Today's Guest Blog is a special treat. J.M. Frey's impressive debut novel, Triptych, is a Finalist for the Lambda Award. It's an absorbing, moving, satisfying and humane story, one that marks Frey as an author to watch. Here she talks about her love affair with writing, and how she came to create such a compelling and original tale.
"A Fish Out Of Water"
I have an absolutely massive soft spot for
fish-out-of-water stories. I mean, huge. I blame, in the best way, J.M. Barrie
for this. (And yes, my professional name is my little tip-of-the-topper to Mr. Barrie
– thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me the same initials.) I wanted, so badly, to
go to Neverland as a child.
This desire informed my reading and viewing
choices as a kid– if I the cover copy of a book even hinted at the possibility of someone from “our” world falling into
and experiencing another, then I was all over that. I must have watched Warriors of Virtue five billion times,
and I could probably still recite My
Little Pony’s Escape From Catrina. Disney’s Little Mermaid and Beauty and
the Beast? Yup. I really got turned onto fantasy with Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, especially the Heaven Cent trilogy, and I know I read Howl’s Moving Castle until the glue on
the spine flaked away (oh, how I wanted to be Howl!)
I love stories where the protagonists are
also “from” the world they are in, but are thrust into a situation that is new,
terrifying, and leaves them unstable. I loved Jennifer Robson’s Chronicles of the Cheysuli. I love Naomi
Novak’s Temeraire books now, and Anne
Rice’s Lestat will always have a place in my heart for being a bit of a bumbler
in those first books, and I could die happy if I got cast as Constance Ledbelly
in Anne-Marie MacDonald’s Good Night
Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet).
Of course my tastes matured as I did, but
that one hook never quite got out of my skin. Tell me the film/comic/book has a
fish-out-of-water character and I will throw my wallet at it.
Which means, unsurprisingly, that when it
came to academic work, I focused on the ultimate fish-out-of-water: the Mary Sue. (Read more about this fanfiction
literary trope here.)
I became enamoured, and eventually went on to write my Master’s thesis on the
topic. But before I did that, I wrote a lot of Mary Sue fanfiction – I wanted
to get the feel for the response it got online, the way people reacted to it,
and study the kind of feelings I had when I was writing and reading it.
One of the exercises I set myself was to
write an original Mary Sue. I
eventually did find a way to do it (and it will come out in June 2012 as The Dark Side of the Glass, from Double
Dragon Publishing), but my first attempt was a novella called (Back), and I failed. It wasn’t a very
successful Mary Sue and was struck from my bibliography for my thesis. But the
story itself was well received when I sent it to my beta readers, so I went on
to sell it to a publisher.
I tell you all this so you know where I’m
coming from when I start to talk about the choices I made when I wrote Triptych.
Originally, (Back) was supposed to be a fish-out-of-water story about a Mother named
Evvie and Daughter named Gwen who meet each other, via a time travel McGuffin, when
they’re both 26 years old. The conflict was supposed to arise from the fact
that Gwen had grown up to be a soldier, and a bit cold, and was dating Basil, a total geek-everyman that her mother
saw as a loser. Her mother wanted her to be stereotypically girly, fall for a
cowboy, be a nurse, raise some kids, all that stuff. The story was supposed to
be about gender performance and the way that different generations have
different milestones to define a “successful” life. And the first few drafts
were. It still is, in a way.
There was also mention of some aliens along
with my time travel MacGuffin, but mostly because I thought that the
time-travel technology can’t have come from humanity, not if Gwen was meant to
have grown up in the 2020s; I didn’t think we’d be advanced enough by then. I
needed some way for the technology to exist. It was a toss away line – something
about Gwen’s alien coworker and teammate accidentally triggering the device.
That was my “oops” moment. Not so much
“Eureka!” as, “What’s this mould growing on my specimens? Crap! Are they ruined
now?”
I owe a lot of what Triptych is to the beta reader on (Back), Liz Aitken. Like me, she had aspirations to be a writer at
the time, and also like me, she was working towards professional publication;
we were both teaching English in Japan and with some other local foreigners, we
had an ad hoc writer’s circle that helped one another with our editing. (I’ve
since lost touch with Liz, and I wish I hadn’t – Liz, if you’re reading this,
email me! Did you get published? I hope so!)
Liz read (Back), but she also read between the lines. She handed me the
manuscript back and said, “Are Gwen and her boyfriend Basil sleeping with the
alien coworker?”
I spluttered. “What? What? No! Gwen and
Basil are not sleeping with… him,
her, it! I don’t know! No!”
“Oh,” she said. “Because right here, it
sure sounds like it.”
She pointed to a paragraph, and I read it
through her eyes. “Damn,” I said. “I… think they were sleeping with the alien.
I’ll fix that. I’ll--”
“Make it clearer,” Liz said, at the same
time I blurted, “Take it out.”
I blinked owlishly at her. “You want me to
leave it in?”
“Yeah. Think of how you can use that. I
mean, if Gwen’s mother hates her now, just
wait until she realizes that her daughter is in a polygamous relationship with
an alien.”
I knew next to nothing about polyamoury and
polygamy at the time, except for the dreadful things I kept hearing in the news
about the child-brides and wife-slaves rescued from religious compounds. I was understandably
wary. Absolutely nothing about the concept appealed to me.
Thank god for the internet, eh?
I spent a long time researching loving,
healthy poly-relationships and communities, talked to some poly folks, and
actually got quite into the concept myself. I learned that some of my friends were
poly, and I hadn’t known. I read a bunch of webcomics and stories about it. The
more I researched, the more it appealed as a story line – and then, because I
am an academic at heart, I also started researching the social contracts and
mores of monogamy, homosexuality in other species besides humans, and family-groups
in animals. My eyes were opened and my mind blown! Hey, Earth was filled with poly relationships worth
celebrating!
(It came out after Triptych, but one of the best books on this topic I have ever read
is Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan,
PhD and Cacilda Jethá, MD.)
Right, okay – so. I had decided to jump in
and make Gwen, Basil and the unnamed alien a family. And I needed to figure out
how to build the biology of my aliens.
A lot of discussion in the texts I read
talked about humans as binary creatures – symmetrical bodies, two sexes, two
genders, etc. Some of it was B.S. of course – human beings only have two sexes
and two genders? Ppffffft – but some of the biological stuff was solid. A
psychology report I read talked about why we anthropomorphise other creatures,
how we read each other’s body language and facial expressions, basically, how
we communicate with our bodies. Humans trust things that are human-shaped. It’s
a deep seated evolutionary thing-a-ma-bob, which is why a lot of “bad guy” aliens
in films are scary insectoid things, because that’s as non-human-shaped as you
can get. I turned to the aliens of my childhood for reference – who did I
trust? And why? – and hit upon the Playmobil alien and astronaut set I had as a
kid. The Aliens and the Astronauts could hug.
So, two arms, two legs, forward facing eyes
– so, biologically, probably created offspring in a binary, too.
So I came to the conclusion that if it
wasn’t biological, then I had to make the threesome aspect a social construct
rather than a biological one, much like our own two-some-ness is a social
construct. There needed to be a cultural precedent. I came up with a myth-cycle
for the aliens called The Deeds of Vren (sort of a mishmash of Odin’s
wanderings, the life of Christ, and a lot of the Indian and Japanese myths
about where and how rules were handed down from the gods to humanity), and made
that the basis of the social rules of the alien’s world.
Of course, none
of that made it into (Back)! The
story was way too short to allow for it, and had to remain focused on Gwen and
her relationship with her mother. But I was able to flesh out the backstory
better, give the alien more life. After the novella was published, I got a lot of feedback from readers about how
they wanted more of the unnamed alien, his culture, his relationship with Gwen
and Basil. I got a lot of emails saying, “What happens next?!”
I thought about
this, let it percolate, and then somehow one day I had decided that I was going
to write this as a novel. (Back)
became the first third of the book, and book eventually became known as Triptych (after several disastrous titles I won’t share). But I
didn’t know what to do with all the bits I had, all the research and the scenes
and the vague plot arcs. I wanted to do something domestic, something lovely
and sad about Gwen and Basil and the alien – his name was now Kalp – and their
relationship. I didn’t want to do action or lasers or space opera. I wanted to
write about love, and what happens when people just don’t understand or give
others the freedom to love where they’d like. That is, I wanted to write a love
story for people like I had been – people who only knew the bad stuff about
poly relationships, and none of the good. Only I didn’t know where to start.
Liz to the rescue
again! She handed me two pages of writing one day and said, “I hope you don’t
mind, but I was messing about and, um, I wrote this. As an exercise. To see if
I could, you know.”
It was amazing.
It was brilliant. It was Kalp, poor distraught Kalp, on his way to meet his new
team on Earth for the first time, being utterly fish-out-of-water. I was, of course, hooked. Liz’s voice is very
different from mine on the page, so when I read what she’d done I couldn’t
believe how alien Kalp sounded to me.
It was perfect.
“Can I have
this?” I blurted. “I mean, can I use this? Can I write Kalp like this, is it
okay?”
Liz gave me
permission to subsume those two pages into the novel, and Kalp’s voice and
personality were born. Very little of that original writing remains in Triptych. It has been edited away, the
tenses changed and the sentences scrambled, but the kernel of it remains in
Kalp.
Now that I knew
what Kalp sounded like, I was able to flex my wings, get into the nitty gritty
of the world building, of the mythology and social hierarchy of Kalp’s people.
There are , god, hundreds of pages worth of stuff
that’s not in the book – art and culture, sports and architecture, so much I wanted
to write about in the story, but had to leave out because the story was about
Kalp’s culture shock and his desperate need for comfort, not a text book about
the history of his society.
I had to make a
lot of tough choices, too. I had to choose -
was I writing a story or a manifesto? I had to temper a lot of my innate
essay-writing drive, had to get off my soapbox and remember that I was telling
a story, not giving a lecture. As a result, there are some aspects that are
weaker on than others – I wish Kalp wasn’t quite so male, and I wish that I’d had a chance to talk up the problematics
of his own society a bit more, but then I had to remember that Kalp is just
desperate to fit in, so he would act as male as possible, and he would
nostalgia-wash his own life up until then, he would desperately cling to the
good on Earth and try to ignore the bad. For example, a local Earth farmer has
tried to go produce from his world – Kalp notes that some of it was an utter
failure, tough and wrinkled and colourless, but chooses to latch onto the fruit
and veg that flourished on Earth. That’s just his personality.
I didn’t want to
assign a gendered pronoun to Kalp at first, but a beta reader pointed out that
it was fatiguing to read Kalp’s name all the time, so I had to sacrifice that
to the story. At least I got to turn it into a bit of a plot point!
So, that’s how I built Kalp and his world,
and created the kind of fish-out-of-water story that I hope will inspire the
next generation of writers, the way that the others inspired me. Gwen is out of
time, Kalp is lost in the wrong culture, and Basil is a geek among jocks; and
yet, somehow, for just a brief moment, they find one another and everything is
perfect, and they are exactly where they should be.
Where to buy?
Kindle edition at $2.99 here.
Trade paperback at Amazon.com here
If you'd rather buy from a real bookstore, try Powell's here
Or order it from your friendly nearby bookstore; here's the ISBN: 978-1897492130
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