03/24/13

Announcements

Well, I didn’t expect a month to go by between blog posts. The two jobs have been moving along at a hectic pace. My writing life has been preoccupied with some big news: And now finally, the big reveal.

I recently signed with Grit City Publications, the makers of Emotobooks. They specialize in short and serial fiction and the stories are illustrated with expressionistic art. The name of the story is Captured Possessions, and grew out of research I did while working on Dark Lady of Doona. During the war between Spain and England in 1588, one of the armada’s ships was captured by Sir Francis Drake. The prisoners worked on an English estate until their release was negotiated. Among the prisoners, it is said, was a woman who disguised herself as a man so that she could travel with her lover into war. It is believed she haunts the place where she was held, now called Torre Abbey. This is her story. We’re in the very early stages of production, but the story is expected to be released later this year. They’ve posted an announcement here. Do check them out. They have a great range of stories, and as a fan, I’m thrilled to be welcomed into the Grit City community as one of their authors.

On April 12, I’m participating in a panel discussion called “Paths to Publishing,” hosted by the Harvard Extension Alumni Association. Plans for this have been in the works for quite a while, and I’m happy to see it come to fruition. The event will be webcast live, and I will provide a link as soon as it’s available. In the meantime, though, for Boston-area folks, the registration page can be found here. Joining me as moderator will be Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding, who was my workshop instructor while I worked on my master’s at the Extension School. The other authors are journalist and historian Linda Kush, ALB ’05 (The Rice Paddy Navy: U.S. Sailors Undercover in China), historical fiction writer James Redfearn, ALM ’02 (The Rising at Roxbury Crossing), and journalist Paul Reid, ALB ’90 (The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965).

Both of these opportunities have been a fantastic way to kick off the post-Mayan Apocalypse that never happened. I knew 2013 was going to be special, and with an upcoming wedding and hopes to move into a larger space better suited to me and my husband, it just keeps getting better.

In the meantime, we’re in the lead-up to Camp NaNoWriMo, April edition. Thankfully, the organizers now allow adjustable word counts, so I don’t have to commit to 50,000 words while in the midst of preparing Captured Possessions, organizing and participating in the panel, and working on a new novel (just reached chapter three!). I’m actually joining the rebel contingent for Camp NaNoWriMo and will be focusing on the novel already in progress, which also happens to be the one I worked on in November. Only I pretty much scrapped the November version and am starting from scratch again. Oh, and working those two jobs I have. It might be my busiest year, but so far, it’s also one of the best ever. A big thank you to everyone who helped me get here.

02/13/13

Vampire Bite Blog Hop

Teaching the Vampire in Literature

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!”—Dracula, 1897.

In 2002 I began a short story about the wife of the historical figure Vlad Dracula. I was in a sorrowful state of mind at the time, and the story served as a vehicle to process what was happening. A couple of years later, as I began a master’s program in literature and creative writing at Harvard Extension School, the story became the focus of many of the creative writing workshops I signed up for. A long-time Goth girl, I wanted to pay homage to Bram Stoker, so in a sense, my first novel is a work of fan fiction. As passionate as I was about this story, I knew there would be a specific niche audience for it. I toiled over it every night after work, writing through the night until the novel was complete. It served as the heart of my thesis, and after graduating, I began the long search for an agent, just as the great recession hit. Long story short: I self-published The Veiled Mirror: The Story of Prince Vlad Dracula’s Lost Love in 2010.

Coincidentally, the associate dean for the humanities at Harvard Extension had been developing a course about vampires. A few months after I published The Veiled Mirror, she contacted me and asked if I would serve as one of the teaching assistants for the course, called The Vampire in Literature and Film. I was honored (and stunned!) by the offer, and didn’t hesitate to accept. What did I learn? All vampire stories have an element of fan fiction—err, I mean pays homage—to what came before. This formula works in many types of literature. We began with the earliest works, Coleridge, Polidori, de Fanu, Byron, and of course, Stoker. As we moved into the modern works: Anne Rice, Charlene Harris, Rachel Caine, Tom Holland, Laurell K. Hamilton, Stephenie Meyer, and Elizabeth Kostova, the pattern became clear. There are certain expectations for a vampire story, and there is disappointment when these are not met. It’s part of the definition of any genre—certain traits are endemic to each one. However, each vampire story must contain some new innovative element that makes the work unique, or else all vampire stories would wind up the same. How to strike this balance is the question.

It reflected the experience I had while workshopping a novel I’ve been working on for years. Initially, it was a Gothic retelling of 1001 Nights with vampires as the central characters. My classmates’ comments were often similar: “But, shouldn’t she be sleeping in a coffin filled with earth from her homeland?” “Wait, you said there was a photo of him—shouldn’t it be impossible to take a photo because it’s like a reflection?” And so on and so forth. What we have now in most modern vampire fiction is a lengthy explanation, somewhere in each story, where the ground rules are set. Think of the introduction to Interview with the Vampire, where Louis dispels myth after myth. Garlic has no effect. He likes looking at crosses because he finds them beautiful. Once Anne Rice built a foundation where readers could suspend their disbelief, the plot could proceed.

With each new generation of vampire fiction, one still can find homage to the old stories, though. The basics are often still there: vampires tend to represent the aristocracy, with few exceptions. Dracula himself pops up fairly regularly. Some new innovation using a stake, garlic, or silver helps defeat or at least hinder the vampire, such as the ultraviolet-infused bullets in Underworld.

Even though it’s hip to balk at trends and many people roll their eyes when talk of vampires comes up, it cannot be denied that the popularity of the vampire story endures for a reason. The first time this course was offered, two hundred students signed up and the enthusiasm was off the charts. The enthusiasm didn’t diminish when it was offered again the following year. In fact, many students offered suggestions to the dean about which books she should include in the future. Various media channels have asked the dean for interviews, articles, and even though the course hasn’t been offered since 2011, the requests keep coming. The course will be offered again soon with a revised syllabus, and I expect we’ll see high participation again. And while my own writing has taken a different path, I still have a special place in my heart for vampire fiction. How can I not? It’s how I got my start as a writer.

To read an excerpt of The Veiled Mirror, please click here. Thank you for visiting, and enjoy the rest of the stops on the Vampire Bite Blog Hop!

11/4/12

Confessions of a Compulsive Note-Taker, Part 1

I took 14 pages of notes about taking notes. Some may call it compulsive; I call it processing information!

The prospect of summarizing the Radcliffe Institute’s Take Note conference is daunting. The conference began Thursday, November 1 with an invitation to attend site visits across the Harvard University campus. Ever the medievalist, I selected the site visits with a strong historical connection. I first visited the Weissman Preservation Center in the center of Harvard Square. The center works on Harvard Library’s special collections—we saw conservators working on medieval manuscripts, documents printed on vellum, musical scores, photographs, and various artistic works. It was breathtaking to see the detailed work that went into preserving these precious items. My next visit took me to Houghton Library, where I stood in the room lined with books handcrafted before the era of Gutenberg’s press. Visitors toured each of the various rooms the library, viewing the collections of Samuel Johnson, Emily Dickinson, and other luminaries of the literary world.

Houghton Library

One may wonder what goes into a conference about annotations and note-taking. A full slate of panel discussions was scheduled for Friday, November 2. Throughout the course of the day, I took more than 14 pages of notes about taking notes. During the various question and answer periods between panel discussions, questions and comments from the audience produced lively conversations on Twitter. The hashtag (#radtakenote) was one of the most active I’ve ever seen at such an event. Someone questioned whether happy note-takers were in fact compulsive in nature, thereby not completely engaged with the content that they were writing about. A common reaction both in the room and on Twitter was that for some people, writing served as a method for processing information. Moleskine journals were mentioned so frequently I had to wonder if they would soon to see an uptick in sales.

Every form of note-taking was considered: from marginalia in books, notes in captain’s logs, field notes used by anthropologists, case studies, and the old “while you were out” pads used by secretaries. Even leaflets stapled to telephone poles and other public places were discussed. There was a clear distinction between casual and formal note-taking. For example, Thomas Edison used notes taken by his workers as a means to work on his patents. In the casual realm, much fondness was exhibited for doodles and sketches that enhanced everyday journals and notebooks. The question was raised whether note-taking is actually a discipline. The consensus seems to be that it is.

Polymath Gilberto Freyre, relaxed in his chair, presides over the panel discussion, larger-than-life. The notes he left in margins of books often showed a wide-range of ideas that while not directly part of the book, were leaps of thought and inspiration taken from the text.

There was an interesting corollary between ancient tools in modern devices. Tablets and styluses from ancient times are not so completely unlike the tablets we use today when one considers the purpose. The development of shorthand long ago served to make note-taking easier. One of the most interesting things I learned was about object called a table book (also called a writing table). A portable journal, people used a metal stylus to carve their notes about plays or sermons they were attending. Once the notes were no longer useful or copied elsewhere, a wet piece of bread or sponge was used to soak up the heavy parchment so that the carvings made by the metal stylus were erased. Shakespeare made numerous references to the table book in the play Hamlet. With the description of the table book came many questions and thoughts about ownership and copyright. These were the days before copyright law. However, artists and preachers were often concerned with the copying and publishing of their work without their consent. Inaccurately produced texts often drove the eventual official publication of the work that has been copied.

One of the most fascinating sessions was about digital annotation tools. David Karger from MIT did a demonstration of an annotation tool developed there to place a text used in class side-by-side with the discussion taking place online. Known as NB, it has become a popular tool for many schools. Bob Stein, founder and codirector of the Institute for the Future of the Book, talked about Social Book, a site where people can share the reading experience socially online. As an author, I wondered how Social Book may be used to engage with readers about my own books. Is this a way to facilitate a new kind of reading that formerly had taken place in brick and mortar bookstores? With a global audience, this may be a way to establish a broader reach.

Making notes and annotations is obviously a key aspect of engaging in dialogue with books and research as a process of contemplation and immersive attention. From childhood, I have been what some would call obsessed with taking notes. This experience was paralleled by one of the speakers who described practically copying entire texts in his youth to help him understand the material. As one matures, the note-taking becomes more selective. I still take many notes. As an author of historical fiction, I read dozens of history books. My process is long and involved. I take notes by hand on the back of edited manuscripts before keying them neatly into the computer. I prefer to write by fountain pen. However, years of writing and carpal tunnel pain have forced me to utilize new tools such as the Dragon Naturally Speaking software. This is the first blog post I am writing using the dictation software.

I keep notes everywhere. I regularly annotate my life using the SpringPad app, Workflowy (my new favorite!), and the extensive annotation capabilities of Scrivener software. My life would feel incomplete without my notes.

There is much more I have to say about this amazing and informative conference, but I’ll have to save that for another time. As some may know, it is NaNoWriMo season, and I have yet to meet my minimum quota of words for the day. Until next time!

10/21/12

Archiving literary history, then and now

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has become an amazing place. It serves as a hub for collaborative projects that span Harvard University, and all disciplines, from humanities to the sciences, are explored in a variety of symposia and events. I seem to be going there a lot lately. I missed the day-long Julia Child celebration, but fortunately, all of the panel discussions are available online.

This week, I attended an event hosted by Radcliffe and Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, entitled From Author’s Hand to Printer’s Mind: When and Why Do Literary Manuscripts Survive?—A Lecture and 20 Questions with Roger Chartier. I really didn’t know what to expect, except that it has to do with books, and of course I’ll attend any event about literature and publishing. The topic dovetailed nicely with the stellar Why Books? conference from two years ago and the upcoming Take Note conference on November 1 and 2.

Roger Chartier spoke about archiving literary manuscripts, generally focusing on the process from 1750 onward. Much has been lost before 1750, but he did discuss the Shakespeare folios and how literary historians try to piece together a biography of not only the author, but the works themselves, by collecting drafts, revisions, notes, letters, anecdotes, and anything that will help piece together the history of a play or novel. Much ado was given to the “genetic perspective” of a text—and the importance of being able to study the creative process. The various challenges of literature throughout history were also presented: the restrictive effects of the Licensing Act of 1737, which sought to control the content of plays. After a manuscript was approved, the printer had to send a copy back to the licensing office to ensure no offensive or seditious material made its way in. A major theme was authenticity. Interesting questions arose: in the nineteenth century, when serialized fiction was popular, there was a distinction between the individual chapters printed in the magazines and the final, collected novel. Charles Dickens had to be concerned about deadlines and space constraints for the serialized works—so when the entire story was compiled and he had the opportunity to revise, which is more “authentic,” the original pieces from the magazine, or the entire novel as he intended it to be in one piece?

Out of the many topics that went deep into the realm of literary research, a common theme kept coming up: How does it relate to today’s method of archiving literature? Consider the popular writing software Scrivener. In it, I can make countless annotations, compile my research, keep a history of my revisions, all in one place. One need only archive my hard drive to compile a biography of my writing history.

When someone posed the question about self-publishing, and how literature was “written for the general public, but is now written by the general public,” and is this democratization of publishing a good thing, I waited, poised to jump in to defend indie publishing. Not a single person spoke out against it. Roger Chartier even compared today’s indie publishing movement to the age before literary agents and big corporate interests. Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard Library, champions the Digital Public Library of America, spoke about copyright and how the laws are being used as foils by lobbying groups and has a negative impact on the digitalization of works. That could have been a symposia topic of its own. But it isn’t new. Authors such as Diderot and Milton railed against monopolies and what is truly in the best interest of the artist.

All in all, it was a fascinating discussion. I was amazed at how much information was packed into two hours. My favorite bit was summing up an author’s creative work as a “unity of hand, heart, and mind.” And I’m glad to see the abundance of interest in preserving it as best as our society can.

04/26/12

Of Authors, Polymaths, and Ian McEwan

"Music and Literature" by Michael Harnet (1878)

“She had an unequalled gift…of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.” –Henry James

On April 17, 2012, Ian McEwan gave the inaugural lecture for the Rita E. Hauser Forum, presented by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. I’m no stranger to events that fall into the realm of the Mahindra Humanities Center. I just went to an all-day workshop on ancient Near Eastern studies for novel research, and the Center provides amazing programming. The renowned Norton Lectures now are part of the Center—presentations by this year’s lecturer, artist William Kentridge, are now available online. When I first saw the ad for the title of his lecture (“The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World”), I wondered what the overarching theme was going to be.

The title had to do with the Renaissance. In that era, the lever was considered one of six essential “simple machines.” (The screw, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and wheel, and axle are the others.) Using this metaphor, McEwan explained that ancient Greek scientist Archimedes once said with a lever, he could move the world—and to this end, in view of the novelist, can they not also do the same? He went on to recount numerous mistakes that appeared in his own novels, and how astute readers contacted him overt the years to point them out. With each passage of a novel, he ended by reading the letter that pointed out the error. Topics included astronomy, cars, neurosurgery…a theme emerged: An author must be a polymath.

During the Q&A session that followed, someone asked how much research one needs to do to be credible. The answer echoed in my own experience. A lot. Vast amounts. Ian McEwan said that if minimal research is done, it will appear so to the reader. Bits of detail feel pasted in, and in order to be successful in the craft, an author must be able to move comfortably within the knowledge needed to tell the story. An author may set out to write a specific scene, but as it develops, it may turn in another direction. He related many amusing anecdotes to provide examples. As he researched Saturday (2005), he sent a neurosurgeon an excerpt. In it, McEwan envisioned a paintbrush used to cover a patient’s skin with Betadine. The surgeon said it was impossible, as there is no way a paintbrush can be sanitized properly. They use clamps with a sponge, because the clamps can be boiled for the requisite amount of time to be sterile.

People often ask me how much research I do for the historical fiction I write. For The Veiled Mirror, my bibliography stretched to a dozen books. For my new novel, Dark Lady of Doona, to be released later this year, it started out with six and went up to about seventeen. Reading about Ireland wasn’t enough, and that’s why the novel floundered when I started it in 2005. It took reading about England and Spain before the whole picture came together, in addition to books about everyday life in medieval times. As I continue to write, I’m always doing research for some future project. As it currently stands, research is complete for three more novels. It continues, and spans a massive range of topics: Arabic, ancient history, ships and sailing, cartography, cooking and brewing, mysticism/Sufism, astronomy and space travel, and these interests expand all the time. On a recent thread in a favorite author group on Facebook, several other authors claimed the polymath title and interesting experiences were shared.

I sometimes look back on the choices I made in the past and wonder whether there were too many missteps in the decisions I made. From beer brewer to international sales at a record label to being an editor and writing instructor and so on. Turns out they were all useful for me as a writer. All those years as an introverted, outcast kid in that small town in central Massachusetts, where I spent countless hours in the small brick library reading every book I could find—they set the seeds for my research methods. The fact that I changed majors in college every other month it seemed—from journalism to linguistics to German language and literature, and studying music theory and piano and philosophy and history and art. Yes, I was thoroughly scattered. Maybe even a dilettante to some. But it’s all useful for me as an author, so I too, like some of my author colleagues out there, can claim the title of polymath.

It was a refreshing experience to hear an author as well-known as Ian McEwan talk about life as a writer, recounting the mistakes and relating what had been learned as a result of the correspondence with readers across the world. He was relatable and down to earth, and that made him so much more than the legendary icon revered by the literary world. Like every other “type” out there, writers are a unique breed. Always curious, we seek knowledge in a breadth of subjects. Always tying to figure out how the world works, and how to represent it in our stories.

And since he kept mentioning Henry James, I’ll end with another of his famous quotes:

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

04/8/12

Merchants of Culture, and the Study of Books

I attend an abundance of events around Harvard. The main calendar covers a myriad of topics from every corner of the university, and because of my job there, I often hear about events long before they happen, and my calendar quickly fills up with events I hope to attend. Most of the time it’s for novel research, sometimes to see a friend who is involved in the event, or simply because it’s just an interesting topic. I only ever make a percentage of what I hope to see, but lately, it’s been quite full: an all-day conference about Women Making Democracy in Arab Spring, a lecture on Islamic art, a lecture by Professor Andrew Delbanco about the state of higher education at the Harvard Extension Lowell Lecture, an all-day symposium on ancient Near Eastern studies, a workshop on conflict resolution, and a lecture at Radcliffe on March 27, the “History of the Book as Discipline,” by University of Oxford Professor Peter McDonald.

This lecture struck a chord with me on several levels. It was reminiscent of the Why Books? conference hosted by Radcliffe two years ago: the history of publishing, the study of publishing, and a discussion about where the industry is going. It was relevant to me as an editor, a writer and author, and as a teaching assistant and writing instructor.

Peter McDonald, who wrote a book on censorship in South Africa called The Literature Police, presented a talk on the economic, cultural, and political connections in the book publishing industry. It was framed in the context of research he did in Apartheid-era South Africa. Culture is shaped by publishing. What the gatekeepers decide is important, be they agents, publishing houses, and even government (when it comes to banning books), determines what the reader sees. Professor McDonald explained that the publishing industry can’t be examined in isolation—one must consider society, education, and what falls in the realm of literary criticism. Beyond that, the availability of bookstores and libraries also have an effect on what people have access to, and while it may not be so much of an issue in the US where ordering on Amazon.com and having a book delivered anywhere is easy, this can have a profound impact on other areas of the world. In addition, what publishing houses choose to publish, and what journals choose to publish, determines what has literary value. How they choose to categorize an author through genre and marketing can make or break an author. The small local markets have been subsumed by the global market, and while this helps some authors gain recognition they may not have otherwise had, authors can also become lost in an ocean of information. In sum, all of these aspects make up the field of the history of books. Studying the history of publishing came about in the 1980s, and Professor McDonald discussed the notes he read of a professor who made this topic into a class. It’s almost too vast to study, but it is essential, and arguably as important as studying history itself.

Echoes of graduate study resonated with me as he mentioned world-renowned scholars Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong and their studies on media. I almost…almost…dug through my old textbooks to re-read them. But I wanted to read the newer books he recommended. Such as The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Merchants of Culture, by John B. Thompson. I downloaded Merchants of Culture almost immediately and have been fascinated by it. It not only provides an excellent description of the history and structure of the industry, but shows how rapidly it is changing. Whether you’re an author, aspiring writer, or work anywhere in the publishing industry, I’d say this is required reading.

Both of these works are critical in terms of showing the impact books have on us as a society. How the Reformation came to be with the invention of the printing press happening concurrently. How our views are shaped by what we read. So what is the big picture here, especially as a self-published author?

A publisher’s conception of an author’s work is essential to who reads it. And the traditional publishers these days are more about the bottom line than ever. Gigantic advances are doled out for celebrity memoirs, no matter how inane. A lot of fantastic literature is left by the wayside. If a new author is taken on, the advances are smaller, the publicity almost zero. If you want to read more about that, go visit J.A. Konrath’s blog. No one describes it better than he does. I no longer feel put on the defensive when I talk about self-publishing. I am in complete control of the category in which I choose to market my work. How I price and market it is up to me. And after writing two works of historical fiction, I’ve decided to change genres and go in a new direction for a while. I don’t have to worry about my contract with an agent being terminated because I chose to do so. I don’t have to worry about how a publishing house may stop making my books available on a whim as the newest literary fad arrives.

What I came away from the conference with was the knowledge that in this rapidly changing environment, I made the right decision for myself. I’m happy being a self-published author, and only reliant on the readers who buy or borrow my books. I see the reviews. People contact me with questions. If it’s good enough for them, I’m happy. And being an eternal student, I’m happy to get the constructive feedback, too, so that I can learn how to be a better writer. I’ve always been a fiercely independent person, who often prefers to sit in a corner alone and observe everything going on around me, and this new world of publishing, while enormously frustrating sometimes when I walk through Barnes & Noble and see some of the shallow nonsense that get featured on its shelves, has been a great boon to me. I’m in control of my own work. People can read it if they want to. And I continue to go to all these great events around Harvard, and think about what I want to write next.

08/7/11

New short story: Ivy League Crypt

Free short story, Ivy League Crypt, available on Smashwords.com

OK, so I admit, there’s a bit of an inside joke here, but it was irresistible. Last year, I was asked to be a teaching assistant and course grader for a new course at Harvard Extension called The Vampire in Literature and Film. Participating in the course helped me get over my insecurities about writing within a genre, which I wrote about in a blog post after the course was done. It was a hugely popular course, with nearly 200 unabashedly proud fans of vampire fiction. Certainly, some held to their particular favorite series, be it Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books, the Twilight series, or Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, and the in-class discussions were fascinating. It was so popular that it’s being repeated again for this fall term, as a distance-only course, open to all.

Reading a stack of vampire novels, one after another, has its effect. I’ve always been a fan of the genre, and the experience coincided nicely with the paperback release of my first novel, The Veiled Mirror: The Story of Prince Vlad Dracula’s Lost Love. The ebook version had been out for nearly a year.

A few months after the course was over, the Extension School was in the midst of a new online program called Freethink@Harvard, where guest speakers would present a topic in a specially designed classroom for online learning, and alumni and students world wide participated via chat and email. One event featured Professor John Stilgoe, Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape. It was called “The Obvious Secrets of Harvard Yard.” In it, he talked about a crypt that lay under the stairs of Sever Hall. After having just been involved in a course that focused on vampires, how could I pass up the opportunity to connect the two? The scribbled idea remained in my notebook for several months before the story formed a cohesive plot in my imagination.

What I intended to be a one-off short story has become more enduring. The imagery in Ivy League Crypt has stayed with me, and now I have an idea to keep it running as a series, and it will probably be its own novel somewhere down the road. It’s available for free on Smashwords.com.

02/26/11

Suffering for Your Art and the Question of the MFA Degree

The Sufi dances…

It’s an old line. You must suffer for your art. It’s been said by famous artists and struggling students alike. Is it true? It can be. For me, the moment that was suffering on what felt like a cataclysmic level occurred in the summer of 2004. I was recently divorced, and was just settling into my own place. I loved living alone, and I spent every minute I could on my novel, The Veiled Mirror. It started out in first person, as it is now. But while listening to my classmates in a creative writing workshop a year before, I let another student’s comment get to me: “Women in medieval times had nothing to say. This won’t be interesting in the first person. Women didn’t do anything back then.” It was an ignorant thing to say, but I let the insecurity get to me, so after more than 200 pages, I scrapped it and started over.

More than 300 pages into the third-person version, I submitted an excerpt of it to a workshop in the summer of 2004. The author running it, Stratis Haviaras, was a brilliant and wise teacher, but the class sometimes turned into a shark tank. A lot of the writers were young, inexperienced, and petty. They tore each other up frequently. My novel had gotten very dark and violent in the third person, and I wasn’t feeling it in my soul. Something wasn’t right, and I knew it. But the take-down in class was devastating and vicious. I cried all the way home.

In the next class, as the shark tank filled with someone else’s blood, the first line of The Veiled Mirror came to me: “It started with fire.” The epiphany felt divine. Later, when I stormed through Harvard Yard to meet Haviaras for a one-to-one meeting and give him a piece of my mind for letting the other students be so mean, he stood at the top of the steps of one of the old buildings, smoking a cigarette. When he saw me, he took off his hat and greeted me with a sweeping bow. He had a glimmer in his eye that told me he knew I had learned something important. Instantly charmed, I settled down, but our meeting was rather quiet. Our meetings often had been through the term. He said something about how we don’t talk much, and I told him about the divorce. He became Jedi-like, looking at me with a compassionate wisdom. “Ah, yes, I know. Well, we must suffer for our art.” But he also told me he truly believed this novel would be published. He was also shocked to the core that I let that stupid comment get to me, and take my novel in the wrong direction by bringing it into the third person. He was ready to go track that person down and give them a piece of his mind.

The novel practically wrote itself after that. Sure, there were moments of suffering. In 2005, when traveling through Romania, I suffered. No sleep due to the hundreds of barking, feral dogs in the town. No food, because the organization running the retreat seemed to always be losing the money to run the trip. I suffered after the novel was done, with a stream of form rejection letters from literary agents. Then I took charge of my own destiny and published independently, and I haven’t looked back.

Would I do it all over again? Absolutely. The Veiled Mirror was the focus of my studies when I worked on my master’s. It went through at least five workshops. The response was overwhelmingly positive a vast majority of the time. And I learned from the criticism as well. It made me work harder, and made me a more focused writer. Some people say that trying to institutionalize art programs make people less creative and more conformist. It’s all about what you put into it, and learn from it. I strongly recommend MFA programs (or similar degrees) to prospective students because it gives you the discipline to stay focused and keep working.

Eastern philosophers have been known to say that artists in the West “suffer for their art” because Western artists make it all about material success, rather than mystical and inspirational art that comes from the soul. I’ve studied a lot about Sufism and Taoism, and I tend to agree with the Eastern view these days. Sure, there is some suffering for your art, as there is suffering in life. But don’t let it become an excuse. I’ve heard too much of that as well in classes. “Oh, writing is so hard! I just can’t make myself do it!” In order to be an artist of any kind, you have to practice your art. Just follow your heart, your Muse, and liberate the creativity to its own free realm.

. . . And the Sufi will always dance

12/18/10

Validating Genre: Vampires at Harvard

“So what is your novel about?”

“It’s about the life of Vlad Dracula, told from the perspective of his mistress.”

The smile freezes, the tone becomes condescending. “Oh, it’s GENRE fiction. You write vampire stories.”

It isn’t an uncommon conversation. I often have had to resist a catty response. And your post-modern story about a person lamenting a break-up and going on at great length about the failures of the relationship is considered literary fiction, the “serious” and “real” fiction?

It was easy to get defensive. I found myself giving hurried answers when asked the question, and I’d always tack on “But it isn’t about vampires. It’s about the historical figure Bram Stoker used as inspiration. It’s historical fiction. The other novels I’m working on don’t have vampires at all.”

This isn’t quite true. Many novels will not have vampires in them. Some will.

Validation came in the form of an offer to serve as a teaching assistant for a new course at the Harvard Extension School, The Vampire in Literature and Film, taught by Associate Dean Sue Weaver Schopf. The range included the early works: Coleridge’s poem “Christabel,” Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Stoker’s Dracula, to the rapid succession of modern works: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. A novel a week for 14 weeks, crossing many genres while featuring vampires. We had historical fiction with Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, and detective stories with the Anita Blake series and Rachel Morgan’s Dead Witch Walking. After years of studying medieval works, spending much of my time in my master’s program on the likes of Beowulf and Boccaccio’s Decameron, I wondered what it would be like to be involved in a course that included a lot of—gasp—GENRE fiction. Pop culture was being brought to the forefront for close reading and deep discussion. The course was also available online, and the class grew to nearly 190 by the time the first class began, one of the school’s most popular courses.

As I began to get my first emails from students, I was struck by the fierce loyalists: they had their favorite authors and series, and they loved them unapologetically. This was all happening as I was publishing The Veiled Mirror.

As the major themes of the course unfolded, my confidence was renewed. These richly detailed lectures established early on that vampires represented the social anxieties of the time. They were the Other, whatever fears were present: immigration, sexuality, economics, disease. Dr. Schopf’s list of social anxieties during the Victorian era alone was drawn out over numerous slides, in a very small font. Now, when compared with Stoker’s Dracula, the modern works became much more interesting to study in depth. The correlation of history, sociology, psychology, and religion enriched these stories, which weren’t just vampire stories, they did in fact span all genres.

A good story transcends genre. In 2008, I went to see one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, speak at MIT. He expertly took apart prejudices against genre, and had no qualms about saying when one of his works did fit into a specific one. The heart of his lecture was as follows: “What is genre? It is a set of assumptions…a loose contract between a creator and an audience…genre offers predictability within certain constraints…it’s not subject matter, and it’s not tone…There are spy novels, and novels with spies in them, they aren’t quite the same. There are cowboy books and films, and there are also books and films that took place among cowboys in the American West that weren’t cowboy stories, but how to tell the difference? If the plot is a machine that allows you to get from set piece to set piece and the set pieces are things without which the reader or viewer would feel cheated, then whatever it is, it’s genre. If the plot exists to get the lone cowboy, riding into town to the first gunfight to the cattle rustling to the showdown, then it’s a western. If those are simply things that happen along the way, then it’s a novel or a film set in the west. If every event is part of the plot—if the whole thing is important—if there aren’t any scenes that exist that allow you to take your reader to the next moment that the reader feels is the thing that he or she paid money for, then it’s a story, and genre becomes irrelevant.”

So, the Extension School will be offering the vampire literature course again in fall 2011. And in her exuberance, Dr. Schopf is considering a second course on it, to examine more works that she would have liked to include in this fall’s syllabus. She’s a brilliant speaker, and the experience was wonderful—the discussions were fascinating, drawing me into books I was ambivalent about. I may be biased, but I highly recommend it. And yes, I do write vampire stories, and stories with vampires in them, and many other kinds of stories as well.

12/5/10

Bounty vs. Overload, and the Eye of the Beholder

Gutenberg’s Press

As someone who loves to study history, I can easily lose myself in research. Books, searches on the internet, it doesn’t matter. But I often find those moments where I can say: Nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter what people have invented, how the structure of society has changed. People’s fears, their beliefs, the dreams do not change. Last year, I saw Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson speak about his career, and one statement he made resonated with me ever since. “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. This is a dangerous combination. We will be facing a point of crisis in the coming decades.”

Somehow, we get into the habit of thinking it’s all new to us. It isn’t. As the cylons say in the brilliant SyFy remake of Battlestar Galactica, “It’s all happened before, and will all happen again.” While reading the Boston Globe last week, I found an article that I knew would lead to my next posting. In “Information overload, the early years,” Harvard professor of history Ann Blair explores the history of how humans process information, and what is perceived as a tipping point: when is the collected knowledge of humanity too much information? A curmudgeonly Erasmus fumes in the sixteenth century, “Printers fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious, and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.” He could have just as easily been referring to our own age, Professor Blair shows, if he had the opportunity to read the endless offerings online. One glance at the plethora of blogs, endless hateful postings by trolls on the average news site, and online manifestos, and he’d be just as right today as he was back then.

Gutenberg’s printing press, much like the world wide web, opened the floodgates and gave everyone the ability to make their voice heard. As outlined in Blair’s article, the Gutenberg press, developed in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, quickly spread across Europe. By the late fifteenth century, the price of books dropped 80 percent, they were no longer luxury items, and the first bestsellers were launched. One could argue that without the printing press making this possible, we may never have heard of Vlad the Impaler, the subject of my first novel, The Veiled Mirror. Prince Vlad Dracula (1430–1476) ruled the Romanian territory of Wallachia three times. It was a turbulent time for princes of that region. Endless infighting led to assassinations and coups, and the Ottoman Empire demanded annual tribute and pressed hundreds of young men into its janissary corps. Skirmishes and major battles were constant. Prince Vlad Dracula was one of the few who was able to retain independence for his territory, but he ruled it with an iron fist, and the terrible punishment he inflicted on Turks and his own countrymen alike became legend. But was that kind of rampant brutality all that unusual, considering the time and place? How was it he became particularly infamous? Saxon settlers from German territories in Brasov reported back about his invasions, the mass executions, and they were published with woodcut images. His story was a best-seller in his own time. If Vlad ruled Wallachia today, videos would go viral, and Twitter users would create a hashtag (#vladtepes?!).

Woodcut from 15th-century pamphlet

In my part-time job, I am a teaching assistant for a course taught at Harvard Extension School, The Vampire in Literature and Film, taught by Associate Dean Sue Weaver Schopf. It’s my first time serving as a teaching assistant, and I’ve loved the role. We recently read Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, where we discover that the vampire Prince Vlad Dracula endures, and all he wants is a brilliant scholar to serve as his librarian, and catalog his vast collection. The irony was delightful. That Dracula treasured history and had the rarest of books in his collection, and he sought a companion who shared his passion, was a great twist.

Vlad: A Warrior and Scholar?

So how much is too much? I admit to a serious book and information addiction myself. I’ve bought more than I can read, and my own collection continues to grow as I research ideas for novels I plan on writing and buy novels I hope to find time to read one day. My electronic collection takes up who-knows-how-many gigabytes, and I just bought a new computer with a terabyte of space to store even more. It may be overload, but I don’t consider it to be. I may need that information someday, I say as I right-click on a PDF to save it to my hard drive. I love knowing that across campus, Harvard’s library system offers millions of volumes in any topic imaginable. From the daunting stacks at Widener to the rare manuscripts at Houghton Library, it’s all there, cataloged and accessible. Their system became so unwieldy in the past that it has undergone an audit and restructuring, as announced in the Harvard Gazette.

It’s a democracy of information, the more the better. As much as I fret about the tide of ignorance and lies that has come into social discourse and so-called news, there is an equal tide to counter it. The tides have ebbed and flowed throughout the centuries. The Dark Ages and the Enlightenment do signify fixed points in history, but not in concept. There have been plenty of each all throughout history. We can’t even begin to imagine what knowledge has been lost, what stories are gone forever, as Mongol hordes destroyed ancient Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, as the Conquistadors destroyed countless Mayan and Aztec codices in Central America , and the Romans burned the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Ancient manuscripts have been used to wrap fish in the Middle Ages, and territorial battles in Europe resulted in monasteries being burned, their scrolls lost forever. We may never have seen Beowulf if it hadn’t been salvaged from a fire.

Of course, now, there are new issues, as had been voiced in the Radcliffe conference I attended this fall. Electronic archives need to be maintained in formats that can be read in the future. Much of my own writing has been rendered useless by floppy disks and a now-defunct ZIP drive. But I treasure my collection, and those I have access to, and those I may never see in my lifetime. Just as long as I don’t wind up like Henry Bemis in the classic episode “Time Enough at Last”of the Twilight Zone, where all his beloved books are before him after a nuclear holocaust, and he breaks his glasses, never to read another word again. (Full episode available on tv.com.) Maybe I should have a duplicate set of glasses made, just in case.

Her Raven Domain

Author Christine Frost's Blog

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