Bickering Blogfest!

Sooo, it turned out that I had fewer bickering scenes than I thought I did. At least fewer bickering scenes that didn't give away the entire farm, anyway. Thanks to Kristen for hosting this Bickering Blogfest of Awesome, and definitely go check out the other entries!

Set up: Mia and Jean hooked up at the wedding of Mia's sister to Jean's cousin, and in that controlled environment, they got along famously. Now, they are out in the real world of Paris, and it's a bit of a different story... I cut out the non-bickering middle. :)

[Excerpt removed]

I'm still on hiatus until July 16, and my comments for this blogfest might be a little bit slow, but I'll get there! I hope you enjoyed Mia's bickering :) And also I hope my French isn't too terrible.

An Award! Hooray!

Hello!

I'm going to have to be kind of unplugged and take the next couple weeks off of blogging. I know, I know-- it is going to be sad for me too! I will totally miss you guys. BUT I am going to be away for the next 12 days, and then I have some company coming from faraway lands. If I have time, or something big comes along, I'll post, but consider me scheduleless, and the posts to be bonus content until July 16th!

To sweeten the bitterness of my absence, I thought I'd build some goodwill by sharing an award!

Recently, I received the Fantasy and Sci Fi Blogger Award, from David J. West over at Nephite Blood, Spartan Heart. Thanks David! I'm kind of stoked about it, since I'm not sure there is another award of its ilk around. At least not that I know of. ANYWAY. It comes with rules! I must name five fantasy/sci-fi books or movies that have inspired me, then pass it on to five fellow bloggers!

Picking Five books or movies is hard. But! I will try to make it happen!

1) The Original Star Wars Trilogy. This is hands down number one in all things. I could have cheated and listed each of the three movies individually but... well. That would have been lame.

2)  The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey. I love Rowan. And I love, love, love Jeff Raven. And the entirety of the Talent series, actually! The Rowan is not the best book ever written by Anne McCaffrey, but the characters are so alive and the world so amazing that it really fired my imagination in a lot of ways.

3) Stranger in a Strange Land by R.A. Heinlein. It goes without saying that Heinlein is amazing, brilliant, and a founding father of modern science fiction. But I just said it anyway. This book, along with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and I Will Fear No Evil and Friday really influenced me as a teenager.

4) Like I didn't just name four books in that last one... But, I have to say that the Dragonriders of Pern make my list, by Anne McCaffrey. Great world building without taking away at all from the characters and their development. She works with such a large cast of characters, but she weaves them together so well!

5) The Crystal Singer Trilogy (Yeah, okay, so I read a lot of Anne McCaffrey in my youth). Because I defy anyone to read Killashandra and NOT fall in love a little bit with Lars Dahl. He's so perfect for Killa. It's like Lois Lane and Clark Kent.

I didn't include comic books because I'm not sure I'm capable of limiting myself to one issue, one trade or one title, but comic books and superheroes have DEFINITELY been a huge influence on me. Though, that probably all goes without saying :)

Okay! I pass this award on to:

Valerie at As the Moon Climbs
Mia at My Literary Jam and Toast (Zombies count right?)
Monica Marier at Attack of the Muses
Matt Delman at Free the Princess
Kristen Yard at Take It As It Comes

Don't worry, I'll still be reading your blogs! And I will probably even be tweeting normally during this hiatus! HOPEFULLY, though, with the break from blogging and the vay-cay, I can get some serious progress made in Helen's rewrite, AND I will definitely be making a Cameo for a blogfest here or there. In Particular, the Bickering Blogfest hosted by Kristen on June 30th!

Have a fabulous weekend, friends and followers!

Minoan Bull Dancing! (part two)

In the interest of procrastinating further on awardage, I give you PART TWO* of the Minoan Bull Dance post (click here if you missed part one)!

Image from Wikicommons, by SpinningSpark. Minoan Bull Leaper bronze group.

To recap briefly: Bull Dancing is way awesomer than the modern day Bull Fight, so what happened?

Well. First of all, Crete fell and the Minoan civilization, such as it was, collapsed. (Perhaps because Theseus slayed a Minotaur?) The long and the short of it is, we have no real idea or evidence for what happened. Mycenae seems to have conquered them, and then not long after that we have the Dark Ages where we know absolutely nothing about what went on outside of the oral history of Homer's epics.

Not that we really have a lot of information on Mycenaean Greece, either, outside of the palace life, but the major point of all this is that Bull Dancing did not make the LEAP to the mainland of Greece whereby it might have been preserved and passed on to common culture. There's some stylistic art representing it--Mycenae stole a lot of art from the Minoans--but no evidence that it ever took place within Greece itself.

Except the bull dance isn't really dead. Cow-Leaping (aka Course Landaise) is still practiced in modern day France, and Bull-Leaping (aka Recortes) takes place in parts of Spain (seriously, there's pole vaulting involved! and the bull totally survives to be leapt another day!). Wikipedia even suggests that there's a practice of bull leaping in India as well--though I highly doubt it descends at all from the Minoans.

There are a few clips of bull-leaping in France online. That link will take you to some really crazy guys who tie their legs together before jumping. I'm not kidding. I wish I were. But this is maybe my favorite youtube video-- it's about 5 minutes long, but has some great information.




So there you have it! The modern Bull Dance! With all due respect shown to the bulls involved!

Bad Boy Blogfest!

I have no idea what this is or where it's going (just wrote it yesterday for this fest from the prompt of the word Amok), but he seems like a very, very, bad man. So. That seems close to bad boy? Thanks to Tina Lynn for hosting this fabulous (and much more challenging than I had expected) blogfest! Make sure to follow the link and read the other entries!

The world roared with silence and despair, so loud that his laugh disappeared, like a pebble dropped into a pit that never stops falling. He cracked his knuckles, and she flinched at the pop of the joints. If she could have spoken, she would have screamed, but it wouldn't have mattered. No one would have heard her, either.

"I would apologize, but I know you'd prefer my honesty." He had a feral smile that would have been more at home on a wolf's face than a man's. "And the truth is, after what your husband did to me, this is really only fair. An eye for an eye, so to speak. He took my head, so I'll drive you out of yours."

She wrapped her arms around her knees and pressed herself harder against the wall, cold and unforgiving stone. It was always stone. Why was it always stone?

"Do you know," he went on, "I didn't expect it to be so easy. It kind of takes some of the fun out of it, now." He inhaled deeply through his nose, and exhaled with a sigh. "But I do love the smell of fear and agony. All these women who walk in beaten and walk out emptied of their entire reason for being. What is a woman, in this day and age, without the means to bear children?"

Tears streamed down her cheeks, but she couldn't even sob aloud. He had taken that from her, just as he had taken the wombs from the others. She would heal, of course, and in a week she'd be able to speak again, but for now, while he worked, the only noises she could make were the whisper of cloth against skin and the sweep of her bare heels against the tile floor.

He crouched before her, holding the white nodes in his fingers, strung with thin wires that she had not yet managed to snap quickly enough to stop the pain they caused. His eyes swept over her and then he smiled again and set them down on the countertop above her.

"You're not going to be good for me today, are you?"

She bared her teeth, her fingers curling into claws. He was too fast for her to hurt too badly. Somehow his hands always found her wrists before she could make him bleed.

He tsked and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, opening it up, white and clean. He didn't meet her eyes as he began to refold it on the diagonal. "Then I guess I'll have to do something about it."

She lurched away, but the stone wall and the cabinets served him now instead of her. What had been the safety of shelter now became a cage, and he dragged her out, laughing while she struggled, and bent her over the cold metal counter, her arms behind her back. Her wrists were trapped by his long fingers and he tied the handkerchief around them so tight her blood stopped flowing. The nodes rested just beyond the tip of her nose.

He released her once she was bound, and she straightened, backing away. He paced after her, slow and easy. They both knew what came next. They both knew that he'd win, in the end.

"If you behave, maybe I'll tell you what happened to your child," he said, the wolf's grin stretching across his features when she froze. "You want to know, don't you? Why they made sure it wouldn't live?"

She pulled at the binding on her wrists, her nails digging into her palms, but there was no give. Cold sweat trickled down her spine. Kill him. She wanted to kill him. If he knew, he had been part of it; she understood that much by now.

"Oh, no," he said, picking up the nodes and stepping toward her. She didn't step back. "No, it wasn't me who ordered it, though I would have taken great delight in doing so if I had known what kind of trouble you'd be to me. I didn't even know you existed, then." He nodded to the chair, straight-backed and maned with wiring. "Sit down, and I'll tell you everything."

Her baby.

"That's it," he murmured, when she stepped forward.

The silence roared in her ears, an ocean pounding against a cliff face. She trembled at the sound, and the emptiness that would swallow her whole. He was near enough to touch her, to press the white nodes to her temples, her forehead. His fingers trailed along her jaw as he finished, then traced the shape of her lips.

She snapped at him, her teeth finding flesh and bone. He laughed, forcing his finger harder against her teeth.

"Go ahead," he said. "If you have it in you, after all I've done, I'll call it a success."

They stared at one another. The taste of copper and venom filled her mouth.

"Do it."

She spit out his finger and turned her face away.

He chuckled low and threw her into the chair. "Maybe you'll feel more cooperative tomorrow."

Tears blurred her vision and she closed her eyes. He tightened the straps of the chair around her ankles, and across her chest, still laughing to himself. She let the silence wash over her, the roaring ocean and the desperate agony.

Then fire ran through her, hot and fierce, and even without her voice, she still screamed.

If you prefer a more traditional badish boy, there's always Jean, though. Under the cut, so don't feel obligated unless you want something to wash the taste of evil out of your eye sockets!

The Minoan Bull Dance! (part one)

So, today's entry really should be about the gajillion awards I'm hoarding (Thanks everyone! I'm honored!)-- but I have a gajillion and three tabs open right now and half of them are about bull leaping from the Minoan to the Modern, and if I don't write this entry they're going to keep staring at me for days.

Unlike my usual research topics, this one isn't a direct result of one of my books. The Bull Dance has been on my mind, however, ever since I read Mary Renault's The King Must Die which spends a significant number of pages chronicling Theseus' life inside the bull ring during his time on Crete. She takes some artistic license with the Minotaur, and has a really fascinating interpretation of the labyrinth, but this isn't meant to be a review of that work, so I'll skip over the specifics for now.

The other day I was surfing the web when I came across this news article. Apparently a matador was arrested for fleeing from his bull in the ring. Now, I'm not really pro-bull fighting. When it comes down to it, it's a highly ritualized animal slaughter for the entertainment of those in the stands. Since, as a culture, we seem to frown on ANY kind of highly ritualized animal slaughter, even those for religious purposes (you'll notice that religions which require animal sacrifice have been forced to the fringe of society over the years), I'm not sure why we're still allowing bull fights. BUT, we do. And having just finished the second half of Mary Renault's opus on Theseus, it occurred to me that this might be a remnant, passed down, warped, evolved, and inherited from the Minoan Bull Dance.

Have you ever watched a Matador? The way they move? The way they dance with the bull, leading it and drawing it out, this way and that? Making the bull practically spin on a dime? But of course, the Minoan Bull Dance was never about the slaughter. It wasn't about killing the bull at all-- and that's a huge difference to set aside even after 3000 years.

 From Wikicommons, a fresco of Knossos, Crete. Wiki dates it anywhere from 17th-15th centuries BCE.

Mary Renault paints the Minoan Bull Dance as a cooperative showcase-- man and bull together in harmony. A team of men and women worked together to keep themselves alive in the ring while they leaped and allowed the bull itself to throw them into the air. The bull, after a time, would know the dance as well as the team. It was a performance of skill which required perfect timing and a relationship (I would even go so far as to say a relationship of TRUST) to the animal they worked with. There are no swords or spears featured in the information we have left of the Bull Dance, but there is plenty of evidence for acrobatics.

Historians suspect that the Minoan Bull Dance was an integral part of the religion of ancient Crete, but we honestly don't know why or what it was for, and it's all further complicated by the fact that the Minoans seemed to emphasize the worship of goddesses over male gods, though they had both. We know it was important because Bull Leaping iconography was everywhere and kind of a lot of it survived in frescoes, figurines, etc. But it could have just as easily been a rite of passage for youths, too, religious in nature or not.

(Side note: This is kind of where I think about how we have all these super hero action figures that will never decompose, and someday, someone is going to dig them up and think Superman was the center of our lives. But generally speaking, when there's this much evidence of something all these years later, before the days of mass production, it did figure pretty centrally in the culture, or so much work and sweat--not to mention resources--wouldn't have gone into it.)

I wish I could tell you more about Bull Leaping and Bull Dancing in Minoan Civilization, but in spite of the fact that I have at least 5 text books on ancient Greece and the Aegean Bronze Age at my fingertips, information on the Bull Dance itself is scarce. (Trust me, I just searched through all of them.) When it comes down to it, we just don't know. We have no real written records outside of linear a and b tablets from that time, and those weren't exactly treatises on religious rites or culture. The Bull Dance is very much still a mystery. Which of course makes it great sport for fiction.

In my next* post, I'll discuss the much more probable descendant of the Minoan Bull Dance-- and it isn't the Spanish Bull Fight.

*next being kind of relative. I'm sure I'll get there eventually, though!

Character Interview Blogfest!

Thanks to Sangu at Echoes of a Wayward Mind for hosting this one! I'm looking forward to going around and getting a chance to meet everyone's characters! Head over to her blog to see the list of participants!

Against my better judgment, my interview was with Adam from The Book of Generations. He's... well. You'll see. I was trying to understand his motives a little bit better. In that regard, he was quite informative. Also, as usual, slightly obnoxious.

Me: So why did you go?

Adam: To give her my blessing, I suppose. To prove that I wouldn't interfere.

Me: That doesn't make any sense.

Adam: I needed her goodwill. You know as well as I do that there was no hope of getting any of the rest of what I wanted. She was pathetically in love with that man, and once she said her vows, once she chose to marry for love, there was no hope for anything else. If it had been another lifetime, I might have tried to take her, but holding Eve against her will isn't an easy thing to accomplish, and it would only have made her even more suspicious of me. Besides, the DeLeon's aren't a family to be trifled with. Maybe if she had been some poor Farmer's wife, it would have been different. But that family wouldn't have rested until she was found. And like I said, she was in love with him already. It wouldn't have mattered.

Me: You DID try to take her in another lifetime. When she was in love, and it didn't stop you.

Adam: That was before she was under the protection of that Norse oaf. The man she was married to… well, he made me look like the better option, no easy feat when she knew me for what I was. And the man she loved was dead.

Me: You couldn't have known that.

Adam: You'd be surprised how quickly word spread then. Rumor, of course, saw to that. The goddesses had more freedom then, and we all knew the story of Helen's abduction. Especially in Troy.

Me: Ah. Of course.

Adam: You think you wouldn't believe a goddess who stood before you in all her glory? Mistrust would have insulted her, and the punishment for that was fierce. You'd have listened too. You DO listen, too.

Me: That's different. And we're not interviewing me. We're interviewing you.

Adam: Are we?

Me: Yes. We are.

Adam: And yet…

Me: If you’re going to be difficult, I’m sure Thor would love to share his thoughts.

Adam: I’m sorry, what were you thinking earlier, about not believing a word spoken by gods and goddesses who entertain themselves with mortal lives?

Me: Olympians. Thor is different. You know he is better than I do. And if he weren’t, Eve never would have loved him.

Adam: Just because he prefers to hand out justice rather than whim doesn’t make him different. He still interferes for his own reasons and to allay his own boredom. It passes the time. And good as she is, it’s no different for Eve. We all need distraction. Sometimes, if you meet the right person, you can even forget you’re going to have to watch fools make the same mistakes generation after generation. At least until that person dies and your left alone to contemplate your fate. Again.

Me: I thought you liked it.

Adam: The alternative is death by flame and lightning. And what waits for an immortal after death? What happens to a god when he dies? I don’t even think Thor knows – does he?

Me: It’s never come up.

Adam: Of course it hasn’t. He wouldn’t want to frighten you.

Me: But you’re not a god. If everyone else God made gets Heaven, why don’t you?

Adam: Who said?

Me: Said what?

Adam: Who said everyone else God made gets anything? God didn’t. I would know. And if you won’t trust Olympians, you can hardly trust Michael any further. Talk about having ulterior motives.

Me: What about Gabriel?

Adam: Gabriel does what he’s told. And says what he’s told to say. How much of that was ordered by Michael, and how much by God Himself is a mystery. But I, for one, won’t stake my life on any of it. And since this is, supposedly, an interview about me, I assume it is my life under discussion?

Me: I knew this was a bad idea.

Adam: You’ll be grateful later when all of this starts spinning stories in your head. And then I’ll be back, and you’ll be glad I didn’t try to shelter you from the truth.

Me: Gee. Thanks.

Adam: The least I could do.

New Layout!

Also, a new About Me tab! Yes, I have finally learned how to give my blog pages! Hooray!

Unfortunately, the customization options as far as text colors go seem to lack the flexibility I desire. This will do for now, but one day, I aspire to having white text in the sidebar for ease of reading. For the time being, you can find all the sidebar "about me" information under the About the Writer tab, plus a little bit extra. So hopefully that will cover it for the moment...

I was kind of going for something Thor-friendly :P

Have a fabulous weekend, one and all!