Books

A Big, Fat Fantasy Series

I haven’t talked about what I’m reading in a while. I have several series I’m rotating among because I have this weird thing where I burn out on a series if I try to read it straight through. So I read a book from one series, read one from another, then read one from another before going back to the next book in series 1, and so forth, except the order I get to them varies depending on the mood I’m in.

I’ve just finished reading book 3 in one of the series, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to hold up and be something I can recommend. I’m not sure what the name of the series as a whole is (the library doesn’t have them categorized under a series name), but the first book is Inda by Sherwood Smith. I’d put it in the “if you liked A Game of Thrones” category because it’s largely about court intrigue and how people get into petty power plays while there’s an existential threat out there that they’re going to have to deal with, but it’s not as gory or disturbing. I’d also compare it to the Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold, although this is fantasy rather than science fiction. There’s the warrior society, and there’s the main character who’s a charismatic natural leader and genius strategist who has a knack for pulling victories out of thin air and winning people over to his side.

The first book starts out looking like a “school” book. Our hero is a second son in a noble family, and traditionally the first sons are sent to the royal academy to train to be warriors who fight for the king, then they’re supposed to go home and train their younger brothers, who will defend their homes while the older brother is fighting for the king. But there’s a break in tradition in which the second sons are also called to the academy to train. What these boys don’t know is that this is all part of a scheme to undermine the king’s second son and change the kingdom’s power structure, and this sets in motion events that will totally change the kingdom. Young Inda is a natural leader, and when he befriends the shy, bookish prince and pulls together a group of boys who shine in the academy, it totally upsets all the schemes. That leads to Inda being exiled to a merchant ship, and his life goes in some strange directions from there.

It’s hard to describe much more of the plot without spoilers, but we get to see these boys grow up and go through all kinds of things. In the book I just finished, they’re adults and leaders in their own right, dealing with the fallout from the plots that started in the first book. All the plotting is very twisty, and it’s fun to see all the various plot threads converge, merge, and diverge. Like with the Song of Ice and Fire books, there are storylines taking place in a variety of locations, and characters from one storyline may end up meeting up with other characters. The worldbuilding is pretty detailed, with fully thought-out cultures. You get a sense for their social structure and priorities and how that has worked to shape their society.

The stories do get a bit intense. There’s violence, since we have war and pirates, and I have skimmed over a few parts or flipped ahead to see what will happen so I can brace myself through a difficult part, but I like these characters enough to want to know what will happen next for them. They’re also really, really fat books. It takes me weeks to read one, but that means I get to be immersed in that world for a long time. I’m taking a break to read something else before I dive into the next book, but I’m eager to do so, so I may not make it through my whole series rotation first.

When the Real World Intrudes

It’s been a month since I finished the first draft of the book in progress. I’ve re-read it and have done some brainstorming about what I need to fix. I don’t have a lot of major surgery to do. I think the basic structure is good. But what I have is essentially a 125,000-word outline. The scenes and plot points are there, but I think they may not be done in quite the right way. I’m going to have to analyze each scene and figure out how I could do it better.

That analysis is what I’ve been working on this week, though I’ve had some difficulty concentrating. You may have heard about the recent shopping mall shooting. That happened in my area. I don’t live close to that mall. It’s on the other side of the metro area. But I have a lot of friends who live around there, so as soon as I heard the news, I jumped online to see if my friends were safe. I found that one friend’s son was just across the road from that center when it happened, so I narrowly escaped having had two friends who’ve had children gunned down (just one is already too many). I’ve shopped at that mall. In fact, I bought a dress I wore for a lot of my Damsel Under Stress book events there. I got chills when I saw the reports that the shooter had researched the busiest times there because the time I shopped there was during that peak window. It was years ago, but it still felt like a close call. I guess I had a closer call last year when someone was shot on the street behind my house and I heard the gunfire. I’ll never forget that sound.

I’m heartbroken about the lives lost and the lives broken — that poor little boy who lost his whole family, the mother who lost both daughters, the young woman celebrating her birthday, and all the others. It’s hard to believe that someone could have so much hate as to want to indiscriminately wipe people out. Even sadder is when you see the number of people online who try to excuse or justify it. Maybe they’re all just trolls or bots trying to stir things up, but it’s still scary.

So, no wonder it’s been hard to focus. It does help that this is a “secondary world” book, so it’s an escape from here and now. I’ve figured out how I need to fix the first scene. That will be my work for today. It’s a rainy day, so it’s good for writing.

writing life

My Planner System

I’ve never been much of a trendsetter, so by the time I catch on to something, it’s old news. My latest late discovery is the concept of the bullet journal.

Actually, I’d heard about this years ago when it first became a thing, and I was intrigued by the idea because I love planners and attempting to be organized, but I couldn’t find a good explanation that wasn’t extremely intimidating. All the examples I found were Instagram-worthy, with watercolor artwork, calligraphy, stickers, and fancy designs. But a couple of months ago I saw an interview with the guy who came up with the concept, and the way he talked about it made so much sense to me — and it seems that it was other people who went nuts with the basic concept and turned it into a competition.

The very basic idea is just that you create your own journal/planner. You just need an index at the front to help you find things and you can create your own code for how to mark items in your journal (where the “bullet” comes from). Beyond that, it’s up to you.

So I got a composition book out of my stash (I buy tons every year for 50 cents each at the back-to-school sales because that’s what I use for brainstorming books) and got started. I will never be sharing pages from my journal because there’s no art or design or fanciness involved. It’s all just lists. I don’t even create a monthly calendar page, since I have plenty of calendars.

For the planner part, I have a page for the month, on which I have a list of goals (like “finish first draft”) and to-do items (like a list of bills that have to be paid and the payment date) and any appointments. I’ll also write down any events after they happen if I’ll need to remember when something happened. Just that alone helps a lot because I don’t have that “did I pay that bill?” panic when I have a list and mark it off every month. Then I have daily pages (usually half pages) on which I put that day’s to-do list and any appointments. I’ll also put menu plans and what time I need to start cooking to have dinner on time. I’m trying to do yoga every evening before dinner, so I factor in that start time with my cooking time. Every morning, I check with the monthly list and put any of those tasks on the day’s list. I have a code for the to-do list for items that must be done that day and the work priority of the day, as well as for items that are in progress (started but not finished) and items I’ve moved forward to the next day.

Aside from that, it’s a book of lists. I have a list of books I want to read, movies I want to watch, a master to-do list (items that aren’t yet on the monthly list but that I need to get around to doing eventually), story ideas, etc. I also have a quarterly plan. Basically, if I need to keep track of it, I write it down on a list. I think I’m going to start a “put it away in a safe place” list so that I can find those things later. It might help to write down what I thought the safe place was at the time I put it away.

It’s really worked wonders for helping me get stuff done. When I write out my daily tasks, I can take those big monthly tasks and break them into less daunting chunks, or I can create a “theme” day to deal with everything in a certain category.

There’s no artwork at all, just lists in a composition book and an index and page numbers. I thought I’d share how I’m using the concept in case anyone else was intimidated by all those pictures of planners people are posting with artwork and calligraphy and stickers and all that. Just having a place to keep track of all the stuff in my head helps me a lot, especially with the little admin tasks that pile up and overwhelm me. Since I started doing this, I finally tackled some things that had been lingering on my to-do list for nearly a year.

However, I failed to put “post blog” on my to-do list (although “draft Friday blog post” was on yesterday’s list, and I got it done), so I didn’t think about it until later in the day. I don’t know if this proves or disproves how well this system is working for me. As long as I write it down, I get it done, but if I don’t, I may totally forget it.

writing, Books

Jane Austen’s Mary Sue?

I’ve been thinking about that “Mary Sue” concept some more, and to further explore it, I’m turning not to action/adventure, but to Jane Austen.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen identified pretty closely with most of her main characters. She had a lot in common with them and they were in similar circumstances to what she experienced, but with different outcomes (since they all got married and she never did). If you look at Austen’s letters and life story, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice was to a large extent Austen’s self-insert character.

Is Lizzie a Mary Sue, though? She’s sparkling and witty, and everyone loves her. Even Darcy, although he initially claims she’s not as attractive as everyone else seems to think, falls in love with her. She ends up marrying the extremely wealthy man, who goes to great lengths to help her and her family. She gets to give a stinging comeuppance to a snobby older woman. It kind of sounds like Austen was writing out her greatest fantasies.

But I don’t think she’s a Mary Sue. Austen gives Lizzie plenty of flaws. She’s a terrible judge of character, believing everything Wickham tells her and seeing him as trustworthy while she doesn’t see Darcy for what he really is, even after he starts softening somewhat. She’s part of both the “pride” and “prejudice” in the title. She goes through a major growth arc.

Cathy in Northanger Abbey is to some extent another self-insert — a clergyman’s daughter with an active imagination who’s obsessed with gothic novels — but the book is, to a large extent, poking fun at this character and the way her overly active imagination gets her in trouble. She may get the happy ending, but after she learns a lesson from making a huge mistake. (This one does have a Star Wars connection, in that Felicity Jones of Rogue One played Cathy in the most recent TV adaptation, which is now really fun to watch after seeing Rogue One if you imagine Jyn Erso showing up instead of Cathy.)

Anne in Persuasion may also have had some element of autobiography to her. Austen clearly relates to her. She’s practically a saint, the longsuffering only sensible person in her flighty family, tending to her sickly sister and her kids as essentially an unpaid servant and suffering in silence as she has to watch other women make a play for the man she loves. There’s a lot of “Victim Sue” going on here. But Austen is also very clear that Anne has screwed up seriously. She’s in the situation she’s in because she made a bad choice.

Austen may have written self-inserts who get to live out her fantasies, but she remains objective about these characters. She’s well aware of their flaws. She makes them learn and grow in ways that Mary Sues seldom do (if you start out perfect, you don’t have to grow or learn).

The reason I was thinking about Jane Austen in terms of Mary Sues was the recent finale of the series Sanditon, which was very loosely based on a fragment of an unfinished novel by Austen. Really, the only part Austen wrote was the setup, a genteel but naive young woman gets invited to stay in a beach resort town with some people her family recently helped. There’s a hint that there’s a dashing (and possibly scandalous) younger brother of the man she’s visiting, and there’s a wealthy lady in town with impoverished young relations hanging around her, hoping to get into her will, as well as a young heiress from the Indes. And there it leaves off.

But instead of the TV writers letting the Austen heroine be an Austen heroine, they created a Mary Sue. This heroine was practically perfect from the start and doesn’t really grow or change. She’s good at everything — she can set a broken bone, give advice about architecture, plan an event, win at cricket, and just decide to be a governess. She wins the heart of the scandalous brother and the bright young architect (only for both to vanish when the series got cancelled and then renewed and the actors were no longer available), then catches the attention of a military officer and a wealthy widower. Her main problem is resolved not by her growing or learning anything but by others intervening. There’s none of the realization of where she went wrong that we get from the real Austen works. An Austen heroine generally has to eat some crow and admit to her failures, and it’s because she’s able to do this that she gets her happy ending. This chick gets her happy ending without learning anything.

And that, I think, is the difference between putting a lot of yourself into your characters and writing a “Mary Sue.” Really, I think we need a better term for this because the whole point of the Mary Sue is that she’s an author’s self-insert, and many of the examples I can find in original fiction don’t seem to be the writers’ self-inserts. In some cases, it’s a character the writer is enamored with and therefore loses perspective. I think in the Sanditon case it’s just bad writing. This is perhaps the least interesting character in the whole series, so they didn’t bother developing her. They just stuck traits to her as though that would make viewers like her better, then gave her a last-second happy ending without her learning anything.

writing

Dressing the Characters

Reading my manuscript as an e-book is an interesting experience. At times I get caught up in it, but then I find myself reading critically and spotting things I want to fix. I’m getting more into it as I progress, probably because I’m past the spot where I rewrote it over and over again so the words are less familiar.

I got sidetracked yesterday, though, by designing “costumes” for my characters. I realized I have almost no description of what anyone’s wearing. I have a mental image, but I haven’t conveyed that very well. I don’t necessarily feel the need to describe everything everyone wears, but I do think I need to convey the overall sense of what people are wearing in this world.

This is “secondary world” fantasy, so I don’t have to be accurate to any particular time period, but that in a way makes things more difficult because it’s harder to find reference images to help me have a more solid mental image for me to describe. So far, I’d describe the overall look in this place to be medieval meets Old West. Of course, I can’t use those terms in the book because these people wouldn’t know what either of those things are.

When I first started writing down the stories in my head when I was 12, I tended to get sidetracked designing costumes for my characters. My notebooks of story notes have as many (very rough) drawings of dresses as they do real story notes. That meant I didn’t get very far in the writing part. Now, though I seem to have swung the other way and my characters seem to be walking around in generic, bland clothing that doesn’t get described. They’re wearing pants and shirts and dresses, but there’s no hint at what they look like.

And that meant some searching online to find examples of things to help me create an overall look. It was kind of fun, I have to admit. I’m not trying to draw things now, just finding images so I can think “these pants plus this kind of shirt and this kind of jacket, but without that trim.”

I’ve also found a few dresses and blouses I’d love to have, but I wouldn’t have anywhere to wear them. Maybe when I make a profit on this book, I’ll celebrate by buying something.

writing

The Next Round Begins

I must like that last book I was working on because I found myself eager to get back to work on it. I like to let a manuscript rest at least two weeks after I finish a first draft so that I can look at it with fresh eyes and be less tied to the process of writing it. I didn’t quite make it two full weeks before I wanted to jump back in. I figure it’s been months since I wrote the beginning, so it’s been far more than two weeks on that part.

Right now, I’m trying to read it like a reader would and see how it works for me in the big picture. That’s hard to do because my impulse is to start editing. On the last book I wrote before this one, I got the idea to read the manuscript on my tablet, which makes it a lot harder to edit as I go (so I just don’t). But it still looks like a manuscript, so I read it that way. With this book, I got the bright idea to format the manuscript as an e-book so it’s just like reading any other book on my tablet. I still find things I want to fix, which is okay, since that’s the purpose of this exercise. When I find something that doesn’t work for me or that needs to be changed, I write it down in my notebook, but otherwise, I keep reading. I literally can’t make changes in the document I’m reading. It also helps to get away from my desk. I’m mostly reading this while sitting on the patio, exactly the way I’d read for pleasure. It’s interesting how reading this way changes my mindset about how I’m looking at the story.

I need to rework the beginning — I may not need most of the first chapter — and there are some decisions I made late in the book that mean I need to adjust some things early in the book, but I’m enjoying the story and like the characters. This is a good sign. I like being in this world. I don’t think I’m going to have to do major surgery on the next draft, just the beginning. It’ll be mostly about consistency and fine-tuning

After I have all my notes on what needs to be fixed I can get to work on fixing it. After that draft, I think I’m going to brainstorm and draft the second book in the series. I want to have two ready to go before I launch, and it makes sense to draft the second book before finalizing the first book. There may be things I need to change and set up, and there’s no point in finessing the words until the story is locked down.

movies

Is Rey a Mary Sue?

In my previous post, I discussed the definition of a Mary Sue character — an author’s self-insert character who’s too good to be true and with whom the author identifies too closely to be able to write her objectively. Now, for the question about Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Is she a Mary Sue? I’m not so much addressing this out of any desire to defend Rey but to demonstrate how this term is misused and how the misuse often comes down to sexism.

My verdict is that she’s no more a Mary Sue than Luke was in the original trilogy and less than Anakin was in the prequels. I will explain.

To start with, Rey is to a large extent Luke in drag, since her first movie is largely a remake of Luke’s first movie. They’re both orphans with mysterious pasts and Force and piloting talents living on desert planets who get involved in a resistance/rebel movement when they come across a droid carrying critical information. They both end up having to come to terms with their shadowy heritage and save the day by turning the big bad’s key henchman. If Rey is a Mary Sue, then Luke has to be a Gary Stu. Or maybe they’re both just heroes.

One criticism I’ve seen is that Rey is good at everything. She’s an expert mechanic, expert pilot, a quick study in the Force, and instant lightsaber champion. I have to challenge this assertion because it doesn’t fit what we see. She is a good mechanic, but adequate explanation is given for this, since it’s essentially her job even before the story starts. She makes a living by scavenging equipment and fixing it up to sell. She knows the parts that make up a spaceship and what they do. She also lives near a shipyard, and she’s clearly familiar with the ships parked there. Not that she even does anything all that spectacular. She repairs BB-8’s antenna by removing it, straightening it, and putting it back. I could do that much. Then she fixes things on the Falcon, but she’s clearly familiar with the ship and the modifications done to it. It’s not as though she builds a sophisticated droid from spare parts as a child.

She’s also not presented as an expert pilot. She can fly to get to a destination, and she seems to have some familiarity with a variety of craft, but she really has only one big flying sequence in the whole trilogy, when she evades the TIE fighters in the Falcon, and she’s not that great a pilot there. She bumps into things and is wobbly. She nearly crashes immediately upon takeoff. She survives and escapes because she’s more familiar with the local terrain than the other pilots are, not because she’s such a brilliant pilot. It’s not as though she wins a space battle the first time she gets in an X-wing or wins a space battle the first time she gets in a spaceship and accidentally pushes buttons.

She does learn to do Force stuff quickly, though I have to question the assertion by one of the commenters that people are usually only able to use the Force after extensive training. There’s plenty of evidence throughout the saga of people with strong native Force abilities using it instinctively. That was the whole point of them discovering Anakin. He was using the Force without knowing that’s what he was doing. In Rey’s case, she got slammed by the Force when she picked up Luke’s lightsaber, which gave her other people’s memories using the Force, and she had voices of past Jedi in her head. Then Kylo Ren opened the channel to her, so to speak. All she really did was push into his head through the channel he’d opened. When she tried the Jedi mind trick on Stormtrooper 007 (it was an uncredited cameo by Daniel Craig), she failed entirely the first time, and it took multiple tries for her to get it to work. That and shoving Kylo Ren out of her head was the only big Force stuff she did. I don’t see that as any bigger than Luke using the Force to guide the torpedoes after one Force 101 lesson so that he made the impossible shot the more experienced pilots had failed at.

As for the fighting, they established early in the first movie that she knew how to fight with a staff. She’s been on her own since childhood in a rough place, and she’s learned how to take care of herself. When she fights with the lightsaber, she’s using more or less the same techniques she uses with the staff. She’s not doing any kind of elegant fencing. She’s staff fighting using different technology. She’s also fighting someone who’s been badly injured and is dripping blood on the ground who has been ordered to catch her alive, so he’s not fighting to kill, while she’s going all-in. Kylo Ren is much bigger and stronger than she is, but I wouldn’t say he’s a great lightsaber fighter, either. He’s all hacking and slashing, working with force rather than skill). I don’t think either of them would be able to hold up against someone like Obi-Wan or Anakin, for instance. So, someone who has skills in fighting transferring that to a different weapon and holding out long enough for the planet breaking up to allow her to escape doesn’t seem like a Mary Sue stretch to me.

Another criticism of the commenters who call her a Mary Sue is that she has no flaws and is therefore boring, but she’s got a bigger flaw than Luke right from the start. Luke at least wants to do bigger and better things. He has ambitions. Rey is in a rut and doesn’t want to leave. She knows she’s in a place where she’ll never fulfill her potential, but she’s holding out for her family to return and refuses to leave the terrible place where she’s stuck. Even when offered the opportunity at something better and getting a new family in the bargain when Han and Chewbacca offer her a job, she just wants to get back to the place where she was stuck. She actually runs away from the very idea of the Force, which is what gets her captured. If we compare to Luke in his first movie, I’m not sure what his flaw was supposed to be. Really, he was just lacking information. His flaw he had to overcome was not knowing how awesome he really was. Luke got the flaw of being impatient in his second movie, and he was shown as being in danger of being tempted by the Dark Side, but he never actually appeared to be tempted. He resisted Vader and then was willing to die rather than give in to the Emperor. Rey went straight to the Dark Side in her first Jedi lesson and sought out the Dark Side cave. She kept connecting with Kylo Ren even after being warned it was dangerous, and she was on the verge of giving in to the Emperor when Ben showed up at the end of the trilogy. Luke didn’t get any meaningful flaws until the sequel trilogy, and that really made a lot of fans angry. Anakin had plenty of flaws, but weirdly they weren’t treated like problems. Padme fell in love with him after she heard him talking about wanting to be a dictator and learned that he slaughtered all the sandpeople, including the children. He was never treated like a hotheaded, arrogant borderline psychopath but rather was this great guy everyone loved.

But the biggest “not a Mary Sue” clue to me is that Rey isn’t really the hero until the third movie. Luke saved the day in his first movie by blowing up the Death Star. Anakin won the podrace that allowed the Jedi to get away from Tatooine and played a decisive role in the final battle. Rey didn’t really play a key role in her first movie. You could have removed her from the movie entirely after Kylo Ren captured her without changing events too much, aside from her being the reason Finn wanted to lead the mission to the base. The only thing she contributed to blowing up the base was hotwiring a door open so Han and Chewie could plant the explosives. In the second movie, her contribution was persuading Luke to get involved and providing the getaway vehicle. She doesn’t get to be the hero until the last movie. Even though Anakin’s trilogy was a tragic, downward arc, he still got to be the hero and save the day up until the point when he turned evil. I find it hard to take seriously a claim that a character who doesn’t get to be the hero is a Mary Sue.

Incidentally, people have argued with me about Anakin being a Gary Stu since he turned evil and didn’t get to be a Jedi master, but come on, the guy was immaculately conceived by the Force, built his own protocol droid at 10, built his own podracer and was not only the only human to be able to race but also won against more experienced racers, won a space battle accidentally the first time he got in a fighter, was the most powerful Jedi, the queen fell in love with him in spite of him having gone on a murder spree. The not being a master was pure Victim Sue. There was some serious “no one appreciates my genius” energy to that part of the story, which makes it even more obvious that Lucas was overidentifying with this character.

Where I think some fans were seeing Rey as a Mary Sue might have been going back to the original definition. When more Star Wars movies were finally made, these fans wanted to see more movies about Luke, Han, and Leia, not movies about this new character. A lot of people wanted to see movies based on the books that are now considered the “Legends” continuity. I would have loved to see the original Timothy Zahn trilogy made into films. Mara Jade is one of my favorite Star Wars universe characters. But that was never going to happen. The actors were already getting too old for the roles at the ages they were supposed to be in those stories at the time the books were published. By the time they were making the sequels, it just couldn’t have worked, and I don’t think the deepfake technology they use for young Luke in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett would hold up for him being a main character in an entire movie on the big screen. So, I suspect some fans would have been unhappy no matter who the new main character was because this wasn’t the person they wanted to see. Her being a woman only made it worse.

You don’t have to like the character, but at least be honest in your criticism. Crying “Mary Sue” is a copout. As far as I can see, she’s just a hero, no different from the other heroes in the other Star Wars films. If you didn’t have a problem with a farmboy who won a big space battle the first time he got in an X-Wing and the first time he really had to use the Force, you don’t have a lot of ground to complain about Rey. I happen to love the character, and I’m in good company. John Williams has said she’s his favorite, and when they asked him to score episode 9, he said his first question was whether Rey was in it. I wonder if this means they’ll lure him out of Star Wars retirement to do the Rey movie (though he’ll be about 95 by then, so I hope he’s still with us, even if only just to get to watch the movie).

What’s a Mary Sue?

While I was doing my Star Wars rewatch, I was watching some of the YouTube videos about Easter eggs and hidden references, which got more related videos recommended to me, and a lot of these guys (but just the guys) kept saying that Rey in the sequel trilogy is a Mary Sue. It all came up again with the recent announcement of an upcoming additional movie about her and whether this new movie will “redeem” her and make her a character instead of a Mary Sue. But is she a Mary Sue?

First, as you always should in any debate, we need to define our terms. What is a Mary Sue?

The term comes from the world of Star Trek fan fiction, from the pre-Internet days. There was a story written as a parody of the kind of story in which the author inserts a new character who’s basically an avatar of herself into the existing story world. Ensign Mary Sue joins the crew of the Enterprise. She’s beautiful, has a lovely singing voice, everyone likes her, she’s good at everything, whichever crew member the author has a crush on falls madly in love with her, and she ends up saving the day. “Mary Sue” came to be used as a general term for an obvious author self-insert character in fan fiction. Later, the use got expanded to describe a character in original/professional fiction who had traits of a Mary Sue and seemed like she might be a thinly veiled version of the author. And then it got overused to mean a female (almost always female) character who was at all skilled or liked.

Although there are occasional mentions of a “Gary Stu” or “Marty Stu,” the concept is pretty heavily gendered. One reason is that the vast majority of fan fiction is written by women, so the vast majority of author self-insert characters are female, and that means most of the “Mary Sue” examples are female, which makes it easier to compare female original characters in professional fiction to their fanfic counterparts. The other reason is that until very recently (and often still), female characters in action-oriented fiction didn’t get to do much. They existed to scream and get rescued. The male characters were the ones with mad skills who got to save the day. That meant that a female character who acted like the usual male hero looked more like a Mary Sue than like the kind of female characters we were used to seeing. And it’s entirely possible that this lack of female characters who got to do anything is one reason most fan fiction is written by women — you have to write original characters if you want to have a female character who gets to do anything.

Not that men are immune from the tendency to write wish-fulfillment characters. Take James Bond. While Ian Fleming did work in intelligence during the war, he was an administrator, not a field agent. It’s fairly obvious that Bond was his Gary Stu, getting to do all the dashing spy stuff he thought would have been exciting. He’s highly skilled, has all sorts of cool gizmos, saves the day and gets the girl(s). Or take just about any superhero. How can the wealthy playboy who fights crime with the help of all his high-tech gadgets be anything other than wish fulfillment? Or there’s the noble weakling with asthma who becomes a powerful supersoldier. But people just accept hyper-competent male characters as normal heroic characters. It’s the women who get called Mary Sues. A couple of years ago, I watched all the Marvel movies. I’d heard complaints about Captain Marvel and what a Mary Sue that character was, so I was looking for those traits when I watched her movie — and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between her and any other superhero in the series.

There are two key things I think often get forgotten in any discussion of the Mary Sue concept. One is that the main complaint about the Mary Sue character initially was not so much about her perfection, but because she took over from the regular characters in that story world. Back in that day, pre-Internet, it took work to find fan fiction. You had to know the right people to get your hands on fan-produced fiction magazines, or you had to go to conventions. So imagine you’ve gone to all that effort to find some stories set in your favorite fictional universe about your favorite fictional characters, and instead of getting a story about the characters you love, you get a story about some random chick who takes over the story and leaves the regulars on the sideline. That’s the annoying part. If the author had filed off the serial numbers and presented it as an original story in which that character was supposed to be the main character, readers might even have liked and cheered for that character because the character would just look like any other hero (remember, the original Mary Sue was a parody, exaggerating traits).

And that’s the other thing that gets forgotten: Just about all heroes are Mary/Marty Sues/Stus to some extent. It’s hard to write a character you don’t identify with in some way, since you’re the only person you know from the inside out. Heroes also tend to be better, smarter, stronger, etc., than the average person, even when those heroes are supposed to be the “ordinary Joe” type. I have a little game I play when I’m reading or watching something. I try to imagine myself in that situation and consider how long I’d survive. It’s not long. It would be a pretty boring story if we didn’t let the heroes be at all idealized, if we stuck to what ordinary people really could do. I can walk for hours, but probably not for days or weeks. I can’t run for more than a few minutes (bad knees), and I’m toast if I have to hang from my fingers off the side of a building for more than about 30 seconds.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as an egregious Mary Sue, but I think they’re rarer than critics seem to believe. Not every woman who’s at all competent, or, as one author put it, capable of getting home in the rain without drowning, is a Mary Sue. It’s come to mean “a female character I don’t like.” Or even “a female character in a role that should be a male.” Whether or not a character is a Mary Sue is often in the eye of the beholder. If you identify with that character, you’ll love the character. If you don’t, you’ll call her a Mary Sue.

My personal definition of an original fiction Mary Sue is a character the author has a blind spot about, to the point that the treatment of the character defies story logic. The author treats the character as though she’s a real person she loves and wants the best for rather than like a fictional character in a story. It’s not about whether the character is good at things or well-liked or saves the day — all things you expect of just about any hero. It’s whether there’s a good reason for all those things. If someone’s an expert pilot because she went to flight school and spent years training, she’s not a Mary Sue. If the first time she gets in a fighter she manages to outfly trained and experienced pilots and wins the battle, we’re getting into Mary Sue territory. Someone who’s nice to people and is well-liked just makes sense. Someone who’s mean and snarky and selfish but also the most beloved person in town might be a Mary Sue.

There are variations on the usual Mary Sue tropes, since this is about authors inserting their personal fantasies into stories and those fantasies may vary. It’s not always about being popular and winning. You may get the Victim Sue, which usually boils down to “no one appreciates me.” This is the character who’s not accepted or liked and the story paints this as terribly unfair. This character may still save the day, forcing everyone to acknowledge how great they are, or may turn to evil, with it being the fault of those people who didn’t accept him/her. Still, it comes down to warping story logic because the author has a blind spot.

Often, it all comes down to a clash between showing and telling. Because the author relates so closely to the character, she may forget that not everyone feels the same way and doesn’t have the same info she has, so all the reasons why we should love the character don’t actually make it into the story

Next: But is Rey a Mary Sue?

Rest Day

This week, I not only finished the first draft of my book, but I also finished and filed my taxes (I don’t normally leave it this late, but I didn’t have the spare brainpower while I was finishing the book. I apply any refund to my Q1 estimated taxes, so it’s not as though I’m missing out on anything by not filing early. The bookkeeping was already done so it was just a case of plugging numbers into forms) and took care of a big admin task that’s been on the to-do list for a long time.

So, today I’m taking a day off and trying not to think about work. A new garden center opened nearby, and I’m going to go get my summer herbs and see what they recommend for the bare spot that gets little sun.

I may do a little other shopping and pick up something nice to drink. Then I’m going to plant my new purchases, then sit on the patio and read.

Next week, back to writing and attempting to do some marketing.

The Draft is Done!

On Monday I finally finished The Book That Would Not Die — the first draft of it. It came in at about 123,500 words. I’m not sure what will happen with the next draft. I’m sure there are some things that can be tightened up, and there are a couple of things I set up but ended up not using, so they can be cut, but I also know that I need to flesh some things out and add stuff like description and emotion, so we’ll see what happens in the next round.

But that probably won’t start until next month. It needs to rest a bit while I deal with other things. I have a lot of administrative work to catch up on. I need to take a slight break. I have some short pieces I want to play with.

I’ve been working on this book for so long that if feels weird not to be working on it. At night, after I’ve turned out the lights but before I fall asleep, I generally think about the book, going over what I wrote that day and imagining the next scene. It feels weird to not have a next scene to think of. I’ve caught myself imagining what the characters are doing after the book ends. It’s not scenes that will end up in a sequel, just the immediate next steps. I have some ideas for what could happen in the next book and I know the character arc, but I don’t have a specific plot. I’m sure it’ll come to me once I start working on revisions.

First, though, I need to reboot the brain. I took a little time off on Tuesday, doing my grocery shopping and then going to the park that has a nice field of bluebonnets to take a walk and have a picnic lunch. Today and tomorrow are admin days, and then I’m planning to give myself a long weekend before I dive into some short stories.