The Desert Mermaid

A few years ago I wrote a winter fairy tale for my constructed world. I think it's pretty good. What do y'all think?

Been thinking lately about changing up the identity of my Global Friends doll, María.


Pictured: María

See, while her personality's always been pretty set, (I mean, lookit that cute face! It's easy to see her personality!) finding a good background for her has been somewhat more difficult. I've settled for a while on Belizean, but it never really got me motiviated enough to flesh out her background.

And then, completely out of nowhere I realized that one of my offshoot OGYAFEland* stories basically had her in it and I hadn't noticed. Replete with big sister (more on her some other time) and storyline and culture and everything.

It's kind of awesome.

Only problem is that I kinda feel bad switching her around so much. I catch myself wondering if that gets confusing for a doll, or if they just roll with it. I suppose it's really a question of whether the owner of the doll finds it confusing, but you know what I mean.

Anyway. I'm sort of excited to have an OGYAFEland doll to play with, so I think that will be the plan. She's going to have pretty much the same personality, too, so that will make things pretty simple.


*OGYAFE = Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic.

Hey guys! Got a worldbuilding question for you.

So while the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic languishes in despair of finding an agent, it's mostly ready to be looked at--probably it could use an editor to point out things I've missed, but I've got it pretty polished. But I can't resist making a few tweaks while I wait, and there's one tweak that isn't so important for the actual book, but for the world.

The OGYAFE is portal fiction because, hey, I like portal fiction, but I'm trying to make OGYAFEland as independent as possible anyway. I want there to be a balance between their world and ours--some things are better there, others here. This extends to people, cultures, technology, and ecology and geography and so forth.

But one thing that's pretty darn fun about OGYAFEland is the dragons.

I really like the idea of dragons as a biological clade--not just a species. Not even a few varieties of intelligent creatures, like in the Dragonology books or similar pretend field guides. I'm thinking of them as but a whole dang taxonomic group distinct from reptiles, birds, and mammals--and with as much diversity, because dragons have been speciating just like all the other animals have. In OGYAFEland, dragons (with the exception of one notable species) are as commonplace, and as varied, as birds.

Which got me wondering.

Should OGYAFEland even HAVE birds?

I admit to going back and forth on this. It wouldn't take much to change it around in the story--a couple of place names would have to be changed, and one character's feathers (don't ask) would have to be specified to look like "dragonfeathers" (a modified scale that many dragon species have evolved--which is more or less how feathers work anyway), but that shouldn't be hard. And I like that our world would then have a biological clade completely foreign to OGYAFEland. Plus, while I'm not going for a one-to-one correlation between bird and dragon species, it's really fun to have them fill similar ecological niches that have the displaced characters from our world trying to make analogies and referring to "chickendragons" and "hawkdragons" and "hummingdragons" and "penguindragons."

But ... to be honest, I'd sort of miss birds.

I guess the whole idea is to have something be better in our world. But I wanted some other input. What do you guys think?

I mentioned before that I wanted the OGYAFE to have Untrue Religions, because as far as I'm concerned that's how religions are in our world work. What I didn't expect was how much fun I'd be having.

Here in The Real World, I have to admit that carrying on about nonsense like ghosts and spirits and psychics and astral planing and horoscoping drives me NUTS. "You know that's bullshit, right?" is the only thing I can think of to say. And I don't actually say it; it's just all I can think of to say, so instead I just stay quiet and then later go slam my head against something.

And yet here in this world I have characters who are totally, and rather hilariously casually, invested in astrology and animism and superstition,* which has about as much basis in the reality of their world as it does in ours, and I am having a BLAST. The setting is sorta-kinda mid-20th-Century in terms of technology, so you get people who are earnestly arguing about what a site's spirits will think of a new skyscraper being built on their turf, or including demon appeasement intheir car maintenance routines, or considering the most auspicious position of the stars when closing business deals, or--well, the entire tangential story I've got loudly playing in my head right now is based on a controversy about modernizing and exploiting spirits--and I love it. Here in our hospital a chapel strikes me as silly; in their world I LOVE that there's a little spirit shrine in every room.

... Then again, I do think they are being silly in the other world; I am just more tolerant of it. And I am fascinated with silly beliefs in both worlds, but around here it's more train-wreckish. Maybe I don't mind so much in OGYAFEland because they're fictional, and thus no real people get hurt when they believe in nonsense. Or maybe I should take a lesson from my own response to my characters, and try to treat real people who carry on about bullshit with more enjoyment than annoyance.

But it is still bullshit.


*But not, they will stress, in gods. That would be ridiculous.

I keep trying to write up a commentary about one of the most interesting fantasy tropes: the Religion Is True trope. Mostly because I've been fleshing out some of the mythological beliefs of OGYAFElanders,* although it's also because I just read Tamora Pierce's Battle Magic and realized that I've been ... slightly disappointed with the direction the Circleverse has been going in for the last couple of books (this one and Melting Stones) on account of this specific trope.

I always liked the Circleverse because the religion, while a central part of the story, was not indisputably, unambiguously true. You had the temple dedicates praying to and swearing by and honoring the gods, but unlike, say, Tortall or Lord of the Rings or David Eddings' books or the Young Wizards or even goddamn Zelda,** in this world they don't do it because the gods regularly drop by the local waffle house for a short stack or leave helpful voicemails for the heroes or bequeath Our Heroes with Mystical Crysticals. Hell, it's entirely possible that the Circle gods don't even exist, and it's just humans ascribing random occurrences to them.

Y'know, like this world.

And don't get me wrong. I fuckin' like all the Religion Is True examples I listed up there. You can tell some great stories with a premise like that. Hell, I'm even working on a Scatterstone installment featuring some True Animism. But even then, making folklore True actually removes an important aspect from the people in your story: their unbridled creativity.

Now, y'all may know I'm an atheist. I grew up an atheist. My big adolescent revelation wasn't so much that I was an atheist as it was the realization that other people weren't. And while that did lead to a good bit of WTFing on my part--wait, you all BELIEVE this?!--and I do think there is a lot of harm to be gotten out of religion, I also think that religious mythology is fascinating. You can learn a lot about people by the myths they come up with. The stories teach important ideals. You can see the way the mind works in magical thinking, anthropomorphism, spiritism, and just-so explanations. And of course, they're really damn inventive. It takes a lot more cognition to make up a story than to report it.***

I don't think I'm the only one who finds this a bit of a gap. Terry Pratchett (of course) explores it a lot. Discworld's got a sort of symbiotic nature of folklore and humanity--like in Hogfather or Small Gods, where the fairies and gods and Anthropomorphic Personifications are real and concrete, but were born of and fueled by collective human imagination. And even Tortall suggests that the Immortals have a similar backstory, though it seems once they're dreamed up they become independent of humans. But those all still have concrete representations of those concepts. The Circle books were the first time it felt like it really was like our world, where it really was all abstract.

And that was the model I used for OGYAFEland, where there are a bunch of different religions/folklores/mythos ... es ... that are not objectively True, but that influence the thoughts and actions of the humans. It looks like how I see the world. And while it's cool for Pierce to change that around, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was a little disappointed when the Circle Religions started to leak into reality.


*And I just recently had a FABULOUS idea for a short story set in OGYAFEland, god DAMMIT who turned on the Inspiration Fire Hose?

**Or even His Dark Materials--weird, if you've read the book, but while the point is that religion is a construction, it's still not a human construction: angels are a Thing, and they are Messing With Us.

***When I was a kid, it frustrated the hell out of me that everyone was trying to figure out what might have inspired fantastical artworks. "Where could the idea of mermaids come from? Could it have been sailors seeing manatees?" I couldn't figure out why it never crossed their minds that maybe somebody just thought it'd be cool to give a human woman a fish tail. Yes, I know people had frames of reference to work with, but hell, they had fish and women. All it takes is one weirdo with a bit of abstract thinking.

So Discovery aired a kind of sequel to Mermaids: The Body Found last week, and just like when the first one came out last year, and with that dragon one some years back, it raises an important and intriguing question:

Dude, am I the only one who thought it was just a really fun sci-fi mockumentary?

The only opinions I've really seen are "OMG I'M CONVINCED MERMAIDS R TOTALLY REAL AND THE GOVERNMENT IS COVERING IT UP" and "TRICKERY! This is naught but a HOAX you fools! It is trashy TV to ensnare unwary minds!" It's like for this particular series people forget that speculative fiction is a thing. Admittedly the documentary format is more prone to being misunderstood than your standard SyFy Original or blockbuster,* but c'mon. They are not trying to tell us The Truth, or to confuse the masses with falsehood. They are being creative and playing with science and story.

Anyway, I was kind of disappointed with the follow-up. I really liked the first one--I'm a total sucker for grain-of-science mockumentaries like that. And given that my school biology notes were covered with speculative attempts to design biologically viable, evolutionarily plausible mammalian mermaids (who are going to show up in OGYAFE 2: Electric Boogaloo), or fungal Mushroom People (y'know, the Super Mario ones), or plant-based fairies (like, say, Terwu'arie from Scatterstone), I would say that shouldn't be a surprise. I love making up critters. Hell, the game Spore was just an extension of what I've been doing all along. Only I do it more thoroughly.

But I am also a sucker for speculative anthropology.** So while the ~*~mysteeeerious mystery*~* of cryptozoology was fun, and I do rather enjoy creepy "found" footage, I would have preferred more of a staight-up metafictional study of their evolution and culture. As long as this IS fiction, I do wish they'd carry the story further. Public discovery, contact, language, all that shit that people think doesn't work as entertainment--I would watch the HELL out of that. ("Since making contact with the merfolk, Dr. Dirk Squarejaw has been living on his boat in the open ocean, studying their lifestyle. He filmed the whole thing. Here are some of the highlights." I WOULD WATCH THAT. I might even skip watching 7 Or 8 Assholes And Mister Rogers, if the two shows were in the same time slot. God, TV is so much cooler in my head.)

... Actually, come to think of it, that was pretty much my wish for Avatar, too. But you knew that.


RANDOM POINTLESS COMPLAINT: It kind of annoys me that they kept referring to the entire species as "mermaids." I hereby propose we come up with a good sex-unspecific term for merpeople that isn't as cumbersome as, y'know, "merpeople."


*Their big mistake was tossing in the Government Coverup. If you're a conspiracy theorist, any debunking of that is only further proof that the debunker is PART OF THE CONSPIRACY. There is no way to argue with the claim that "they had to present it as fiction because otherwise the government/Illuminati/lizard people would have completely crushed it."

**Or anthropoidology, I guess.

Nothing like watching all the appendix bullshit on the Lord of the Rings DVDs to get one motivated to do some worldbuilding. When Richard Taylor's declaiming* about the backgrounds of different varieties of Orc helmets, or how they tried to advance armor to make it look like things changed over centuries, you can't help but want to put more detail into your own world's culture and customs. Quite useful to have on as background noise, really.

Why yes I AM on a Tolkien kick lately; thanks for noticing!


*As far as I can tell, Sir Richard Taylor, KNZM, has "declaim" as his ONLY setting. Everything he says sounds like he's practicing a dramatic reading of some epic medieval saga.

I may not be able to argue with Christopher Tolkien, but I have to say I agree far more with this article about The Hobbit--especially since my recent curiosity about Tolkien's languages has led to another attempt to read The Silmarillion.*

I'll add, though, that one of the best things about the movies is the pure JOY with which they take you on a tour of Middle-Earth. I suppose Radagast the Brown could have been edited out, Saruman needn't really have made an appearance, the plate-juggling didn't have to be there, and the Stone Giants were over the top. But before you dismiss them as useless nods to bookish Tolkien nerds, I want you to remember James Cameron's Avatar.

My response to Avatar could best be described as an intense, burning indifference. Before it came out the producers made much of the fact that it was a carefully constructed other world, with its own ecosystem and language and culture. And yet, when you saw the movie, you realized that the glowing world of Pandora lacked personality. Three hours went by and at the end of it I somehow cared less about everyone involved. I was vaguely familiar with maybe two Na'vi (Neytiri and Tsu'tey), but I couldn't conceive of what Neytiri did when she WASN'T shepherding Jake The Dumbass around. I didn't know whether there were favorite swimming holes. I didn't know who made Neytiri's formal necklace. I didn't find out what other villagers did with their time. I didn't even know any other Na'vi names, in a movie that was purportedly meant to showcase their world.** Nobody told off-color jokes that didn't translate, nobody had a favorite fruit, nobody played an instrument, nobody secretly saved Grace's giant copy of The Lorax because it was fascinatingly alien. They were just a mass of Na'vi.***

And they hardly dwell on the world. The great wonders are passed by in favor of dragging the dull plot along. "Oh, yeah, we've got hammerheaded peacock rhinoceroses. Meh. Let's have another heavy-handed argument with the speciesist CEO!"

Now remember the delight with which Radagast shows off his rabbits, or Bilbo sits down to a nice little bathrobe dinner, or the weird little minion of the Goblin King goes zip-stringing off the scaffolding. The movie is really proud of itself and completely in love with its source material, and it wants you to share that joy. And that doesn't just mean sweeping panoramas, but also the minute details. And since even Peter Jackson can't cram every wonderful thing into a movie, the details that do show up have to suggest that this world is going on even when you aren't looking at it. The Hobbit does that. Avatar not so much.

That, I think, is what a lot of people are missing. And yet it's the delight of stories (hell, that's the whole point of our own Torn World--to showcase both a big world AND the wonderful little people living day-to-day in it). So if you ever feel tempted to gripe about those Stone Giants, just remember that they'd have improved the hell out of Avatar.


*I tried to read it in high school, but quickly discovered that Tolkiens Sr. and Jr. have all the abilities of a history textbook writer and more when it comes to making totally goddamn badass tales staggeringly boring. If my brain goes numb while reading about a battle with a giant spider, you need to spiff up your storytelling.

**There's a moment in the film when Jake has had his vision quest or something--not actually shown--and has Become One Of The Tribe, when Neytiri points out that he can now "choose a woman." She then lists a couple of women in the tribe--Jane is the best singer, Sharon sure knows how to kill the everloving shit out of a deer--while obviously hoping Jake will pick her. What was supposed to be a cute, romantic moment in the film was completely lost on me while I grappled with the idea that Jake even KNEW any other women in the tribe. BECAUSE I SURE DIDN'T.

***Na'vi language creator Paul Frommer seems to be battling this anonymity single-handedly, or at least few-handedly with the help of a small but dedicated squad of hardcore Na'vi learners. His blog is a lot more fun than the movie, and the sample sentences tell you a lot more about Na'vi life, as well!

You all will be happy to hear that I now know the correct pronunciation of Daja's name. All these years I've been using an affricate for the j, and it turns out it's a straight fricative.* ALL THIS TIME I'VE BEEN LIVING A LIE.

---

This revelation comes straight from a seemingly rather jet-lagged Tamora Pierce, who was the guest of honor at CONduit, Salt Lake City's slightly pathetic attempt at a big geek con. Normally I stay the hell away from cons, because I never have been able to grasp the fine art of milling around and am baffled by the format of panels.** But this was Tamora Pierce, so I put up with the milling so's I could ATTACH MYSELF TO HER LEG AND ASK IF SHE'D READ MY MANUSCRIPT urbanely say hello, show off Daja, ask a few writing questions, and listen to some panels. I even managed not to be the most obnoxious person at those panels! Good for me!

---

So for years I've had this big ball of hemp twine sitting in my desk drawer next to a whole bunch of little rubber bouncy balls, for reasons unexplained. Finally I figured I might as well use them and did the only logical thing I could: learned how to braid a shepherd's sling. Now we'll see who's man enough to try stealing my radishes.***

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Been trying to create some more folktales for OGYAFEland. At the moment I'm working on their version of Santa Claus, because it's never too soon to start Christmas. It's been fun coming up with an origin story for him with folk elements, cultural assumptions, and of course bears. Everything's better with bears.

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My sister, the incomparable sunshine_shaman, has been posting a whole bunch of photos of her Euroventures. I must be hungry, because my favorite one at the moment is a photo of a bunch of cupcakes. You can't eat Notre Dame, after all.

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I have discovered that the most irritating thing about trying to get an agent isn't rejections. Everyone always tries to make me feel better when I get rejected, but I just think, "Oh, well, onto the next one!"

No, the obnoxious thing is just waiting for an answer. Rejections are responses. But no response? That way lies Dorothy Parkerian madness.


*For those of you who care, that means it sounds like the French j, or the s in vision.

**When I'm interested in a panel, I tend to just start conversing with the panelists like I'm one of them. I don't know how to help it. I had the same problem with interesting classes.

***Perhaps I could also do something about those goddamn barking dogs all over the neighborhood. Like, hypothetically, clocking their idiot owners upside the head with a rubber ball whenever the poor mutts start yapping their fool heads off.

Trying to find a book on the history of astrology and its influences on the world, which isn’t hard to find. The tricky part is finding an author who doesn’t feel the need to constantly insist that astrology is TRUE DAMMIT. Bit surprising, really—I’d have expected it to be impartial, but the last author waxed strongly poetic about how empty astronomy is without astrology, and how astrology gives lives meaning and connects us to the greater universe in a tangible way, and other such bullshit.

Thing is, as an anthropology nerd, I find astrology fascinating. Not for its objective truth; one can be interested in urban legends, or religions, or fairy tales, without thinking they’re actual truths. No, I like to see what a complex mythology like that says about the people who made it up, and how a human-generated system influences how humans actually behave. It doesn’t matter if the position of Jupiter actually affects a person’s life*; what matters is that the person behaves as if it does.

I kinda wish I could find a book that sees the difference.

And yes, this is more research for writing. I’m trying to add some more mythology into the OGYAFE culture, and they just can’t get enough of their stars. If nothing else, it gives me some good place names to work with.


*It says you should spend the rest of the week face-down in the mud.