Monthly Archives: May 2011

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Guest Post | “The Three Wedding Nights of Daenerys Targaryen” by Daniel Abraham

By Daniel Abraham May 13th, 2011

The Dragon's Path by Daniel AbrahamSo like everyone else on the planet, I’m watching HBO’s Game of Thrones. Unlike most people, I’m not bitorrenting a pirated copy. I’m going over to a friend’s house. How’s that for old school?

It’s a different experience for me than for most folks, though, because I’m also in the middle of adapting Game of Thrones to a visual medium. I’m writing the comic book scripts for Bantam and Dynamite. The license they bought was for the original book, not the HBO show, so I haven’t spoken to anyone in Holywood about the decisions they made, what to cut what to keep in. I’m on my own for that, and seeing the decisions they made has been fascinating. (What about Bran’s dreams? Where’s the three-eyed crow?)

One thing that struck me particularly, though, is the wedding night of Daenerys Targaryen. It’s a wildly problematic scene in a number of ways, and the problems and solutions about how to deal with it pretty much run the gamut.

In the original book, Daenerys is a thirteen-year-old girl given by her brother to a foreign warlord. It’s a political marriage meant to cement an alliance in preparation for war, and as such, boy howdy, does it have a lot of historical precedent. We’ve seen Dany as a victim and a child, lost and powerless, through the whole book. We’ve seen the wedding – which is violent and strange and frightening. Then the time comes, and Dany is taken off from her family and the people she knows with a huge, strong man who has the acknowledged right to have sex with her whether she wants it or not.
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Guest Post | Douglas Hulick, author of AMONG THIEVES, on Reviews

By Douglas Hulick May 12th, 2011

Among Thieves by Douglas HulickFirst, I want to thank Aidan for inviting me to blog over here on A Dribble of Ink. It’s terribly flattering when someone trusts you enough to ask for your help in maintaining a blog they’ve worked so hard on over the years. It’s like being asked to house-sit, only there isn’t any booze to steal or plants to ignore. Which is a bit of a let-down, now that I think about it.

So, Lesson Number One: Guest blogging — not as fun as wrecking someone else’s house while throwing a huge party, but better than sitting around your own place watching TV.

That being said, Aidan was good enough (at my request) to come up with a list of possible topics for me to write about. Things like how my life has changed now that I am published author; or whether I might want to write about one of my literary influences; or what it was like to take a familiar character trope (the thief) and try to put a fresh spin on it.

These are great suggestions. In fact, they’re so good I may steal them for use on my own blog at some point (assuming, you know, I start one). I’m particularly intrigued by the whole “new spin on the thief” thing, because I haven’t consciously thought about it that much.

But if I’m going to steal them for later use, that doesn’t exactly help me right now, now does it? Which leads us to…
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Guest Post | “Drawing inspiration from further afield: fantasy set in non-Western cultures” by Aliette de Bodard

By Aliette de Bodard May 11th, 2011

Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de BodardOne of the very first fantasy books I read was Patricia McKillip’s The Book of Atrix Wolfe. Though it is an utterly beautiful book with a heartrending plot, it exemplified much of what slowly started to bug me about fantasy: the setting and plot devices tend to be utterly European, drawing from traditional fairytales (and in particular from a strong Celtic tradition, as is evidenced by the figure of the Fairy Queen, and that of her husband, leader of the Great Hunt). Over the years, as I delved deeper into the genre, I realised that most settings were faux-European (especially faux-Celtic, rendered with varying degrees of skill and accuracy by various authors). Coming, as I did, from reading a variety of mythological books and historical mysteries, among which non-Western cultures were at least equal to medieval England in terms of pre-eminence, this seemed to me rather sad, and failing to do justice to the great variety of human culture across the globes and the time periods.

Fortunately, one of the other books that I read early on was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet, which, not content with reversing the race dynamics (her heroes are brown-skinned, the evil invaders distinctly Aryan), also drew heavily on Polynesian cultures as well as on Asian philosophies (the ending of A Wizard of Earthsea in particular has always struck me as exemplifying the yin/yang dichotomy). When I started writing fantasy some years later, I wanted to step away from the traditional faux-European culture that seemed to be the backbone of most secondary world fantasies (though this has changed in the last decade, it has done so very slowly).
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Guest Post | Michael J. Sullivan on GAME OF THRONES, GRRM and the NYT

By Michael J. Sullivan May 10th, 2011

Theft of Swords by Michael J. SullivanHello,

My name is Michael J. Sullivan and I’m the author of the Riyria Revelations. This series has been picked up by Orbit Books for a fall release and I’ll be back after Aidan’s honeymoon to tell you more about that. In the meantime, he asked if I would do a guest blog so that you all have something to read so you don’t go into withdrawls. I have a morning ritual that involves coffee and reading articles on my ipad. The day after the George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire debuted on HBO, I read a few reviews that really got my blood boiling. I wrote a blog boast entitled “Song of Bias and Prejudice”, but since I’m still a relatively new, and unknown author I don’t think many people saw it. In any case I think it is appopriate for the audience so I though I’d take this opportunity to share. I hope you enjoy. Here goes…

When I was in eighth grade I was caught with a copy of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring in shop class, by another kid. This “kid” who I will refer to as “Richard,” because that was his name, had been my best friend in sixth grade. Richard had just moved to the area that year and didn’t know anyone, and I adopted him when he was shunned by everyone else. After settling in however, Richard traded me for a better, cooler, best friend the following year. One of the ways he endeared himself to his new circle was by using what he knew, from our best-friend-years, to belittle and humiliate me, which always plays well to a group of twelve-year-olds trying to establish themselves as superior to anything. So when he found me reading a book, his eyes lit up with new potential.
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Guest Post | “Is it cos I is a girl?” by Elspeth Cooper

By Elspeth Cooper May 9th, 2011

Songs of the Earth by Elspeth CooperI was in hospital recently (my gallbladder and I were in the middle of an acrimonious break-up) and as you do, I got chatting with my fellow inmates.

‘So, what do you do?’ asked the woman in the opposite bed, in the pink bunny slippers.

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Oh!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Romance, is it?’

‘Er, no.’

‘Crime?’

I wouldn’t mind Val McDermid’s sales, I thought. ‘Actually, I write fantasy.’ I held up my copy of The Name of the Wind. ‘Like this.’

My interlocutor peered at the cover, but obviously didn’t recognise the name. ‘Is that like that Twilight, then? All vampires and werewolves and stuff?’

‘Not really. It’s more sword and sorcery.’ In the face of her blank expression, I fumbled for the one name I was sure she would have heard of. ‘Lord of the Rings.’

The shutters of indifference came down with a near-audible clang. ‘Oh. Stories for boys.’

I did try to explain, but apparently because I didn’t write about oversexed earls in pursuit of fluttering virgins, or ghastly Yakuza executions in grim grey cities, I was now off the lady’s literary radar. What she would have made of the longsword hanging up in my office I do not know.

The doctor who came to draw some blood asked me the same question, in a hearty, take-your-mind-off-what-I’m-doing-with-this-needle voice, whilst prodding my inner elbow for a vein.

‘So, what do you do?’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Historicals?’

‘No, fantasy. Ow.’

‘My son’s into all that whatchamacallit, Assassins’ Creed, on his X-Box. I’ll get some gauze to wipe that up.’

A year previously, I’d had a similar conversation with my publisher. She’d just had a meeting with the fiction buyer from Waterstones, and the author gender vs target readership issue had reared its ugly head: boys won’t buy books written by girls, and it can affect sales by as much as ten percent – the horror! My publisher and I even went so far as to toss around some gender-neutral pen names like Alex Cooper before she decided that female was the new black for fantasy writers, and that was that.

Clearly, the publishing industry is well ahead of the curve here; for the rest of the population, fantasy is just not something that girls do. It is still perceived as a very male-dominated genre, the province of geeks and gamers and lank-haired Lurches in Slipknot hoodies. The likes of Jemisin, Downum, and Cashore have not yet penetrated the wider public consciousness. Meyer has, Charlaine Harris has, but we can’t all have big-budget TV shows and movies and enough with the damn vampires already! You’re giving us girls a bad name.

I was rather hoping that the Game of Thrones mini-series would start a few more cracks in the genre glass ceiling; if anything it seems to be reinforcing it, but that’s another issue, being debated elsewhere by minds more articulate than mine.

So, a question for the floor: if a woman tells you she’s a writer, do you assume that because she’s a woman, she won’t be writing about sharp edges, harsh realities? Does the gender of the author alter your perceptions of a book as you’re browsing in the store, and make you more likely to pick it up, or less?