Light Beyond All Shadow arrives!

This morning the mail brought a lovely hardback book I've been anticipating for a couple of years. I can't believe it's been so long since I first answered the call for papers from Dr. Paul Kerry, who was putting together a volume of essays from Tolkien scholars about the submerged aspects of Christianity in Tolkien's works.  I had been wanting to write about the iconography of Middle-earth from the approach of semiotics, and Paul's proposed book started me thinking about how I could shift my research to fit his topic.

I wrote a long, involved essay with copious references that ended up being trimmed by a third, and then tightened again as the book's publisher ran into the wall that is The Tolkien Estate and their copyright issues over quoting from the master's works. That debate was to eat up a couple of years. Some contributors dropped out from frustration, others decided to stay the course. And then, the university publishing the book changed their own publishing/distribution company, and there was more waiting.

I'm happy now that I decided to stick it out because today I have this beautiful book in my hands, and my essay on Tolkien's iconography happily lodged in illustrious company between its pages.

Hope the winners are happy!

Well, the Goodreads Giveaway is done!  Hope those 10 people who won a copy of Shaman's Blood enjoy their little prize! (Also hope those 300+ folks who tossed their virtual names in the bag feel moved to go buy a copy)

My publisher actually put a lot of work into the production of the book, with careful and thorough copyedits that helped me catch some last-minute ripple-effect incongruities from an added chapter. Great folks to work with!

That which is unnecessary shall be washed away...

Well, at least that's what it says on one of the cards that shows up the most in my tarot deck. But the saying fits with an ongoing conversation I've been having with authors and agents and a couple of small publishers on Twitter...mainly how the collapse of big-box booksellers may bring about the resurgence of the neighborhood indie bookstore. Would love for it to be true. 

new books!

Woohoo - the box of free author's copies for SHAMAN'S BLOOD came yesterday!  Wow, still loving that cover with the monster serpent on it. 

Modern Mythmaking 3

The mythic impulse – what drives our species to think in these terms and put these concepts into stories? A primary reason is to locate ourselves in the universe, to interpret space and the planet we inhabit. Refining that slightly and we have mystical reasons: religious, metaphysical, a sense of awe, a reverence for the mystery of life. On a social level, myths validate established moral orders, and establish codes of behavior. Psychologically, myths help explain how individuals relate to culture and society – they explore what it means to be human. It’s this last function that I think applies most to the artist (writer, sculptor, musician, etc.) as mythmaker.

How does this so-called “mythic impulse” translate into what we write? It’s in the recognition of mortality, confronting the inevitability of death.  It’s in expressing the social order you’re part of (or want to deny), in trying to see more deeply into the “spectacle” of the universe and our own existence within it.

Campbell wrote and lectured on the concept of humanity’s impulse to explain itself in mythic terms, and frequently suggested that in today’s cultures it’s more often the artist who articulates mythic structures and symbols in our lives, assuming a function once relegated mostly to the priestly class of past millennia. As artists, and particularly as writers, we siphon structure and content from the mythic imagination and make it uniquely ours. Is there a progression from the flawed gods of old to dark superheroes like Batman and Optimus Prime? Anyone who thinks myths aren’t relevant to our modern society hasn’t read any Neil Gaiman recently. And maybe that’s another topic all by itself!

New reviews on Goodreads

Nice advance reviews of Shaman's Blood showing up on Goodreads. Thanks to those who liked it and "got" the story!! http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11875885-shaman-s-blood

Anyone on Goodreads? Check out the Giveaway program offering - you could win a copy of my new novel! http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/12093-shaman-s-blood

Modern Mythmaking 2

Hard to explain why myths and the process of mythmaking fascinate me so much, but I find they infiltrate and color a lot of my thinking about writing. Legends are interesting to me as well, but not quite to the degree as mythmaking, which I think has a direct hotline to the human psyche.

I would define a legend as a story passed down from the past, that purports to be historical. We often find an actual, verifiable person or event at the root of a legend, which may sometimes be the defining story of a particular culture. This "legendary" character, after being kept alive for centuries or even millennia as part of a culture's collected wisdom, can take on mythic dimensions with deeper significance.

From the Greek mythos, myth is most often defined as a pattern of beliefs that symbolically express the characteristics or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture. It's that word "attitude" that makes the difference to me. Myths are traditional stories through which a culture’s world view or explanation of natural phenomena can be expressed. The emphasis here is on describing and explaining the natural world and by extension, the humans who live in it.

A myth is not quite the same as a legend. Sometimes a myth is loosely based on a real event, but more often it is a story that has been created to teach people about something intangible. Myths based on legends alter the story in ways that model behavior and affect patterns of thought. Which might bring you to ask, what’s the difference between mythology and religion? The quick answer is, not much, but for the purposes of discussion, we can make this distinction. Religion is a system of beliefs and practices regarding a supreme being or supernatural phenomena; it can be a personal set of beliefs or an institution of rituals and rules. The emphasis is on belief in (and one’s relationship to) a specific supreme deity.

Campbell describes religion as a specialized attitude toward myth ... which brings us to the mythic impulse, a concept at the crux of modern mythmaking and a topic I'll save for next time!

Summer Solstice

Embracing Summer Solstice with hope and bright expectations for the rest of the year.

Modern Mythmaking

While Tolkien was my “hook” into myth, folklore, and the mythic imagination as I was writing my dissertation, my larger interests are in mythology and the ideas of philosopher and visionary Joseph Campbell. Campbell wrote widely about coming to terms with how we tell our own stories and invent our own myths, and especially the signs and symbols we use to define them – in essence, confronting what it means to be human.

Consider the mythic imagination – what is it, who has it, why should we care about it?

Campbell believed that we, as humans in the modern world, re-create the myths and legends of antiquity in our daily lives. He saw this as a way of unlocking or releasing our human potential, whether for personal or public reasons. Human beings have been telling stories for millennia, as spoken tales, art drawn on cave walls, and later written down as text. These stories are called by various names: folktales, fairy stories, legends, fables and parables, myths. It’s a slippery task to identify the differences among these forms – obviously there are a lot of overlaps, with generous dollops of the magical, the supernatural, and the superhuman.

Folktales are usually stories that have been passed down orally from generation to generation. Often we don’t know the original author – some stories, for example, might have been created around the fire by a group instead of a single person. Often there are many versions of any given tale, some very similar while others may have only one or two characters in common and take place in totally different settings. The work of Katharine Briggs is your gateway to British folktales, if you want to dig further. Even more fascinating, at least to me, are the Japanese tales of shapeshifting, such as haunting encounters with the fox wife and the crane wife.

Folktales may have begun life based on a specific event, but they get changed almost every time they are told, even in the mouth of the same runesinger. Typically, the bases of these folkloric events happened so long ago we no longer have a record of what the actual story triggers even were. As time passes, the story loses its tenuous connection to reality so that the message or moral of the story becomes more important than the event from which it sprang. When that happens, it becomes a fable or a parable.

Next: legends and myths. Stay tuned!