Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #88: Steampunk/Wuxia: “The Weather God.”

Steampunkers

Steampunk is an intriguing genre to me, though I often think I don’t do a very good job of writing it (I haven’t been able to master its newest manifestation, Dieselpunk). But a call for stories intrigued me, especially the when I noted that the editor wanted stories that were not set in Victorian England, as many Steampunk stories are. This got me thinking. I find that many stories often start this way:  just thinking. The mind begins to go outside the realms of the ordinary and into the realm of the imaginative.

I began to realize that science and technology did not originate in Europe. The ancient cultures had their achievements as well, and many technological advances originated in China. It began to look like a good mix. What about combining some traditions of Chinese literature—in particular, the lore of the wuxia, the wandering warrior who possess incredible prowess as a fighter and used those powers for good? This led to the creation of an ongoing character, and then ongoing characters:  Princess Jing Lin, Chen Hao, and Soong Yuan. Since writing the story that came out of this exercise of the imagination, I’ve published several tales of these wandering knights. It’s a good exercise to get out of Western culture, and for someone who grew up watching David Carradine in Kung Fu and Bruce Lee movies. The first story, “The Weather God,” combined the wuxia tradition with Steampunk motifs.

Jing Lin

First the characters. Jing Lin is the Princess and heir apparent of Xingnoa, a nation I invented that lies north of China on the coast of the Yellow Sea. Protected by mountains and fiercely independent, the nation has managed not to be absorbed by China, though the Chinese have made annexation of Xingnoa an ongoing ambition. In the era of “Spheres of Influence,” when European nations came into the area and demanded trading rights, open ports, and political control of area of the country, Xingnoa.

Jing’s father, thinking he would have sons who could inherit his kingdom, put her in a Taoist convent. She lived there until she was fifteen and, as part of the disciplines of the place, learned ceremonial martial arts, including fighting with a wooden staff and hand-to-hand fighting. No children come for Quon and his wife and, at fifteen, Jing is taken from the convent and begins training to take over the kingdom. When her father learns of her abilities as a fighter, he is amazed. Jing trains with Shaolin masters (shades of Kung Fu) and periodically returns to her convent to further develop her abilities in fighting, meditation, and self-control. Eventually, she leads the armies of Xingnoa.

Jing lives many years as a chaste virgin, but after a while, she sees the impracticality of this for a military leader and takes lovers. She meet Chen and they become intimate. They also join as a pair of fighters, working at this time to keep foreign influences away from Xingnoa. The Europeans and Japanese have anchored a fleet in Xingnoa’s main harbor and plan to bully the country into giving them concessions. While meeting with a nobleman who knows a scientist, Shao Jiazhen, who is purported to have a weapon that can defeat the Europeans, they strumble upon Soong, who is a servant girl there. She is paid to poison Jing, almost succeeds and reveals that she has been suborned by Shao Jiazhen’s captors. When Jing hears her story, and sees her abilities at fighting with a staff, she gives her the opportunity to come on their journey to the interior of China with them to free Shao.

Shao is a remarkable scientist. When Jing, Chen, and Soon free him, he unleashes robotic warriors who fight their American captors and enable them to escape. Shao has a weapon that destroys the European ships, freeing Xingnoa from the threat of foreign domination. Chen and Jing also begin a relations (that will lead to their marriage in later stories). Soong is loyal and proves a good fighter. Jing begins to train her as a wuxia warrior. She has issues to work through. Because her family is poverty-stricken, she has hired herself out as a servant to a wealthy household. Part of her duties is to service the men and some of the women who stay as guests. The sexual abuse she has suffered has scarred her. Part of Jing’s task in training her will be to heal her soul as well.

Soong

This first story laid the groundwork for others. I have published three tales about these characters, including a novella, The Sorceress of Time. I plan for more stories about this trio of martial arts experts. The overlay of wuxia and Steampunk proved fruitful. Such combinations can often stoke the imaginative part of our brains into something that blazes brightly.

“The Weather God” appeared Penny Dread Tales, Volume II in and was reprinted in Best of Penny Dread. I’ll have more to say about Jing, Chen, and Soong in future blogs.

For more titles see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #54: "Angelique"

Angels have always been a topic of interest for the human race, from the Bible days onward. They came as messengers of God or the gods (our word angel is derived from the Greek word angelos, which means "messenger"). They carried messages from Heaven to Earth. In the Bible, people almost crapped their pants when they saw an angel; messengers from heaven are scary! C. S. Lewis once commented that angels in the Bible always said, "Fear not," when they first appear; but in the popular depictions of angels one sees in Victorian literature, he noted, the angel looked as if she should say "There, there." And angels, by the way, were always male, not female, in sacred texts. But what about a quirky angel—one that was quite different from stereotypes? An angel who is a little edgy? Thus came the story "Angelique."

"Angelique" is not about an angel. It is about a young man who meets one and she is quite different from how he imagined angels would be. Tyler Foreman is in a relationship with Pella, who has repudiated a strict fundamentalist upbringing and lives with him. He works at software firm; Pella is trying to make it in the very competitive world of freelance photography. And Tyler has an attraction to Goth girls. Pella is not Goth and he has never dated such a woman, but he likes photos of them in his cubicle and as screen savers. He finds one he hangs as a pin-up:  Angelique. She has jet black hair, blue lipstick, heavy eye makeup, and is nude from the waist; rings piercing both nipples; tattoos covering her upper arms; black rose tattooed on her stomach; fishnet hose, long nails painted black, rings on all her fingers and both thumbs. That she is topless earns the censure of some of the female workers he knows.

Angelique

One day, after a long staff meeting, he returns to find the photograph of Angelique changed. She is now wearing a halter top and her tattoos are gone. Her sultry expression is gone and she seems to be smirking at him. He stares for a long time, assumes someone stole the picture and photo-shopped it, but does not try to get it back to its original state. And, as in Oscar Wilde's classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, the photograph continues to change, and not in a small way. The model changes from a woman of European origins to an Indian woman with brown skin, large, lustrous eyes, and long black hair. He keeps waiting for his friends, whom he is sure have sabotaged the photo, to come out of hiding, laughing, and admit the prank. But they don't.

Pella

At the same time, Pella eventually begins to experience unexpected success. The editor of The New Yorker wants to use two of photographs. Soon after informing her of this, he picks two more and wants her to send him a portfolio. And, for the first time in her career, she is paid a substantial sum of money for her shots. Pella quips, "I think my guardian angel hasn’t left town after all.” They go out to celebrate. While they are dancing, Tyler suddenly gets an overwhelming impression that he should go to a local hotdog place called Yesterdog. He excuses himself and goes there. Angelique, Pella's guardian angel, is there waiting for him.

She does not fit the stereotype. She is not blonde and fair-skinned (as angels are usually depicted). Here is a little of their encounter:

“Angelique?” he asked.

“You were expecting, maybe, Alexander’s Ragtime Band?  I thought you’d never get here. Sit down.”

            He slid into the seat across from her. He noticed she had two hot dogs and an A&W root beer. Three dogs and a Canada Dry Ginger Ale (his favorite soft drink) sat on his side of the table.

            As she stuffed the end of a hot dog in her mouth, he studied her face. No doubt about it. She was the girl in the photograph:  the brown skin, lustrous black hair, brown eyes—only she wore a white minidress and white knee-boots, like a go-go dancer from the sixties. The white costume made her skin more lovely, her eyes more full of mystery and depth.

            She pointed to his hot dog. “Eat,” she ordered. He obediently ate one and then another. She wiped her mouth.

            “If you’re an angel,” he began, but he stopped.

            “Why am I not a white blondie with wings and a halo? Stereotypes. Since a lot of white people started believing, there are more ángeles blancos these days, but that’s only been in the last fourteen-hundred years or so. Prior to that, believers were almost all from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and I came along in your year 694, back when most of us guardians were fashioned to resemble, as you say today, people of color.”

            “Guardian? You’re a guardian angel?”

            “You said it yourself.”

It seems that though Pella has repudiated her childhood faith, her guardian angel has not repudiated her. Tyler asks if she has come to protect Pella from him. She tells him, to his astonishment, no, she has come to protect him.

She explains this and also why she altered the picture. Tyler's liking for Goth girls, she informs him, is symptomatic of his need for a "back door"—something to illustrate to him he can leave Pella if he needs to, though he doesn't want to now. That however, may change. Pella, Angelique says, is on the verge of fantastic success as a photographer. She will become one of the wealthiest and most famous photographers in the world. He will have the role of her husband. Because of this, he will be tempted to leave her. He thinks Angelique wants to protect her from this, but she tells him it will be worse for him and that, if he stays with her, new and beautiful doors will open for him. He is a little miffed at learning that he is secondary to Pella in talent and potentiality, and when Angelique gets ready to leave he sarcastically asks if she's in a hurry because she's going off to get laid. "I might," she said. When he expresses surprise that angels can unite sexually, she tells him, “There’s a lot you don’t know about us. Read Milton. I’ve got to go.”

She leaves him there alone. After a while, he returns to the bar where he left Pella. 

It was a fun story to write. It appeared in Indigo Rising, a journl that ceased publication, but it looks like it has relaunched. I'm trying to get access to an archive and, if I do, will post a link.

For more titles and more great reads, check out

my Writer's Page. You will enjoy reading ShadowCity, a fantasy novel about a parallel world; Strange Brew, about a rock star who suddenly finds a powerful witch in love with him--not a good situation; The Prophetess, about a teenage girl who is able to become a fortune-teller because she is possessed by a demon, but then things turn in an unexpected way. Many others.

 

And my latest novella,

The Sorceress of Time.

The world of wuxia, Asian martial arts bred many legendary figures. One of them, the Princes Jing Lin,

used her considerable skill as a warrior to assure freedom and independence for her people. But

when her father wants to make an

alliance with China and marry her off to one of the Emperor's family, she is troubled. For one, she is in love with Chen and wants to marry him. And she does not trust the man to whom she is betrothed. Sorcery though, is available. They key to the future lies in the past.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #45: "The Strega of Fitzgerald Street."

Streg is the Italian term for witch. A strega is a witch (with the "a" to designate the female gender). If you read to your kids or to young children in general, a good chance is you read Strega Nona (Grandmother Witch) by Tomie dePaola. In my history of a writer, I have written and published a handful of stories about a streg named Alessia Bernini who, as an ongoing character, is connected with the stories of Sossity Chandler, but not directly. The character who introduces Alessia is Kathy Farisi, a woman who was Sossity's best friend but destroys her marriage through an affair with her husband. At the beginning of the story "The Strega of Fitzgerald Street" we see Kathy in the aftermath of her disastrous adultery. She has visited the confessional but does not feel forgiven. Her aunt tells her she should go to see a streg to get help from her depression. Kathy will not hear of it at first, but desperation and the torments of depression make her finally agree.

Alessia

According to tradition, streg do not practice black magic; that is, they do not sell their souls to the Devil in order to get magical powers. Their magic is not evil—well, not exactly. They practice what is called natural magic—magic that derives its power from nature and from the study of natural forces found in the earth and in the power of life, growth, and continuance. Continuance, in fact, is very important, because a streg's power depends on her place in a line of magical practitioners that goes back a thousand years. The power Alessia possesses has accrued over a millennia.

The skeptical Kathy goes to see Alessia. She is surprised that the streg is young, very pretty, and stylishly dressed. And Kathy is immediately confronted with what she has done and with proof of Alessia's magical power. Alessia tells her she needs to see Sossity Chandler to begin making things right and to cleanse her soul of the guilt she feels—the same thing Kathy's priest told her when she confessed. Kathy flatly refuses: “I can’t. I can’t face her.” She took a deep breath. “If I think I have to see her, or even be near her, I’ll kill myself. I would rather die than see her, and I mean that.” Alessia asks her to agree to a contractual proposition that, she says, will cure Kathy. But there are is a penalty involved. If she reneges on the agreement

“I’ll come for your soul. We are not playing a game, Miss Farisi. This is a serious matter. If I tell you to do something and you don’t do it, you are in my debt and thus in my power—and I have a great deal of power—the power of the fifty generations of practitioners in whose succession I stand. I don’t like making people my possessions, but I will, and I have done so many times. Fail to do what I instruct you to do, and you are mine forever.”

Fear had taken her by now. Yet she had to make it clear to this woman that one thing was non-negotiable.

“I’ll do anything except go to Sossity. I won’t agree if you tell me to do that.”

“I will not ask you to do that or ask you to do anything like it. I promise as much.”

“What do you mean you’ll make me your possession?”

“You don’t want to know,” Alessia answered darkly.

They drink wine to seal the agreement. Alessia gives her particular instructions. She is to go to the campus of a local college, find an ash tree by a bridge, and eat a tiny portion of a leaf that has fallen from that tree. Kathy determines to obey the instructions.

She goes to the campus, finds the tree, picks up a leaf that has fallen from it, eats the tip of it, and throws the remainder on the ground. When she looks around, she sees Sossity Chandler and her daughter, Cheryl. They have come to the woody campus so Cheryl can collect leaves (a thing children inevitably end up doing at some time in their elementary years—mine did). Alessia has not lied. Kathy did not have to go to Sossity; Sossity has come to her.

The meeting is awkward. Cheryl, in her innocence, greets Kathy enthusiastically and says she is looking forward to staying at her house the next month (custody rights). To Kathy's surprise, Sossity is civil, perhaps even conciliatory, though the meeting is tense and the two women are uncomfortable. Still, Sossity silently communicates that she does not hate Kathy. She does not excoriate or insult her. Then Cheryl picks up the leaf Kathy has thrown to the ground. Kathy tells her it's broken and she should get a whole one, but the child says she likes it and puts the leaf into her basket—a sign, undoubtedly, that Alessia's spell has worked and what happened was not merely coincidence. After an awkward but gracious parting, Sossity goes her way. Kathy is enabled by what happened to begin what she was not able to do before:  to find healing and know the possibilities of recovery and perhaps even reconciliation are still present.

 "The Strega of Fitzgerald Street" can be found in the archives of the journal NewMyths.com (note:  this is the actual title of the publication, not its web address). Great story, enjoy the read.

For more the titles of novellas and novels, check out my Writer's Page.  

And if sorceresses are your thing--along with martial arts and wuxia--get a copy of my latest novella, The Sorceress of Time. 

I would love to hear your comments!

Enjoy the day.

Read!

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #43: "The Room of Mirrors," Horror and the "Other"

The idea for the story "The Room of Mirrors" came from a novel by Pearl Buck I taught one semester at Grand Valley State University. A class titled Literatures in English emphasizes works written in English but suggests instructors focus on books from outside America and the United Kingdom. I taught books written in English from Nigeria, India, Nepal, Australia, South Africa, and other cultures. I did teach one that semester by an American writer, Pearl Buck.

Pearl Buck is most famous for her novel The Good Earth, about China. She grew up as a missionary kid in China and often wrote about that culture and other Asian cultures. I didn't want to teach The Good Earth because instructors teach it frequently, so, as I often do, I picked one of her more obscure books. Mandala is a novel she wrote about India. I would call it good but not great; still, it gave me some ideas and focused my imagination on Indian culture. This led me to write a story about an Indian man's involvement with an American woman—a feature taken from Buck's novel.

But this was a horror story. A young woman who in college became a call girl now pursues that as a vocation. She ends up as mistress to an Maharini, the ruler of a province in India. He keeps her in a place called The Room of Mirrors, which is, as the name implies, completely covered in mirrors. The place creeps Phoebe out, but she likes the isolation of the estate the Maharini, Shashindra, maintains. She likes the quiet and the beautiful view of the Himalayas because she is contemplating an important choice. Her old boyfriend, Calvin, who knows about her choice of vocation, has offered to marry her. She wonders if she can leave her vocation and be faithful to him—and if he will continue to love her, given the trade she has plied the last few years. He says it doesn't matter to him. Phoebe is not so sure.

 She has a nightmare in which she sees every panel of mirror in her bedroom showing the face of a woman. Most are Indian, a few are African or European. And at last she sees a blonde woman covered with blood, standing next to her, outside of the mirrors. She cries out. One of the Indian servants comes to her, asks her what the dream was so he can interpret it, but when she describes it, he obfuscates. She dismisses the dream and tries to sort through the issues involved with her choice to go with Calvin or continue working as a high-class prostitute.

Calvin has met a girl named Charissa, who is Greek and an actress. He has told her about Phoebe (the story has two narrative streams). The same woman shows up at the Room of Mirrors and, tells Phoebe something she is not supposed to know that enables her to escape the room of mirrors.

First, she tells her about the room and explains the faces Phoebe saw in the mirror. They are the imprisoned souls of women who have served as mistresses to various rulers of the province. After they die, their souls are imprisoned. The sorcerer who arranged the spell so the Maharini's wives would not perceive their husbands' infidelity lives eternally from the energy of their spirits and from their anguish. Charissa had become one of the current Maharini's women in order to get acting roles. In her depression, she killed herself, but because she died in the Room of Mirrors by suicide, is able to get out. She is the key to freeing the women. Phoebe only has to lure the Maharini into the room for the women to exact their revenge.

Phoebe uses her charms to lure him up that very night. The women's arms and then bodies emerge from the room in a current of snaky distortion and engulf him. Charissa protects Phoebe. The women, however, do not kill the Maharini. He is unconscious but not dead at the end of his ordeal. A doctor proclaims a heart attack. Charissa can now resume her life and she and Phoebe see the women of the Room of Mirrors freed from the imprisoning spell and the spirit of the sorcerer who imprisoned them dissolve in anguish. Charissa resumes her career (she has an plausible explanation for where she has been for the last two years). Phoebe leaves with Calvin for a new life together with him.

Writing about foreign cultures is tricky. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, notes how Westerners often stereotype and exoticize third world peoples. I was aware of this danger as I wrote, though I might have fallen into the habit a little. Still, the story was written to give a moral lesson, and people of all races and creeds can exploit others. And I like to think justice was done in the story, though, I admit, the Westerner comes to "save" the people from the "other" culture, and so it does fall into the habits Said's book warned us against.

But the story stands and I think, even if it does have flaws, it is a good story. Can a Westerner represent other cultures equitably? Well, I'm trying and learning. "The Room of Mirrors" is possibly a first step and an experience that will teach me. Writers evolve.

"The Room of Mirrors appeared in a journal that is no longer published. Another story to re-submit!

And I have a new book out--ironically, about a non-Western character. The Sorceress of Time is about Asian culture and wuxia warriors (more cultural exchange here). Read for a story of choices, time travel, and the pursuit of justice and right. If you've seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you will know a little about wuxia. Only this story has a happier ending!

For more book titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.