Award Nominations Are A Wonderful Start to the Day

Hastur Lord was nominated for the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Award! It didn't win, but it's in some very fine company. Since the core of the novel was a partial manuscript Marion wrote during the final year of her life, and since it continued the characters and relationships she'd established in The Heritage of Hastur, focusing on a heroic and sympathetic gay protagonist, one that appeals to a wide range of readers, I am especially pleased. I think Marion would have been, too.

Darkover Characters: Yours, Mine, and Ours

One of the most challenging aspects of continuing Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series--or any world invented by another author, for that matter--has been the portrayal of characters that are not my own. Most were created by Marion herself, but some came from one or another of the writers she had worked with before me. A case in point is Marguerida Alton, who began as a small child in Marion’s books but was brought to adult life, much to the delight of many readers, in the Darkover novels written by Adrienne Martine-Barnes.

To begin with, writing someone else’s characters is a no-win situation. No matter how carefully you, the new writer, study what has been done before, pouring through notes and out-takes and letters as well as published material, you’re going to get something wrong. Or perhaps not wrong but different. This is primarily because we are all individuals. Each creative vision, each way of working with characters, is unique. Add to that, the variations inherent in each story.

More Thoughts on Writing and Healing

Some years back, my sister gave me a copy of Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (Beacon Press, 1999). It sat on my shelf as I debated whether its contents would be grim or admonishing. I was wrong on both counts. Although my fiction writing is just that--fiction, as in “I made it all up, I truly did”--the book presented me with two invaluable gifts.

The first is that when we tell the truth, we improve not only our emotional but our physical health, and there’s research to prove it. DeSalvo writes specifically about autobiographical narratives of trauma or other difficult situations. I think the same holds true in a broader sense for all writing. It does not matter that my character is not me or these things never happened in my own life. I can still tell the truth, the truth of my heart, the truth of my spirit. When I do that, something unfolds within me and is given space to breathe, to stretch, to grow into a different shape.