Where are the ladies?

I'm having this weird problem. I've mentioned before the preponderance of gay elves in the stuff I've been working on, which is a little odd, and leads to a lot of LGBT themes I may or may not be wholly qualified to discuss. Probably not. And generally, this doesn't bother me so much. But one problem with it has been that this means a lot of the stuff I've been writing inadvertently turns into a bit of a sausage fest.

In the course of everything I've written, there have been any number of strong female characters (especially in the first half or so of the surprise novel about the gay dudes) but these have largely been relegated to supporting roles. To my credit, they are not always just lame love interests pining away for dudes, but still, the point stands. In terms of main POV characters, I think I've only written three female protagonists in any real depth. One had her very own novella, which I actually think worked out rather well, and the other two are POV characters in a novel. One of those has a storyline that's fairly mushy and makes me vaguely uncomfortable, and the other dies halfway through the damn thing. I didn't want her to -- she's such a badass and isn't tied to traditionally feminine themes at all -- but she did. She totally got herself killed.

I'm working on something right now that still very much in the primordial ooze stages (as in, I'm not entirely sure what the structure is (novella? loosely structured novel? interrelated short stories -- probably not given my history with those) and I've subsequently been playing around with various POVs, which is kind of my favorite thing to do. Blame the years of psychology classes, I guess.) and I thought it would be a good way to work in some ladies, but so far that hasn't been the case, either. There's a minor character who's mostly kind of a ho, and two more major characters, one of whom is tied into a love subplot which I like, but still kind of too close to Lifetime territory for me to feel comfortable with her hoisting up the vag flag alone. And the other chick in it is awesome, but she's not really going anywhere in it. Dammit.

So, what's the deal? I figure people tend to have a range of POV characters they feel particularly comfortable writing from, or groups with whom they have a particular affinity, but why are mine by and large gay men? And more often than not, gay men who are bicultural, when I myself am just a straight white girl? I actually seem to find women harder to write than straight dudes, I'm not sure why, even after meticulously creating societies that are fairly gender egalitarian. I'm starting to wonder if this is something I should be a little worried about. It is an odd sort of drift, and I do think the inclusion of strong non-stereotypical female characters is an important thing. So why aren't there any in my stuff? This is something I really feel like might need a more methodological, explicit approach to fixing, where I make myself write something with lots of women in it that doesn't devolve into pillow fights and such and perhaps keep the gay dudes on th periphery instead of vice versa. But then it feels forces and weird.

Food for thought.

I love a good map.

Seriously, for someone like me who is a total logic/consistency fiend they are so necessary. It's like a cheat sheet - it tells you where you put things so you don't have to go wading through mountains of text, or how apart things are, or what borders what. All good things. The oldest map, Jarthen-wise, is not actually by my own hand, it was drawn by my friend Van two (maybe three?) Thanksgivings ago:

(this is a photo of the original I printed out, annotated, then scanned. It is a storied document.)

We drew this when Jon, Van, and I had a dispute about how big Elothnin was. Apparently, in that historic prologue, Jon had assumed it was rather small - maybe the size of Wales. The kind of place where battles happen between armies of tens of people. And I thought it was roughly the size of China. So, kind of a gap there. Van mediated us into settling on something about the size of the American West roughly the shape of the Indian subcontinent. The really lovely thing about this map, though, is that it gave us a chance to nail down the surrounding areas, those places outside of Jarthen and the Border Wars that had to exist (since it's not like Elothnin was a damn planet or anything) but hadn't really been discussed. Fun fact about this map: the provinces of Elothnin are outlined up there, but all the names we came up with (besides the Fethil, which was well established by that point) were so shitty that none of us wrote them down.


This is the most recent map. Partly I drew it because I firmly believe that despite what Jarthen and Queen Lilhelndine and Jon would have you beleive, Elothnin is not a goddamn empire. But the Elvo-Felintark Empire, is. And is totally sprawling and shit. But this really got drawn because I have a character that ends up traveling through it a good deal (starts in the City of Mages, hops down to Elothnin for a bit, then over to Shalakesh, then up to Shangri, then he runs around a bit in the Elvish Grasslands for awhile before making the long walk back to the City of Mages) and I literally just needed places for him to go. Period. Becuase even though I wrote a novel that is set in the Empire here for the first third of it and it is the only really nation besides Elothnin that we've developed I had no idea what was actually in it. Or how big it was. Or what (if anything) lay beyond it. I rather like the way it turned out -- especially Sparky the Sea Monster.


This, though, this is a beauty. This is a map of the City of Mages, probably my favorite spot we've written about. It's a bizarre place, built by a race of hermits who no longer live there, abandoned and repopulated with a whole mess of races that have turned it into the most cosmopolitan place in the Jarventherse. It's a place full of culture clashes and weird little cultures of its own, a great place to explore identity issues for sure.

And until I drew this map, I had no idea what it looked like. I've been filling it in as I go, noting who lives where, how far this shop is from that one, and so forth. Some of the dots up there have popped up over and over and over (Moshel's apartment, for example, is a point of interest in the book about the gay elves, shows up in the first City of Mages book and a scene or two in the still very unformed and amoeba-like scenes of the second City of Mages book, a novella about satyrs, and will likely at least be referenced in the second or third Jarthen book. It's a happening place. Not really, it's actually full of clocks and books and grumpy gay elves, but whatever.) and some of the dots I thought would appear but never did (Theo's apartment, I'm looking at you.). It's got multiple generations overlapping in it - for example, one character has lived in four different places labeled up there across hi life span. This map is basically always out when I'm working on the City of Mages stuff. This map is canon, I'd live and die by this map. Go, CoM map, go.

Maps that will likely be drawn at some point: Susselfen, Neerhemhind (with special attention to Elftown and Captfael Castle), Opleneer pre and post war, Tarquintia, possibly Norsa, the T'Langan archipelago in greater detail (and possibly full scope. I wonder what's east of the Erkenheld Forest?), and some continent on the other side of the world. Oh, we have plans for that. Oh yes. They involve black elves and slave traders, woot.

Non-sequitar rant: the horrors of spring

So, I have terrible allergies basically year-round. I have built up enough of a tolerance to Benedryl that I can take three or four at a time and not get sleepy. Which is kind of ridiculous. In the spring, it gets worse because things bloom and there's pollen and nature is awakening and what have you, which apparently my nose is not designed to handle. Even though it was designed by nature. Whatever. So, I usually take more anti-histamines than usual and throw a few decongestants and just go with it, and usually that works.

But for some reason, it is not working this year. I'm not sure what it is -- the crazy roller coaster Michigan temperature, the roofing work the landlord is doing on my apartment building, the cactus that has recently taken up residence on my desk, the Hand of God striking me down (via clogged nasal cavities) for my rampant and unrelenting blasphemy -- but it is ridiculously bad this year. I'm popping more pills than a bored WASPy housewife and burning through tissues like there's no tomorrow.

But the worst part is the sneezing, hands down. I'm sneezing in strings of five or six at a time, and they are always, always followed by a string of expletives just as long. Which makes me look like I have Tourette's. Thank christ the semester's over and I'm working from home most days. Still, though, it's only a matter of time before I drop the F-bomb in a lab meeting.