Wandering Fox
It
took some doing but the Queen of Air and Darkness located Wandering Fox
on Io and seized the chance to talk when Fox wandered away from Camp
PETA in search of something. While the Queen's sudden appearance startled
Wandering Fox a bit, it didn't take long for the two to find a spot along
the stream where they could settle in and talk.
Your home is very elegant in a very stark fashion. What drove your design choices?
I'm a minimalist at heart. Even with all the bells and whistles available through the new home decorating utility (which is quite fun to play with) I prefer to keep things simple and plain, some might even say stark. I've tried to do patterned backgrounds and tables, but nothing suits me quite so well as the solid blocks of color that I always seem to return to. What's currently up is a black on black design, Ivory Black over Lamp Black, with Navajo White text. I can't help but think that it's probably going to become permanent. And my home image is a photograph of the desert at night, lit by the full moon. Deserts are curiously beautiful places, I think, although I'd miss the trees too much ever to move to one.
In the Io Effect, you are a Native American "stranded" as it were among peoples of many different -- but to you -- unknown sorts. What is there about that situation that attracted you to write there?
I had created Fox a long time prior to the creation of the Io Effect as a novel, and due to some problems with the character herself and the options available, I wasn't able to effectively write her anywhere. Then the server crashed and when the site came back, there was Io. I figured that in a primitive landscape of that sort, a certain kind of person would have a better chance of survival than others would and so I "revived" Fox, rather than try to put one of my more modern characters into the story.
There is a LOT of history and culture in your posts (which make them wonderful to read by the way) which shows a great deal of reading and research goes into them. Would Wandering Fox be an anthropologist if she had the chance?
I think that she would, primarily because if I'd ever had the chance (or known that it was an option) I would have. The most interesting of all the many interesting things about people is the social constructs that they choose to surround themselves with. I read (and write) primarily fiction, but when I do read non-fiction, it's always archaeological...like right now...I'm reading a book about the ancient Maya and a book of Near Eastern myths and legends...Gilgamesh, to be exact.
You don't hold back on details of unpleasant things if the story needs them to be told such as the description of how your mother was killed in your "Why Fox Wandered" post. But your writing balances those details without making them -- as so many television shows and movies do nowadays to be violent or gory for its own sake. Is that a hard balance to strike when writing?
Why keep the unpleasant things out of writing? They are a part of life, and always will be, to blithely ignore them would be to do a disservice to life and truth itself. Whoever it was that first said "truth is beauty" was lying to himself...or at least only telling half the story, because truth is also very ugly. Look at what happened to the Suffragettes, to the Civil Rights Workers, to the anti-war activists at Kent State in the sixties. Those were not beautiful things, but they were true things, they did happen, however much we might have preferred that they hadn't. If I were writing a sharecropper from the thirties who got knocked in the head for signing up to vote and woke up in Io, if I ignored the fact that lynchings were a daily occurrence in some parts of the South, how could I do justice to the character or to the period of time that the character purported to be from? Life is not and never has been a fairy tale. But a recounting of such difficulties during a life doesn't neccessarily have to be told as a horror story either, there is absolutely no reason to go into grotesque detail, sensationalism has no place in literature. Simply tell what happened, your readers' imaginations can do the rest. It's always more successful to imply than it is to spell out, in erotica an implication is far more titillating, in horror it's far more scary and in science fiction it leaves more room for speculation on the part of your audience. Part of the problem with television and movies right now is that they are in "show-not-tell" mode, and showing gets boring. Because audiences are bored, they turn to something else, and in order to keep their viewers, the people behind the "entertainment" get more and more vulgar, showy and obscene in a futile attempt to engage the viewer. It's not particularly hard to make the determination between enough and too much...just remember that if you don't give your readers a little room to add any details of their own imagining to a given scene, most of them won't be your readers for long. Writing a scene that is too explicit as compared to one that is adequately presented is similar to the difference between the art styles of baroque and roccoco...one is way to much "decoration" for most people, the other is just enough.
I've asked this question of other folks and always gotten very interesting answers so I'll use it again: if you were creating a novel for Fox, what time and place would it be?
I don't really know...I don't think that I'd actually create an historical novel for Fox...maybe high fantasy, or just possibly science fiction. I've always wondered what Ortzi or Rameses or one of the ancient Incans or bog men might think of our modern world if we were able to take some of the cells from their mummies and clone living people. Of course...we'd somehow have to skip over the impossibility of actually cloning the content of their brains, their minds; but that's the "fiction" part of "science fiction" isn't it?
"You do, indeed, Fox. Too many people misunderstand that all too important difference between recreating a body and recreating a soul. Another way folks seek to cheat death without understanding the value of enjoying who they are now. I have truly enjoyed speaking with you but... (stops to listen) it would seem someone is calling you. Be well, Wandering Fox" and the Queen fades from sight as another from the camp comes into view.
