image from ilona-andrews.com

This week’s pick for Daddy Issues in Urban Fantasy is Kate Daniels, the protagonist of Ilona Andrews’s urban fantasy series of the same name.

Kate’s a kick-ass bounty hunter who, when we meet her, works informally for the Order of Knights of Merciful Aid. It’s a gig that sounds more benevolent than it is, since the Order is just as likely to kill you as it is to help you. Kate’s job is to clean up magical messes by killing things, and she does it well.

As we learn about Kate, we realize that she’s in hiding. Her blood links her back to her father, Roland, a Very Bad Man who is the world’s oldest necromancer and may or may not want to take over the world.

Kate was raised by her foster-father, Greg, whose death she is investigating at the beginning of the series. Greg rescued her as a child from Roland, who would kill to keep her from destroying his plans and, well, to keep her from existing. Greg raised her to hide and to fight, knowing that eventually it would fall to her to take Roland down.

Okay, I’m a little fuzzy on the details at this stage, but it’s been something like two years since I’ve read the early books. Cut me some slack.

Because of her background—and the knowledge that any of her blood left unattended could bring assassins down on her in an instant—Kate does not let people into her life. When we meet her, she has no friends and terrible taste in men. Part of her journey is learning to trust others and to accept her own power. She eventually falls into a meaningful relationship with the were-lion head of the Pack in Atlanta, she makes friends, and she “adopts” a motherless young girl.

While she does have a bit of a Harry Potter-esque martyr streak, that comes from being the only one to have the power to stop the biggest evil. And the fact that she’s willing to sacrifice herself for those she comes to love indicates that her isolation and hard childhood have not corrupted her: she can still love, and she’s not always willing to say that the end justifies the means. Some things are worth throwing it all away for.

Kate is an example of how Freud isn’t always right, at least in urban fantasy. Yes, she wants to take her dad down, but it’s difficult to say she has penis envy when she already has her father’s powers. She’s just as powerful as he is, only younger, prettier, and with a cause she’s willing to die for.

What do you think, readers? Does taking the metaphor out of an Electa complex completely reshape the meaning of daddy issues? Or is it all still metaphor, just an indication that girls need to overcome a father’s influence in order to develop fully?

For the record, I don’t think that last one is true.

When I was about eight, a friend of mine brought me a gift from her trip to California. It was a round cardboard disc with a butterfly printed on it.

“It’s called a pog!” she explained.

“A what?” I asked. I was dubious, even as a third-grader. My dad once bought me a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words, “Yeah, right.”

My friend explained that it was popular game in California—we lived in Missouri—involving these round discs (“pogs”) and something called a slammer. The players would stack the discs and take turns shoving the slammer down on the stacked pogs (that’s not phallic at all), which caused the stacked pogs to scatter. The player who had thrust the slammer kept whatever pogs landed face up. The face-down pogs were re-stacked, and the next player took a turn.

I guess. That’s what Wikipedia tells me now. My friend didn’t know any of that. I never had a clue how to play it, but, man, those pogs were the rage. People collected them, traded them, played with them—I’m pretty sure they were eventually banned at my elementary school.

I had no idea what to think about them, though. I probably had one of the first pogs in Springfield, Missouri, but I never had a slammer (again with the metaphor—I blame Freud), and I never collected more than a dozen or so. I was completely bemused by the game.

Some of you who are a wee bit older than me could probably relate those pogs with the onset of puberty. Suddenly you have all these new things and feelings and no earthly idea what to do with them! …But they’re kinda cool and potentially fun all the same.

Not for me, though. They were just shiny and popular. Mostly I was following the teacup-human herd.

Now that I’m a grown-up, though, I wonder why I collected them at all. They were cool only because they were popular, and they were only popular because we’d been told they were cool. Do you remember playing pogs? Was it fun? Who knows! It was just one of those trends that comes and goes without any fanfare at its birth or its death.

We encounter so many conventions like this, things we’re “supposed” to do, because “everyone” says we should. In the end, we become victims to the fad-monster and forget to do what we really find fun.

A pog is just a round piece of cardboard, kids. And sometimes rules are just dressed-up inhibitions. Let’s kick those fruitless conventions to the curb!

Did you pass on pogs? Or did you play the game and find it fun? What other trendy demons caught you? I love hearing from you, so tell me all about it!

Well, if you look at my GoodReads Currently Reading list, you’ll see I’m working my way through Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales. It’s a seminal tome on, well, myth and culture in ancient Ireland and Wales. (Shocker.)

You may have noticed that I love history. I’m not a historian or anything, but I devour medieval biographies, archaeology magazines, and any history of the United Kingdom. I also love mythology, so a book that looks at mythology in the context of history and then places the myths of one land in juxtaposition with the still older myths of another Indo-European tradition just sets my nerdy little heart aflutter.

I especially love tidbits that reveal how ancient people were exactly like us or, in some ways, even more progressive.

Take this bit, for example:

It is said that Partholón went hunting and fishing one day, leaving his wife and Toba, his henchman, to guard the island. The woman seduced the man, and that was the first adultery that ever was in Ireland… Then Partholón upbraided his wife, but she put up the defense that it was her husband’s fault for leaving her in a situation in which the inevitable had happened… And that was the first judgment in Ireland, ‘the right of his wife against Partholón’, a judgment which seems to echo the words of the Indian Laws of Manu: ‘the adulterous wife throws her guilt on her (negligent) husband.’

Or, as my fiance summed it up, it was Partholón’s fault, since he couldn’t satisfy his woman. The international law of ‘he had it coming.’

Now, I’m not advocating adultery or anything. But this little factoid amused me so much that I had to share it with you. The people of two thousand years ago really weren’t all barbarians strutting about, saying, “Ale! Wenches! Mrar!” Once upon a time, perhaps, people had some free-thinking ladies who took their fun where they found it.

It goes further than just ancient girls gone wild, too. You see a fair few matriarchal societies in fantasy novels, but rarely do we see a society based on the skewing of just one accepted standard. What if there was a world where people were always punished for negligence? If, for instance, you got robbed and could do nothing because you’d left your door unlocked: it was your fault for failing to protect your property. (Not that Partholón’s wife was property, but you get the idea.) There’s not a whole story concept there, but endless plots could spring up from putting someone from that society in conflict with someone with our modern notions of how social interactions should go down.

What do you think, readers? Did Partholón have it coming? Have you come across any fascinating factoids lately? I love hearing from you!

He and my protagonist were supposed to have chemistry. (Chemistry will probably get a blog post all its own. Because WTH do I mean by chemistry?) There’s more between them than just chemistry, but I’m not going to tell you all about it just now. In spite of my best intentions, though, he and Mitzy just had nothing. Zip. Blah. There was no spark between them.

I got to thinking about it, and I realized that the two characters just had nothing in common. They’re supposed to be friends (or more..?), but their relationship was a working one, a partnership born of convenience, not one of true admiration or liking. They didn’t even have any shared interests.

This happens sometimes. Characters just plain don’t click. On Friends, the writers made the mistake of giving Joey and Rachel a more-than-friends relationship, after nine years of sexual tension and history between Ross and Rachel. It just didn’t work, to the degree that the writers actually wrote the wrongness of that relationship into the show. After their first real date, whenever Joey tried to kiss or touch Rachel, she ended up slapping him: funny as a bit, but also a result of their lack of chemistry. It was just wrong.

My characters aren’t meant to have perfect chemistry, but they are meant to be friends. So what’s an author to do, when she discovers her characters don’t click?

Why, give the less-important character a personality makeover, of course!

I’m still in revision-mode, so I’m able to do this. A few slight alterations to the male character (which of course will lead to some significant scene rewrites), and he will have more in common with my better-developed protagonist. Their dialogue will lighten up, their interactions will be sexier, and Mr. Relationship-man will have a reason to stick around once he no longer needs my protagonist as a contact.

You can’t force two people to have chemistry, even when they’re fictional. Sometimes two personalities just don’t mesh, and that’s okay.

Luckily, when they’re fictional, you can change their personalities.

Have you ever had to revamp a character’s personality to make a plot-point work or to make him click with another character?

I told her about a personal project I’m working on that took me a year to get started on because I wanted it to be perfect. Eventually I realized that you have to start somewhere—perfection doesn’t just manifest fully formed. If you never start, you’ll never even come close to perfection.

She told me a story her mentor, a songwriter, once told her. This woman sat down one day to write a song.

But before she even played a chord, she started to think, “Wow, this a great start. These lyrics could be really good. What if it turns out to be a great song? And what if it becomes hugely successful? What happens when my album becomes a bestseller? And I get tons of money? And when I get nominated for an award? I don’t even have anything to wear to the Grammys!”

And she got so intimidated by her own thoughts, she couldn’t even start writing the song.

It’s fun to imagine future success, and perhaps terrifying to imagine the responsibilities that come with the success, but most of us probably shoot the opposite direction with our flights of fancy. We think, “Wow, this sentence is bad. What if the whole chapter is bad? And then what if I finish the book, and none of my beta readers like it? What if I send it to agents and they send me back letters that just say, ‘HAHAHA NO.’? And what if I send it to editors and they tell me I suck? What if I actually can’t write and I have to get a job at WalMart because I have no marketable skills? And what if I’m so pathetic that I’m going to die alone after one of my midnight shifts at Walmart and no one notices until I never show up for my next shift?!”

You get the idea.

Trouble is, it doesn’t matter if you have nothing to wear to the Grammys if you never even write a song.

We need to stop getting in our own way. Every great book, every great song, every great work has to start somewhere. So put the pen to the paper and quit worrying about what you’ll wear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my first novel lately. (I love that I can say first. Happily, none of the following applies to my second novel.) I started reading it back in December, and some of those early chapters are… well… they’re not good.

Readers, between you and me, some of it is just plain bad. I was still finding my feet and my voice, and failing to find some other metaphorical-anatomical parts I shan’t mention.

Other parts of it are pretty good, though.

Still, it needs more than a polish. It needs a new engine, a new chassis, and to be completely ripped apart and put back together with new, shiny paint on the outside… and unfortunately the paint-and-polish part comes last.

So what am I going to do?

As tempted as I am to just chuck the whole 215,000 words into the trash —it would be a write-off, after all, since that’s almost a quarter of my million bad words—and start fresh with the story, I’m not actually going to pitch the whole thing. I need to read all of it, to see what I did well in addition to what I did poorly. Some of it could probably go into the new version of the book.

But here’s the big thing: I’m going to break it into a trilogy.

Yes, I’m doing that which I said I never would. It’s a big story, more than I really should have tried to handle for my first book, but no new writer ever listens to that advice. Each character’s plot needs more development, and there’s no way I could do that in a single novel.

Still, it’s going to be a secondary project. Right now my focus is on Shaken. I need to work on a snazzy second draft, get it to some beta readers, and begin the Great Agent Hunt. Mitzy’s a strong character, I’m told the voice is good and funny. With some polish, I think Shaken could do well.

Here’s hoping.

Ever ditched a big project? Did it bum you out, or give you the same weird feeling of empowerment that I have right now?

I’m talking about the first movie, not the others. They’re not the best. But the first one is seriously cool, and it has a nice romance in it to boot. Goth-punk urban fantasy + romance = the recipe to make Kristin like something.

Image from Wikipedia

Let’s look at the main character, Selene. She didn’t make my original Daddy Issues in Urban Fantasy list of ladies with issues, but only because I temporarily forgot her (oops).

Selene is a vampire Death Dealer hunting Lycans… In other words, she’s an assassin who finds and kills werewolves, who have been at war with the vampires for something like a thousand years.

She was turned into a vampire by the Big Bad Vampire Viktor after he told her that the Lycans killed her family, and she became a Death Dealer because she sought revenge.

It’s all lies, of course. Viktor, her pseudo-father figure, killed her family and turned her because she reminded him of the daughter he killed for becoming pregnant with a werewolf’s child. Cute, huh? The werewolves, while not exactly innocent, neither started the war nor killed her family, effectively making her whole life’s work pointless. That’s enough to mess a girl up pretty seriously.

So when Selene falls in love with a werewolf (soon werewolf-vampire hybrid), it looks like history will repeat itself. Viktor, the person she trusted above all others, wants to kill her and her lover. But instead of bowing down to male authority, Selene stands up for her newfound love and eventually kills Viktor.

The movie dances along the line between girl-power and anti-feminist. Selene and another female character spend a lot of time getting slapped around (literally) by male authority figures. Michael, Selene’s lover, is the one with the awesome hybrid powers. Women are punished for having sexual relationships outside the box, and the only female Elder dies without having much part in the movie.

In spite of that, though, Selene is the one who rescues Michael. When he’s about to die, she turns him into a vampire, which is pretty refreshing in a genre where men turn women into vampires or women save their male vamp-boyfriends by offering blood. Selene is also the one to kill Viktor, saving Michael and herself—and everyone, really.

She recovers from the trauma of losing a real family, losing a foster father, and learning that her quest was based on a lie. Her entire worldview is shaken, but she has the courage and the vision to fight for what is right.

In other words, she might puzzle Freud. She does kill her foster father, though, so I suppose that puts her pretty squarely in Electra territory.

So what do you think, readers? Is Selene a new feminist role model? Is she destined to attract violence and cause the deaths of the men who love her? Or is the the hope of strong women in urban fantasy?

A number of years ago, my fiance and I bought a hair trimmer online so that I could cut his hair for him. Thirty bucks up front would save us x-number of twenty dollar haircuts down the road. Makes sense, doesn’t it? This was probably five years ago, so the trimmer has more than payed for itself.

His haircuts never look good, mind you. I can barely blow-dry and straighten my own hair, let alone make someone else’s look good. I’m not one of those girls who can twist her hair up effortlessly into a sexy-chic, gravity-defying bun held in place only with a pencil and chutzpah. I basically just buzz his hair off, all one length, trim the funky bits, and shave his neck. It tends to grow out with a “duck tail,” the edges at the back of his neck flipping up in little curls.

That’s not how our thriftiness became troublesome, though. He doesn’t really care how his hair looks.

No, the trouble is that he has thick, coarse hair, and lots of it. Clean-up requires two trash bags on the floor, a broom, the vacuum cleaner, and a hazmat suit.

When we lived in New Mexico, we lived in a two hundred-odd-year-old building, with rough, uneven wooden floors installed at least a century ago. I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder, sweeping—I could sweep the dirt into the cracks between the floorboards. So when I woke up one day with a sore toe, I just assumed it was a splinter from our ratty floors.

I limped around for awhile, then finally sat and made my other half look at my toe. Sure enough, there was a splinter. He got the tweezers, told me to brace myself, and dug it out.

It was one of his trimmed hairs. It had pierced my toe-flesh and lodged itself there.

I still shudder to think about it.

I think I need to keep this lesson in mind during the coming months. I’d hate to inadvertently give my wedding guests food poisoning from “Caterers ‘R Us” and hives from “Flowers by Some Guy With A Field Near His House.” Thrifty (and easy) does not always equal smart.

Have you ever taken thriftiness into silliness, readers?

“Well, I’m doing my best to grow,” said Davy, “but it’s a thing you can’t hurry much. If Marilla wasn’t so stingy with her jam I believe I’d grow a lot faster.” 

“Marilla is not stingy, Davy,” said Anne severely. “It is very ungrateful of you to say such a thing.” 

“There’s another word that means the same thing and sounds a lot better, but I don’t just remember it,” said Davy, frowning intently. “I heard Marilla say she was it, herself, the other day.” 

“If you mean ECONOMICAL, it’s a VERY different thing from being stingy. It is an excellent trait in a person if she is economical. If Marilla had been stingy she wouldn’t have taken you and Dora when your mother died. Would you have liked to live with Mrs. Wiggins?” 

“You just bet I wouldn’t!” Davy was emphatic on that point. “Nor I don’t want to go out to Uncle Richard neither. I’d far rather live here, even if Marilla is that long-tailed word when it comes to jam, ’cause YOU’RE here, Anne.” – from Anne of Avonlea

I can also give you a picture of an angry cat in a party hat!

I can also tell you that it would be a crying shame if, even on my birthday, I couldn’t post a picture of a cat in a party hat for you all to see. If you care about free access to information online, you should take a stand against SOPA and PIPA by contacting your representatives.

You should also check out what my blog-friend Emmie Mears has done to her website today, see what  Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Google say about it, or join the strike yourself.

No, not behind our backs, silly person. They’re fictional! I mean, why do we like the characters that we, as individuals, like? Is it because we can relate to our favorite character? Is it because they’re someone we’d like to be friends with? Or is it some ineffable combination of reasons that we’ll never know?

I got to thinking about this while reading The Wheel of Time books. I think I quit the series the first time in part because a character I really liked (Perrin) became involved with a character I really disliked (Faile). But what about those imaginary people gave me a strong enough opinion to even care who they dated? …other than a book-character crush, which I totally had (have?) on Perrin.

Take Anya. She’s my favorite character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Sorry for all the Buffy references lately. I’m still sick in bed and having a marathon.) But why is she my favorite? I’m not exactly “newly human and strangely literal.” I have no experience working as a vengeance demon, though I do understand her penchant for retail work—though I don’t love money as much as she does. She’s a damn good singer and scared of bunnies, which makes me giggle. And she’s very pretty, but I don’t really have a crush on her. She is very funny, and funny in a way I can appreciate.