Molly Ringle

My lovely and delightful author friend Melissa McTernan was one of my early readers for Ballad for Jasmine Town, and said recently that she found herself still occasionally thinking about the book, months later. Which to me is such a high compliment! And it has led me to ponder: what is it that makes a story, be it book or show or film, stick in our heads longer than usual?

Plenty of shows or books are perfectly engaging while we’re watching/reading them, but after we’re done, they drop straight out of our consciousness. We barely give them another thought.

Then there are those we can’t stop thinking about. What is it about those? What qualities make them that way?

I have more pondering to do on this, but I have a preliminary theory. These “sticky” stories are ones in which things don’t turn out entirely perfectly.

The ending might be satisfying on the whole, but there are elements that hang around to haunt us, because what happened to some characters was incredibly unfair, even tragic, and there’s no fixing it. (Except of course with fix-it fic!) Problems we want to fix, but cannot, are much likelier to linger in our heads than problems that got neatly tied off and resolved.

Ballad for Jasmine Town has more of those tragic elements than many of my books do. Without giving spoilers, there are some huge unhappy things that befall a whole lot of characters, and even with (okay, minor spoiler) restored peace as the ending mood, those events cannot be undone.

As a fandom-loving person, one of my favorite sites at which to go down rabbit holes (that saying itself being a fandom reference, of course) is TVTropes.org. Despite its name, it does not confine itself to TV shows, but encompasses all of popular culture: video games, literature, music, theatre, anime, you name it. It has accurate and often amusing names for the over 30,000 (!) tropes listed on the site, and it cross-references each one with the books, shows, etc., that contain examples of the trope. It is fantastic fun, and I can easily lose an hour there anytime.

(A quick sidenote before we continue: Tropes are not a bad thing. You’re thinking of clichés. Those are to be avoided. Tropes, however, are storytelling conventions. As TV Tropes puts it, “tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. It's pretty much impossible to create a story without tropes.”)

Today I was browsing the site for examples of the tropes in my own books, and found a good basic one on The Fair Folk.

As usual, TV Tropes knows what's up! Their entry is spot-on for what I have learned in reading about the fae, and is more or less what I show in the Eidolonia books (Lava Red Feather Blue, and the upcoming Ballad for Jasmine Town), as well as The Goblins of Bellwater, which isn't set in Eidolonia but has a similar system.

Excerpt from TV Tropes:

To me, Pride is important, and queer people of all types are important all year, because they make ALL of us think about traditional gender roles and sexuality norms and whether our cultures really need to be the way they are. Those are issues that too often go unquestioned.

(My undergrad degree was in cultural anthropology, so I can assure you that human cultures display LOTS of variation on these topics, and thus the answer is: nope, no culture has to be the way it is. There are countless alternate paths for gender and sexuality, if you look at all the world's humans and get your own biases out of the way.)

The questioning can be uncomfortable. It can rattle people. But the questioning and the understanding are ultimately going to do far more good than the sticking to "tradition."

I think part of the reason I've always been drawn to gender and sexuality topics is that I, too, have always felt like I did not quite fit into what a girl or woman was "supposed" to be, or "supposed" to want. My coming of age, and maturing, and figuring out I was demisexual and probably at least a little bi, involved nowhere near the courage nor the trauma of the coming-out of many of my queer friends. And really, it's thanks to them that I even learned this much about myself in the first place. So in my view, they absolutely deserve a month per year in the spotlight, though ideally they should get a lot longer than that.

It recently occurred to me that Howl’s Moving Castle is kind of another retelling of Jane Eyre. No wonder I love it.

HMC is of course in the fantasy genre and is more whimsical, not gothic and set in the real world like Jane Eyre or other novels that also retell it (e.g., Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, or Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden—both of which I also love). Nonetheless, consider the similarities:

· Young woman, largely unappreciated and downtrodden throughout her childhood, sets out on her own and acquires employment and lodging in a large, gloomy, isolated castle/manor owned by a mysterious but alluring man

· She soon makes friends with the man as well as a youngster who lives there (Howl’s apprentice, Markl; Rochester’s ward, Adèle)

· The guy definitely has some complicated secrets

· One of the house’s other denizens, who is fire-themed, is central to the man’s complicated secret (Calcifer the fire demon/shooting star; Bertha with her tendencies toward arson)

· There are themes of disguise and transformation (various HMC characters are under appearance-altering spells; Rochester pulls off an “old gypsy fortune teller” disguise, among his other deceptions)

· Both stories employ many juxtapositions of the eerie, dark, architectural/technological interior of the manor/castle against the peaceful, lovely natural landscape it sits in

The other day my younger sister mentioned Phantom of the Opera and how chaotic it is, plotwise. This led me to write a very quick parody in the style of a Reddit AITA post. Enjoy. :)

#AITA

I’m a music tutor (53M) and a guard of sorts at the opera house, and have been seeing a singer there (23F). She started out as a student of mine, then gradually we fell in love. We’ve had some issues at work that keep coming between us, though. I killed one of her coworkers by hanging him from the stage rigging (he sucked; ask anyone; it was no loss). And another time I dropped a chandelier on the audience, but by doing so I was making a statement about neglected compensation that I’m owed, and I must point out that it did get the management’s attention, so it worked. Anyway, I’ve heard (via listening through the walls—I have a network of secret tunnels) a lot of people saying I’m a monster and my gf shouldn’t be with me. Oh, also, forgot to add: there was one time I put a noose around her fiance’s neck and threatened to kill him if she didn’t choose me. But this is the theatre; we’re dramatic folk. Besides, all relationships have their bumps, right? AITA for just wanting her to come down to keep me company in my home on the subterranean lake under the opera house, and for everybody to just let me kill people I don’t like without getting on my case about it?

I was just talking with a writer friend about the difficulties of wrangling all the threads of a big novel, in its early stages—something we both have plenty of familiarity with. It got me looking back at my notes for Lava Red Feather Blue, which I struggled with for the first several months of trying to write it. And this note was the turning point:

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Aug. 13, 2017

Here’s my moody trouble today and why I think I’m feeling like this isn’t as much fun as I hope: I’m giving too much thought to what people will like (tons of magic and action, nothing whatsoever to eye-roll about anywhere at all), and not enough to what I actually want to write. So what is it I want to write? Romance between these two guys. With a backdrop of this really cool magical island.

So while, yes, I need to figure out what this island’s fae-related setup is, I also need to keep my focus and the story’s heart on what I keep being most moved by: the potential of Merrick and Larkin’s relationship.

I think today I’ll get out the romance plot outline I downloaded from somewhere and try to lay out the story’s main plot points based on that. Then overlay them on the subplots of magic and setting.

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I've gone back to this post and added the following paragraph to the beginning. I'm posting it by itself here in the hopes that it sets the record straight and reaches more readers. Thank you keeping me honest and humble out there, truly.

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Just to clarify, All the Better Part of Me, the novel mentioned below about the 25-year-old bi man, is a coming-out story, but it is probably the only one I will ever write. I have since moved on to the more hopeful scenario: LGBTQIA+ characters getting to have adventures alongside the straight and/or cis characters without sexuality or gender identity being an issue—the worlds we see, for example, in Lava Red Feather Blue and Sage and King. This is the way things should be, the status quo we can aspire to. I hope books showcasing diversity, no matter who writes them, can help open up mindsets so we can get to such a world. I owe great thanks to the many people who have given feedback on my stories and thereby guided me to this decision. You're helping me learn, and I never want to stop learning, even when the process is humbling.

I just watched the new Lady Chatterley's Lover on Netflix. I wasn't expecting much, since adapting this book tastefully is always tricky, but I actually loved it. Yes, there's nudity and sex aplenty—that's an integral part of the story's territory—but to me it felt natural, lush, and highly romantic. In fact, I'd guess that the most valid accusation about it is that it's more romantic than the novel, which has a darker and more grim feel. (Find me a book set in coal-mining lands that does NOT have a grim feel.) But I'll take the more romantic interpretation any day, because that's how I swing.

I attribute the lovely and emotionally alive feel of this film to the fact that it had a female director, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, and the female gaze she brings to it. What do women want? Besides occasional escapes to the secluded forest cottage in the rain to tup the gruff but tenderhearted and book-reading gamekeeper, we want thriving green scenery, atmospheric country houses with cool vintage furnishings, beautiful frocks (to discard on the forest floor as we please), and intelligent conversation in which we are heard and respected for our choices. And that's what this director serves us lavishly in this adaptation.

Fab job to all involved. (Especial kudos to Emma Corrin and Jack O'Connell for the incredible bravery of all that nudity and intimacy.)

One screenshot censored just to keep myself out of internet jail.

Today, on a whim, I leafed through some of my high school journals. And this bit kicked me in the gut. I was writing about my boyfriend:

"I even began talking to him about breaking up. Needless to say, this upset him so much that I was knocked back into my senses. Especially the way he pointed out that there was no one else who would take me."

Oh 15-year-old Molly. I want to go back and hug you and tell you he is SO WRONG and that that was, furthermore, a horrible, false, cruel thing for him to say, and also, whether or not a new person will immediately "take you" upon a breakup with someone is not important. I know it seemed important at the time, especially given how shy and picked-on you were in middle school (a scant few years earlier), but you matter whether or not you're dating someone.

I even can be generous enough to say, from reading more of these entries, that I feel sorry for my (really honestly not very good) ex-boyfriend too, because it's clear from what I wrote that his parents and grandparents were cold and strict with him, and that he was super insecure.

Anyway! We don't have to worry about 15-year-old me too much, because, as amply described in said journals, I promptly set out to test his theory by flirting with at least a dozen other people over my remaining years of high school and finding quite easily that YEAH, many were interested. So there.

First, a quick piece of writing news: I recently finished the first draft of Ballad for Jasmine Town, my next book! It takes place on Eidolonia, the island of fae and witches where Lava Red Feather Blue is set, but you won't need to have read Lava Red Feather Blue to understand it. Each book can be read as a standalone. The manuscript is currently incubating undisturbed for a month or so before I open it up again for revisions, but I will of course have more to tell you about it in the future.

Meanwhile: we are almost to my favorite holiday, Halloween! In my opinion the US needs more holidays where we wear costumes, roam the streets at night, and exchange chocolate free of charge. Not to mention all the spooky movies and books we treat ourselves to this time of year.

This got me thinking that I should rank the top five most Halloween-suitable books among my own writing. Here is what I came up with, and I admit I am perhaps cheating since one of them is a three-book series:

5. Sage and King – Only scary if you have a phobia about spells that turn you or your body parts into plants. Assassin magicians can be mean that way. Overall mood is fluffy and steamy, though.

4. Lava Red Feather Blue – Not too scary on the whole, except for one scene involving a dark passage through a fae-realm forest of birch trees whose purpose in life is to terrify and/or kill anyone who enters.

3. The Persephone’s Orchard series – It is about the gods of the dead, after all, and there are some cruel murders and a dash of human sacrifice. (The Bronze Age; these things happen.) But said gods are basically lovely people in my version.

2. The Ghost Downstairs – This one has several traditional creepy haunted house moments, which I personally think are some of the spookiest scenes I’ve written. But it’s also essentially sweet and romantic throughout in terms of mood.

1. The Goblins of Bellwater – To me this novel isn’t truly scary, but I would say it’s my eeriest and most unsettling book, so moodwise it’s probably the best Halloween fit.

As for films, we have so far dusted off two old favorites for weekend movie nights, both of them comedy monster movies: Tremors and Young Frankenstein. Truly delightful!

Do you have any favorite reading or viewing for Halloween season? I want to hear about your costume too!

Be well and pace yourself on the candy.