Return of the Web Site, or
. . . I can’t make ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Web Site Doom’ work somehow. (The Jewel of the Web Site? The Web Site of the Nile? X-Multigendered: the Last Web Site?)
Anyway. http://robinmckinley.com/etc / Some of my old web site has returned. And since it hasn’t been available for a year or so I figure it’s a good enough excuse to take a night off. At least a few of you will be glad to read the bits you’ve emailed me wistfully about missing.*
The speeches are what they are but some of the other stuff Badly. Needs. Updating. Some of the updates need updates too. For example, this statement appears in the middle of the Outlaws of Sherwood interview.
If there’s ever a book published with my name on it that doesn’t have important women characters in it, call the police. I’ve been kidnapped, and someone has stolen my name.
This is then footnoted** as follows:
+ + +
Having said that, I am now, a year or so after I wrote these interview answers, writing a story that does not have any important women characters in it. Sort of. That is, the narrator is a guy, and the two other main human characters are guys. Emphasis on the human. The only other truly central character besides the narrator is female. She’s just not human. The third most important character is also female. She’s not human either. Hey, it’s easier to write from the human point of view . . . okay, so I am a lazy, slovenly, unimaginative poor excuse for a fantasy writer. Noted. But that’s the way this story is going.
This situation is not entirely my fault, if anyone wants to think in terms of blame. When Peter and I wrote the first of our Elementals series, Water, more than one reader remarked that it’s a little overwhelmed by girls. You can get away with this kind of thing novel by novel, and people may write you letters (and the occasional meditative, or possibly snippy, magazine/review article) about it, but as a novel writer you’re allowed to have, um, preoccupations. One of mine is Competent Women. There are still too few of them out there, and I know where I choose to throw my professional weight. But when you start writing groups of short stories around a theme, if you have preoccupations also the whole business threatens to tip over and land with a splat. And as it happens (one of the reasons I love him, of course) my husband has a rather, ahem, girlish bent as well. Only one of his stories for Water has guys in the central roles (and, arguably, they’re the villains, although they’re sorry about having to be villains), and none of mine do. That’s five to one. Oops. I have previously written one, count ‘em, one story with a man in the central role (also from a collection of short stories, The Door in the Hedge); it’s obviously just not something I do. But for the sake of an Elementals collection that looks more like an Elementals collection rather than an Elementals Women collection, well, I do see the point.
There’s an up side to this torture however. One of the reasons that the second volume of Elementals is taking so long to get put together is because I keep starting short stories and they keep turning into novels. (Sunshine, due out this autumn, started life as a Fire story, as I’ve said elsewhere. And I have two Air stories I’ve put aside because they got too long, and I’m starting to panic.) There is no way that I’d be able to stay inside a male narrator long enough to write a novel. I think. I’m pretty taken with his female friends….
+ + +
Snork. ‘There is no way that I’d be able to stay inside a male narrator long enough to write a novel.’ This is DRAGONHAVEN we’re talking about, you know, which when I wrote that was still a short story. CHALICE wasn’t even a twinkle on the horizon at that point—nor were Hellhound or First Flight, which are what finally stayed short stories long enough to bring FIRE out this autumn, although it was a near thing with First Flight*** —but the two AIR stories are BELLS OF MAZAHAN, which has become one of the (several) Third Damar Novels waiting in the queue, and . . . PEGASUS.
* * *
* There are still pieces missing. There’s at least one speech missing tonight as I write this. But the old web site had been sort of bolted together as I erratically produced stuff to put on it, and I never got around to figuring out how I wanted it organised so poor previous-Blog-and-Web-Site Mom could do it. The speech in question is no doubt at the back of a virtual closet labelled ‘Garden’ or ‘Pink All Stars’^
^ Even virtually, I recommend you stand back if you open that door.
** See. There’s a precedent.
*** One of whose advance readers wrote me that I really should write a sequel . . . and being somewhat acquainted with this blog, she then ran for cover.
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