Women in SF&F Month: Ashaye Brown
Apr
20
2021

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Ashaye Brown! Her YA fantasy debut novel, Dream Country, features a sibling rivalry between gods: the triplets Sleep, Dreams, and Nightmares, any of whom may have committed matricide. Dream Country will be out on April 27—exactly one week from today!

Dream Country by Ashaye Brown - Book Cover

Fantasy as Lucid Dream

The relationship between fantasy and dreams can be confusing. As words, we have no problem recognising them as synonyms, both signifying the imaginary, mental imagery, the fantastic as a whole. But it’s when fantasy becomes Fantasy, a genre with plot and intention behind it, that suddenly it is nothing like a dream. Because dreams are something that happen here in the real world and Fantasy never could. When most people think about fantasy, they think about the impossible. They think about impossible worlds and impossible creatures and impossible lives. They see fantasy as divorced from reality and that’s off-putting to them. They throw out words like “escapism”, “childish” and “useless”, as if these are insults; as if some people do not need to escape; as if there is nothing worth keeping from our childhood; as if all things must have their use.

And yet these same people who say these things, most nights of their lives will interact with the impossible. They escape, they become a child again and they never, not once, puzzle over their “use”. In short, they dream.

I’ve often wondered about this contradictory attitude and wondered why dreams aren’t treated with the same derision as fantasy. If they were, then they would be a social taboo, some awkward thing our bodies did every now and again that we prefer not to talk about, like going to the toilet or excessive sweating. Instead, we keep dream diaries in order to remember them better and we look into dream interpretation and symbolism as if it were a secret message slipped to us by our subconscious. We talk about our dreams, in the mornings, over the breakfast table and no one becomes embarrassed or repulsed.

But when our dreams become a voluntary creation — a fantasy — that’s when the problem arises.

When I was a child, I would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, heart pounding, tears brimming, having narrowly escaped the clutches of a bad dream. I would pad softly (and a little shamefully — it was only a dream, after all, I seemed to tell myself) into my mother’s room and she would let me stay the night with her. Or, I would climb down from the top bunk and lay down head to toe with my brother, even the sound of his rumbling snores and the proximity of his feet to my nose being preferable to having to face that terrible dreamworld alone again.

No one ever judged me for my reactions. They understood that even though it was a fear of the imaginary, it was not an imaginary fear. Then, in the safety of the light of the following morning, when my heart had had its chance to slow down and the tears had stopped flowing, my mother or my brother would ask me, casually — what was the dream about? And if I chose to tell them, I would tell it like a story, I would give it structure and meaning and plot and these would be my first clumsy attempts to tell a fantasy story.

Now, as an adult, I gravitate towards fantasy, whether it’s fantasy as light and as safe as my recounting of my dreams in the morning, or as dark and as terrifying as the bad dreams of the night before.

My mother has asked me if I would ever write anything set in the “real world”. My brother has asked me why I don’t read more stories set in the “real world”. It’s as if they have forgotten how real a dream can be.

If, as a child, I could have taken hold of my nightmare — warped my dreamworld into a shape of my own choosing, something just as fantastic, yet infinitely more manageable — I would have. I would have been amazed that a superpower like this already existed, but that some adults looked down on it, shunned it and shamed those who used it. It was not that, as a child, I did not know what the fantasy genre was — I was simply unaware of its potential.

Fantasy is not a lesser version of reality, it is a greater version of a dream. It is a lucid dream. It is the dark and the light, the safety and the fear. It is escapist, it is childish and it is useless. Fantasy is not the realm of the impossible, it is the genre where everything is possible. It takes a dream to create a fantasy, it takes knowing what it is like to be in awe of what your mind can do when it’s free in order to have the confidence to let that freedom reign. To imagine. To create. To dream.

Photo of Ashaye Brown Ashaye Brown is a British author of Afro-Caribbean descent. Ashaye’s unparalleled passion for mythology led her to study a range of world cultures and mythologies, before exploring them further through her writing. Ashaye’s debut novel ‘Dream Country’ is the first in an intended series set in visionary realms themed around dreams, nightmares and rich mythologies.
Women in SF&F Month: Ciannon Smart
Apr
19
2021

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Ciannon Smart! Her Jamaican-inspired YA fantasy debut novel, Witches Steeped in Gold, is out tomorrow—but if you can’t wait until then to start reading about witches seeking vengeance, you can read this excerpt!

Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart - Book Cover

Building an Empire

I didn’t think I had the imagination to create a secondary world.

Now, the jury’s still out as to whether I can or not, but Witches Steeped in Gold has been written, bound, and is waiting for its April 20th release in various warehouses around the world. It’s too late to back out now.

When I first knew I wanted to become a writer, I gravitated towards writing books similar to what I was reading at the time: Twilight, Divergent, The Hunger Games. They all contained worlds that felt familiar, aside from an eldritch wrongness permeating the foundations of society. Familiar felt safe for me, comfortable, as I wrote and rewrote my earliest manuscripts at fifteen. There’s an adage, write what you know and draw what you see, that I actually read in a book. For five years I did just that. My worlds were western; the magic, where it appeared, was soft whisper on the page.

Then I came across Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and that familiar ground beneath my feet gave way. Suddenly I was immersed in a world of angels and demons, chimera and magic; what’s more, I loved it. My reading tastes expanded; I discovered the City of Bones books, Shadow and Bone, Red Queen, and more. I was hooked on these expansive societies, some hidden in the pockets of the familiar, others in entirely fabricated places.

Things changed once again when I heard about two books that would change the game, for me: The Belles, and An Ember in the Ashes. Magical Black and brown girls. New worlds with non-western touchstones. I wanted more; in order for that to happen, I had to write the story myself.

Up to this point, the lane through my memories that we’ve been walking, dear reader, has been linear. But before I can move forward, I need to go back a decade to the second time I’d been in Jamaica. A family tour of the island included a trip to Rose Hall, a former plantation home in which an alleged white witch lived. Like most 90s babies, I grew up hooked on Sabrina The Teenage Witch; to learn my own culture had a magic system, witches, floored me. So much so that, when the time came to write the non-western fantasy story I craved, this trip would be my inspiration.

I wasn’t cavalier about what was ahead, but my fear to leave the familiar was replaced by drive. I turned to those authors whose works I’d admired. Victoria Aveyard, in particular, was keeping a blog back then that I found hugely informative. I drew maps, I read through Brandon Sanderson’s Laws of Magic, I excavated Jamaica’s history by way of my mum and various relatives. It was an interesting symbiosis; layering my story removed layers from a heritage I hadn’t known as well, growing up in England.

And layers, really, have been key to building the empire in the Witches Steeped in Gold world. As much a character as my cunning protagonists, it too is varied and nuanced; not to be trusted, and flawed. Book One is but the tip of the iceberg of places I can’t wait to show you.

 

Photo of Ciannon Smart Of Jamaican heritage, Ciannon Smart grew up in a small town in the south-east of England. As the only daughter in a house full of boisterous sons, she developed a voracious appetite for reading from an early age, preferring anarchy in stories rather than real life. In YA she loves her heroines exactly as she loves her villains: willful, wily, and unpredictable. When not writing, Ciannon can be found reading, painting, or taking the long way home to listen to a good song more than once. Witches Steeped in Gold is her first novel, and you can learn more about her at www.ciannonsmart.com.
Women in SF&F Month 2021: April 19–23 Schedule & Week in Review
Apr
18
2021

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Thank you so much to all of last week’s guests! Here are their guest posts in case you missed any of them:

All of the guest posts from April 2021 can be found here.

And the next week of guest posts will resume tomorrow! This week’s guests are:

Women in SF&F Month Schedule Graphic

April 19: Ciannon Smart (Witches Steeped in Gold)
April 20: Ashaye Brown (Dream Country)
April 21: Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights, Our Violent Ends)
April 22: Angela Mi Young Hur (Folklorn)
April 23: Tori Bovalino (The Devil Makes Three, Not Good for Maidens)

Women in SF&F Month: Diane Duane
Apr
16
2021

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Today’s guest is Diane Duane! She was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 1980 and 1981 after the publication of her first novel, The Door Into Fire. Since then, she has written more stories and novels, including those set in her Middle Kingdoms and Young Wizards universes as well as in established universes like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Star Trek; comics and graphic novels; and scripts, including work on the TV shows Star Trek: The Next Generation, Batman: The Animated Series, and one of my own favorites, Gargoyles. She is a New York Times bestselling author and a two-time Mythopoeic Award finalist.

The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane - Book Cover The Book of Night with Moon by Diane Duane - Book Cover

If there’s any truth to the concept that you can tell a lot about a writer from the books they’ve got in their office, then I’m afraid one of my great passions is instantly obvious to anybody who walks into my workspace (which doubles as the living room in the little cottage where we live). Besides the books on world mythologies and fairy tales, besides the Compact OED and the other assorted dictionaries and guides to other languages…  there are also about two hundred cookbooks.

Food—reading about it, making it, eating it—is a passion with me. (Fortunately one that my husband and fellow fantasy writer Peter Morwood shares.) In this time of COVID, and the limitations it’s brought to many of us on where we can go and how far, a constant theme around here is the thought of what restaurants we can’t wait to get back to when we are free again and vaccinated, and it’s safe to go out (or as safe as it’s going to get). That Xi’an street food place up in Dublin, that Bourgognaise café in Paris, that train-station buffet halfway up a mountain in Switzerland where they do pizza on a rösti base, that wine festival in southeastern Germany in July… Around here, the edible is a constant undercurrent to the readable. After all, we’ve all got to eat. And thereby hangs the issue of a favorite tool for me in fictional worldbuilding: food.

Looking back over the last decade or four, careful examination shows me that food and various issues surrounding it have turned up in a majority of the novels and screenplays I’ve written. In the beginning, its inclusion was mostly unconscious—a side effect of the “write what you enjoy” principle. But eventually I became more consciously aware of its tremendous usefulness in the worldbuilding process in both SF and fantasy, and started exploiting it more purposefully.

Food can be such a gateway to meaning. In already extant cultures, whether you’re familiar with them or not, food will tell you things if you’ll let it. Every culture on this planet has deeply held traditions surrounding eating, favorite dishes, manners at table (in places where tables are an issue, or a thing); deeply held opinions about what it means when people eat one way and not another, or what it means to eat one food and not another. These traditions add depth to all kinds of transactions among human beings, often unexpectedly revealing what they feel is most important in their culture. If your goal is to immerse the reader in another world, it seems to me that similar depths are absolutely worth building into a created culture from scratch, so that you can exploit these resonances to maximum effect—both to make your world feel more real, and to make your characters’ interactions with and inside it feel genuine and organic.

There do seem to have been times when this general approach seems not to have struck fantasy writers as all that useful. For example, in quest fantasy that came out in the third quarter or so of the last century, food culture (not to mention eating) seemed liable to fall out of the worldbuilding picture almost completely. Sometimes food might only come up for consideration when characters didn’t have it (and were starving), had too much of it to describe (when feasting), or were so occupied with strictly action-oriented events that eating was hardly ever described as happening at all. In her satirical “travel guide” The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones (doubtless having read way too much of this kind of thing during her career) went straight to the heart of this problem by describing pretty much all quest-fantasy food as having been reduced to two categories: WAYBREAD and STEW (“…though there are occasional BIRDS, FISH, RABBITS and pieces of cheese”).

At least these days matters have improved somewhat over the… let’s call it “minimalist” approach… that so annoyed Wynne Jones. Leaving aside for the moment their value in worldbuilding and culturebuilding, plainly lots of other writers have noticed over time that meals and eating in written work can be hugely structurally useful. For example, scenes set over the dinner table, be it a small intimate dinner-for-two or a huge extravagant feast, can be a great place to handle exposition (and the characters’ reactions to it). Any such scene comes with easily-imagined, almost built-in breaks for interactions that make large amounts of info—which might otherwise feel “dumped”—a lot easier to swallow.

Spider-Man: The Venom Factor by Diane Duane - Book Cover

Additionally, characters can become incredibly revealing—to each other, or to the writer—over a good meal. (Nor does this necessarily have to do with alcohol, though of course that can help.) Some years back, when writing Spider-Man: The Venom Factor, my first Spider-Man novel, I had more fun than was probably strictly legal by sitting Spidey and Venom down together in a posh Manhattan restaurant, under the supervision of a character based on a very senior restaurateur who in his time had made even Mick Jagger behave himself, and forcing them for just a little while to deal with each other as something besides superhero and supervillain: as—to whatever extent was possible—fellow human beings. That chapter (which Peter and I routinely referred to while I was writing it as “My Dinner With Venom”, and for which I asked him to choose the wines) turned out to be one of the high points of the book for many of its readers, who said they loved the shift in roles and tone.

And those larger feasts, too, when they come up, can routinely be evocative of other cultural depths that the writer wants to hint at. For example, I’m writing this during the Passover/“Holy Week” period, when for some of us the intersection of food with cultural history—old triumph or tragedy, the challenge of sacrifice or of sudden life-changing contact with the divine—slides noticeably into the foreground. At such times it’s hard not to start thinking about what similar (or very different) practices there might be in a culture one’s thinking about building.

A whole spectrum of possibilities spreads itself out, with endless options to recall own-world cultures or differ from them. Are there perhaps food-based traditions of worship now abandoned or forbidden, or lingering though their meanings are near-forgotten (like the “ear of grain reaped in silence” of Eleusis, of which at this end of time we know absolutely nothing else)? And then the issue of how viewpoint characters may react to these comes up, in terms of the more urgent issues taking up the day-to-day business of their lives. Are the old ways a nuisance, or a source of secret curiosity? Are they a source of amusement, or of horror—something that haunts a character’s nightmares (or dreams)? In any case, such cultural backstory can be buried as deeply as the writer needs, to best serve the narrative. It doesn’t have to show at all… or can be suddenly exposed in an offered cup of wine.

I went a little way down this road in my first novel, letting a meal in a riverside tavern veer toward the numinous (though mostly in retrospect). In The Door Into Fire, the questing characters almost accidentally discover that the innkeeper of the isolated hostelry they’re visiting at the edge of the lands men know is in fact the Goddess who made the world… taking this opportunity to say goodbye to them as they walk into deadly danger, because (while they live, at least) She may not get another chance. And what they discover about Her there over dinner—besides some individually telling points about themselves—is that She’s a pretty fair cook.

Dinner was cold eggs deviled with hot whitefruit and marigold leaves, roast goose in a sour sauce of lemons and sorrel, parsnips roasted in long-pepper butter, blanched fern-fiddles tossed in smoked bacon fat, and winter apples in thickened cream. [One character] made a lot of noise about the eggs and the goose, claiming that the powerful spices and sours of Steldene cooking gave him heartburn; but this didn’t seem to affect the speed with which he ate. There also seemed to be an endless supply of wine, which the company didn’t let go to waste…

And of course thereafter the dinner conversation turns casually to local news, and recent politics, and directions on how to get quickly and safely through nearby terrain (because doesn’t it usually?). Even in other universes, a good meal has a grounding quality to it, reminding one of the things that matter: needs satisfied, life behaving at least something like normally, family and/or good friends close by.

In such times as we find ourselves in at the moment, it seems to me this might be something we need more of. (Even if lockdown conditions do start people looking more closely at some of those mealtime spreads, and demanding ingredient explanations and recipes… because as we’ve recently seen, when you can’t travel, the urge to cook at home can get unexpectedly strong.) That reassuring quality of the shared table, even if only on the page, of a however-imaginary food culture with its own quirks and specialties that sound like they might be fun to try… and of comfort food that doesn’t even have calories? Sounds tailor-made for where we are (and where we will be, I fear, for a while yet).

I hope more of my colleagues will, in the long term, sit down at this end of the creative “table” and help themselves to the buffet. Meanwhile, locally speaking—I’m half afraid I’m going to wind up adding one more cookbook to that shelf in my office; and it won’t be “mine” just because I bought it…

Diane Duane has been writing science fiction and fantasy for more than forty years. She is a two-time Astounding Award nominee for The Door Into Fire, first novel in her Lambda Award-winning LGBTQ Middle Kingdoms universe, and multiply award-nominated for her groundbreaking Young Wizards science/fantasy series, the eleventh volume of which is now in progress. She has additionally written novels and screenplays for many major licensors, including the DC and Marvel Comics-based universes (Spider-Man, X-Men), and properties as widely (and bizarrely) assorted as Scooby-Doo, Duck Tales, Gargoyles, Transformers, and Barbie: Fairytopia. She has also written for Star Trek in more forms than anyone else alive. As a result of all this, she is a holder of the “Faust” Life Achievement Award of the International Association of Tie-In Writers. …Her most recent work has been set in the Middle Kingdoms, where she’s in progress on the third of a “prose miniseries” of novellas and short novels, Tales of the Five. Book 3 of the Tales, The Librarian, will be published during Q2 of 2021 via Lionhall Press at Ebooks Direct, the independent ebook store she shares and manages with her husband Peter Morwood. (And who knows…maybe, sometime in 2022, that cookbook will turn up there too.)

Women in SF&F Month: Alexis Henderson
Apr
15
2021

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Today’s guest is speculative fiction writer Alexis Henderson! Her first published novel, The Year of the Witching, combines the horrors of mysterious witches in a spooky forest with the atrocities occurring in a puritanical society—and kept me riveted, even when I was having difficulty focusing in 2020! The Year of the Witching was also a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist in both the Best Horror and Best Debut Novel categories last year.

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson - Book Cover

Writing Dark Fiction: An Exercise In Self-Acceptance

I often describe myself as a deeply anxious person. As a child, friends and acquaintances often described me as timid or “high-strung.” I often remember being moved to tears—or worse yet terrified into a state of total detachment—by sudden fits of terror. Since the very beginning of my memories, fear has been a constant companion.

So it seemed strange that as I grew older, I chose to devote the bulk of my creative endeavors to the exploration of the horrific. As a person to whom fear is a kind of chronic condition, I didn’t understand why I repeatedly chose to engage the things that frightened me most. I would like to say that writing horror was some triumphant attempt to prevail over the anxieties that plagued me. But I’ve come to realize that’s not entirely true.

On the good days, writing about the things that I fear most is an exhilarating, and yes triumphant experience. On the bad days, it can be painful and even triggering. While writing my own dark stories, I often ached for some reprieve or escapism. I began to question whether or not I have the mental stamina required to excel in my trade of choice. In comparison to the masters of the genre—the Shirley Jacksons and the Stephen Kings—I felt like a pitiful farce. They had learned to prevail as champions over fear while in turn, I floundered, consumed by it.

Over time, my anxiety worsened. My fear took the form of a small demon that lurked behind my ribs, gripped my lungs in its claws. At night it filled my mind with worst-case scenarios that kept me awake until the wee hours of the morning—What if this is the last book I ever write? What if I’ve depleted myself creatively and have nothing left to give? What if I’ve already peaked? What if I’ve broken myself beyond the barest hope of repair?  

These questions became a constant chorus. In turn, my writing began to feel less like a creative act and more like a transference of pain. I began to feel like I was monetizing my nightmares, commodifying the fear that plagued me like a kind of sickness. I tried to write my way out of this slump and failed several times before I stopped trying. Humbled by the increasingly real prospect of my own creative failure, I dragged myself to my writing desk once more. Out of necessity—or perhaps desperation—I let my fears guide my hand. I didn’t try to fight or deny it. I simply gave in, and in doing that was able to make a friend of my fears for the first time.

Through this act of surrender, I learned to form a careful kinship with the dark fascinations that once threatened to consume me entirely. At night, I allowed myself to ask all of the questions that terrified me the most, and I continued to write in spite of them. As time went on, I began to realize that the fears that I believed were a hindrance—to be dismissed, denied, or otherwise discarded—were pieces of myself that couldn’t be divorced from the greater sum of my being. Thus, through the writing of horror, I have learned not just to accept my fears but to accept myself.

Photo of Alexis Henderson
Photo Credit: Marissa Siebert at Hazel Eyes Photography		 Alexis Henderson is a speculative fiction writer with a penchant for dark fantasy, witchcraft, and cosmic horror. She grew up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, which instilled in her a life-long love of ghost stories. Currently, Alexis resides in Columbus, Ohio, where she’s learning to cope with the cold.
Women in SF&F Month: Leona Wisoker
Apr
14
2021

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Today’s guest is speculative fiction author and editor Leona Wisoker! Her short fiction has been published in Cats in Space, Galactic Creatures, Sha’Daa: Inked, and other anthologies, and will soon be in Abyss & Apex as well. She is also the author of the stories and novels in Children of the Desert, a science fantasy series beginning with Secrets of the Sands. The last novel in the series, Servants of the Sands, was recently rereleased as two print volumes with a new chapter at the end.

Secrets of the Sands by Leona Wisoker - Book Cover Bells of the Kingdom by Leona Wisoker - Book Cover Servants of the Sands: Part I by Leona Wisoker - Book Cover

Of Being So Damn Tired

Grand and sweeping pronouncements about women’s roles, whether fictional or factual, feel stale these days. Examining our historic oppression, whether globally or individually, feels the same. So much has already been written about emerging writers, about convention mishaps, about political fights, about the shifting world we live in. These are all excellently worthy topics, but I’m just not up to discussing them right now.

And that’s the theme, right there, isn’t it? We’re tired. We’re all so very, very tired. It’s been a ridiculous year and so many ridiculous months and so many, many ridiculous days. How often, in fiction, are women allowed to just be tired? When is the heroine allowed to get properly exhausted and collapse for a few days instead of Heroically Forging Ahead?

One of my favorite authors is Tove Jansson, a Finnish author who wrote and illustrated children’s books (and did illustrations for a satirical, anti-fascist magazine as well). She was bisexual in a time and place that absolutely did not accept such things, and her books are heavily queer coded.

Her Moominvalley series follows the adventures of a family of woodland trolls. Early books are highly improbable and whimsical, focused on the children (Moomintroll and his friends Snufkin, Little My, and Sniff, among others) and the patriarch of the family (Moominpappa). They involve comets, floating houses, and magical hats. The later books are where Jansson really sinks her teeth into the complexity of the characters. The magic retreats, replaced with a finely drawn network of connections, and Moominmamma becomes the center of every story — even in Moominvalley in November, when she’s not directly in the story at all.

I find it fascinating that the shift in focus from Moominpappa to Moominmamma is when the stories lose their ridiculous edge and move into deeper waters. Throughout the series, Moominmamma is consistently the voice of calm and reason against her husband’s pompous recklessness and her children’s flighty adventures. She treats crisis with good humor and gets the family through Situation after Situation without showing the least bit of strain — until Moominpappa at Sea, the next to last book in the series.

As Sea opens, Moominvalley is under a summer heat wave and everyone is cranky and snapping at one another. A small fire starts in the back yard, and is quickly put out by the family; Moominpappa, napping on the veranda, is furious that he wasn’t called in to handle it himself. He stomps and sulks and stands guard over the tiny blackened area until he’s sure the family is properly sorry for their offense. Unfortunately, they all think he’s overreacting, and Moominmamma can’t find a way to smooth Pappa’s bad mood this time. She’s getting tired, you see. The kids don’t see Pappa as infallible any longer, and Pappa’s getting grouchier, and it’s just so hot.

So the entire family bundles up into a boat and sails to an obscure island, in hopes of restoring the balance: Pappa being in charge, everyone else — especially Moominmamma — relying on him. The shift to severe isolation in a desolate location, the demand that Pappa do all the work, and the inevitable reality that Pappa isn’t, actually, able to shoulder Mamma’s load — it’s all so exhausting for Moominmamma. She’s given up her beloved garden, her friends, her work, her home, and she has to constantly encourage her flaky husband as he tries to fill a role he is simply, incredibly unsuited for.

Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson - Book Cover

This is still a kid’s book. There’s still a lot of whimsy. There are sea-horses — literally, delicate horses that live in the sea and come up onto the shore to prance and laugh; there is a Groke, a terrifying, sad creature that kills the ground she walks on. There are hiding places and exciting discoveries and mysteries. But woven through as an increasingly strong thread is the simple fact that Moominmamma is so damn tired.

At one point, she breaks. She starts painting flowers on the inside walls, and gets angry when Moominpappa tries to get in on that: this is mine, she says, and refuses to let anyone else add to her artwork. For Moominmamma, this is the equivalent of a volcano exploding. She simply never draws that sort of boundary.

As she continues drawing, she finds that she can literally step into her art: she curls up behind her painted flowers, and the family comes and goes, searching for her throughout the day and getting upset when they can’t find her. She ignores them and sleeps on. Again, for Moominmamma, this choice to center herself, to rest, is absolutely epic. She hides more than once, until she comes to a healthy place within herself and is able to rejoin the family with refreshed spirit and take proper charge again. At that point, she finds herself unable to retreat into the paintings any longer; she doesn’t need to. She’s reclaimed herself.

I cannot overstate how much it means for me, as an adult looking back, to see that sort of quiet acknowledgement that sometimes our families are just too much and we have to step back, hide for a bit, and rest until we’re recharged. The acknowledgement that kids are kids, and they’re self absorbed, and they’re just not going to notice that we’re in pain. Those of us who are caretakers so often have to handle our own burdens as well as the pain of the people around us, while not showing a sign of struggling.

This past year, these past four years, have been so very, very exhausting. We’re all struggling. We’re all cranky and snapping at one another like the Moomins in a heat wave. Many of us are doing the equivalent of retreating to a remote island in an effort to force control over an uncontrollable situation.

Tove Jansson had a gift for poking fun at society, for shaking assumptions and overturning norms. Terry Pratchett, in fact, pointed to Jansson as one reason he became a writer, and indeed when you look at the two side by side there are definite echoes from one to the other.

Jansson wrote novels for adults as well as for children. She was an artist: she held multiple solo exhibitions, painted murals, illustrated a Swedish translation of The Hobbit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and other books. She worked to bring her Moomin series to the stage, and as her time in theater went on, she fell in love, at age 42, with the woman who would become her lifelong partner.

Looking at the list of everything Jansson created and accomplished in her life, I can only imagine how exhausted she became on a regular basis. She certainly lived a rich and complex life, and showcased that in her stories. I really wish I’d had the chance to meet her. I could have made it happen — she passed in 2001, just as I was settling into a full-time job and a new marriage in Virginia. If I’d thought to look her up in earlier years, I could have at least contacted her to tell her how much her stories meant to me. It simply never occurred to me.

Part of the exhaustion over the past years, for me, has been a steadily growing realization of just such missed opportunities. A stark awareness that I’ve put my energy into so many things that just haven’t paid me back proportionately. A sense that I’m getting older, and I really just don’t have the interest in saving the world the way I used to. Smaller, simpler, more directly effective actions suit me far more than tilting at windmills, lately. And reading. I’m reading more and more in recent years, and I’m finding my interests changing.

I particularly want to read more stories in which the women get to reclaim themselves and solve the problem, not by charging the enemy or setting a clever trap for the bad guy, but by resting. I want to write those kinds of stories. And do you know what…I just might!

Leona R. Wisoker writes a variety of speculative fiction, from experimental to horror, from fantasy to science fiction. Her science-fantasy series, Children of the Desert, follows several characters through a world slowly coming apart as dangerous secrets are revealed and centuries-long plots move into their final stages. Shorter works, such as Silver and Iron in the Sha’Daa: PAWNS anthology and Dragon Child in the Galactic Creatures anthology, reflect her early love of stories that involve demons and elves.

Leona’s work is fueled by coffee, chocolate, and whisky. She often contemplates exercise, decides it’s too much time away from working on really important things, then returns to creating bizarrities, researching random subjects, or planning her next garden project.

Leona’s web site is leonawisoker.com. She can most often be found on Twitter (@leonawisoker), talking about politics, writing, food, cute pet pics, and gardening.