Dave's Anatomy #100: Revenge and the Pleasure Principle: "The Priestess and the Sorcerer"

“The Priestess and the Sorcerer” appeared in Erotique, one of those amphibious stories part sword and sorcery and part erotica. As is usual with an erotic story, it starts out with a steamy sex scene. A man and a woman are getting it on. The descriptions are explicit. The man is said to be a Norman—one of the French who invaded England in 1066 and took control of the nation. The woman, named Hegla—a non-French and more Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon name—is servicing him. After he finished, though, the second part of the hybrid story kicks in. The Norman suddenly begins to weaken. In panic, he feels the life ebb out of him, feels his frame convulse and cave in. In a moment, he is dead, his body a shrunken, shriveled leftover of what it was before—all due to his intercourse with the woman he thought to be a prostitute.

But Helga is just standing in for a genuine working girl, a friend from childhood, named Kirsi. When she sees what has happened to Helga’s customers, she is terrified and kneels down, muttering the name of the holy goddess. Helga replies, It is her work you see, and she will bless you as greatly as she has cursed this man because you helped me as you did. We begin to understand that this is a planned-out hit—vengeance—and that it involves magic. Helga leaves for the next phase of her plan. Kirsi gives her a yellow scarf and tells her to stand by a stone on the road if she wants to snag her next customer.

As Helga goes to the rendezvous place, the reader is given backstory. Helga was a priestess of the Goddess Freya, a temple maiden who had begun training and age six and was under a twenty-year vow of virginity and service. One morning, three men ride in, pull a sack over her head, sexually assault her, and abduct the acolyte she is training to be a future priestess.

She returns to her family to recover. No longer qualified to be a priestess, she slowly heals from the trauma of her experience. She learns that the men deliberately assaulted her to show the weakness of her religion. They hope to spread Christianity, the faith of the new wife of the King has taken. The King himself has not embraced the new religion. The Queen's minions seem to think that brutality is a good way to coerce people into converting.

Helga eventually finds healing with her family. She ventures out and connects with old friends. She even takes lovers, wanting to normalize her experience of sex. After a year, she goes away to meet with a sorcerer. She is willing to give anything to him, including her soul, to enact vengeance.

The Sorcerer, named Scealu, helps her, and does indeed want her soul. She willingly gives it. He has her cut herself just belong her collar bone and smear the blood from the cut on the stone inscribed with runes. The stone absorbs the blood. The wound on upper body is gone, leaving a white scar.

Helga returns. She has already killed a second man in her disguise as a whore. The third man, who is with him, sees what has happened to his comrade, and flees. Helga’s father and brother catch him and tie him to a bed. Helga stimulates him, climbs on top of him, and pleasures him. The last of the trio of her assailants is dead. But she is not finished. The men had taken her acolyte, Gwendolyn, and left her a group of nuns who had established a convent by the sea. The Normans apparently warned them. They have abandoned Gwendolyn and are in a boat; the helmsman is threading their way through a place of treacherous currents amid small, rocky islets.

Helga, who learned to hunt as a girl, takes up her old bow, lets fly an arrow, and kills the helmsman. The boat careens out of control, smashes against the rocks, and the nuns fall in the water and drown. She has exacted her revenge. She delivers Gwendolyn to the new priestess of Freya, says good-bye to her family, and returns to Scealu, who owns her soul.

Once there, he asks if she has anything to give in exchange for her soul. She is offended by the idea of offering her body to him (she did so in exchange for the magic that enabled her to kill the three Normans). She also grows angry at the thought of exchanging her dress and standing naked for him. The text continues:

Then she noticed the leather covering designed to protect the soft flesh of her wrist from the recoil of the bowstring when she let an arrow fly. She had forgotten to take it off. She untied the thong, frowned angrily, and threw it at him. He caught it and smiled.

“You are a spirited woman,” he said. “This is a very well-made arm guard. I return your soul to you in exchange for it.”

Her courage and desire for justice has impressed him. The white scar vanishes. Helga relaxes. Scealu tells her she is free of the spell and can go; the men who embrace her from now on will not be affected as the Normans were. He also tells the new religion will replace the old. This will be so in her lifetime, he says, so she will need to act wisely. He invites her to spend the night with him, and she agrees. She will make a new life back home. Whatever changes come, she will weather them with courage.

The story appeared in the journal Erotique Volume 3.  Get a copy here. If you like erotica and sword and sorcery fantasy, you get the best of both worlds in this story.

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Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #95, ShadowCity

World-building is the prime attraction of fantasy and fabulism. Skillful writers create worlds that are places of danger and adventure—places we want to live despite their threats—magical worlds full of adventure and possibility. Narnia, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Darkover, Avalon—the list is long. When a writer creates a world, he or she can also create the rules. Different races of beings, the existence of magic, religion, topography—everything is at the writer’s power. It is intoxicating. It was the lure that led me to create the world of ShadowCity.

ShadowCity was the third book I published—a novella, a fantasy story about a parallel world that exists in tandem with earth as a dark copy. The world, you come to understand, is a developing word—a site that is embryonic and waiting to take its place in the universe. It has a guardian, a young woman from earth named Jimena Chagall. The main character in the book, Scott Evard, was in love with her but her erratic lifestyle, drug use, and enigmatic disposition has split them up. He meets her by a river walking path near a bridge, a place where panhandlers hang out, begging money. She is thin and smells as if she has not bathed in several days. He gives her money and offers to take her to his apartment where she can rest and bathe. “You just want to see me naked,” she quips. “Like I haven’t seen you that way before,” he mutters. As he walks away, someone tries to murder her. Scott, a boxer in college, manages to save her and beat her assailant insensible. They call the police, who take her for questioning. Mark has a business meeting he has to attend and promises he will come to get her at the police station.

Jimena

When he does, she kills her assailant by removing the shadows from his room. The police think he has had a heart attack. Jimena fills him in on the aspect of her life he has never known about. She the guardian of a world but has neglected her duty. As a result of this, darkness has almost completely taken the forming world over. The evil has become so strong, the evil rulers of the world have sent a killer to Earth to murder Jimena. She realizes she has to go and try to correct things, though at this point it seems like a hopeless endeavor. She and Scott sleep together that night. She dresses and slips off, but Scott wakes up and follows her into a large shadow. He ends up in the parallel world.

The plot is intricate, but the world-building merits mention. The world, Jimena tells Scott, is a copy of Earth “all based on string theory” but too complicated to explain. It is a refuge for people who know darkness and loss:  those who have been harmed by the dark forces on Earth, and those who are themselves dominated by darkness. The latter have gotten the upper hand, and Jimena must right the situation.

But from the beginning, Scott notices her methods smack of darkness and cruelty. She buys a slave (Drya, a Maenad), tortures a woman, bullies and intimidates both enemies and friends. She captures a young woman warrior and promises Scott he will not let her people harm her for treason but ends up doing nothing to stop the girl from being hanged. When Scott chides her, she says he will not like everything she does but she must resort to such methods in order to set the situation right.

Drya

What Jimena does not understand is that in behaving as she does she is letting the darkness that threatens to engulf the world seep into her soul, weakening her. She is in danger of being overwhelmed by the very thing she is fighting.

What happens? You’ll have to get a copy and read it to find out. It is a fast-moving story of love, struggle, adventure, and magic. It explores, like Lord of the Rings and The Earthsea Trilogy, the nature of good and evil. You can order a copy here. It's a great read and an exploration of a fascinating world that exists as a shadow of our own world.

For other great titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Are vampire novels your thing? Read Sinfonia:  The First Notes on the Lute. A young woman's love of music is only matched by her love of human blood. See the video.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #64: "The Dragon's Ploy"

Dragons are perpetually fascinating. Stories about them exist in many cultures. I knew them from European culture, but they also existed in Chinese myth and in the culture lore of other societies. Like vampires, they have developed character complexity over the centuries. In the Bible the Devil is represented as a dragon. Early dragons are brutal and destructive, like the dragon in Sir Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen. But modern writers, as usual, began to question the usual characterization. Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit, is ruthless and cruel, but he is also wise and astute in a cynical, pragmatic way. Today readers will encounter wise and benevolent dragons. There are good dragons, loyal dragons, pet dragons, baby dragons, dragon friends and companions. The only thing that has not change is the fascination. We encounter dragons in Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Game of Thrones, among other stories. My first memories of dragons were not good.

As a kid, I was scared of "monsters," and this included dragons. I remember running out of the living room in fear when a commercial for Walt Disney's film Sleeping Beauty showed the Prince fighting the dragon the evil witch transforms to in the last scene. In school, though, a few years later, we read a story by a writer named Heywood Broun, "The Fifty-First Dragon." Dragons were much less scary in this story and it amused me because it talked about the dragons like they were matter-of-fact things that one might encounter in day-to-day life. 

Daenerys and dragons in Game of Thrones

I wrote the story "The Dragon's Ploy," in response to a call for submissions. I had never written a dragon story before and thought it would be fascinating to give my particular "take" to the genre. In this story a young man named Terrowin is caught kissing a young woman named Matilda who is in the King's employ. The king, named Rimauld, cruel and facing a rebellion, decides to make examples of them. As punishment, Terrowin is taken to a mountain where a dragon has just died. He is drugged and thrown into the dragon's cave, where he goes to sleep on a pile of cursed dragon's gold. Matilda is sentenced to be imprisoned in a tower for the rest of her life. 

He wakes up bewildered and then remembers what happened. A scene in C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader' where the character Eustace is transformed into a dragon greatly influenced me in this. When he fully comprehends what is happening, Terrowin is faced with a dilemma. His human side and his newly acquired "dragon" side begin to fight for dominance. He struggles to keep the dragon side subservient to his human spirit and manages to succeed. The only time he is overwhelmed by his dragon side is when he is flying and encounters a virgin. He devours her, not able to control himself. 

Matilda

Then he begins to wage war against King Rimauld. Terrowin flies over the kingdom and burns the estates of the King's main supporters. He incinerates Feste the Fool, who told the King about his attachment to Matilda. He attacks the castle and flings a cup from the dragon's lair into the tower where she is imprisoned. It is part of a ploy, and the ploy works. Thinking the dragon who was formerly Terrowin still has an attachment to Matilda, and knowing dragons have a distinct liking for virgins, he brings the wretched girl to the dragon's lair. But the king miscalculates. Terrowin is not driven mad with a desire to devour the young woman because of dragons' liking for virgins. He and Matilda, it seems, did more than kiss.

Having his senses about him, he frightens off the soldiers and kills the king. The King's sorcerer, Gaspar, is there, and says he knows how to change Terrowin back to his human form. He does not trust Gaspar, but Matilda vouches for him. He drinks a potion and wakes up in bed, changed back to his human form. The insurgency has taken over the kingdom. He is a hero. And, of course, he and Matilda marry and live happily ever after.

"The Dragon's Ploy" appeared in Hogglepot.  You can read it here.

For additional titles, novellas, and novels, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Do you have a favorite dragon story? Share it!

Check out my latest novel, Sinfonia: First Notes on the Lute. The vampire Nelleke Reitsma plays the lute well. Of course, she's had 300 years to practice. She performs for Queen Elizabeth and is very cozy with a playwright named William Shakespeare. But she has many other lovers and, like all vampires, a love of human blood.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #41: The Welcome Song of Morrigan

The Celtic Goddess Morrigan is one of my favorite deities to vilify. Maybe I need to be careful, because if she exists she probably doesn't have a very good opinion of me—and she's not a supernatural being you want to be on the bad side of. She was the Celtic goddess of war and of discord. Like many deities, she is an ambiguous figure. In the ancient Irish languages, if you accented her name as Mórrígan it meant "great queen; if you did not accent it and called her Morrigan, it meant "phantom queen." Her totem animal was the crow and she was sometimes said to feast on the bodies of slain warriors through the form of the carrion crows who always hung around battlefields to eat the corpses when the fighting was done. All in all, she was a troublemaker and a goddess to be afraid of. She appears as a malevolent force in my book The Last Minstrel and my long story, "The Raven and the Forest Girl." In the story "The Welcome Song of Morrigan," you do not see her but she is an evil presence throughout the story.

I was still shooting for dark horror at this time. As the title to my story implies, it is about a song, and about a musician, Shane Evans. He plays and researches Celtic music and is following up some leads on an Irish harper who collected old tunes. After the man's death, his son moved to northern Michigan but one day the son's new bride killed him and two of the servants who worked for the family. Sentenced to life in prison, she killed two inmates, was put in solitary confinement, and eventually hanged herself. The house, controlled by a trust, has given Shane permission to go through the musical archives there. He is let into the house by a teenage girl named Tina who says she plays guitar and likes Celtic music. Her boyfriend, she says, plays in a rock band.

Shane is lucky that day—or so he thinks. He finds three pieces of music he does not recognize. One is written on velum, not paper, sealed, and titled "The Welcome Song of Morrigan." Shane is elated. Tina looks at the music and asks if she could perhaps have a transcription of it. Shane makes copies for her and drives back to his home in Grand Rapids, quite a ways away, leaving his discovery in his music studio. Wanting to celebrate, he goes to a coffee bar where he knows friends will be, finds them, and shares his good news. At the table is a young woman named Devona, quite beautiful, and interested in Shane's discovery. As they are talking, police appear and want to question Shane. He finds out Tina has killed her boyfriend, hacking him to death with an ax. When he goes back in, Devona identifies herself as one of the elven people and tells him what he has recovered is the Welcome Song of Morrigan—a song with a curse on it that welcomes people to madness, violence, and death.

After hearing about Tina and now meeting up with Devona, Shane wonders if all the psychotic women in the world have come to Michigan. He goes outside, a car screeches to halt, and Tina, looking demonic, attacks him. Devona validates her claim of being a supernatural creature by magically deflecting the ax. The police, who have remained (correctly thinking the girl might come there to kill Shane) confront her. She attacks one of them, wounding him with the ax. They shoot and kill her. Shane goes to the police station. When he sees Devona again, she asks where the music is. She plans to recover it and guard it, which is her task as a supernatural creature. They drive to his home. When they arrive, Shane is horrified to see Leah Roush's car in the driveway.

Leah is a friend who plays in a local rock band. Shane has given her a key to his studio so she can use his equipment. He and Devona rush inside to find Leah's severed head on a table. Shane thinks she found the music, played it, and someone, probably her boyfriend, heard it and killed her.

The police eventually find Leah's boyfriend's body (he has killed himself) and a note that says, "She killed her." They think he means Tina but Shane knows he meant Morrigan. The music is there. Devona seals it and says she will take it to the Temple in the lost land of the faerie folk where she is the guardian of the document. The Queen of Faeries, she says, has granted her a boon—anything she desires—as a reward if she finds the song and brings it back. She and Shane make love. She confides that the Faerie Queen made her leave her husband and children and become a guardian thousands of years ago (which is why she is so eager to make it with Shane). He suggests she use her boon to ask that she be freed from her task. She agrees and goes to present her petition to the Queen. She will become mortal when her request is granted but is willing to pay that price for freedom and for love.

Shane goes to the police station. The police conclude that Tina killed Leah and her boyfriend killed himself out of grief. Shane is exonerated and the Welcome Song of Morrigan is safely sealed away in the Temple of the Fairy Queen. When Shane returns to the 24/7 coffee house, he finds Devona waiting for him.

 The story appeared in Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror, 2011, which appears to be out of print now. Some of my Morrigan stories are accessible, though. You can read a lot about her in The Last Minstrel where she appears frequently and in all her nasty, malicious glory. The same is true in a my novella,  "The Raven and the Forest Girl,"which appeared recently in Silver Blade. In this particular story, Morrigan does her evil but finds out there are deities floating around who are much more powerful than she.  As I'm doing with many of my stories that have appeared in magazines no longer in publication, I'm going to find out about copyright issues and, if they are not an obstacle, resubmit and, hopefully, republish "The Welcome Song of Morrigan" to make it once more accessible to the reading public.

For more titles, look at my Writer's Page. 

I would love to hear your comments!

Creativity: Making Connections, Part III

Last blog, I talked about how one of the earliest creative leaps the human race made was the equation of animal behavior with human behavior. From the trickster stories of coyote and fox the native American tribes told, to the “brother rabbit tales” originally from Nigeria, to Aesop’s fables and onward, the obvious connection between human and animal traits were exploited in story. One of the best examples of this, and one of the most instructive for creative writers, was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

If you haven’t read this story, it is about a group of animal friends. Okay, that’s easy enough, but Grahame performs a tour de force by carrying the story much further than the simple correlation that has been the mainstay of storytelling for millennia. He expands links between human and animal behavior in ingenious and innovative ways.

His characters have personalities, as we might expect. But he weaves his characters out of traits that are already there. Water Rat, his main character, is “cool”—not in the slang sense we use it today, but he is calm, even, and temperate. Rat befriends Mole. Mole is a bit obtuse (moles are almost blind), stodgy, and plodding, but has a great heart. They meet Rat’s friends: Badger, who, in his own way, is vicious (badgers are not nice animals if you encounter one). Last of all, there is Toad. Toad is an egotist. He is “puffed up,” as toads will be.

All the creatures, then, take on personalities suggested by the appearance or behavior of the animal they are. But Grahame goes further. He places them in a social setting. They live in the woods, but not entirely. Rat has a boat. The animals live in houses. Mr. Toad is rich and lives on an estate. Apparently (though you don’t get a lot of information on this) they interact with humans and the humans don’t seem to think their presence odd. The animals constitute their own little society. In fact, Toad’s out-of-control behavior is, according to Badger, “giving us a bad name.” He is harming the social reputation of the animals in England.

This is funny, and the animals cross backward to remind us of human types we know. A sequence of hilarious events unfolds. Toad, who is wasting his money on gadgets, becomes enamored of the newfangled motorcar, gets in accidents, and eventually steals a car and is thrown in jail. He escapes and gets home only to find his estate has been taken over by unseemly animals—weasels, stoats, and foxes—and he must fight to get it back. His animal friends help him.

The theme of the book is friendship. The animals care for each other. They are considerate of each others' needs and feelings. They love each other.

I like art about friendship. Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Tombstone are three of my favorite films because they are largely about friendship. There is no better book on friendship than The Wind in the Willows. It is not only funny, but a touching and moving tale about human (in the guise of animal) friendships.

What is the ultimate experience of friendship? One afternoon, Mole and Rat are out in Rat’s boat and

experience the ultimate:  they see God. The god of animals is Pan and the two of them encounter him. In a magnificently written piece that stuns me with its creative imagery, the little creatures are overwhelmed by Pan’s presence. The god—knowing that nothing in life will be wonderful for the two animals after the supreme experience of seeing him and being in his presence—makes them forget what they have just known so they can go on being happy. Instead of hearing Pan’s pipe and his song, they only hear “the wind in the willows” as they go their way.

How did he think of that?

But if you’re making a story out of connections between humans and animals, humans have always been religious. They have always had “theodicies,” moments when they see God or the gods or the spirits. Why not animals as well? And what would it be like to see the Supreme Being? It would be difficult to convey that via a human character, but an animal character opens the door to such a description. And Grahame does with a masterful hand.

So, I’ve made the point in three blogs that one facilitates creativity by seeing connections, links, and analogies—between the homeless and supernatural creatures, between animals and humans, between the content of rock songs and the paranormal. Add whatever else presents itself to your imagination. Look for the connections. This is one path to writing creatively.

Next, I want to look at other ways writers have been creative in what they did with genre, subject matter, and other literary conventions. Stay tuned.

I’d love you to check out my Writer's Page.

I would love you to buy a copy of my novella, Strange Brew.

Creativity: Making Connections, Part I

 I’ve blogged about creativity a couple of times, and literature on the subject abounds. Still, after I wade through what’s been written on it, I’m left with only a vague, hazy image of what creativity is—and a hazier idea of how you obtain, bring about, and generate it. How do you “do” creativity? How can you write a fantasy, sci-fi, paranormal story that is truly creative?  These questions lead us into the swamp of uncertainty. But a swamp isn’t all bad if you’re an alligator or a hank of Spanish moss. The first step in writing creatively is to get outside of the usual paradigms.

I talked about Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere in another blog ( link to blog). Here is a link to one more blog on this (Trains of Trust ). You can read about it in detail there. I would only say that when he was given an assignment, he did not do the thing people usually do. He did something completely different. He wrote about homelessness by creating a fantasy world. How did he think of this? I can’t get in his head, of course, but I do notice that he perceived certain analogies and similarities and exploited these in his writing. These were the stuff of his creative approach to a discussion of the topic. And it became one of the most powerful and moving statements about homelessness I’ve read even though the world is not once used in the novel.

What did Gaiman notice? He noticed the link between magical creatures and the homeless. He worked with these points. I’ll attempt to illustrate.

 

Very often, supernatural creatures are marginalized. Elves, dwarves, orcs, leprechauns, angels, werewolves, vampires, lamia—such beings are not a part of society. Try going to a job interview at a corporate office and explaining that when the full moon comes out you transform, so you can’t work on such nights; or that your blue-green skin is not a genetic condition because you’re not human, you’re a naiad. Supernatural beings such as inhabit the “London Below” of Neverwhere are emblematic of the homeless, the marginalized—of society’s outcasts.

Very often, supernatural beings are exploited. Why do people want to capture leprechauns? To get their gold! Werewolves and vampires are hunted down and destroyed because they threaten human beings. Elves, dryads, satyrs, ancient gods and goddesses are driven out as humans develop land, cut down forests, and build houses. King Kong was made a show, “The Eighth Wonder of the World.” This happens to the homeless too. Exploitation is often their lot. Gaiman made the connection.

We could go on and on about this. My point, however, I think is clear. Neil Gaiman wrote the most creative book I’ve ever read by perceiving and working with analogies and similarities. If I want to write successful paranormal literature—successful because it opens up fantastical worlds—I’ve got to exploit such connections and shape them into stories. So do you. In calls for submissions I always read things like “startle us,” “take us somewhere we’ve never been before,” and similar phrases. A writer does this by creatively shaping the material of life—by seeing connections and creating something that is new but oddly recognizable.  

I’ll give an example from my own writing. I am a guitarist and a fan of sixties music. Cream, one of the great rock groups of all time, released a song called “Strange Brew.” It had the line in it, “She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue. / In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you. / With you! What are you gonna do?  Strange Brew:  kills what’s inside of you.” I—and most people, I think—interpret this as a song about a trouble-making girl who has latched on to a guy and is going to make lots of trouble for him through her clingy behavior. What is he going to do with this disruption? How is he going to handle it?

But I got an idea. I made a connection. What if the woman in the

Vintage 1970

song was, literally, a witch? What if she had gone mad? And what if she fell in love with a guy? What would you do in a case like this? Moreover, the witch is not just any witch. She is the Sorceress of the Northern Seas, the most powerful witch in England. And she is not above using her magic to make sure the man she love sticks around. What is he going to do? As for her “mad mind”—well, it’s the 1970s in my novel, and Lybecca the sorceress has become a part of the drug scene and deranged herself to an extent on LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, and all those wonderful hallucinogens people took back then. The plot thickens. What is he gonna do?

The creative move is to take the supernatural and connect it with pop culture, drug culture, rock culture, and music. The story develops from a funny, quirky one into a more serious one as Lybecca takes Andrew (the musician) back in time to seek a cure for her infirmity. They end up in the pre-civil rights south, meet blues icon Robert Johnson, and plunge into a harrying adventure that might or might not free Lybecca from her troubles.

The creative edge lies in making the connections:  take pop culture—drugs, the 1970s, the pop music scene, miniskirts, big hair on male rock singers—and connect it with magic, witches, and the supernatural. Irony, humor, and, in the end, a poignant story of love and healing come about.

So if I have a how, this is it. Notice the connections. Connect the dots that maybe aren’t visible, but

are there. Neil Gaiman did this with the supernatural and the homeless; I did it with early pop culture and the world of magic and sorcery; Kenneth Graham did it with proper Victorian society and animal behavior in The Wind in the Willows. The connections are there, waiting to be lashed together. Look for them. Read voraciously to notice how other paranormal writers, old and new (Shakespeare was great at doing this), have exploited connecting points between the mundane and the fantastical.

More on The Wind in the Willows in the next blog.

And by all means get a copy of Strange Brew

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