With Facets of Fantasy being the highlighted free book for next month, I thought I’d discuss these three stories a little more in-depth. For The Amulet of Renari, there’s Violet. Here's a picture of a girl who sort of resembles her, except Violet's eyes are darker. But I like this girl's expression. The second pic is a fantasy art piece I found online and thought, "That's what Judith looks like. It's her exactly."

All my heroines are unique, but Violet does stand apart in a couple of ways. I’ve always felt she wasn’t much characterized and is in a way one of my flattest female leads. But she has an extremely strong presence. We don’t get to know her much, for a reason. She’s the sort of person who can really, really surprise you. There’s an edge to Violet—I’d almost call it mildly disagreeable. And it’s important that we don’t see her very clearly throughout the story. The whole purpose of her character is to feel uncertain about her.

The Amulet of Renari is an idea of Narnia—not fanfiction, not dealing with any characters or actual plots from that world. It’s a story about Narnia. About why this place has always been different from other fantasy. Narnia has unique underlying ideas and a specific hold that won’t go away. But I was surprised when I worked on Renari that I found these ideas so unlikable. I think we may not know yet who’s really interested in Narnia. Something, hinted at by the wolf-people in Renari, seems dark, actually, and it’s never talked about. I’m not sure that all of the people around Narnia are aware of this or would like it if they found out. And that’s where Violet’s personality matters. There’s a kind of person who’s deeply underestimated and just when you think you know them—you realize you don’t. Violet is that sort. The sort who moves. 

Whatever Renari was really built on in the past, nobody has told Violet exactly what it is and they may not have told us either. And I do get the feeling people are watching Narnia closely to see what it’s all about. I’m not sure whether Violet represents the deeply entrenched, hidden aspects of Narnia or whether she belongs with the many who’ve grown up loving Narnia and don’t know that someone else might have been there all along. Either way, we might be in for some surprises. Whoever she is, she’s fundamentally untrustworthy. You never thought she had it in her. 

​And there will be more updates. 

Continuing my posts about junk directed at writers and at me personally, I’ve made a list of words that show a disrespectful attitude. One of the rudest, most disrespectful things you can do to a person is not give them your full, real attention while still wanting to express an opinion. If one of my books is worth your commenting on, it’s worth your full time.

What sort of person tries to make or break a book; destroy all an author’s hard work; slices up something they barely even understood; makes sweeping, negative judgments on something they didn’t even finish? Or read so hastily, basically planning what they were going to say before even reading. A person who is stating disrespect. “I don’t like this person/movie/book. I don’t want other people to find and like them either. But I didn’t pay them the compliment of giving them a full chance before I decided, so I’ll just throw out some random insults."

This makes the person doing it look stupid and contributes nothing to the social conversation. Why people do this, I don’t know, but if people ever approach you with some kind of attitude that’s just involved enough to say something rude and not involved enough to actually give you real time, put them on mute and show them the door.

• “Confusing.” This is one of the oldest bad-guy tricks. If people say this, they are trying as hard as ever they can not to understand the point of your book. That’s why it “confuses” them. They still want to say something critical so other people don’t find your book and like it. But they don’t know what to say because they’re tuning the book out. So they say the setting, plot structure, or dialogue is “confusing.”
• “Bad Writing.” This is similar to the “bad acting” and “bad directing” labels in the film industry. This is just plain old snotty nonsense. “Bad directors” are simply directors that you don’t like, like George Lucas. Same for writers, a stale cliché of being bad at what they do for a living if you don’t like the person. But being told you’re bad at something you’ve put much effort into is downright mean and should be ignored.
• “Building.” I know this doesn’t sound like a word to be outlawed, but talking about something other than the story is shady. People trying to cover up what they’re thinking about you will often reference a set-piece like buildings, and if they’re so vague they shouldn’t be talking at all. My ears are ringing still because of one older man who pounded, pounded, pounded that a palace on an old book cover of mine was a GERMAN building. GERMAN, German, German, German, German, German building. Eventually I felt like, “Knock it Off. That has nothing to do with the story.”
• “Editing.” Oh, the big, bad editing slap. This is the go-to trick for people who want to undermine something. It’s not even pretending to talk about content. After all the effort of building a world, people come and give you a fresh little, “but it has some editing errors.” Occasionally I’ve seen books with serious errors, but mostly they are tiny and are, by the way, found in almost all professionally published books. They are easily fixed and if you were reading the story you probably wouldn’t see them so awfully much. And if you’re not fully reading the story, drumroll, drumroll—“Why are you talking again?”
• “Descriptions.” This is like saying you don’t like someone’s hair color. You just . . . just like black hair better than blonde. You just honestly DO like brunettes better. What’s the point of saying that to a blonde woman? It will hurt her feelings and the sad thing is she shouldn’t even care what you think. Same when discussing whether someone has a lush, spare, wordy, or terse writing style. It’s just the author’s appearance, basically. And no, they don’t all look the same. If I had received a compliment on my writing to replace each little comment like this, I’d be too vain for my own good, most likely. 

And there will be more updates

This book was begun several years ago, as part of a group project. My sister started the project and I knew most of the other members personally, some for years. So I agreed to join. There was much defensiveness last year because I portrayed some of the characters in my book as immoral, something that wasn’t done in any of the other VJA books I’ve read so far. Even my mother, who was editing it, spent literally 75% of the editing time, on a deadline, going over and over and over and over and over and over and over a few chapters early on which showed parties, a scene between Myrtle and Horace, and some slangy 30s dialogue. I had to really push her to move on and I could not see why all the concern was necessary. All of this material was light and unimportant because the characters were the same without it—cavalier, often selfish, and immoral.

But that IS the interest in Mansfield Park. I didn’t take Mansfield Park because I related to these characters. It was because MP is a story that’s rarely told right. Rarely told truthfully. Every movie, every retelling seems to get something wrong. And since finding the story that’s really in the story is what I do, I felt the task was mine since I had to join the collection. This was the story that I found inside Mansfield Park. It's a book about virtue, that’s true. Everyone praises virtuous Fanny Price or has obvious motives for bashing her. But it’s also a book about vice and most of the people interested in the book do want to discuss that side of behavior. I looked into the mirror of the story and this is what I saw. It’s not a personal reflection on me or my writing. In fact, this is my only story ever to show such characters. I don’t usually take on books with that as their hidden “true story.”

And there will be more updates. 

With Bellevere House coming up for sale next week, I thought I’d post a bit about Jane Austen. When I was growing up, JA saturated my house because of my mother. Some of my earliest creative efforts involved making little picture books of Pride and Prejudice, although I haven’t been interested in the story since. She really was just wallpaper and I didn’t think she was interesting. She was just there.

After working on the JA project, I began to rethink this author and her fans. My mother was not typical. Her view was old-fashioned even when she was young (the 1960s) and one of the few other fan-type commentaries she enjoyed was a book written in the 1940s. The 1940s. So I wasn’t prepared for the 21st century fans, or even late 20th century fans. The cult. The explosion. The Jane Austen girls. I didn’t know who these people were and I didn’t overly care. But I did gradually notice their movies and fanfiction had a tone I didn’t expect. Some of the movies were dark, sleazy, or bizarre; others droning, angsty, or a bit odd when portraying characters. (Such as Harriet.)
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I hadn’t thought of working with any of the novels in an in-depth way and I lumped them all together as DeBooksByJehnAusten. (Sounds like a name for a fan website, doesn’t it?) Once I did, I noticed surprising things, and when I watched the movies closely, instead of casually, I saw more. And then I was reminded of that old 1940s book. The authors of that book had rated the novels from best to worst and I’d wondered why they put P&P so near the bottom and Emma so near the top. True, I didn’t care about P&P—but didn’t everyone love it? And EMMA? Boring, BORING Emma at the top??

I came to feel that was entirely true. Their list was pretty much accurate. Even then, they were seeing something I wasn’t in these books. And after I overheard someone talking about the parents in JA, as a way to rate the books, I saw they also all agreed. So here, partly based on them, partly on personal experience, is my official Jane Austen list.

• Emma ~ a bit boring and something about it feels old and overdone. (Somehow.) But it’s harmless and cute. Much more interest in Frank Churchill than you’d think.
• Persuasion ~ slow and truly for a niche audience. But not as bad as you’d think, even if characters like the Elliots seem stuck-up and remote.
• Mansfield Park ~ deeply frustrating. After working with it, I concur. There’s so much that’s good, but something about the audience’s view (and the characters themselves) is unlikable and vague.
• Northanger Abbey ~ I want to like it. I really do. It used to be my favorite and underlying it’s still harmless. But the view of so many characters now makes them out to be bad people.
• Pride and Prejudice ~ shady, shady. True, many just think they’d like to be witty, clever Lizzie in a fancy dress. But there’s a dedicated audience that needs explaining. And why does it convert so well to having the characters as little kids? I'm not the only one to do this. That’s weird.
• Sense and Sensibility ~ There’s not much to say at this point. It’s  . . . become more dark than it used to be. It’s hard to speak well of any of the men and even Mrs. Dashwood seems questionable.

And there will be more updates.