When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*
In case it wasn’t apparent… ROOTBOUND is in dual POV! You might say I have a soft spot for wisecracking thieves grudgingly embracing emotional vulnerability, so I had a very good time writing Eugene’s chapters.
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
Since your essay "Medieval Myths and Bad Fantasies" mentions queerness in the middle ages, I'm interested in whether you have an opinion on fantasy settings that include queerness in a shallow way which clashes with the rest of the worldbuilding.
To elaborate: there's an observed pattern in "queer-normative" fantasy stories vaguely based on pre-modern European settings where queer identities and relationships are treated as normal and accepted, yet the author didn't do the work of making the "queernormativity" fit in with the rest of the worldbuilding, and didn't consider how oppressions are linked: misogyny and systemic sexism often still exist in these settings.
So two upper-class women can marry each other, but the question of where the heirs will come from isn't addressed, and since misogyny exists it implies that the political advantage of marriage comes from controlling women and reproduction to ensure a male heir to retain the family's power, which wouldn't be possible with a same-sex marriage.
I would like to mention a YA fantasy novel I recently read, "Little Thieves" by Margaret Owen, wherein its implied that if a girl "likes girls", it would only be socially acceptable for her family to marry her off to trans girls.
This made me face-palm, because wouldn´t the fact that the girls being married off don't get to choose their partners anyway defeat the purpose of this "inclusiveness"?
Fantasy authors can do what they want, but "what they want" often includes bad worldbuilding.
Where I've seen this happen in the kind of fiction you describe, it's -- I think -- a more or less direct result of refusing to admit that medieval Europe was complicated. Starting with vague ideas about normative misogyny and heteronormativity (the latter a distinctly modern concept) and trying to mix queerness in is not going to end well when the author hasn't bothered to think about the complex and diverse ways in which sex and gender work in a range of (historical) cultures.
In notable contrast, Shelley Parker-Chan's Radiant Emperor Duology is extremely queer and in a vividly realized fantasy version of 14th-century China.
I don't want to initiate a dogpile on anyone so please everyone remember there are real people behind keyboards here... But as the author, I can say this is a pretty significant misrepresentation of the book's worldbuilding and gender politics, and I'd hate for it to be anyone's introduction to the series. (Especially this year!)
people need to be more aware of ragebait as a marketing strategy and stop accidentally promoting companies by sharing their ads. reddit falls for this too hard.
You've said you'd thought about splitting HT into two books. How would you have gone about dividing it? Would it still be the same event, stretched across two books? I'm so intrigued by the cliffhanger comment—as if the ending of PD wasn't bad enough.
Also PLEASE do share some deleted scenes.
Since this heavily involves spoilers for Holy Terrors, it's going under a cut!
Originally I planned on the final act of HT being much larger, but then the murder mystery/political maneuvering in the first two acts needed more space to unfold than I expected. In the (hideously long) first draft, after Irmgard launched what I shorthanded as IrmWorld, Vanja woke up not in Kvelhaupt, but aaaallllll the way back in Castle Falbirg/Sovabin. She then discovered that in this reality, she was still a servant, Dame von Falbirg had adrogated Irmgard as the heir of House Falbirg in favor of Gisele, allowing Irmgard to ascend to the imperial throne. This left the dame and Gisele much better off financially, but in a bleak state overall, as Gisele only knew a life under her mother's thumb, and Ragne was nowhere to be found.
Vanja then decided to steal enough from the castle to fund an escape so she could try to find help, but wound up caught by Dame Falbirg, who wanted to punish Vanja by burning her hand with an iron. Before this could be carried out, however, they were interrupted by the arrival of... Prefect Hubert Klemens.
And that is where I thought I could potentially split it into two books.
I actually felt like the remainder of the original manuscript was a bit cramped because I was trying to keep the wordcount from ballooning, so it could have been expanded into its own book quite easily. The basic premise was that the ghost of Klemens, through a quirk of the circumstances of his death, was also able to remember the world as it had been; and because he wouldn't have died in Minkja if Vanja never left Sovabin, he'd been brought back with the other applicable ghosts.
Like in the final version of HT, Irmgard had imbued allies and victims with powers as "saints-palatine" under her control across the empire. Vanja and Hubert teamed up to track down the rest of the gang and engineer situations that allowed them to assume the roles (and thus abilities) of the saints themselves, and then eventually took on Irmgard. In the process, Vanja was also confronted with the reality of the world Irmgard wanted, and the erasure of the largely positive impact Vanja had had on many lives, leading to the final reconciliation with Justice that stayed in HT.
Unfortunately, the publisher was not willing to discuss splitting the manuscript into two, and only maintained that HT needed to be the final book and drastically shorter. I honestly can't say if that was the right call or not. There were some great moments and set pieces in the original draft—IrmWorld got to be unsettling and trippy in some very fun ways—and I really enjoyed having Klemens actually on the page. With more room to breathe, I might have been able to explore some cool concepts or revisited members of Vanja's family besides Ozkar.
On the flip side, Vanja doesn't need to see the good she's done in the world by that point, she knows her worth. And the tricky thing about dream world/temporary alt reality stories is, the reader knows they aren't permanent. That can undermine the stakes somewhat, and/or make the reader impatient to get back to the real setting. It's not impossible to avoid, but I think some folks would tap out at the prospect of an entire book in an artificial reality when we've spent three prior books invested in that universe's actual reality.
At the end of the day, I'm proud of HT for what it is, and I am also very happy I never have to write it again. 😂
Hello! 💛 I have a small question. I'm reading Painted Devils rn and... is that Evergreen ref? 👀
PERHAPS....
(Though once again I will gesture towards the untrustworthiness of AI: somehow PD is both a sequel and the first part of a duology? Never take these summaries at their word!)
Hii Margaret! I read little thieves series last year and I'm absolutely in love with the characters, along with the story, I've already reread it once, and I was wondering if there's going to be any novella or something of little thieves, if there's anything like that you've planned? Just wanted to let you know we adoore vanja and emeric. Thank you!!
Rereading that chunk of text is no small feat, give yourself a hand!! I've definitely taken a break from that world for a bit, but if the right idea comes along, I'd be happy to go back. There's definitely plenty of room to expand, and one thing I've considered are more standalone-ish, shorter adult magic mystery novels following our disaster couple. I haven't broken ground on anything just yet, though!
