This weekend I spent a number of hours reading three new urban fantasy books that I picked up at the new Hub City Bookstore, a great place to find new works because the books are not crowded. One of my purchases was Amazon Queen, ( affiliate link) book two in a series by Lori Devoti. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the series.

Devoti’s prose is clear, spare and gripping. Her long-lived Amazons share our human space, but keep a low profile, as is typical of urban (or in this case, rural) fantasy. Their struggles to remain unseen by humans is less important than their desire to be separate from their sons, who are no longer killed or left to die as in olden days.  When the sons kidnap an Amazon child, the old ways come face to face with the new era, and changes must be made.

The queen of the Amazon safe house, Zery Kostovska, sees her unquestioning belief in the system that raised her crash around her ears as the tribe she protects comes under attack. The politics of belief and obedience are laid bare in this action adventure, and no one escapes the confrontation that ensues.

This would make a great movie with lots of explosions, blood and car chases.  Feminists and Dianic witches might find this a thoughtful read as well as good entertainment. Birdwatchers probably would not like this book due to some profiling, but I found it engaging and an interesting mystery.

For three days we have had spring–a condition in South Carolina that often lasts only for days between winter and summer. In spring I can leave my windows open at night and sleep under a ceiling fan just cool enough to snuggle under one light quilt. I can hear the owls and whippoorwills in the evening and the mockingbirds and cardinals at dawn.

It’s not just about turning off both the heat and the air conditioning, which is nice in its effect on my budget. It reminds me that I’m not another piece of furniture in the house, that I am part of what goes on outside the walls–the birds warbling their songs, the flowers wafting sweet perfume, the oaks and pines pumping out their yellow mist of pollen. The cool air that spills across my monitor in the morning from the long 50′s style horizontal window fills my lungs with oxygen, sweet and cool. It makes for a good reason to get up early and just be.

Yesterday I bopped out of my chilly office at work into the 88-degree sunshine, which filled me with a great sense of peace and contentment. There’s no way to pull fresh air into the atrium where my cube nestles between several offices, and probably just as well, but the fresh air certainly feels good and brings with it the remembrance that the world is perfect and fine.

It’s up to me to go with its flow and find the peace it offers outside my digital existence. It’s good to remember that I am analog. Sometimes I forget.

It’s not such a big thing, but I was interviewed last week and was even quoted in a story on US News and World Report. This is another second of my fifteen minutes of fame, and it feels good!

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/online-education/2010/03/25/8-big-mistakes-online-students-make.html

My mother told me stories when I was little: Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. I soon learned that I was not destined to be a princess:  my feet were too big; I wasn’t small, dainty and blonde, but large, brunette, and outspoken. I did spend a lot of time playing by myself, trying to escape from my younger brother, and much of that time I imagined being a fairy. I am in the middle of revising my first novel, which is the story of how a middle-aged woman gets a job as a fairy godmother.

I loved making tiny things that my fairy friends could use: a bed made of sticks and dandelion fluff, a bottle cap for a dish, a hearth with fine gravel and sand. I could never get the hang of weaving grass blades for cloth or making baskets of straw, even tiny ones. Later on, I got into doll houses, making furniture to scale. I also learned to sew by making Barbie clothes, fancy evening gowns that I would never have a place to wear.

There was a bush in my yard that I liked to pretend was the gate to Faery. I thought if I went through it, rather than around it, I would be there. I never tried it though. I was partly afraid that I would not find Faery, and very much afraid that I would, and that I would not be able to get back. This is much the same reason I never dropped acid…I was afraid I would not come back.

What captured my imagination about 4^th grade was Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. On the first page, the narrator said that girls were better pilots than men— unheard of! President Kennedy was making speeches about going to the moon. We were told that we could do anything we put our minds to. Heinlein’s books had people who could build space ships almost in their back yards, who took risks to get what they wanted. The lack of girls in these stories gave me no one to be unable to identify with. Escaping the small southern mill town I lived in to adventure in outer space was wonderful. I didn’t have to worry about getting lost.

At the time, I was also reading Anne of Green Gables and Little Women series, both of which featured protagonists who did not fit into the mold of the proper sort of girl in either their times or mine. They both became teachers, and probably served as my role models, as I didn’t think I could make it as a writer. Even Jo March gave up her writing to run her school for wayward boys.

Then when I was fifteen, a new show came on that I loved: Star Trek. Yes, it was cheesy, the plots simple and recycled often, a low budget set with one guy in charge of special effects, but it featured people who went into space and tried to solve problems through negotiation rather than phaser banks—Faery with dilithium crystals and a transporter beam! My neighbor recently gave me a box of all the old episodes on VHS, so my daughter and I have been watching them. They dealt with social problems of prejudice, fascism, and cultural interference. Every week both intuition and logic played their parts in working out the solution. I loved it then, and I have enjoyed it again, although I’m laughing at them more than with them. Ah, but Mr. Spock—sigh!

I re-read a lot of Heinlein’s early work last year. Much of my value system is based in his stories of independent scientists and teenagers who outwitted the tradition bound adults around then. He taught me that frightened people turn into a lynch mob if someone points out a scapegoat. Heinlein wrote about characters who loved life, adventure, and sex. He wrote about the positives of technology when used by intelligent, thoughtful people, but showed how physics is completely unforgiving in the hands of the ignorant or careless. These myths of the modern world shaped my attitudes about how life should be, and made me uncomfortable with what I saw as the limitations on my life as a woman. But when I was reading, I was the hero, not the girl.

I seemed to lose my life when I married at 20 and then graduated from college to teach remedial English in several rural high schools. I lost my sense of magic. I had read Lord of the Rings and hated it. What was the big deal? Now I know—where there are no women, fairies, elves, Ent Wives or what have you, the society dies. I don’t think that’s what Tolkein meant, but that is what I read.

It has taken me a long while, more than ten years of therapists telling me that I was not crazy, two marriages, bankruptcy, and taking up witchcraft to begin to find myself again. I still read science fiction for the insight into our culture. After all, as Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,”   which explains how I got into computers and web design when I had a C average in math. Any sufficiently advanced magic will make technology work.  Ask Mr. Scott.

Volunteer Violets

In my neglected flower boxes, violets are blooming. I didn’t plant them. They sprang up of their own accord, like a gift from the Universe.

Violets are my favorite flower for its deep purple petals, its gold beard and its persistence as beautiful wildflower that commands its own pesticides to be eradicated from the pristine grass of manicured lawns. It blooms around my birthday in mid-March—though is usually associated with February birthdays  (Stritof & Stritof, 2006). When I moved into my home, the back yard was covered with violets, and they bloom along the edge of the street in front of my house.

It is one of the first flowers of spring, and has several medicinal uses, including a mild pain reliever (salicylic acid, aspirin) (Jackson. & Bergeron, 1999-2006).  An infusion of its leaves relieves congestion and sore throat, makes a hot compress, and in larger doses is emetic (Grieve, 1900). Mrs. Grieve also claimed that a man cured his colon cancer by eating all the violet leaves in a 1600 sq. ft. area of his garden over the space of nine weeks. as they are high in vitamin C (Sweet viola, n.d.). According to Reismiller (2000), Pliny recommended violets for gout and spleen problems. Mrs. Grieve claims (1900), that Celtic women mixed violets and goats milk for skin lotion. The flowers and leaves are edible, and the roots contain powerful alkaloids that may be found useful in treating modern diseases (Jackson & Bergeron, 1999-2006).

Violets are strewn across the landscape of mythology, though ignored like weeds. Several myths concern suicide or murder. In another rite of spring, Attis castrated himself in remorse for his infidelity to his lover/grandmother Cybele (Kybele) ; his blood became violets as he died (Reismiller, 2000). He was reborn as a daughter to Cybele, and her priests mutilated themselves for love of Cybele. Each March, a pine tree would be cut and covered with violets for the spring blood-letting rituals in honor of Attis (Reismiller, 2000).

Other coverings of graves with violets occurred with Nero, Napoleon’s wife Josephine, and Frederic Chopin (Lauro, 2000).

Ajax, too, killed him

field of violets

self for a cowardly act, creating bloody violets (Reismiller, 2000). Athenians used violets on altars, in wedding bouquets and in funeral displays, based on a story that Ion (another form of the Greek word for violet) was given violets and advice from Ionian (violet) nymphs about the establishment of the city (Larson, 2001). The Iroquois tell about a brave who stole a maiden from a neighboring village, and when her people killed them in the forest, violets sprang from their bodies (Olcott, 1917). Medieval Christian mythology holds that the violet was an upstanding flower until the crucifixion, at which time it lowered its head in shame (Sweet viola, n.d.).

Other violets are associated with star-crossed love. For one thing, St. Valentine wrote his notes from prison on heart-shaped violet leaves, not roses, and even today, many valentines are delivered with posies of violets (Beredjiklian, 2000) In astrology, the violet is protected by Venus and is associated with Taurus (Violet Trivia, 2000). The Frost King in English myth allowed his lovely wife Violet to visit her people every year, but only as a flower (Reismiller, 2000). In another myth, Orpheus created the violet by dropping his lyre on the ground (McIntosh, 2005). Violets were among the flowers picked by Persephone and her nymphs before her abduction (Reismiller, 2000). Zeus created violets from Io’s (io is Greek for violet) tears, so she would have something to eat besides grass after he turned her into a cow t hide her from his wife Hera. In retribution for Cupid’s declaration of their beauty, Aphrodite/Venus as “violet-crowned Cytherea” beat some maidens black and blue, thereby turning them into violets (Athena, 2006).
The wide variation of myths is reasonable as there are over 500 species of violets, including pansies, violas, and johnny-jump-ups. It was a favorite image in Renaissance writing: A violet (love-lies-idle) provided the potion that caused Titania to fall in love with Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream (Reismiller, 2000). In Hamlet, Ophelia gives out flowers after her father dies, but says, “I would give some violets, but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end.” (Act IV, scene 5).  John Donne’s image in “The Ecstasy” uses the violet to summarize the devotion and passion of the lovers: “Where, like a pillow on a bed / A pregnant bank swell’d up, to rest / The violet’s reclining head” (Ward & Lovejoy, 1999, p. 365). Robert Herrick puts them “‘Fore damask’d roses,” and Sir Walter Scott calls it, ” the fairest flower / In glen, or copse or forest dingle”(Ward & Lovejoy, 1999, p. 365). In Toulouse, Poets were awarded a gold violet at a poetry festival in May, the Compagnie des Jeux Floraux, which has been revived in modern times. (“Toulouse,” 2006).
In historical times, the Tatars ate violet roots as they marched across central Russia (Reismiller, 2000). Napoleon was known as the Violet Corporal because he said he would return to France in the spring. A pass phrase for his supporters was “Do you like violets?” His love for violets came from his wife Josephine, who had large gardens of violets. On his defeat, the wearing of violets was considered sedition to the king. The City of Toulouse claims the violet as its city emblem, and it is called the Violet of Parma (“Toulouse,” 2006). Eugenie met Napoleon III with amethysts and violets in her headdress. Queen Victoria favored violets, as did Mohammed.

In China, a group of writers dubbed “the Butterfly” had a magazine, The Violet, published in China in the 1920s, portrayed the 20th century Chinese woman as a violet—beautiful and educated (Mostow, 2003). The editor Zhou Shoujuan focused on the problems of women under the old Chinese system, and in the 40s published a memoir of his fantasy affair for the love of his youth who was lost to an arranged marriage (ibid). According to Mostow, (2003) The ‘violet’ phenomenon, as a modern vision of women, sex, family, and daily life combined with the aesthetics of pleasure and intimacy, implies the author’s agenda to reform urbanites’ sexual tastes and behavior to save China from moral corruption” (p. 158). The primary content of the magazine was sad love stories.

In the language of the flowers, violets say, “I am faithful, I am true, I am thinking of you.” White violets say, “Let’s take a chance on happiness!” They symbolize modesty, faithfulness, innocence, understated beauty, and are associated with the fiftieth wedding anniversary (Stritof & Stritof, 2006). Many images of the Virgin Mary contain violets to represent her humility (Arnett, n.d.). According to Jackson & Bergeron (1999-2006), violets symbolized love and fertility. In addition, they indicate the awakening year, earth’s renewal, hope and the simple joys and sorrows of love (Reismiller, 2000). The Violet is the state flower of Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, chosen in each case by schoolchildren, which perhaps reinforces their representation of youth, love and innocence (Rice, 2000).

I love them because they are persistent and beautiful, coming back from their strong roots every year.

References

Arnett, J. A. (n.d.) The painted flower. ART Ideas website. Retrieved 12/16/06  from    http://www.art-21.org/Docs/Articles/Painted.htm

Athena, A. (2006) Aphrodite: Goddess of love. Women in Greek Myths website. Retrieved 12/16/06   from http://www.paleothea.com/SortaSingles/Aphrodite.html

Beredjiklian, N. (2000) St. Valentine’s Violets. The Violet Gazette V1:1. Retrieved12/16/06   from http://americanvioletsociety.org/HistoryTraditions/Saint_Valentine.htm

Grieve, M. (ca. 1900). A modern herbal. Botanical.com Website. Retrieved12/16/06   from http://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/v/vioswe12.html

Jackson. D. & Bergeron, K. (1999-2006) Violet: viola odorata. Alternative Nature Online Herbal. Retrieved 12/16/06   from http://www.altnature.com/gallery/violet.htm

Larson, J. (2001) Greek nymphs: Myth, cult, lore. Oxford, NY: Oxford UP.

Lauro, L. (2000)  Frederick Chopin and the Paris violets.  The Violet Gazette V1:1. Retrieved  12/16/06  from http://americanvioletsociety.org/HistoryTraditions/ChopinViolets.htm

McIntosh, C. (2005) Gardens of the gods : Myth, magic and meaning. New York: IB Tauris.

Mostow, J.S. (2003) Zhou Shoujuan’s love stories and mandarin ducks and butterflies fiction. The Columbia companion to modern East Asian literature. New York: Columbia UP.

Newlands, C.E. (2002) Statius Silvae and the poetics of empire. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge UP.

Olcott, F. J. (1917) The legend of the violet. The red Indian fairy book. The Baldwin Project Website. Retrieved 12/16/06 from http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php? author=olcott&book=indian&story=_alphaindex

Reismiller, J. (2000) Footnotes to the Violet. Violet Traditions. American Violet Society website. Retrieved 3/28/2010 from http://americanvioletsociety.org/HistoryTraditions/Traditions.htm

Rice, A. (2000) Violets As State Flower Symbols. American Violet Society website  Retrieved 3/28/2010 from http://americanvioletsociety.org/HistoryTraditions/Violet_State_Flowers.htm

Stritof, B. & Stritof, S. (n.d.) Meaning of flowers. About Mothers Day website. Retrieved 3/28/2010 from http://mothersday.about.com/od/gifts/a/flowermean_3.htm

Sweet viola: viola odorata (n.d.) The English Cottage Garden Nursery Retrieved 3/28/2010 from http://www.englishplants.co.uk/swviolet.html

Toulouse: Land of plenty (2000-2006) FranceMonthly website. Retrieved 3/28/2010 from  http://www.francemonthly.com/n/0303/index.php#article7

Violet Trivia. (n.d.) Retrieved 3/28/2010 from http://americanvioletsociety.org/ HistoryTraditions/Trivia.htm

Ward, B.A. & Lovejoy, A. (1999)  A contemplation upon flowers: Garden plants in myth and literature. Portland, OR: Timber Press

The first nub of the bulb begins to turn green

When I got an amaryllis for Christmas, I was at best unimpressed.  The box is a kit with a disk of compressed stuff for dirt, a dried bulb with a pale nub sticking up, and a plain ceramic pot…just add water.  It’s the sort of present you get someone when you don’t know what they want, or you know that they don’t need anything, and it’s some thing that can be thrown away after.  I often get my mom flowers for occasions like her birthday because they don’t clutter her house, except for the odd vase, and sometimes I don’t send them with the vase. They are pretty for a while, and then she throws them out.  So I accepted gracefully and took the kit home.

I soaked the hockey puck of compressed medium and was surprised to find that it spread out to more than fill the pot even without the fist-sized bulb.  I planted the bulb and set it in the window, wondering if it was already dead.  After all, I could then say I tried,  and when it rotted or dried up, I could throw it away.

But when the little white nub, like a thick fingernail sticking up from the wet potting medium, began to turn green and split into fleshy leaves, I felt a sense of renewal. Life really does come from an unseen place. It needs only the most minor encouragement–a little water and some light from a window that only gets 15 minutes of sunshine and then only in the winter.  Amaryllis are not fussy–no special light pattern or arcane mix of fertilizer or ritual of watering other than minimal care.  This one has already bloomed, three giant, red lilies on a stalk as big as two of my fingers, and now the leaves spread two feet tall, five graceful green curves that span my picture window. Soon it will be time to find a spot for the bulb outside where it will get enough sun to bloom again next year. The plant feels like a friend now, not just something that clutters my desk, though the showy flower is finished.

How much care does a person need to bloom? Do I give myself at least enough light and moisture to allow my inner life a space to grow, and do I pay attention each day to the slight changes in my growth,  letting my roots develop and appreciating the daily work the leaves do in feeding the bulb of my soul? Do I check in with myself now each day even long enough to see if I need some watering? Am I getting enough sunlight and time to myself?

My friend the amaryllis reminds me to pay attention, and its friend, the African violet, is blooming like crazy.  And I am writing again.

Pond with Turtle and Mallard

On a walk with my daughter at our favorite spot, we saw a turtle out basking in the late afternoon sun, sharing a log with a mallard. I think they enjoyed the warm day, the first day of spring, and coincidentally the first really warm day of 2010–low 70s. It was lovely and I think they were so glad to be in the sun, that they were willing to pose for some pictures and put up with the kids who whooped joyously as they hopped and skipped through the park.

It helps that the leyland cypress screen the pond somewhat from the path, but a mommy who was ahead of me walked out on the bank and took a couple of pix too, while her kids came as close as they could to see.  Come summer, that would probably be enough to chase the animals way, but on this day, we were all able to just get along.   Peace.

The previous post is password protected as a way to share writing for critique without publishing it.  The password is “writenow” if you want to see instructions for making a password protected post.

These instructions are for a science fiction contest I am sponsoring on Linked in with the Write On Networkers group.  It would be great if you want to join us and submit to the contest. The prize is a book and a certificate–no entry fee, no cash prize.

I saw Avatar this weekend, figuring that it would be the best bang for the buck in my small movie-going budget, and of all the holiday release movies, would translate least well from big to small screen. It’s a beautiful film, with ethereal images of alien flora and visceral fauna, with excellent animation, all very beautifully designed to translate to action figures and video games, which are needed to pay for the movie production. My favorite is the hammerhead rhinoceros that just gets irritated when you shoot it with a rocket launcher, but you can stand your ground and holler at it to make it back up.

But after I went home and the palpable effects of the eye candy wore off, the story lacked the imagination of the artwork. The plot is extremely predictable, with the primary tension being the hope that they would not really go there, that goodness would triumph over the American Way. I get so tired of evil, uncaring corporations and evil, twisted military people.  Ya know, it’s a cliché, and nowhere is it more of a cliché than in science fiction and fantasy movies.  I won’t discuss the story–anything after the first five minutes is a spoiler. If you’ve seen a trailer, you know the story.

If a studio is going to spend an insane amount of money on making a movie, why not hire a writer and develop the characters to match the work of the concept artists?  Oh, right, studios are evil corporations. I’m not saying that the characterization or the acting was bad, but it was pretty much just Fern Gully in space, but then Star Wars is just the Wizard of Oz in space. Avatar is entertainment, but it needs a Han Solo whose “plan does not involve martyrdom.”

I don’t expect hard science in movies, but it does not make sense that the connection thingies of the people of Pandora (gee, how original) are in their braided ponytails instead of their real tails–why have tails at all, except to be stepped on?  Oh, right, romance novel heroes have long hair. And the macguffin, unobtainium, is perfectly placed as the thing that makes the ecosystem work, so the corporation has to kill to get it.  Nice.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie. It’s almost an installation piece of art, and I sort of wish I had stayed up until 2am to get a ticket for the IMAX version for total sensory overload. But Avatar could have been so much more. Science fiction writers abound, and they write stories that never get translated into movies. I guess we just don’t care about stories unless the visuals blow us away. At least I got a set of 3D glasses. I feel like Sylar wearing them.

So, by all means go, and help the industry know that extravaganzas are what we love best.