The Writing Life: The Perils of God Mode

Being a god involves a surprising amount of paperwork.

            

I won’t pretend that we writers aren’t attracted to the craft, at least in part, because of raging control issues. In real life, most of us only have a limited number of things we have any real authority over, and most of those fall under the category of what to eat for dinner.

            

Writers, however, have absolute power within the boundaries of our particular world. If we want the sky to be green, all we have to do is say so. If someone annoys us, we can kill them off in as grisly a fashion as our heart desires. We can fill a thousand different conversations with the things we wish we’d said in life.

            

It takes a little time to realize that having all the power means more than just being able to do what you want. You have to do *everything,* from keeping track of each and every character to making sure that they have everything they need to give you the ending you want.

            

One character may keep a gun in a drawer next to his bedside, but if you don’t make certain he stops by his house to grab it before the final battle then he’s going to go in unarmed. You also need to make sure he has some skill at actually shooting the gun, and come up with a reason for him to have that training that makes sense. Making note of all these little things, and assuring that they’re both in place and believable, is the literary equivalent of a police officer filling out paperwork after a case.

            

The more complicated a story, the more paperwork you have to do. My Sleeping Beauty, Elena, is a sorceress, which means I’ve had to hear far more about magic than I ever wanted to. More specifically, I have to study magic, figuring out why a particular spell works and what will happen when I introduce this outside element to another spell. Because Elena would know, and has a tendency to explain such matters in a far more technical language than I use in describing anything, ever. Since she knows, I have to as well.

            

Most of the time, I adore dealing with even the finickiest of details. It’s like building an enormous, world-spanning dollhouse, and it takes someone who finds equal delight in making sure the walls are structurally sound and writing tiny little headlines on the fake newspaper on the coffee table. You have the power to send a bedset plummeting off the third story, and it can be fun to watch it smash on the rocks below. But you also have to be the one to sweep it up, and make sure that the upstairs bedroom gets a replacement bedset at some point.

            

Of course, you could simply blow the house up and solve all your problems. But then you’d have to figure out what kind of device would cause the right amount of damage, smuggle it into the house without anyone noticing, and decide whether or not you want there to be any survivors.  Depending on the answer to that question, you’re left with a whole new set of problems.

If being a god was easy, anyone could do it. 

Deities 101: The Mythology of the Pipe Woman Chronicles

We have a visitor today! The amazing Lynne Cantwell has recently released “Annealed,” the latest book in her Pipe Woman Chronicles series (Never heard of it? Check it out on Goodreads!) Her literary playground is the world of gods and goddesses, and she’s stopped by to offer us a Deities 101-style look at the power players in her world.

The Mythology of the Pipe Woman Chronicles
by Lynne Cantwell

When I began writing the Pipe Woman Chronicles, I made a conscious decision to make it a different kind of urban fantasy.  Instead of incorporating vampires, zombies, and other things that go bump in the night, I decided to mine various pre-Christian pantheons for the otherworldly beings who populate my novels.  Here's a quick primer.  If you’re interested in seeing what they look like, I’ve created a Pinterest board.  Feel free to stop by!

Kicking things off is White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman, the Lakota Sioux goddess who gifts Naomi with her extra-special powers of persuasion.  The Lakota believe White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman brought them the sacred pipe they smoke when making decisions for the tribe.  She also taught them their seven sacred ceremonies – among them, the Sun Dance and the hunka, or making-of-a-brother, ceremony that both occur in Annealed.

Many Plains Indian tribes – including the Lakota and the Ute – include Coyote in their belief systems.  Coyote is a Trickster who can change shape at will.  He is always cooking up some scheme to enrich himself at someone else's expense.  The Ute have a number of stories about Coyote plotting to have sex with one woman or another.

Another Ute legend is that of Blood Clot Boy. (I couldn’t find a picture of him for the Pinterest board, sorry – although that may be just as well.)  He transformed initially from a clot of buffalo blood into a human-like boy, and a childless couple adopted him.  His chief activity was providing his family, and later his tribe, with plenty of buffalo – an important function for a nation whose subsistence largely depended on them.

Three Aztec (or, more properly, Mexica) gods figure in the Pipe Woman Chronicles: Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, and Coatlicue.  Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca seem to be brother gods who swap control of the world at the dawn of each new age, or sun.  We are currently in the Fifth Sun, and the god in charge is Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent who some New Agers believed would return to Earth at the end of the Long Count that occurred last winter.  Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, is another Trickster – a shapeshifter who commonly takes the form of a jaguar.  Early Christian chroniclers would often try to cast one local god in the “good guy” role and another in the “bad guy” role, and Tezcatlipoca drew the short straw for the Mexica.  But the evidence suggests that he was respected rather than feared, and that he would even help his followers on occasion.

Coatlicue was probably imported by the Mexica from an older tradition.  She is considered to be the Mother of some members of the Mexica pantheon (although not the mother of either Quetzalcoatl or Tezcatlipoca, despite the conflation of their separate myths).  Her youngest son, Huitzilopochtli, led the Mexica from their fabled paradise of Aztlán to their final home in what is now Mexico City.  Legend has it that she is still waiting for Huitzilopochtli to come back home to her.

From sunny Mexico, we move to cold Northern Europe and the Norse pantheon.  I think almost everybody is familiar with these gods:  Odin, the one-eyed AllFather; Frigga, his wife; Thor, the hammer-wielding god of thunder; and Loki, who is yet another Trickster.

And from the Celtic pantheon, I’ve brought in Brighid.  Catholics know her as a saint. But before Christianity came to Ireland, Brighid was the goddess of smiths, poets, and healers.  There is a shrine in Kildare where a perpetual flame is tended in her honor in a twenty-day rotation: women keep the flame lit for nineteen days, and Brighid Herself tends it on the twentieth.  Or so the legend goes.

Part of the fun of writing the Pipe Woman Chronicles was getting all of these different gods and goddesses together and playing them off of one another.  I hope my readers will enjoy their interplay, too.

SYNOPSIS
It’s zero hour…
Naomi has just two weeks to find a new home for Joseph's grandfather. The old Ute shaman is fighting for his life against a mysterious injection of toxin he received at the hands of the Norse Trickster god Loki. If Naomi is to defeat Loki once and for all, she must learn what it is he seeks under the old man's wickiup.
She has just one week before she must mediate between the Earth's pagan gods and goddesses and the Christian God. If her efforts fail, all of humankind will suffer the consequences.
And her baby is due any day.
In this, the fifth and final book of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, Naomi is in a race against the clock to balance the demands of her body, her family, and her friends – and she must do it while the whole world is watching.
AMAZON BUY LINK - http://amzn.to/13GulSX
GOODREADS - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17922277-annealed

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynne Cantwell has been writing fiction since the second grade, when the kid who sat in front of her showed

her a book he had written, and she thought, "I could do that." The result was Susie and the Talking Doll, a picture book, illustrated by the author, about a girl who owned a doll that not only could talk, but could carry on conversations. The book had dialogue but no paragraph breaks. Today, after a twenty-year career in broadcast journalism and a master's degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University (or perhaps despite the master's degree), Lynne is still writing fantasy. In addition, she is a contributing author at Indies Unlimited and writes a monthly post for The Indie Exchange.

GOODREADS http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/696603.Lynne_Cantwell

FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lynne-Cantwell/

BLOG - http://hearth-myth.blogspot.com/"

AMAZON - http://www.amazon.com/Lynne-Cantwell/e/B005JTP5NE/

TWITTER - https://twitter.com/LynneCantwell/

Flash fiction #2: Gods of the Party

Artemis, like all goddesses of the
hunt, tended to be a little too fond
of camping. (Wikipedia)

One of the groups that gets mentioned in “Fairy Godmothers, Inc.” is the National Association for Retired but Still Mighty Gods and Goddesses (NARSMGG). They don’t get much play in the book, but the idea just fascinated me.

Gods of the Party

by Jenniffer Wardell

They let Hephaestus and Aphrodite plan the Winter Solstice party.

Hephaestus was a god of building things, and unlike most of the pantheon knew how to plan for things that didn’t involve smiting. And goddesses of love and beauty always knew how to throw great parties, even if it was just so they’d have the proper setting to shine in. Also, most of the club members couldn’t remember hearing the two scream at each other very often, which was a rare thing among married deities and always a plus.

(What no one said out loud was that they were quickly running out of options. A giant snake broke through the wall and crashed every party Odin and his family tried to throw, and Coyote couldn’t be trusted to stick to a budget. Everybody agreed that Osiris was a nice guy, but after last year everyone also agreed that gods of the dead should never be left in charge of party planning. Kali was a fun girl, especially for a goddess of destruction, but she tended to throw chairs.)

It turned out, though, that the reason Hephaestus and Aphrodite rarely screamed at each other was that they were rarely in the same kingdom at the same time.

“I’m not building you a new sound system! The old one works just fine!”

“It’s fine for normal gods, you lump, but I need something as magnificent as I am!”

“Well, whatever you come up with had better be pretty small, or there won’t be room for both it and your swollen head!”

“Ares thinks my head is gorgeous!”

“You idiot, your head isn’t what he’s looking at!”

In the end, the only way to avoid bloodshed was to have two smaller parties. The quieter gods went over to Hephaestus’s place for hot chocolate and a cozy forge fire, while the wilder gods went out drinking with Aphrodite.

The fact that the club building was still standing at the end of it all automatically made it the most successful party the gods had ever thrown.  Hephaestus and Aphrodite were unanimously voted as the club’s permanent party planners.

Well, almost unanimously. But there was no pleasing even a godess's mother-in-law.