The unremittingly fabulous Aria Heller has drawn me this AMAZING portrait of Erlen; I really can’t get over the look in his eyes or the texture of the skin and hair and clothes — and the buttons, let me tell you all about these buttons. I’m just flabbergasted at how perfectly this captures his character.

I touch on rape and PTSD in this post, so if those are likely to upset you or set you off, I would suggest treading carefully.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a bit new to writing reviews, so bear with me if I neglect to observe the conventions of the book-reviewers’ trade; in the interest of proper disclosure, I should note that although Broken was published by Candlemark & Gleam, my own publisher, I bought the book myself and was neither asked to review it nor compensated for writing a review.

Susan Jane Bigelow’s Broken is a work of future-Earth science fiction, focusing on two protagonists: Broken, the former Extrahuman (superhero) who has lost her cause and many of her powers, and Michael Forward, the precognitive boy who must save a future leader of the human race. Both Broken and Michael are incapable of seeing a future for themselves — Broken is the story of how they square with that awareness of their finitude. In the process, both learn the many shapes that love and sacrifice can take, and both decide what they want their lives (and, implicitly, their deaths) to mean for others.

If you know anything about my narrative themes, you’ll recognize immediately that this story was designed to appeal to readers like me. I’m an absolute sucker for existential stories about what human life means as we live with an awareness of death, and I melt at novels that show human kindness in the face of pride, fear, and hatred.

Most readers, though, have trouble enjoying a book on theme alone, and so I’d like to discuss what makes this book not only resonant but also technically adept. Bigelow’s prose is very lucid, only seldom drawing attention to itself — but every now and then, I’ll stumble across a turn of phrase that positively gleams. Her characters are not only plausible but sympathetic, and even the most caricatured characters only grow more believable as the story progresses. While my plot summary gives short shrift to Monica, I found her character absolutely indispensable; more than Broken with her memories of flight and Michael with his dreams of his people’s future, Monica’s uncertainty and fear helped to ground my readerly experience of the narrative. She draws out the best in Broken and Michael — and in herself — as she learns to be brave in the face of a world that takes away all that she loves, and she does it from a position of faith that’s never easy or simple for her to maintain. While at first I was slightly skeptical as to the emotional depth of Broken and Michael, separately or as a team, Monica brought out unsounded depths in both of them that testified to Bigelow’s skill with characterization.

Bigelow has also built a very plausible global state, taking into consideration not only how human politics would change in response to future wars but also how these experiences would shape the geography of New York City and New England. When she wrote of physical spaces, of houses and libraries and roadways, I could see the scars of war and poverty on the infrastructure. Among these landscapes, American radicals and reactionaries seek a return to American statehood or a destruction of the global government — and at times, they find themselves either crossing or taking refuge behind old lines of prejudice. In addition to the shifting geopolitics of Earth, though, humans have adapted to relatively recent contact with alien races and expansion to new planets. Here, Bigelow is attentive to the human race’s capacity for adoration and destruction; scholars study their extraterrestrial neighbors and idealists attempt to imitate their life-styles, while in the capital nonhumans are lynched in the streets. Among humans, too, the emergence of “Extrahumans” inspires the same responses of awe and fear. The Extrahumans develop a fan following and a line of promotional merchandise … and an unswerving mission to hunt down all humans with more-than-human powers, for purposes never entirely clear to the members of the Extrahuman Union. Bigelow’s future-Earth culture is thick, in an anthropological sense; it’s not only cleverly built on the superficial level, it’s also clearly layered with generations of plausible change from our own time. It’s a world that has changed and grown, and although Michael is convinced throughout the novel that his charge will be the world’s salvation or its ruin, Bigelow makes absolutely clear: even in the worst-case scenario, this Earth will go on. It’s truly inspiring worldbuilding — I want to read histories of this world.

As trite as it is to say, Broken put me through my emotional paces; I laughed, I cried, I raged, and above all I hoped. I would highly recommend this book.

You can buy Broken here.

Today, the print copy of Erekos is available to buy! As you can imagine, I’m utterly delighted — so delighted, in fact, that I’m going to give away one printed Erekos poster to a commenter. A very small copy is below the jump, with assorted witterings about art style and early drafts to go with it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got a guest post up today at Amara’s Place on why Erlen and Jeiger are totally in love. If that sounds like your thing, stop by a fantastic lady’s blog!

There are better ways to start a post than with V.S. Naipaul, perhaps, but few that give better context for my concerns on authorship and gender. Our names have a pleasing symmetry, his “V.S.” and my “A.M.” falling neatly together. His name, though, concludes with “-paul” — that archetypical church-father, that Beatle or that Pope. My own name has the Finnish -la suffix, like Marco Hietala‘s name. Like the suffix in Tuonela, the land of the dead, and the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland that tells of the land of heroes. It ends with an -a, which Romance languages have trained western readers to gender female.

In retrospect, I ought to have recognized it as inevitable that readers (and, just as saliently, reviewers) would interpret “A.M. Tuomala” as a female person. Most readers, trained on Spanish and Italian and French, had no other linguistic context for the name; perhaps an avid football aficionado might think of Jani Tuomala, or a Finn would recognize the name as his own or his neighbor’s, but beyond that familiarity with Finnish, who would know? (My grandmother used to tell me stories about how people would pronounce her name correctly, although it was difficult to spell, “Except they’d pronounce it too-MA-la instead of TOO-ma-la, like it was a Spanish name.”) It might be a modifier for a quarrelsome daughter: “hija tuomala,” that ill-behaved girlchild.

I write stories about women, too; I mustn’t forget that. Because only women write about women; men are interesting to everyone, but women are only interesting for women.

As a person who doesn’t identify as gendered, part of my deep uneasiness with this gendering of my author-self is very personal. I see reviewers referring to “her writing,” and I experience a disconnect — “Who is she? What troublesome woman has made my writing her own?”

I have to acknowledge, though, that part of my uneasiness comes from the same place as V.S. Naipaul’s contemptuous pronouncement that no female writer in history could match him. It comes from the same place from which Smurfette comes, that place that anxiously reminds me that women must always be only women and that by adopting a female identity I sign away my right to be the helper or the fixer or the tremulous one or the gutsy one or the engineer.

Well, I’ll have none of that.

I can spend the rest of my life fighting for recognition of a genderqueer identity and not account it time ill-spent. I can fight to convince reviewers to call me sie or xie or zie, to speak of hir writing or zir writing, to create a space in my language for a gender that is neither male nor female but instead both or either or neither, and I would not account that time ill-spent. What I may do inadvertently, though, is spend the rest of my life fighting against the recognition of a female identity, and I cannot brook that.

If A.M. Tuomala is to be identified as a woman, I want her to be that troublesome woman, that ill-behaved girlchild. I want her to be a person in her own right, complex and difficult and impossible to condense into an archetype of femininity — a woman who makes myths of a place of heroes, who are men and women and neither.

Like many writers, I think, I’m an introvert by nature; I was raised by my culture and my love of books to believe that writing was an art, (perhaps even an Art), and thus materially different from tawdry, commercial media circuses like television. Thus, when I entered the world of professional writing, I was a bit blindsided by the demands of the culture. I had to “establish an author brand”? I had to promote my work? I had to — gasp! — talk about myself? Until I was working on my own slim little author biography, I had never realized that these works had to be carefully crafted. I had assumed, as I assumed about pretty much everything to do with the publishing process, that an author bio was something that just happened to a finished manuscript when it went into the publishing engine.

As I redraft my biography, I am sad to report that this is not the case.

I regard marketing with a distaste that’s one part political opposition, one part trained humility, and one part pathological shyness, and so it’s difficult for me to think of myself as any kind of public person. This likewise makes it difficult for me to think constructively about how I can build a public personality, even as I recognize the necessity of it for my professional writing career. Perhaps, for my readers, my works will be able to stand on their own merits; perhaps people who like my work will only vaguely associate it with my name or my reputation. Perhaps, if I can ever kick this blog into shape, my readers will come here because they want a connection that’s ongoing and meaningful and personal — the kind of relationship that can’t be summarized in an author biography or an “author brand” or a snappy promotional slogan. I’ve begun to understand, though, that author bios and all they stand for aren’t really for the readers. They’re for my colleagues in the publishing world, my fellow authors, and the people who aren’t my readers yet … and realizing this helps me to realize, in turn, what it means to become a public person.

Creating myself as an author means creating a character who bears my name. It means crafting that character’s personality and interests as I would craft a work of fiction — never dishonestly representing my avatar, never making the person-that’s-me act against type, but instead choosing which aspects are relevant to the story I want to tell about myself. Do I want people to think of A.M. Tuomala as a mystic? An eccentric? A comedian? None of those things are wrong, even if they’re not the whole story, and people who take the time to meet A.M. Tuomala will realize that soon enough. They’ll recognize that this person is an aspiring scholar, a country kid who still can’t figure out traffic circles, a watcher of Olympic diving, and a vegetarian. When I write a character, though, I can never tell you everything at once. I have to start with a striking moment that will color everything that comes next. Achane raises her sister from the dead; Milaus looks at her and sees a tool rather than a mourner. Suhailah disregards a friend’s warning and offers to help a stranger find her husband. Innokentiy opens his brother’s mail and then pretends that he hasn’t.

Later, you can learn about how Achane and Milaus are both striving and failing to fulfill their fathers’ legacies; later, you can learn that Suhailah used to feed her aunt’s cats. The author’s public persona is that moment of introduction, when the character comes onto the page and bends the world around herself — and my task as a writer is to introduce you to that character in a way that assures you, there’s a story here.

When I was a child, I was absolutely mystified by Olympic diving. I understood the criteria for other sports — in track events, the person who ran fastest won; in field events, the person who flung the shot or the javelin furthest won. Even ice skating made a kind of sense, to my child-self, because it involved (among other things) jumping the highest and performing the most spins in midair. It was about being, in some very visible and tangible way, more than the competition.

And at some point in the summer games, the diving would come on, and I’d watch these graceful, spare women spin and twist and writhe in midair … and they’d be consistently outscored by women who executed a single, controlled turn and then sank beneath the surface without a splash. I would watch these divers with their bodies in one long line, their faces utterly immobile, and I simply couldn’t make out what the judges saw in them.

I’ve been thinking on those Olympic divers as I work on a scattering of small projects. Culturally, we construct writing as an expression of Talent — something passionate, perfect, shimmering. Something that arises spontaneously from the deepest wellsprings of the self, already self-evidently excellent. When I fail, when my prose doesn’t cohere and my dialogue is wooden and my setting could be anywhere, it’s hard not to feel as though I’m somehow a failure, too.

I must be a failure, right? If I were excellent, I would have Talent, and it would make me shine like a spinning coin. It would be easy to see what made me excellent.

In the single, flawless turns of those Olympic divers, though, there is nothing spontaneous. There is nothing shining, nothing sudden — there is only the discipline and strength of women who have schooled themselves to fall with steadiness.

I salute those people who can get by on Talent, and who are self-evidently more than the rest of us; I wish them well, and I will gladly watch them fling themselves into the air to spin and to shine and to smile. But I’ll be over here learning discipline, falling again and again until I can execute that single, perfect turn.

As a nominal grown-up, I can recognize that the spinning and flipping and smiling take an awful lot of discipline, too — it’s easy to miss, when you’re looking for Talent.

I’ve been snagged on Weigenland for a while. It’s not that I don’t adore the new characters in the cast — I do! And it’s certainly not that I don’t want to explore a new country in my fiction; there’s little I like better. Today, though, as I was making my way through the city that’s my current home, I realized what it was that’s been tripping me up: Erekos was a rural book, and Weigenland is very much an urban book. I know how to write forests and mountains, rivers swollen with floodwater and rice paddies stretching down to the sea; I know how to write the people who live in rural areas, and the kinds of connections that they build.

I simply do not know how to write cities. After living in one for three years, I am still mystified by the tiniest things — why people jaywalk, why people run red lights with cops watching, what kinds of things get sold at the convenience store on the corner of my block, the fact that I live on a block that has a convenience store. Where I grew up, it was a ten-minute drive to the nearest convenience store, and you were about as likely to find plutonium there as you were to find fresh produce; if you wanted that, you either grew it yourself or you drove twenty minutes to the nearest grocery store. The roads where I grew up were one-lane, with deep ditches on either side and uneven patches over the newest generation of potholes, and on the rare occasion that two cars wanted to use the road, one person had to pull over in a driveway to let the other past. Needless to say, there were no sidewalks or crosswalks.

My project for today, therefore, is to go out into the Big City and research urban spaces. Obviously, there’s no direct correspondence between my city (twenty-first-century, industrial, situated on the Great Lakes) and Festenkessl (analogous to the seventeenth century, capitalist but not industrial, situated on a river on otherwise dry plain) … but I think there’s a kind of quiet correspondence nonetheless. Both are cities that grew slowly outward over centuries; both have districts of ethnic and economic homogeneity; both have their public spaces and their residential spaces and their patterns of pedestrian movement between them. Both are wildly different from those tree-shaded roads I know so well.

Call me old-fashioned, in this newfangled digital age, but I love the feeling of a book in my hands. I love the weight of it, the comforting texture of the pages, the way the paper’s scent fades from the chemical ink aroma of new books to the warm vanilla of old. It’s fantastic to have my novel transmute from words in my head to a physical thing that I can hold … but it’s especially nice that this thing is a book.