The Story of the Young Man Who Went Forth to Learn About Fear

I love this story. It’s not exactly one you’ll see reproduced by Disney, though. You’ll see why…

Once upon a time there were two brothers. One was very capable; the other was a dunce. He couldn’t manage to do anything right. The other brother did everything well—but he wouldn’t go into the churchyard at night to ring the bell. The place was scary—it made him shudder.

The younger brother had never shuddered—he wanted to learn how. So when his older brother was away and his father asked him to go to the churchyard to ring the bell, he leaped at the chance. Meanwhile, the father asked the sexton to go after him and see if he could give his son a good scare.

So the young brother went up the church tower to ring the bell. He was alone one minute; the next he turned around and saw a silent figure behind him, dressed all in white. The brother asked who it was; the figure said nothing. Three times the brother asked; three times the form was silent. So the brother took him for a ruffian and threw him down the stairs.

Turned out it was the sexton, and he’d broken his leg in the fall.

The young brother went out in the world to find out what fear was—and nobody could teach him. He sat down under a tree with seven hanged men swinging from it; he winds up trying to warm them with his fire and setting them on fire themselves (he’s not too bright), but he’s not scared.

Finally he winds up at a haunted castle. The king has offered his kingdom and the hand of his daughter to anyone who can spend three nights alone in the castle (I guess that’s one way to get around a bloody war of succession). The young man jumps at the chance.

On the first night, he’s approached by cats and dogs with blazing red eyes and sharp claws. He nails down their feet and kills them and dumps them in the moat.

On the second night, he’s visited by a bunch of ghouls playing ninepins with human bones. He leaps into the game and loses some money, but isn’t scared. He sees a dead man in a coffin and once again tries to warm him up, this time with body heat (ew). He lays down in the coffin next to the corpse, which tries to strangle him. Understandably miffed, he shuts the coffin lid and kicks the coffin into the moat.

On the third night, he’s visited by an evil old man who tries to kill him. He nails the man’s beard to an anvil and beats him until the old man offers to show him the riches of the kingdom. He leads the young man into the dark basement, shows him some dusty old chests—and then disappears, taking all the light. The young man has to feel his way out of a pitch-black dungeon—which is dusty, but not scary.

At the end of the day, the King is impressed, the daughter is impressed, and the young man wins the kingdom. But he still hasn’t learned how to be scared, or “how to shudder” as he puts it. Finally, his new wife dumps a barrel of fish over his head—and that’s when the young man learns how to shudder.

The moral of the story? Never try to warm up a corpse. They are ungrateful bastards and they just might try to strangle you.

Cupcake - Post-PAX round up

Oh, Pax. You were everything I'd hoped for and more, from the Tamriel Food Truck, to the Indy games, to the concerts (like MC Frontalot and Johnathan Coulton!), to all the great people dressed in awesome costumes and the amazing displays.

I dedicate this cupcake to you, awesomeness!



I was so sad to have to leaf.....

 Thank you for an awesome time, PAX. I hope we see each other again next year.... :)

What I'm Reading - Bad Bad Romance

So, yeah, I've been working through a whole bunch of old books hoping to figure out what to keep and what to throw and I've realised that the 80s and 90s were pretty terrible for romance.

Just how awful do you ask?

Well, I'm starting to take notes on just how often in these books the following occurs:

1) How often does the hero "take charge" and "show her who's the boss" by randomly kissing her, despite the fact that they're supposed to be discussing business, whether as adversaries or as boss/employee?

1.1) How often do the hero and heroine have an unequal and therefore unhealthy dynamic between them? (I consider this a subheading because of this often being a boss/employee relationship. This is not to say that this can't work out, but when someone uses their position of power to force or coerce an awkward relationship of some kind to happen, this definitely is a doesn't work in my book.)

2) How often does the heroine "melt" or "swoon" for no apparent reason, other than his manliness? (and this doesn't necessarily include strictly bodice rippers, either.)

3) Is this about a big city ___ and a country ___?

4) How many times is __ iterated as being a "man's" or a "woman's" job?

4.1) How many times is a man called misogynist or a woman a feminist? Does one of these two not actually fit the definition, leaving you to wonder if the writer knows themselves what the word means (usually the woman)?

5) How often is lust turned into "love" by the end of the book (inexplicably)?

Oh, I'm still working up my metrics, but holy heck, I'd forgotten just how bad some of these are. And you might ask how I'd gotten so many bad romances if I'm tearing them apart now. Well, many I inherited over the years from other people, left at my house, borrowed, a few bought for a quarter at garage sales. Some bought at the used bookstore while I was still forming my understanding of male-female relationships. Some, I apparently read without getting the "romantic" element. I was HUGELY surprised recently by a reread book that I remembered some big plot points -- there was an immortal rape-y/incest-y father-cult-leader guy, reincarnation, this scarf that was supposed to bind people together -- but apparently entirely missed or forgot just how completely.... anti- each other the protagonists were. To the point that I don't understand AT ALL how the two of them ended up "falling in love." Seriously. They're not nice to each other. She suspects him of being this other person. (Someone who, by the way, neither takes no for an answer nor understands the meaning of "bad touch.") Meanwhile, he's angry at the world for an accident that had left him unable to do many of the things he used to enjoy -- like non-pity sex and sailing. And oh yeah, not constantly bleeding from a psychic curse.

I have --seriously, now -- read better fanfic. I do not remember AT ALL why I liked this book.

At this point I'm not sure what I'll do with the books when I'm done, but probably get rid of them unless they give me a huge laugh. If anyone is interested... just let me know....

I bought a treadmill

Today I bought a treadmill.

Well, I ordered one from Amazon. I'm not sure exactly when it will arrive. It's pink and collapsible which is a must for our flat. We just don't have the space for a big, bulky piece of exercise equipment.

I have been meaning to buy a treadmill since January. I've put it off with some rather lame excuses:  it's kind of expensive or one of us will have to be home all day waiting for it. To finally, my favorite excuse: I don't need a treadmill I could go swimming and walk around the block.

Now, I could, and should do both of those things. Especially the swimming as it's not weather dependent (indoor pool) but I've been saying that for years. Literally years. And so far . . . with the brief fluttering moments of 'running' that I try to take up every spring (pretty much as soon as the clocks go ahead I think-- YES! I will start running) I've failed.

I could give you all the excuses I've given myself over the years. The exhaustion. The getting home too late. The not being able to get up early. They are all GOOD excuses. But in the end, that's all they are, excuses.

The thing I don't talk about a lot is that I'm scared. I'm scared of how out of shape I am. I'm afraid to join a gym. To exercise in public. I have friends who love exercise and gyms. Who swear by the virtues of a good work out. I'm sure they are right.

I'm also sure many of my friends haven't had the hurdle I have to tackle. I need to lose a significant amount of weight. Not a few pounds. Not a stone. Not a little belly filled with extra cookies. It's not something I want to talk about. A few times I've brought it up and people have been . . . let's say less than understanding. And it's fine. I mean it's not fine, but it is what it is. It's also why I've been very quiet about this topic.

Once upon a time I was a competitive swimmer. I loved the smell of chlorine. I thought nothing of getting in the pool and swimming for hours. The idea of getting in a public pool freaks the hell of out me. What if people see me? All of me. OMG. It's the real reason I don't go swimming at the pool around the block from my job. What if my coworkers went there? What if they saw me? What if they judged me?

I am sure that's a natural feeling for most people. But, I never used to feel that way before. I didn't care if people saw me or judged me, I knew, knew that in the pool I was a force to be reckoned with. Now, I just don't feel that way. I feel . . .embarrassed.

I've never been super slim. I'm sure once I'm done getting in shape I won't be super slim. I don't think it's how I'm built. But before the past few months I've never felt unhealthy. I feel unhealthy now. All the time. I don't like that feeling.

So, I ordered a treadmill. I found a diet I like. And I've got a plan. I'm not going to say too much about it on here because I'm not ready to share my plan. But, in the spirit of sending things out into the universe I thought I'd create a post that dealt a little with with how I feel about this new venture.

I can get on my soapbox. I can tell you how when someone who is slender or slim tells me that he/she needs to lose weight my brain breaks a little. When someone is pregnant and she moans about how big she is getting and I realize she is still significantly smaller then me I die a little inside. I am carrying around more weight than someone who is growing a new life inside of her! I've actually had a few moments this past year where I've gone into the bathroom and sobbed over this fact.

Sobbing doesn't help. I can't change the way other people are going to behave. I can't change the thoughtless comments that people make. Maybe it's because they don't think I have a particular sensitivity to my weight or maybe it's because they aren't thinking. It happens. Part of this is my issue and part of it is theirs. The only thing I have any power over is how I feel about myself. If I'm not happy, that's my issue.

A few years ago I wrote a post on another blog about rhinos never becoming unicorns. It was a metaphor for this image:

I still firmly believe that there are no such thing as unicorns. That aspiring to become the super-model of horses is a stupid pursuit for a rhino. Because rhinos are all kinds of awesome. Rhinos are the only real one horned horse-like creature in the world. They have flaws. They have faults, but I would much rather be a fighting-fit rhino then spend the rest of my life trying to force myself into an image that is impossible to obtain. I'd rather be healthy, even if I'm not slim, and happy.

I guess that's where I'm actually going with this blog post. (Wow, that was a roundabout way to get here). This year, I finally sent off my manuscript to agents. I finally felt that I had something good enough to share. And I did. I'm confident of this now. I did the ass in the chair writing method. Over and over again.

Now, it's time to get the ass out of the chair. I know how get a novel written. Now, it's time to get healthy again. It's time to be confident enough to get back in the pool. To get on the treadmill and run.

Because, when the zombie apocalypse does come I don't have to be the fastest survivor out there, I just have to run faster than the person next to me. Let's hope it's not one of those amazing sprinters.

Wish me luck! xoxo

Fairytale - The PAX Edition

While I promise, my next time up I will have another installment of the Snow Queen, I wanted to take the opportunity (since I'm there today) to throw in a shout to fairytales and games.

Video and table top games are an opportunity for creative geekery to blossom within the confines of and blow out the established mythologies. Games like the Fable series, take this head on by inviting the player to take on becoming part of the legend mythos that is built around what happens in the story, while others, like Bioshock and many war games, take "established" history in a new direction. Tabletop games, like D&D and White Wolf, where players and gamemasters alike take an active role in shaping the story that's being told, invite whole new mythologies based on collective imaginations. Some of the familiar stories get retold regardless of the medium and some change -- weeping women by the riverside and bogeymen in the dark, these are a part of the history and mythology and inform much of the classes, races, and storylines you see in RPGs.

But, what is history other than the stories we tell eachother about our collective past.

I have a wild feeling that in some future period, these stories we've created that turn the established roles and stories on their head may become part of what is concidered to be the "normative" fairytales and collective mythos of our time instead of fun tangents.

Of course, that may be what Aristophanes and other Greco-Roman stories are. We just don't know, because so few of them remain. Did they "know" they were fiction or fiction-based-on-true-events or did they fully believe it to be fact (Genn would be the better person to ask on this).

Either way, I'm hoping to send on some of the photos (probably attached to this post) of the new mythologies I see at PAX. And I really hope that I get to interact with a few.

Io smile upon you and beware the Deep Crow.

The Hobbit: How It Should Have Ended

I love How It Should Have Ended.  It is almost never not freaking hilarious. And I also love all things Tolkien. Put these two together, and...my cupcake for today.

PS: SCROTUM BEARDS!!!!!

When He's Gone

I’m in a long-distance relationship. My boyfriend is French, and I live in New York. For the past three months, he’s been staying with me at my place. On Monday—the day this post will go live—he’ll go back to Europe.

This isn’t a post I could write on the day it’ll get published. So I’m writing this on the Saturday before he leaves, in a quiet second-floor café in Williamsburg, with the snow coming down outside. He’s sitting across from me, working on his own book (we’re both writers).

There is something incredibly sweet about being with someone, each of us engrossed in our own projects, but fundamentally together. I love being able to look up at him and share a smile over laptop screens. I love watching him absorbed in his work, and looking up to see he’s been watching me.

I know that today will go fast and Sunday will go faster and then, by the time this is published, he’ll be gone. I wish I could slow this moment down. I wish time was malleable and I could stretch it out right here, where I want to stay—in this warm place, in this unremarkable, perfect moment. 

 My boyfriend and I have been together for several years. We see each other for a few months at a time, and often we meet in far-flung locations. When he’s not here, I live by myself and set my own rules, and I love it. Our relationship isn’t conventional, but for us, it’s worked. Still, there are times when I wish that whenever we were together, I wasn’t so aware of how precious our time is, and how little we have.

When he goes, I’ll be fine. I’ll hang out with my friends in New York and I’ll Skype with my friends in other cities and I’ll throw myself into my work. I’ll buy some new shoes I don’t need and get a haircut and remember again how to relish the feeling of coming home to an empty apartment at the end of a busy day. I know how to make myself happy on my own—something I think of as a hard-won secret superpower—and I think that makes me better able to love others. But being able to live happily on my own doesn’t mean I’ll always want to, or that I won’t miss him terribly.

Fairy Tale Friday: After Ever After

It's my turn to share a Fairy Tale Friday. I was all ready to retell a story. I really was . . . for reals this time!

Then I got a series of emails that made my head explode (in the best possible way). More on that later (I hope)!

So, as I was getting ready to share my fairy tale I found this. I laughed so hard I sobbed. It's been a long week fraught with unseasonable cold, unreasonable weather and deadlines. In the wake of all that I can't think of a better way to end this week then with a laugh.

Enjoy!
xoxo

Cupcake of the Week: Pompeii (Get Your Nerd On!)

I saw this trailer the other day for an upcoming exhibit at The British Museum on life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Needless to say, I jumped up and down a lot and am booking my tickets soon. I'm a huge nerd about Ancient Greece/Rome. I might have mentioned it before using made up words like nerditude! But in all seriousness, it's things like this that make me happy. The British Museum is one of my favourite museums in the world. I try to visit it once every few months. It's one of the many amazing things about living in London.

So, this is my cupcake for the week. A trailer for a museum exhibit (I know the idea of that just makes me happy) and a brand new exciting exhibit. It's a happy day for a nerd like me!

What I'm Reading: Wolf Hall

I’m used to thinking of Thomas Cromwell as a villain.

Thomas Cromwell was a minister of Henry VIII’s—the one who engineered his infamous divorce with Catherine of Aragon. In that time, divorce was almost never done—and getting a divorce could get you excommunicated, putting your immortal soul in peril. Henry VIII did that and more to marry Anne Boleyn—wresting religious control away from the Pope and putting himself at the head of his own Church of England (today’s Anglican Church), all for love. Of course, we all know how that love story ends.

Anyway, what Henry did was revolutionary in the extreme for his time—a time when the threat of hellfire was very real to many people. And Cromwell was its architect—a secular advisor and lawyer who was, as Henry tells him at one point in this book, “cunning as a bag of vipers.” This is usually how Cromwell is portrayed in literature and art—as a ruthless man who didn’t care who he had to impoverish or see executed in his relentless pursuit of the King’s will. Mantel, however, sees him quite differently. And I love her for it.

Note: Spoilers be below.

Mantel’s Cromwell is a tough, ruthless man—but he is also deeply human. He tries to protect the people he loves. He works to persuade Thomas More—a prominent cardinal and important advisor of Henry’s who refused to go along with his divorce, in fear for his soul; for which he is ultimately executed—to come around to the King’s point of view in order to save his life. He has two daughters who die of the plague—a disease that in this world recurs with the regularity of Flu Season in ours—as well as a wife, whom he loves and mourns throughout the book. Even after the deaths of his daughters, his house is loud and merry with children—nieces, nephews, and people he takes in.

The language in the book is deeply poetic. Coming from the generation before Shakespeare’s time, it should be at least as dense as that—if we’re going for verisimilitude. Hilary Mantel’s solution is a seamless language that perfectly evokes the spirit of the time without being too dense or difficult to parse through—and the book is brilliant just for that.

But for me, the brilliance goes farther. I have deep respect for a writer who can look at a painting like the one in this post (come on! That guy is a villain! How can he not be a villain?)—and see someone underneath that readers deeply sympathize with, even at his most unsympathetic.

As for what I’m drinking here: brandy. It’s not easy to drink—at least not for me. But the warm, heady glow it gives is worth the burn on the way down. 

Karma - We are up in your bizzness. For a good cause.

I come from a long line of very nosy people. My sisters and I come by it naturally. There's something about us that has to ask questions. Something about us that inspires confidence in people, that gets them telling us things that we probably shouldn't know (less in a setting like this, more in a face-to-face kind of way). But, more than that, we have a tendancy to take the opportunity to snoop. Sometimes it's as small as watching someone out of the corner of our eyes and from that observation trying to figure out more about them and who they are; sometimes it's as much as what happened this weekend, something that made the snooping for good not evil.

So, I met up with my sister this weekend for a little girl-time, and as part of it, we ended up in a parking garage in this little shopping district near here. As we're bopping along, heading for the elevator, my sister spots a wallet.

Now, yes, the best way to find the woman to whom it belonged was to make a search of it. But, we have very different search patterns. I was a little uncomfortable -- even with as much of a snoop as I can be -- with an out right rifle. I'm more of a ... directed strike type. I would have looked for something specific, the sort of something that stands out -- a business card, an address -- and go from there. Sometimes even researching in more public ways from there. I've spent too much time working at keeping private information private to be particularly comfortable with anything else these days.

My sister, on the other hand is a full-on rifler. And a thourough one. I now know waaay more than I probably should about that poor lady, BUT we were able to find her phone number in there, called her, and got her to come back for it. Apparently it had fallen out when she was loading her children into the car.

I've been there. Losing a wallet -- whether it has money in it or not -- can be really scary, especially when you don't know where you might have left it. I used to put a little contact sheet in my wallet, and I think I will again.

One way or another, I wanted to put a shout out to my sister for finding the lady and returning the wallet. And not being content just to leave it with someone from security. Snoop on, Lady. Snoop on.

Fairy Tale Friday: The Little Mermaid

Most of us are familiar with the Disney-ized version of The Little Mermaid in which Ariel and Eric get married and sail off to live happily ever after. Not so fast. In the original version of the story, that’s not exactly how it goes.

In the original, the Little Mermaid was the youngest of five sisters, daughters of the Sea King. They all have beautiful singing voices—which they use to attract sailors onto the rocks. The boats crash, the sailors drown, and the mermaids get all the loot.

One time, the Little Mermaid sees a  handsome prince in one of the boats—and falls head over heels in love. But a big storm comes up and wrecks the boat. The Little Mermaid saves the prince from drowning, bringing him back to land; but she’s too afraid to let him see her when she wakes up. So she hides in the sea and watches to see if he’ll live. Before long, another beautiful young girl comes by from a nearby village, and that’s who he sees when he opens his eyes. He falls instantly in love, but the girl is in some kind of religious order and has to go back.

The Little Mermaid is miserable when she goes back home to her father’s palace. She talks to her grandmother about the humans, and the grandmother explains that, while mermaids become sea foam when they die, humans get an immortal soul—and get to live among the stars after death. She tells the Little Mermaid that she can have a soul only if a man “were to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother; and the priest place his right hand in yours, and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter.”

That can never happen, the grandmother goes on to say—because the Little Mermaid has an ugly fish’s tail. No prince could ever love a woman without legs.

Desperate, the Little Mermaid goes to the Sea Witch and begs her to give her legs instead of a tail. The Sea Witch agrees, but in payment she demands the mermaid’s beautiful voice. Unlike in the movie, she cuts off her tongue to complete the spell.

Once the Mermaid is topside, she has legs and feet—no clothes, though—and every step she takes feels like knives driving into her feet. She bears it “as lightly as a soap bubble” to get the chance to win her prince. He gives her a page’s outfit, lets her sleep on a cushion at the foot of his bed, and calls her “my dumb child.” Nice.

It turns out the religious girl who turned up on the beach that time was a princess—and he winds up marrying her. The Little Mermaid knows she is doomed to die (remember, she can only have a human soul if she gets a human man to love her). But her sisters come up to her, having sacrificed their hair to the Sea Witch. They give her a knife, and tell her that if she kills the prince, she’ll be turned back into a mermaid and live.

Of course she doesn’t do that—deciding to die instead. Instead of turning into sea foam, she finds herself transformed into a fairy or a “daughter of the air”—depending on the version you read. Her immortal fate? To flit around the world, driving out pestilence and bringing good breezes to humans—and in another 300 years, maybe, if she’s good, she can earn a soul.

The moral of the story? Quit mooning over that human guy and settle.  Find yourself a nice merman you can introduce to your mer-dad and all your mer-sisters. True, he might not be everything you ever wanted. But he'll be nice to you, won't call you "my little dumb friend," and won't make you sleep at the foot of his bed. And it’s better than losing your tongue and becoming air.