So, as I earlier reported, my publisher has gone out of business. I disappeared after that for a few different reasons, mostly because I immediately dived into the next steps for my books.
I have, just today, sent both Jake and the Dynamo and Rag & Muffin out the door. I sent Jake and the Dynamo to another indie publisher that is interested in the orphans of Superversive Press, but after consulting with my editor, I’ve decided to shop Rag & Muffin with larger publishing houses.
It would be imprudent to name names. All I can say is, the books are out of the house, and I’m working on my rejection slip collection.
This means a couple of things for my current projects: First, Dead to Rites, the sequel to Jake and the Dynamo, is in limbo until further notice. It will get picked up when (if) Jake and the Dynamo does.
Second, I have no idea of release dates anymore because my submissions could get rejected. Rag & Muffin probably will be, since I’m aiming higher with it.
Third, I’m right back where I started a few weeks ago, working on Son of Hel, which I will submit somewhere when I’m done with it.
Fourth, I’m getting married in April, so I disappeared partly because I was working on arrangements for that. In a couple of weeks, I’ll travel back to Memphis to help the magical girl move, as she’s starting a new job soon in my current town of residence. Then we’ll get married a couple of months after that, and then I’ll have to move again because I’ll be moving in with her.
So that’s what’s up. I’m afraid I’m way behind on watching, reading, and reviewing stuff because my own projects and personal life have taken precedence.
I missed it unfortunately, but yesterday was the feast day of St. Lucy, or St. Lucia. Because her feast day falls within Advent, she has been pulled into the world of Christmas lore.
St. Lucy is a Christian virgin and martyr of Syracuse said to have lived from 283 to 304 and to have died under Diocletian. She refused to burn incense to the emperor and was condemned to a brothel. When soldiers came to take her, they found they could not move her, even when they tried to drag her away with oxen. They then attempted to burn her alive, and she miraculously survived, but died from a sword thrust.
She is a patron saint of eye diseases, and images of her holding eyes on a plate have been part of her iconography for a while, but the legend that her eyes were gouged out during her martyrdom apparently appeared only in the fifteenth century.
According to legend, she delivered food to the Christians hiding in the catacombs. To light her way, she wore a wreath on her head with candles affixed to it, and this is why her feast day is celebrated with children crowned in wreaths and candles, often with one particular girl chosen as the honorary St. Lucy of the year. This is particularly popular in Scandinavia, and according to Britannica, the celebration of St. Lucy marks the beginning of the Christmas season in Sweden.
Traditionally, the girl playing Lucy wears a white robe, a red sash, and a wreath of evergreen Lingonberry branches. Pepparkakor, or gingersnap biscuits, are also associated with her holiday.
I am not at present clear on how old this tradition is; a few glances around indicate that the Advent wreath with the four candles is originally a Lutheran tradition—though most Lucy wreaths I’ve seen have five or seven. I will have to dig deeper before I can say whether the St. Lucy wreath predates the Christmas wreath or vice versa.
Photo by Claudia Gründer
Particularly fascinating about St. Lucy is that this distinctive appearance of her processions—a girl in a white robe with a wreath of candles on her head—has (apparently?) become associated with the Christkind, or Christ child, in some places, especially Germanic countries.
The Christkind, or Christ child, was intended by Protestants as a replacement for St. Nicholas—but instead of turning the focus to Jesus as was probably intended, the Christkind ironically became a separate figure, usually played by a girl or woman with curly hair, sometimes with a tall crown of gold but often crowned with a wreath and candles.
And that’s why you don’t mess with Christmas characters: When you try to get rid of them, you just end up creating more.
I’m still uncertain about what originated where and when, but at least according to Chris Marchand, it was the Protestant image of the Christkind that informed the image of St. Lucy. Given the late—and Protestant—origin of the the Advent wreath, this seems plausible, though I previously assumed it was the other way around.
Basically, if I understand aright, the unorthodox depiction of the the baby Jesus as a candle-headed girl got folded into the image of the young woman saint who was already a part of the Advent season. Incidentally, Marchand mentions that St. Lucia has also taken on the role of a gift-giver, sometimes giving presents exclusively to girls.
At the moment, I confess I’m unsure what to do with either St. Lucia or Christkindl in the world if Son of Hel, the Christmas-themed novel of Krampus as his motley crew of St. Nicholas’s companions tasked with saving Christmas, but I feel an obligation to work these characters in somehow.
Today, as I write this, it is Krampusnacht, so now seems a good time to discuss Krampus, who will be one of the major protagonists in my next novel.
Krampus is one of several bogeymen who orbit Saint Nicholas in the legendarium of the Germanic and Francophone peoples. For whatever reason, Krampus has gained a lot international popularity lately, eclipsing the similar Belsnickel and Knecht Ruprecht, who were, until recently, probably the most popular such characters outside their regions of origin. This is due in part to the internet, but also to the revival of traditions surrounding Krampus in Austria and Bavaria.
If I were to guess, I would suppose that it is his distinctive appearance that makes Krampus popular. The typical “companion” of Saint Nicholas is a bearded and rough-clad character whose dark and shabby appearance contrasts with the saint’s bright and festive one. These figures tend to have similar accoutrements—chains, a wicker basket, and a whip or switch or bag of ashes or some other device to punish naughty kids.
Krampus, however, is a slavering, horned demon-like creature with a long tongue. He still has the switch and basket, but he is considerably more striking and terrifying in appearance than most of his counterparts.
Worth noting, however, is that people outside the areas of Austria and Bavaria frequently confuse Krampus with similar characters called perchten, who are associated with Frau Perchta, a hobgoblin-like witch who comes around at Epiphany (and whom I’ll discuss in another post). The perchten are her minions, similar in appearance to Krampus and celebrated in similar fashion with dress-up and physically intense parades. I am informed that a lot of images or descriptions of krampuslaufen—Krampus runs—that one sees on the internet are actually perchtenlaufen.
Although these two creatures have migrated to different parts of the calendar (Krampus before the Feast of St. Nicholas and Perchta around Epiphany), the similar features suggest similar origins or at least a lot of trading. This is typical of folklore, with concepts dividing and combining and dividing again.
And if we want to get picky, we could also ask whether Krampus and the Buttnmandl, a monster made of straw and wearing huge cowbells, are really the same, or different. The answer is that there’s not really an answer: Trying to define these things is like a fanboy trying to explain away inconsistencies in his favorite franchise. For this reason, too, someone like me who wants to write a novel on all this folklore has to quit at some point, or lump together as many of these characters as possible, lest the cast be overwhelmed with too many, too similar monsters.
A Percht is not a Krampus, even if similarities certainly exist. Confusing the two is hardly possible, even though the Krampus is on the go only up to 6th December, with the Percht being around only after Christmas. The name is derived from the mythological figure “Perchta”. Both beautiful and ugly Perchten travel around in the harsh nights between Christmas and the Epiphany with the slogan: “To peace, to rhyme and to health”. They should exorcise the dark and cold winter with loud bells and chase away any evil spirits.
The same website helpfully explains the traditional equipment of someone dressed as Krampus:
Tradition dictates the Krampus’ equipment: a fur suit usually made from goat or sheep skin. Large, heavy rumble bells carried on a wide leather belt around the middle of the body. A rod of thin Birch branches or a cow’s tail. And of course the elaborately carved mask. Each Pass has nowadays their own style and sometimes the masks are modern and zombie-like, or, as with the Rauriser Devils, strictly traditional. In the Rauriser Traditional Pass the masks are carved by the members themselves and painted with red, white and black colours. They must meet certain criteria, such as the red fabric tongue and specific arrangement of the horns from a goat or a ram.
The origins of Krampus, like all these characters, are obscure. But they all serve a similar role: They are bogeymen, creatures that threaten children with punishments. The great folklorist Jacob Grimm also saw all these characters as related to household goblins such as kobolds and brownies.
One of the reasons I want to write a novel of Krampus even though Krampus stories have been done (perhaps done to death) a lot lately is because, so it seems to me, nobody who gives these characters a modern take wants to treat them with any respect. Brom in his admittedly entertaining novel Krampus the Yule Lord depicts Krampus and Santa as the last remnants of an ancient rivalry between Norse gods, and the comic book Krampus features a Hellboy-like Krampus unwillingly serving an entire organization of Santa Claus-like characters.
For whatever reason, nobody seems to want to write a story in which Santa Claus is actually St. Nicholas, the St. Nicholas, with all that might imply, or depict Krampus as his servant, reluctant or not, rather than his enemy. Nobody except me, that is.
The reason for this, in Brom’s case at least, probably arises from a decidedly modern hostility toward Christianity, so moderns pit Krampus against St. Nicholas as a supposedly freer, naughtier, less stuffy alternative.
The only problem with that is that Krampus is a decidedly Christian character: The reward/punishment dynamic of the saint and his sidekick developed in a Christian context. In fact, one thing Krampus does, often not mentioned in today’s essays on the subject, is demand that children pray. If they say their prayers, they can escape his wrath. Some of the Krampuskarten, those grotesque but whimsical postcards from the nineteenth century, depict Krampus demanding prayers from children.
Krampus may have some pre-Christian origin (the claims across the internet that he’s the son of Norse goddess Hel have no backing that I know of), but that origin is lost, and even if we could see such a hypothetical pre-Christian Krampus, he would have changed so much that we wouldn’t recognize him.
Rag & Muffin is finished. It’s done. It’s out of my hands and off to the publisher. It’s been through the editor, through the proofreader, and then back through me. That’s it.
I edited this one to death and then continued editing after it was dead. By the end there, I might have been doing more harm than good, so that meant it was time to get rid of it.
I have no word on a release date, but at least the book is now on someone else’s desk instead of mine. Now that that’s gone, I can work in earnest on Son of Hel. I’m still in the research phase of that one.
My final stage of editing is to go through what I call my “kill list,” a collection of my worst writing habits and the quirks that I try to edit out of the final draft.
A few people have previously asked to see my kill list, and I demurred because it is a collection of personal mistakes. However, I’ve reconsidered; for what it’s worth, I present the list here at it presently stands.
These are the most common errors in my own writing, at least that I’m aware of. Removing these from Rag & Muffin will be my final act upon the manuscript before it leaves my possession for good.
Overuse of LEAPT
Overuse of JUMPED
Comma before BUT eliminated in independent clauses except in cases of extreme constrast
BECAUSE and CUZ: No comma before except for clarity
THAT vs WHICH: Former restrictive, latter not
SINCE: Comma after main clause if it introduces reason rather than temporal information (non-restrictive)
AS: Usually no comma after main clause unless explaining a situation
Excess instances of AND and BUT at beginning of sentences
Excessive use of APPARENTLY
LAY, LAYING, and LAID (make sure used correctly)
No comma before AS IF
EACH OTHER vs. ONE ANOTHER (two characters vs. more than two)
VERY, A LITTLE, A BIT (overuse)
Double check that LY words before adjectives are adverbs
SUCH AS: comma on nonrestrictive, no comma on restrictive
Comma before TOO only when a pause is wanted or there is an abrupt shift
Eliminate EVEN THOUGH
Use ALTHOUGH at beginning of sentences and THOUGH otherwise
I’m going to try to produce a review for tomorrow, but for now, I’m drained. I have finally got through the last edits on Rag & Muffin, my first (or third?) novel.
This has been a long time coming—and I mean a ridiculously, embarrassingly long time. To give you an idea, I first conceived of this dark, subversive, deconstructive magical girl story before Puella Magi Madoka Magica existed.
Yes, really. I could have spearheaded the dark, violent magical girl trend—except I suck.
Yeah. It’s been that long. I was too sluggish to take advantage of this idea, so my muse romanced somebody else instead.
That’s not necessarily so bad, though: I had a lot of skill to develop before I was able to get this story into a polished form. I also had to get my personal stuff together because this book was for reasons I can’t state in detail an emotionally and spiritually taxing project. I had genuine “agony and ecstasy” while working on this. It is (at least in my opinion) a deeply ugly and deeply beautiful story, and I sometimes felt as if I had to rip my soul apart piece by piece to complete it.
My editor said she had a rough time going through my draft. I think (hope?) that’s a good thing, that it has the impact it’s supposed to: I ripped my heart out and stomped on it to write this, and my goal is to rip your heart out and stomp on it also.
I wanted to sprain your stomach muscles with laughter when I wrote Jake and the Dynamo, and I want to tear your heart out with Rag & Muffin. My goal as an author is to rupture organs.
Some compare writing a book to giving a birth, but creating Rag & Muffin has been more like gestating a xenomorph chestburster. It’s wicked and nasty, and I personally also think it’s beautiful. It’s a story of the highest ideals and darkest lusts mixed up and shaken together. It has guns and Kung fu and furries and gothic lolitas dumped into the setting of Talbot Mundi’s pulp fiction with a heavy dose of dungeon punk thrown in for good measure. It’s about sex and death and God, which might be the only important things in life.
It’s about growing up. It’s about getting religion. It’s about losing religion. It’s about kicking ass and taking names. It started as a simplistic and puerile revenge story, but then it grew—and grew.
It’s not about revenge anymore. It’s about saving your soul. It’s about you—you, you son of a bitch.
I am currently finishing up Rag & Muffin, having received the initial comments from my editor. This is in a sense my “first novel,” which is why it has taken longer, and been more painful, to complete than Jake and the Dynamo was.
Even my editor found this project somewhat painful. As she told me when she sent her initial edits, the story is “unrelentingly dark,” though she also stated that “the mood and the background and the eeriness and the culture are all supremely well done.”
I can’t describe openly on the internet all the difficulty I went through to produce this manuscript, but I can say that it was a long, hard road, and I am glad to be nearly done with it.
I can’t give a release date for this, but I expect my final edits and submission to be done probably by the end of the month.
I was earlier working on a review that I should have up by tomorrow, but good sense obligates me to spend some time on Son of Hel instead.
This novel will try to bring together a lot of different lore that has accumulated around St. Nicholas. To that end, I have started building a library of Santa Claus stories, folklore, and historical works. I am currently reading Brom’s amusing novel Krampus the Yule Lord, which I’ll review when I finish, and I have just received in the mail Gerry Bowler’s Santa Claus: A Biography, which chronicles changes in the conception of the jolly saint over time.
Also, just because I can, I am incorporating into the novel some archaic yet fascinating misconceptions about the North Pole. Before the Earth’s magnetic field was understood, it was once imagined that at the pole stood a “Black Precipice,” a massive mountain of lodestone. I have supposed that Santa has his military-industrial complex constructed on this mountain, which kind of makes sense, seeing as how he has an army of elves, elves can’t stand cold iron, and you can’t bring iron anywhere near the lodestone mountain.
See? Logic.
There was also a semi-famous man named John Cleves Symmes who believed very strongly, though entirely without evidence, that the poles had gigantic holes in them leading into the hollow Earth. A few conspiracy theorists still cling to this today, though it’s hard to know how serious they are because some online conspiracy-theorists are just in it for the laughs. I have long thought it would be fun to combine the Symmes’ Hole with the Black Precipice and imagine that the lodestone mountain is actually jutting out of the interior Earth, in the center of the hole.
As I have tried to envision the environment of the North Pole in this conception, I find that my imagination has failed and I have not dreamt big enough. The Arctic Ocean at the pole is around 13,000 feet deep.
According to Wikipedia, Symmes proposed that the holes were a full 4,000 miles wide. A little further checking, however, shows that his original theory proposed that the Earth is “open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees.”
Although a fundamental mistake in my math is more than likely, if a degree of latitude is approximately 69 miles, and if Symmes means the 12 to 16 degrees to be a radius, then the holes are actually only 1,656 to 2,2008 miles across.
He also expected to find a warm and habitable land with abundant animal and vegetable life located one degree north of 82º (why didn’t he just say “83º”?). That would make this habitable land, presumably existing somewhere inside the hollow Earth, about 14 degrees or 966 miles across.
If that doesn’t seem to jive with the hole-at-the-pole theory, you must understand that Symmes believed that the holes were gradual enough in slope that one could enter the hollow Earth without being aware of it, though it’s difficult to imagine how that would work.
Ignoring the notion of a gradual slope to an inner, concentric sphere, we can take these numbers and propose a gigantic, circular waterfall about 2,200 miles across or approximately 6,900 miles in circumference with the habitable but inhospitable Black Precipice in its center, 966 miles in diameter or approximately 3,034 miles in circumference with a height that probably rivals Mount Everest even above the surface of the Earth and stretches even further below it—more than a thousand miles, in fact, to reach the surface of the inner concentric sphere.
Instead of a habitable inner world as Symmes supposed, we must imagine an inner ocean or perhaps a vast network of waterways carrying the pouring ocean water from the Symmes Hole at the North Pole to the Symmes Hole at the South. This, conveniently, matches another, late Medieval hollow Earth theory. Thus the holes serve to circulate and refresh the oceanic waters, though this necessitates a water spout at the South Pole as vast as the waterfall at the North.
Again, the scale of these things is simply hard to imagine. The whole of the Arctic Circle, and perhaps more, must be shrouded permanently in an icy mist from this tumbling water. The noise must be constant and louder than a hurricane.
I have a lot of work to do to produce Son of Hel, my next project. Although the story is going to be an action-focused tale of Krampus, the Christmas demon, I want to do it justice in spite of the inherent silliness. My goal is to create a fully realized culture for the North Pole where Santa Claus lives, and to integrate as much existing folklore as I am able.
To that end, I am currently sitting here with stacks of books on folklore and making notes about various kinds of fairies from different cultures in order to integrate them into the society of elves at the North Pole. I’ve also been discovering the various companions of St. Nicholas, figuring out which ones I can combine into a single figure and which ones I must make separate characters.
Although they are of rather recent origin, I am also determined that Santa’s eight-plus-one reindeer will figure in the story. The following is a draft of how they appear thus far. I originally intended this scene to be a raucous party, though the result (at least at present) is surprisingly subdued. That may change in later drafts.
In a few hours it would be the fifth of December, the eve of what those at the North Pole had come to call the First Run. Mistakenly but understandably believing Nicholas to be dead, the universal Church had long ago chosen December sixth as his saint’s day, so that was the first day he delivered toys to children. Compared to Christmas Eve, St. Nicholas Day was a small, brief run with few deliveries, requiring no more than a few hours. But it helped Nicholas and the elves ensure that the sleigh and its accoutrements were in working order and ready for the Big Run, when he delivered toys to children all over the world. The First Run had a high margin of error; it was a good time for troubleshooting.
But the fifth of December, the day before, was not St. Nicholas’s day. It was a dark day, a day of fear, and it belonged to someone else, someone decidedly less jolly—and considerably less generous.
As evening came on, in anticipation of the First Run that would begin in twelve hours, Alpha Squadron congregated in the stables. This squadron consisted of the eight reindeer who had achieved the highest marks on the annual flight test, and for almost a century, the same eight reindeer had held this honor.
In scientific terms, they were Arctic reindeer, also known as Greenland caribou, or Rangifer tarandus eogroenlandicus, and those in the stables of Saint Nicholas were the last of their kind, for their subspecies had been otherwise extinct for almost four decades. It was thanks to the magic of the elves that they had powers of speech and flight as well as unusually long life. The Black Precipice of the uttermost North was a haven for them, just as it had become a haven for the last of the fay folk whom an encroaching modernity had driven from their woods and meadows.
Contrary to popular depictions, they were not tiny. They were huge, muscular brutes with shaggy coats, thick shoulders, and wide, blunt muzzles. Most were bareheaded, for they had shed their antlers the month before once their rut had ended. The only exception was Vixen, the one cow who had scored high enough for Alpha Squadron. Though considerably smaller than the others, Vixen’s tall, sweeping antlers lent her certain air of sober majesty. She would keep her antlers until spring.
In a dim corner of the stable, Comet, formerly the squadron’s captain, brooded atop a mound of hay. Although this was supposed to be a time of revelry, he was silent, and his hard expression had its effect on the rest of the squadron: The others spoke in low voices, giving Comet occasional, uneasy glances. Vixen, somewhat apart from the rest, gazed at him steadily for a minute before she shook her head and sighed.
