There’ll be some photos tomorrow, but for today I have a video for you, namely a new book trailer for Muse & Crisis.

You can see it below the cut. And don’t forget that you can watch all my book trailers at any time at the videos page.

Muse & Crisis
by: CoraBuhlert

First of all, I am interviewed by fantasy and horror author Ty Johnston at his blog today. Of all the interviews I’ve done so far, this one was my favourite, so come on over and say hello.

Jeff Vandermeer has an interesting post about entry points into fiction.

This is how they dispose of politicians in Bavaria: Also today, the secretary of the interior of Bavaria, one Joachim Herrmann, was supposed to officially start construction work on a new road, when a dedger capsized with Mr Herrmann still inside.

Luckily, no one was hurt during the boating accident in Lower Saxony, while the Bavarian secretary got off with a sprained ankle and some scratches.

It was supposed to be just a relegation match between Hertha BSC Berlin and Fortuna Düsseldorf about which club gets to play in the first Bundesliga next year, of little interest to anybody who is not a fan of either club. Though one of my fifth graders was positively electrified today, since he happens to be a Fortuna Düsseldorf fan for reasons unknown. In the end, however, it was the craziest football match of the year, which had to be interrupted twice – the first time, because fans threw lit flares onto the pitch, and the second time, because Düsseldorf fans invaded the pitch two minutes before the referee ended the match and refused to leave until chased off by players and the police, prompting a twenty minute interruption. I ended up seeing the final three minutes (plus twenty minute interruption) on TV, when I switched over, because Psych was just so bad.

In the end, Fortuna Düsseldorf ascended to the first Bundesliga, though considering how chaotic the match was I would probably have broken it off and either declared Berlin the winner (since most of the troublemakers were Düsseldorf fans), ordered a repeat match in an empty stadium or disqualified ‘em both and promoted whoever was next in line.

Honestly, why do we even allow flares in football stadiums twenty-seven years after the Bradford City stadium fire? As for pitch invasions, the prevalence of those in Britain in the 1970s were a large part of the reason why the high steel fences were erected in British stadiums, which eventually caused the high death toll during the Hillsborough disaster. It’s also the memory of these disasters that makes me furious to see football fans behaving like jackasses today. I don’t want to see more people hurt in stadium disasters, because some fans can’t behave themselves. Plus, there are plenty of kids and teenagers in the audience, since the most fervent football fans are usually boys between 10 and 18.

And now for some genre and writing links:

At Booklife Now, Robert Jackson Bennett wonders about urban fantasy, genre definitions and genre boundaries.

Jay Lake has a great post about worldbuilding, technology and why doors shouldn’t slam on spaceships.

Jay Lake also points out this fascinating article on Rosemary’s Baby as a commentary on unease with feminism and the changing roles of women in the US in the late 1960s. The article also draws an interesting link to little known B-horror-films of the mid 1970s such as It lives and The Brood, both of which are pregnancy horror/monster baby flicks. I guess The Omen also fits in with this (though Damian was adopted, as far as I recall) and probably the vastly underrated The Fury as well.

Though personally, I’ve always found Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives a lot more horrifying in that respect than Rosemary’s Baby, probably because I really dislike the “evil child” trope and have always disliked it. Besides, when I first saw most of those films after private television finally brought them to our screens in the late 1980s, I was a teenager and more inclined to sympathize with the monster child than with the parents. But between those two and The Boys from Brazil (hapless women find themselves giving birth to and raising Hitler clones), I think it is safe to assume that Ira Levin had issues with women, pregnancy and feminism.

By the way, I’ve always found it striking how easy it would be to rewrite Rosemary’s Baby as a modern paranormal romance, since it basically has a very similar plot. Coincidentally, this also shows how much speculative fiction has changed in the past forty years, both with regard to the portrayal of women (Rosemary is everybody’s plaything) and the portrayal of the supernatural (sex with a demon was horror in 1968 and hot in 2012).

Now I’ve never been a big fan of Mother’s Day, because it reduces women only to motherhood and totally ignores all those women who aren’t mothers. If you want to celebrate women’s contributions to society – which I’m all for – why not do so on March 8, i.e. International Women’s Day?

As for Father’s Day, in Germany it has become little more than an excuse for young men (many of whom don’t even have children) to go out and get drunk. If it’s really supposed to be Father’s Day, shouldn’t those fathers be spending some time with their families? And why do they have to co-opt a religious holiday for Father’s Day?

Finally, if you really want to celebrate your parents, wouldn’t it be much better to be there for them on the other 364 days of the year rather than give them an overprized flower bouquet or an ugly tie on one day of the year?

However, today a discussion at school very sharply brought it home to me how celebrating Mother’s and Father’s Day excludes kids living in non-traditional families.

One of my eighth graders was trying to borrow some money from his classmates to buy an ice cream. He was broke, he said, because he spent his last money on a Mother’s Day present for his Mom. Other kids chimed in about their Mother’s and Father’s Day presents for their parents. Then a girl said, “I’m not buying any presents for Mother’s or Father’s Day. They can all go fuck themselves.” And a boy said, “I don’t even have a mother.”

Now the girl is in foster care and doesn’t get along with her foster parents. The biological mother was unable to care for her kid, the father took off ages ago. The boy is being raised by his much older brother – the mother was apparently so inadequate that the kid literally struck her from his life. Nor are these two kids the only kids living in non-traditional families. I have lots of students from single parent families. I have students where the primary caregivers are the grandparents rather than the parents. I haven’t had any students from gay or lesbian families yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time. Celebrating Mother’s and Father’s Day in the traditional way excludes all of those kids.

Now I teach at a secondary school and Mother’s and Father’s Day aren’t a big deal here. In fact, I did not mention either holiday in my classes at all – the kids brought it up themselves. However, in kindergarten and in elementary schools, it is still common for kids to make Mother’s and Father’s Day presents in arts and crafts classes or to write essays and poems about their mothers or whatever. Regardless of how these activities make kids from non-traditional families feel.

So why not designate a general day to celebrate loved ones and caregivers instead? Because the grandparents taking care of their grandchild while the parents are off working in a foreign country or the young man raising his teenaged brother because there is no one else sure deserve the appreciation as much as regular parents.

USA Today has a surprisingly good article about Fifty Shades of Grey and its implications for sexuality in America.

After the Bundeliga championship, Borussia Dortmund also won the German cup tonight, beating Bayern Munich 5:2. For our American friends, we’re talking about soccer here.

German actor Günther Kaufmann died yesterday aged only 64. Internationally, Kaufmann is best known for his parts in several of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films, but he was also a familiar face in German television and on the stage. Günther Kaufmann was probably the only person who appeared both in a Fassbinder film and I’m a celebrity, get me out of here! His last film was the comedy Türkisch für Anfänger (Turkish for Beginners). Günther Kaufmann lived in Bremen for a while, played at the local theatre and was involved in a bonafide stage scandal, when he appeared nude in Johann Kresnik’s play Die zehn Gebote (The Ten Commandments) and had simulated sex on stage – all in a church.

The verdict: Derivative and grimdark at its worst.

This applies only to the TV show BTW and not necessarily to the comic book it is based on.

Spoilers behind the cut:

The show starts with our hero, a young police officer, shooting a little girl in the head. Okay, so the little girl was a zombie, but it’s still kind of hard to sympathize with a protagonist who shoots little girls in the face. Now the scene wouldn’t have bothered me so much, if it had been an organic part of the story. But it’s basically a random zombie encounter (that takes place before the zombie apocalypse begins, at that) placed at the beginning of the story for obvious shock value. Look how brave and daring our show is! We shoot little girls in the face on TV.

After that little flashforward to the zombie apocalypse (Is the attention span of American viewers so short that they can’t even wait ten minutes for the zombie apocalypse to begin?), we see our hero and his partner in their squad car, exchanging banter. However, the banter is so full of misogynism of the worst sort that I found myself hoping the zombies would show up already and eat both of them. Our hero is not so bad – it’s his partner who’s really insufferable. The guy not just looks like a Neaderthal, his views on women seem to come straight from the Stone Age as well. Whenever this guy was on screen – and wouldn’t you know it that he turns out a main character – I hoped that zombies would finally eat him or that one of the other characters would bash in his head with a hammer. Really, the guy is that obnoxious. And as if all that wasn’t enough, it also turns out that he is sleeping with the wife of his friend and partner. Not that the other male characters we see are better – most of them talk about women in disparaging generalities, control them “for their own good” and treat them like possessions.

In addition to the sexism, there are also problematic racial tropes. For starters, The Walking Dead is a big offender in the magical person of colour category. The first human survivors our hero (who is white) encounters after escaping from the hospital are a black man and his young son, who promptly save our hero from a random zombie and fill him in on the apocalypse. The father is played by British actor Lennie James, who also played the lone black person in Jericho, by the way. Apparently, Lennie James always gets to play the token black survivor of the apocalypse, which is a pity, because he is a fine actor who deserves better. At one point, he sits behind a first floor window picking off zombies with his rifle, when a zombie who used to be his wife shows up. You can tell at once that she used to be his wife, because she is the only black zombie we see.

We do see more characters of colour in episode two (the German broadcaster showed two episodes back to back), but again their main purpose seems to be to rescue our hero, who then goes on to come up with a brilliant escape plan. Magical person of colour and white saviour all in the same program – could this show be any more problematic? Oh yes, and our hero also makes it very clear to the crazy racist(TM) among the survivors that racism is bad and wrong.

But The Walking Dead is not just problematic due to inherent sexism and racism, it’s also derivative as hell. Our hero is wounded during a shoot-out and wakes up in a deserted hospital several weeks later – an idea, which was actually quite original in 28 Days Later. Mysterious message luring survivors to a supposed “safe zone” which turns out to be a trap – 28 Days Later again. Characters disguising themselves as zombies to go somewhere they need to go – seen it before in Shaun of the Dead. Racial tensions among the survivors – that’s straight from the original Night of the Living Dead and it was actually daring back then. Survivors holing themselves up in an abandoned department store – Dawn of the Dead, only that it was a shopping mall there. There’s probably dozens of other ideas borrowed from other zombie films, which I didn’t recognize, because I’ve only seen about four or five zombie flicks in my life. Really, it’s almost as if The Walking Dead was a collage of ideas borrowed from other zombie tales and usually done better there.

But the real kicker is that the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are all bleeding idiots. In fact, that’s probably the reason why the zombies haven’t eaten them – cause these people don’t have any brains to speak of. For starters, it is pointed out again and again that noise attracts the zombies, which is why one should only shoot at them as a last resort, since the shot tends to draw more zombies. So what does our hero do? He gets out of his squad car and strolls into a park – in the middle of the zombie apocalypse – to seek out a legless zombie woman whom he had seen earlier and put her out of her misery. Nor does he club her in the head or something, no, he shoots her and risks drawing hell knows how many zombies, while quite a bit away from his squad car. Now I can understand killing zombified friends and loved ones – and there are two instances of that in the first episode. But wasting ammo and risking discovery for a completely random zombie is just dumb.

Later on, our hero gallops through the deserted streets of Atlanta on a horse he found along the way and turns a corner to ride right into a zombie mob. I laughed out loud at that point and I don’t think that scene was supposed to be funny.

Not that anybody else is smarter. The misogynist partner and the wife of our hero sneak off alone into the woods for a bout of illicit sex – in the middle of the zombie apocalypse! After stressing again and again how important it is to keep quiet, Lenny James suddenly takes a rifle up to the first floor of the house he and his son have holed up in and begins picking off zombies on the street – while his son is downstairs and undefended. The survivors holed up in the Atlanta department store don’t even have the sense to block and barricade the double glass entrance doors of the store with something.

Towards the end of the second episode, there is also a complication/plot twist that is so bleeding obvious I saw it coming long before the characters did.

I am truly mystified why this show is considered a success, since it is hard to imagine how anybody, let alone zombie fans, could stomach more than two episodes.

Lynn Viehl discusses inspiration and worldbuilding at Paperback Writer.

At his blog, Jay Lake wonders whether speculative fiction needs evil overlord type characters like Sauron and Voldemort or whether stories about morally ambiguous characters in conflict but with no clear-cut villains can be just as successful.

IMO the question isn’t whether books without clear-cut villains and with morally ambiguous characters in conflict can be successful, because they already are and have been for a long time now. For example, many romance novels do not have a villain in the traditional sense, though they have plenty of romantic rivals and other antagonists such as disapproving family members. And yet romance is the most successful genre of popular fiction. And even SFF can be enjoyable and successful without a clear “evil overlord” character. The problem is that some writers interpreted “shades of grey” as “Let’s give the reader a whole cast of equally loathsome characters and a world so unpleasant it would be improved if the Daleks invaded and killed everyone”.

While on the subject of shades of grey, at the Observer, James Bridle looks at the fanfiction origins of Fifty Shades of Grey and wonders whether the fanfiction community isn’t a fertile mining ground for new writers with established fan bases just waiting to be exploited by commercial publishers. Because obviously no one ever thought of that before (Hint: Trying to monetize fanfiction is usually a bad idea, particularly if attempted by someone not a member of the fanfic community) and because E.L. James is the first fanfiction author ever to make the transition to commercial publishing, since Cassandra Clare, Naomi Novik, Kelly Meding, Jane Seville and many others obviously don’t exist. Yup, it’s a majorly clueless article about fanfiction from the POV of the traditional mainstream media.

Meanwhile, Fifty Shades of Grey has been taken off the library shelves in one county in Florida for being “too pornographic”. Of course, this extremely negative and judgmental attitude towards sexuality in parts of the US is what has made a fairly unremarkable piece of erotic fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off like Fifty Shades of Grey so popular in the first place.

The nominations for the British Fantasy Awards have been announced. And after narrowly missing the Booker shortlist, British writer Jane Rogers has won the Arthur C. Clarke award for The Testament of Jessie Lamb. Considering how much controversy there was about the Clarke award earlier this year, this choice seems largely uncontroversial. After all, even Christopher Priest liked The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

Maurice Sendak, writer of Where the Wild Things Are and other popular children’s books, died aged 83. Unlike many others, I never read Where the Wild Things Are as a child and only encountered the book in the hands of my then little nephew who loved it so much that I bought him a Wild Thing action figure one year.

Vidal Sassoon, the hairstylist who invented the geometric cuts so popular in the 1960s, also died at age 84. The Guardian has a gallery of classic Sassoon hairstyles. Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the short Sassoon bobs and the non-hairstyle which Mia Farrow wears in Rosemary’s Baby (credited to Sassoon in the dialogue) must be one of the least flattering styles ever invented. Nonetheless, a lot of women obviously felt differently.

Meanwhile, it seems we are still discussing the same topics we were discussing last week:

At Making Light, Abi Sutherland responds to Elizabeth Bear’s column in Clarkesworld about too much darkness and grimness in speculative fiction. The Bear column is linked in this post, by the way.

Charles Stross also briefly refers to the posts by Elizabeth Bear and Abi Sutherland before launching into a discussion whether the rise of e-books and the related change in sales channels and purchasing habits will spell the death of the concept of genre in general and the science fiction genre in particular. There is an annoying overuse of “curate” and “curation” (two words that should only ever be used in connection with museums, not blogs and bookstores) in the currently trendy usage, but otherwise his point is very interesting.

Though indie writers are often more wedded to narrow genre boundaries and stereotypical covers than the most traditional of the traditional publishers. On the Kindleboards, you constantly see posters ripping into perfectly good covers, because “they don’t accurately reflect the genre and no one will buy it”, you see beautiful and unique covers in signatures replaced by generic stock photo based covers that look like everything else out there or you see posters advising other posters that they should stick to a single genre or at least use different pen names for different genres. Now I obviously don’t take that advice, but it is still depressing to see how many indie writers try to squeeze themselves into smaller boxes than traditional publishing would ever demand from them.

Some writing advice from the masters: The Wall Street Journal has an article by John Irving on foreshadowing and writing endings.

More writing advice from the masters: The blog Dominus Lumiere reprints William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The design magazine Print has an interesting article about romance novel cover design. Though I have to say that the examples shown in the article are exactly the sort of romance covers that drive me up the wall – ahistorical models in ahistorical clothing.

Print also has a good article on science fiction design and why the best SF design is largely a thing of the past.

Nonetheless, Celle is a lovely town, as evidenced by the photos under the cut:

A rapeseed field in full bloom just outside Syke

Celle Castle. It's surprisingly difficult to get a clear shot of the building

Flowers in the park with a glimpse of Celle Castle in the background

A sculpture of a horse and trainer in the park around Celle Castle. Note the geese in the foreground.

Some timbered houses and the spire of the town church

The baroque town church in Celle

The townhall with elaborate trompe l'oeil decorations

Close-up of the trompe l'oeil decorations at Celle townhall

A historical pillory at the old townhall in Celle. This was one of the very few places that rung a bell for me, since I remembered the kid who would be sent home put into the stocks "as a joke".

The Bomann Museum in Celle, devoted to local history

A statue of the medieval Duke Otto on the facade of the Bomann museum

A statue of agronomist Albrecht Thaer who was born in Celle

A square with timbered houses in the centre of Celle

More timbered houses

A timbered house and an interesting lamppost

Another timbered house and a statue

Timbered house with interesting monster designs and a lamp

A particularly gorgeous timbered house with a fountain in the foreground.

Close-up of the timbered house in the previous picture

Yet another timbered house

Many of the timbered houses have inscriptions. I particularly liked this inscription in Lower German, which says: "Do what you will, people will talk anyway".

Sun sign outside a shop in Celle

More signage, this time around advertising a bakery and café

This timbered house seemingly cut in half is called the "Divorce House". According to a friendly local, a man left his wife who demanded half the house from him as a divorce settlement. So he built half a house, quite literally. When she still wouldn't stop nagging him, he killed her and burried her in the backyard, where her remains were found a century later. It's probably not true, but it makes a great story.

And right into the middle of all those lovely medieval timbered houses, they planted this crime against architecture: A Karstadt department store built in the 1960s, which somehow managed to survive the mass closings of Karstadt stores some time ago

These modern sculptures outside the Celle art museum look like giant maces or outsized triffids

The Reader, a sculpture in front of the city library

Sculpture of a man crashing through a door in Celle

An art installation featuring talking lampposts which tell bits about the city's history

I hadn’t been in Celle for more than twenty years now, ever since in schooltrip there in 9th grade. That long ago schooltrip to Celle was truly a schooltrip from hell. None of our class really wanted to go to Celle – the teacher picked the destination because “he wanted to get to know us” and because it was nearby.

First of all, hiring a bus for a whole week was deemed either too expensive or too ecologically incorrect or most likely a combination of both, so we were forced to go by bike on all of those outings to interesting places in the area, which sometimes meant going forty or fifty or sixty kilometers by bike in a single day. If you got tired or couldn’t keep up, you were bullied as a weakling.

What was more, I had problems with a boy who pursued me. The boy had been infatuated with me for a while, but his behaviour on that trip really crossed the line into harassment. The teachers didn’t step in – indeed, they found the whole thing funny. Finally, I told the boy very clearly that I wanted nothing to do with him, whereupon the boy threatened to commit suicide with a pocket knife. The teachers didn’t care. One of the other kids who was worried came to get me to persuade the boy to give up the pocket knife. I was frantic and pleaded with him, because I was genuinely scared he’d hurt himself, while the teachers stood by and laughed. I don’t blame the boy BTW who was after all fourteen years old, a bundle of hormones and had as little respect for personal boundaries as most kids of that age. But I blame the teachers who should have stepped in as soon as they noticed I was uncomfortable.

However, the episode above was not the worst of it. For the youth hostel was run people who either hated teenagers or couldn’t handle them. And when someone from our class scrawled the words “arsehole” and “wanker” into the registration book of the youth hostel, the manager freaked out and threatened to throw us all out and send us home, unless the perpetrator were found and sent home, because the defaced registration book was an “official documents”. It is probably telling that I actually hoped we’d all be sent home. The teachers should have placated the manager and told the man that if the book was really so bloody important, maybe he shouldn’t have left it lying around in the open, since teens are known to scrawl rude words on anything that isn’t nailed down (I regularly get back worksheets with rude words or penises scrawled in the margin). Our teachers, however, proceeded to identify the perpetrator in the most humiliating way possible by making us all line up and calling us separately into a room to be interrogated. Eventually, they found a perpetrator, a boy who was a notorious troublemaker, who was promptly sent home and ostracized and humiliated in the process. Now this boy was a friend of mine and someone I felt fiercely protective of. He was also a favoured bullying target by other students and teachers. At the time, I was convinced that he didn’t write those words or at least that he didn’t do it without prompting by others. A friend and I also suspected someone else. However, we didn’t speak up, because we had no proof, though we did comfort the boy who was sent home, two of only three students who did. In retrospect, he probably did write them, since that was totally the sort of thing he would do. And the guy I suspected was someone I hated, so I probably was biased.

Not everything about that trip was horrible BTW. I discovered the Rocky Horror Picture Show during that classtrip because someone had the music on tape, though I didn’t see the film until the following year.

Actually, the main problem was that the teachers were incompetent idiots who forced kids on monster bike tours not everyone could handle, who didn’t step in to stop sexual harassment among students (I wasn’t the only victim, plenty of girls and some boys were harassed and no one ever said anything) and didn’t even stop a freaking suicide attempt (okay, so the blade was only about three centimeters long, but he still could have hurt himself) and who threw a kid to the wolves at the behest of a despotic youth hostel manager. These weren’t the only bad things one of those teachers did in the two years he was my class teacher (I didn’t know the other teacher very well, she was a French teacher and I had Latin) – he was horrid all around. Nonetheless, the class trip destroyed my confidence in teachers for good. And indeed, that one teacher is my model for the teacher I never want to be.

So while the blame for that schooltrip from hell clearly lies with the teachers, my teen self squarely put the blame on the town of Celle for some reason, which is why I never visited the place again in more than twenty years. And even now it’s still difficult for me to write about what happened on that trip, because part of me is still angry.

Visiting Celle again after more than twenty years, I noticed that I actually remembered very little of the town itself. I remembered the Castle and vague flashes of pastel coloured houses. It was an odd town at any rate, so odd that I privately pretended I had been deposited on an alien planet.

As I walked through the town, more flashes came back. The butt ugly 1960s department store smack in the medieval town centre brought back memories of being in the food department in the basement, while my then best friend couldn’t decide which ready-made meal to make as a “Honey I’m home” treat for her moronic boyfriend. I remembered standing for what seemed like hours in some chain boutique in the city centre while my best friend tried on jeans in five different sizes and couldn’t settle on one to buy, even though we had the very same chain at home. I remembered how her inability to decide on anything snatched away the two hours of free time we had, so I couldn’t even check out the bookstore (it was still there, too). I remembered being forced to do a “ralley” through the town, fulfill stupid tasks and answer stupid questions (such ralleys were very popular at the time), while the boy who was later sent home ran through the pedestrian shopping district asking every passer-by whether they happened to know the formula for a fart, which was one of the questions. I half wished that I could briefly step back in time and give the answer to my old pal (and perhaps warn him not to write rude words in that bloody registration book). But apart from those flashes, I might as well never have been in Celle at all.

In our way into the city, we even happened to drive past the youth hostel where we’d stayed during the schooltrip from hell. “Crap, it’s that fucking youth hostel”, I exclaimed. The place still looked the same, too. It hasn’t even been painted in twenty-five years, it seemed.

“Well, which way to the city centre then?”, my companion asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you’ve been here before.”

“Yes, but we used to bike all the time back then, and besides I’ve been trying to forget all that.”

I had the brief temptation to stop at the youth hostel, walk in and confront the manager. But then I realized that it would be in vain, because I was more than twenty years too late and that the old manager is probably long retired anyway.

There are photos of Celle as it actually is (rather than the distorted memory I have), namely a historical town with beautiful medieval and renaissance architecture, in the next post.