Deborah's Journal

My relationship with Rosemary Hawley Jarman is all Tanith Lee's fault. Which is actually a good thing. In my more whimsical moments, I suspect there is a secret society of British fantasy authors who, if they don't actually know one another, enjoy only a single degree of separation. (Sometimes that degree is me, and it's both odd and delightful to be performing introductions across the Atlantic between people who live on the same island, but that's another story.) So when Tanith introduced me to Rosemary, Rosemary and I also had another connection, which is that the small press Norilana was publishing both the first anthology I'd edited and Rosemary's romantic fantasy, The Captain's Witch. Her 1971 novel, We Speak No Treason, featured the much maligned King Richard III.

Rosemary is one of the authors who teach me about editing. It's quite a humbling experience to work with writers with far more years and experience than I have. I feel privileged to get a peek into their

"Ever since my first glimpse of fjord and glacier," she writes, "the Norse legends have become emotionally significant. The magical sword I see as the archetype of mortal striving and desire. In this story I have departed from the Wagnerian tradition and it is a woman who, like the hero Siegfried, renders the broken weapon into a sacred force. The Ring has elements of the Sleeping Beauty, the longed-for princess, and the flames symbolise the ordeal to be passed through in search of fulfillment. Nothing changes, even today, so long as love is pure."
own processes. More than that, I've come to see that editing-according-to-Deborah is like a dance. The author does her best to put her vision (or, as Rosemary puts it, her "creative plan") into words on a page, and I do my best to discern the heart of that story and, upon occasion, to make suggestions aimed at realizing that heart more fully. Sometimes I'm spot-on, but at other times I can misperceive or get overly enthusiastic about what I think the story is about (as opposed to what the author intended). I know I'm on the right track when I'm able to judge when to drop it, what is the author's creative prerogative, and when to press a question, when there's something unresolved that in my judgment impairs the story from reaching its potential. Working with Rosemary, especially seeing how she thinks in terms of a "creative plan" has given me great insight into the flexibility needed for good editing. This was especially helpful with "Fire and Frost and Burning Rose" because she's taken a mythology and shaped it in unexpected ways.
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Last year, I started a series of blog posts on the stories in The Feathered Edge: Tales of Magic, Love, and Daring - how I met the authors, my thoughts on these particular stories, how our lives and work are woven together in community. Life and deadlines intervened, so I never finished, so now I'm reposting them and will complete the series. I can post each blog here, or just a link to send you over to my blog. Which works better for you?

[Poll #1896343]

Italy has some of the most romantic and mysterious cities in the world, and I was delighted when Jay Lake and Shannon Page sent me a story set in the Renaissance Florence. 

 

Florence, by Thermos

Venice, by Paolo da Reggio

My own adventure began in 1991, when I was living in France. We used our children’s spring break to visit Italy, and that meant Florence and Venice. These places overwhelmed me with a sense of being not quite in the same reality as other places I’d been. I was accustomed to living near water (having come from Venice, California -- all right, just across the street from the Venice city line), but not the pervasive sense of dark, fluid depths underlying every building and every walkway, nor the atmosphere of age and history, or the constant reminders of private lives – of secrets – behind those shuttered windows and doors. Whether strolling through the piazzas or over one of the many bridges, or riding in a gondola, or sitting in a café, I felt myself surrounded by stories. I remember the moment of awe when I stepped out into the plaza of the ghetto (the original ghetto, after which all others are named). There isn’t much to see, just a well-swept space surrounded by tourist shops; it’s not what I saw but what I felt, century upon century of hope and despair, of huddled safety and wellsprings of determination.

A tourist brochure, perhaps from the city of Venice itself, I can’t remember now, featured images from carnevale. One of these was the famous character, Bauta. This costume consists of a unadorned white mask, flared at the bottom where the mouth should be, a black tricorned hat, and a black cloak. It is impossible to tell if the person wearing it is old or young, man or woman, rich or poor – a true disguise for that brief time of merry-making when such distinctions no longer hold sway. In the publicity image, indirect, diffuse lighting cast the figure in mysterious shadows. You can see something of what it looked like here.

Or here.

Oh my, I thought. Story material.

---

When I returned to the US, I pinned the picture on my bulletin board beside my computer. Although I worked on other projects, my eyes kept drifting back to this enigmatic, slightly menacing figure. I had a chance to take some of those shivers and weave them into a story when I was invited to submit to an anthology of historical fantasy, Ancient Enchantresses, edited by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch. I based my story, "Unmasking the Ancient Light," on the life of Dona Gracia Nasi, one of the most extraordinary Jewish women of the Renaissance. My friend Bauta did not put in an appearance in my story, but furnished a wealth inspiration for an ancient, brooding menace.

Then, as I was reading stories for The Feathered Edge: Tales of Magic, Love, and Daring, I opened the one Jay and Shannon had sent me and read:

Firenze, 1498

I peered around the rough-edged corner of the Palazzo Martelli, searching down the long, night-shadowed lane but seeing nothing save the muddy path to the river Arno below. The Ponte Vecchio glimmered in the distance, lit by a single torch at the near end.
 

Palazzo Martelli, by sailko

Oh my. Italy, again!

And what a marvelous time this is! Florence is ancient and brooding, but infused with the vigor of magic, of a living, working city, not a vacation destination. This is not the Florence of picture postcards and tourist brochures. Dangerous things lurk in waters, and watch you from the rooftops…and behind the gaity and mercantile riches, a battle is being waged, one whose stakes are hearts as well as souls. Jay and Shannon weave the vivid details into an erotic tale of desire, sorcery, and power.

One of the challenges of writing short fiction is how much must be accomplished in how few words. Harry Turtledove once said that novels teach us what to put in a story, but short stories teach us what to take out. Every story element must serve multiple purposes - setting the scene and evoking the larger world beyond it, creating and heightening tension, revealing character -- oh, and moving the plot along. It's a tall order to accomplish in only a few thousand words. Some writers do the world-building part so well in even so short a space that it keeps beckoning them to return. That happened to me with a series of short stories I wrote for Sword and Sorceress (that eventually became a fantasy trilogy, The Seven-Petaled Shield). It also happened to Madeleine E. Robins with her world of "Meviel."

The first I saw of this wonderful place was the story Madeleine wrote for the first anthology I edited, Lace and Blade from Norilana Books. It was called "Virtue and the Archangel" and began thus:

Veillaune meCorse left her virtue in the tumbled sheets of a chamber at the Bronze Manticore. This act, which would have licensed her parents to cut her off from family and fortune, was a grave error; but with her maidenhead, Veilliaune also left the Archangel behind, and that was a calamity.

I guess the world of Meviel was just too enticing for one such tale to suffice, and when I was reading for the next volume, Madeleine queried me whether a second story in the same setting would be of interest. Bring it on, I said, and received the hilarious "Writ of Exception." I'm not going to divulge any of its secrets; you'll have to read it for yourself.

Time passed, as it does, but the years did not dim Meviel's luster, because when I inquired of Madeleine if she would like to do a story for the anthology that would become The Feathered Edge: Tales of Magic, Love, and Daring, she wrote:

I'm working on a Meviel story... No alternate sexuality per se (after the last two stories I sort of wanted to change things up a bit) and no romance particularly: just a girl who reads too much and gets kidnapped by pirates and...

I ask you, what editor could resist that premise? Who knew there were pirates in same world as Veillaune meCorse and the Archangel? True to form, the pirates in "Wreath of Luck" are and are not your usual sort. There's a lovely twist of -- is it magic or superstition or a plucky young heroine creating her own good fortune?

If you love Madeleine's work as much as I do, you'll want to check out her wonderful Regency novels on Book View Café (and the latest "Sarah Tolerance" adventure, The Sleeping Partner, in paper, too). Madeleine's also got a story in Beyond Grimm: Tales Newly Twisted.

Another of the writers whose work I got to know through the SFWA Circulating Book Plan was Australian Sean McMullen. I think the book was Glass Dragons, the second of his Moonworlds series. It's often challenging to begin a series in the middle, but this one posed no problem. Dragons and vampires and "War of the Worlds" and angsty heroes and radical organizers-of-the-people's-revolution, oh my! Well, not all in that first book, but it was enough to get me hooked.

So a little while later, I wandered into the Tor party at a WorldCon and there was Sean McMullen. I think the introduction caught me by surprise because the first words out of my mouth (after "Hello, I'm Deborah") were, "I love your work!" And received a glorious smile in reply, as if I'd just handed him a precious gift. And yes, it was. We create in such solitude, and reviews are such treacherous things when it comes to "did people like my book? did they understand it?" Then to come all the way to a different continent, to be surrounded by people you've heard of and maybe corresponded with but never met in person, and to have a fellow writer recognize your name and have read -- and remembered -- your work. What a joy!

That conversation was necessarily brief. If you've attended a publisher's party -- or any part -- at a WorldCon, you will understand why. Most communications at large conventions are sound bytes anyway, but when you add a crushing crowd, noise, and alcohol, it's many times so. But Sean and his work kept crossing my path -- we both love cats, we're both martial artists (or I used to be -- 30 years of tai chi and kung fu). By the strange synchronicity of publishing, when I returned to the pages of F & SF with my own work ("The Price of Silence," April/May. 2009), it was to an issue that had a story of Sean's as well.

I can take a hint. When I was scheming The Feathered Edge, I wrote to him. We worked together on one story idea, and eventually he sent me "Culverelle." Curiously enough, is set in the same world, with the same overall characters and tale, as "The Spiral Briar" from F & SF. They are not the same stories in that they have different emotional and moral centers, but if you fell in love with Eleanor (as I did), and you savor the wonderful blend of engineering, chivalry, and Faerie, I encourage you to run out and find the other story -- and make a note to look for the novel The Iron Warlock when it's released.

"Culverelle" in some ways belongs to the small but excellent group of stories about women learning to be warriors -- by training. By practicing, by learning what their strengths and weaknesses are and by using those strengths in an intelligent way. (Another example is Barbara Hambly's novel, The Ladies of Mandrigyn.) I love that Sean doesn't simply wave his authorial hands and turn a determined but unfit woman into a super-paladin in a few paragraphs. When we take on such a training, we must be prepared for it to change us in more than physical ways.

Later in the anthology, you'll meet another woman warrior, from Judith Tarr's "The Woman Who Fell In Love With The Horned King." See what you think about what they have in common, and how their experiences are different. As a fascinating side note, the swordswoman on the cover could be either!