my heart is a glorious machine;

Reading sarahtales' fantastic essay Ladies Please (Carry On Being Awesome) and writing the Novel at nearly the same time has birthed a lot of swarming thinky thoughts. For one thing, yesyesyesyesyes, and a large side helping of "huh?" because, you know, I read these fictional girls who apparently have friends only so they can complain about them and compete with them and/or talk about Boys with them, and I guess those people exist (I started running into them a lot more in later youth groups) but that is so not the world I grew up in. Okay, the world I grew up in also didn't have schmaltzy Christmas music, kids embarrassed by their parents for no reason other than that they are Grown-Ups, people who don't like books, or public school, so non-fantasy YA fiction frequently depresses, irritates, or confuses me. But still. If I could exist, at least temporarily, in a world where being female is not some kind of contest, fictional characters can do this, too!

And awesomeness comes in many different flavours! Female characters do not have to have big weapons and fight everything to be awesome. Though they totally can. (C.f. Zoe Washburne, Kara Thrace, Sarah Walker, Buffy bleeding Summers.) I love that Fred Burkle gets to fight evil with Science, and Willow Rosenberg gets to fight evil with computers and magic, and Kaylee Frye gets to fight evil by being a mechanic (and with optimism!), and Hermione Granger gets to fight evil by being clever and a know-it-all, and Martha Jones gets to fight evil by telling stories*. I love that Lydia Asher gets to be a medical scientist at the turn of the century, but she's vain about her glasses and she likes pretty clothes and she's happily married, and she bloody travels across the world with a vampire and plunges into complicated spy politics to save her husband. I love that Meg Murry gets to fight evil by loving her brother. I love that Emily Starr and Anna Grazinsky and Cassandra Mortmain and Anne Steele and Molly Weasley and Jo March and Joyce Summers and Arwen don't even have to save the world to be awesome.

* Note: I still don't like that episode, or Tenkerbelle, but Martha walking the world and telling stories? Completely fantastic anyway.

Thinking about my own story in this context pleases me, because while I didn't set out to write Awesome Mutli-Faceted Female Characters, I am pleasantly surprised at how everyone turned out, and it's fun to play with them in that respect. Evangeline, the contentedly introverted but friendly older sister, is the one who gets to fight vampires; Camilla, the bossy, loyal, loving mother-of-the-family middle sister is, personality-wise, the more stereotypically ass-kicking one, but she gets to be awesome by being supportive and keeping the family together and making everyone food and knocking sense into them. Briony mostly gets to be awesome by growing up and being loving and optimistic at this point, but I really want her to do some amazing stuff in the second book that I am pretty much resigned to writing now. Lottie gets to be, well, crazy, alas, and I don't actually know how that's going to play out at all, so I can't really comment on that. I am, however, increasingly bothered by the fact that the girls' mother is completely non-existent, not only in the present but in the past. I've dropped mentions to her a couple of times, but I still have no idea who she was or why and why she isn't here anymore. And then that bothers me because what this novel and quite a lot of other stories in the universe at large are really lacking are Awesome Women Over Thirty. (Immortals do not count.) I mean, okay, at the moment I don't even know who many of the characters are besides the occupants of Evangeline's two homes -- her family flat and the library -- because the story hasn't ventured out into the wider world yet. Maybe women's roles are a little different in this 1912. Maybe there are some other awesome women in the Ministry of the Paranormal, or at the Noxes' church, or at Briony's school, or all of the other places I haven't explored yet.

I also had the brief weird thought of gender-switching Evangeline's father and having her mother be the reclusive, eccentric, but intensely loving dealer in rare books and magical miscellany, except that kind of turns a lot of things on their heads -- like, the colleague relationship between Evangeline's Parent and Mr Caruthers would be entirely different, and the Nox family would be entirely female, and I'm not really sure I want to do that, and then I'm still stuck on the question of Where Did The Other Parent Go Anyway. Not to mention the fact that Edwin Nox is, you know, in my head of his own right, even if he never seems to do anything. (You're all saying, It's obvious! BOTH PARENTS COULD BE ALIVE AND WELL and I say, Absolutely! Except I keep trying it and the story soundly rejects it, which annoys me a lot! Especially because stories really need more awesome married couples who love each other. Maybe the girls' mother is just Off Being Plot Pointy Somewhere? Only I cannot think of anything for her to do. But I also hate the Importantly Dead Mother stereotype...)

And now, dear f-list, an excellent example of How I Suck At Essays. Note the lack of coherence, the digressions, the change in topic, the total lack of cogent point... and now I have to go do the dishes write about Briony crushing on Mr Caruthers' coat, just for lady_moriel.

My parents and I nearly watched Pan's Labyrinth tonight (nearly, because our cantankerous eight-year-old DVD player hated it even more than it usually hates things, although Yvaine is completely fine with it; we plan on nicking the one from church because every other DVD we try to play skips like mad, even straight out of the case), and the trailers in front of it were so disjointed in subject matter and sometimes downright weird that it got me to thinking. Trailers I remember -- the deeply weird-looking Fur with Nicole Kidman as some surrealist photographer and Robert Downey Jr. as some guy with too much hair, this neo-horror film in which there are Shenanigans in the Operating Room, and... some film about some salsa singer with J.Lo's boyfriend? (One of these things...) Okay. And the fact that these films only tangentially related to Pan's Labyrinth as a genre film led me to realise afresh that what we need in filmmaking? Is speculative fiction.

I'm not talking about Fantasy, or Science-Fiction. We've got a fair amount of good sci-fi/fantasy films lately, and I like or love a lot of them -- The Lord of the Rings, of course; Stardust; Serenity. I'm talking about the subtle stuff, the stuff that blurs the lines. The stuff that mightn't end up in the sci-fi section of your local video store (funny how we say that when they are neither exactly stores nor do they carry many videos anymore -- and doesn't everyone just Netflix or download these days?), but would probably be in the fantasy section of the bookstore. Like Pan's Labyrinth. Like the multi-layered Wings of Desire, or the is-it-or-isn't-it of The Illusionist and The Prestige. Films that ask questions, that explore worlds, that explore our world, illuminate it, or wonder how it might be different -- which is why I like the term speculative fiction over sci-fi or fantasy. It can be both. It can be either. It can be something that doesn't fall neatly into either category (a book like Einstein's Dreams, or my apocalypse short story). Most importantly, it speculates. It imagines. It blooms with possibility, with wondering. It tries, often, to understand our world through a lens of imagination.

Film is wonderfully suited to this sort of storytelling, too, because it's so visual -- you don't have to tell us what your alternate London looks like: you let the camera swoop around and we take it all in, delightedly. (Side note: one of my favourite things about the Harry Potter films, though they tend to fluctuate wildly in quality, sometimes over the course of just one film -- anyway, I really, really love the visual representation of the wizarding world, the stuff that just goes on in the background, like in Half-Blood Prince, when we go into Fred and George's shop, and it's just... I wanted to clap and laugh. Perfect.) Sometimes that's more powerful. You can have half-insect humanoids wander past the screen, or buildings made of old rubbish, or streetlamps lit with magic. You can use the camera inventively, show dreamworlds, magic, strange beings, trains of thought, alternate universes... You don't even necessarily need a large budget for this sort of film; the otherness of a world can be communicated through camera movement, colours, music, dialogue. (Side note mark two: we watched Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast the other night, and oh the special effects. Sure, it's 1946, they're primitive by today's standards -- but they're magical. There's a real tactile, imaginative, clever brilliance about them that digital effects just do not and cannot have.)

In conclusion, because this isn't really an essay exactly... I want more. Maybe I've got to make it, though that seems sort of daunting and terrifying. (Not half so much in writing, because the path's a little more well-trod, and also because books cost nothing to write except sleep and sanity and the cost of researchy books and chocolates and baguettes and cheese and coffee, and you don't need a whole load of other people just to get the bones of it.) 

Next time on Not-Quite-Essays With Banui: the much-debated dynamics of Urban Fantasy, because this is a subject close to my writerly heart.