs we'd learned in the empty places. Her voice shone with her wings, both lit from some wondrous source. As I lay there, listening, I could feel it. The velvet night wrapped me up in its warm embrace and carried me up through the higher planes of its silence. When I sought to look, I found that my eyes were no more, nor was my body.

The song though, was a thing I could see, a thing I could touch. Her voice became my world and my world became the stars. Light came to the deepest shadows and dark engulfed where light had been. I was ecstatic. When I laughed, my voice was that of the stars which were bells, shimmering in the highest of the heights.

Then the skies became cold, so cold. The very marrow of my being shivered and ached. I found my body again and with it, I found agony. My laughter was no more. My screams ran at right angles to my being. Her song now was a keening, a wailing despair echoing in my existence. The world trembled, and I trembled with it.

Within eternity I wept, tears running hot over cold sweat. Her voice was softening, a whisper then. The chill became bearable, the kind found in a draughty winter shelter. The song slowed. My trembling eased. My breath ragged, I returned to myself, but I was changed. Innocence gone, I now knew the mysteries and by the gods, the mysteries knew me.

Friday Flash: The Seeking-Rhyme

Here's a wee bit of Friday Flash for you all.  A short little scene, really, it's something that was in the first chapter of my WIP.  I'm going to cut the chapter in the final piece but I like this scene.  It shows the kind of person Michael would like to be and maybe would be if his past didn't continually hunt him down to bite him in the ass.

The Seeking-Rhyme

“S'cuze me, mister?” A small voice called out. Michael turned to look out of curiosity, and was surprised to find that the small child had actually been addressing him. Nevertheless, he squatted down so that he was at the child's eye level.

“Yes, wee-one? What is it?”

“I lost my mommy,” said the child. “I was looking at something, and when I looked back, she was gone!”

Michael glanced up and down the street. “Well, she can't have gotten too far, I imagine. We'll find her, don't you worry your little head. Where was the last place you saw her, then?”

“Over there, by the window with all the shiny things in it.” The child was pointing at a bead store down the street, with many examples of beaded flowers and animals on display.

“All right, we'll start there,” said Michael with a smile. He took the child's small hand in his own and together they walked towards the store front. When they got there, he crouched down again and looked the child straight in the eye. “Now, I'm going to show you a little trick, and with it we'll find your mommy, easy as anything. All you have to do is close your eyes and spin around, all the while saying this little seeking-rhyme. It goes like this: Spin and shine/ Seek and find/ I have lost my mommy-mine/ Spin and shine/ Seek and find/ I shall find my mommy-mine. When you stop, whatever direction you're facing, that's what direction your mommy will be in.”

The child looked at him doubtfully and mumbled, “That won't work.”

“Oh it won't, will it? Well, there's no harm trying though, is there? Come now, I'll do it with you.”  He stood up then and started spinning, and the child reluctantly joined in. Together, they recited the words:

Spin and shine

Seek and find

I have lost my mommy-mine

Spin and shine

Seek and find

I shall find my mommy-mine

They opened their eyes to see a woman rushing down the street, frantically searching this way and that, calling out as she went.

“Mommy!” the child exclaimed, and started running towards the woman.

“Oh, my darling!” she cried, scooping the child up into a fierce hug. “Oh, I was so worried about you, where on earth did you get off to?”

“A nice man helped me, Mommy, we made a spinning song and then there you were!”

“Who helped you?”

“That man there, with the long coat,” the child replied, pointing towards Michael.

“Where..? Honey, I don't see anyone in a long coat,” said the woman, perplexed, then she shook her head. 

“Whatever, doesn't matter. I'm just glad you're safe!”

Michael smiled and nodded to himself, then went on his way.