#i sold my soul to jacqueline carey

[inkshares]

Women's History Month: Inkshares Authors on Essential Writers

In honor of Women’s History Month we asked a few of our upcoming Spring, Summer and Fall 2017 authors which female writers inspired them the most. From Barbara Ehrenreich’s groundbreaking investigative journalism, to Rainbow Rowell’s perfectly complicated female characters, and of course no list is complete without a little J. K. Rowling. Please join us in celebrating these many essential voices that should not be ignored.

J. Danielle Dorn, author of Devil’s Call (July 2017): The summer of my 26th year, I was unemployed, living off of my savings, and suffering from PTSD after surviving two separate instances of sexual assault in a six-month period. It being 2011, the news I had not yet read the Harry Potter series spread through my social circle like a bad cold. With all this free time and money to spend on booze and books instead of petrol and health insurance, I caved to peer pressure and purchased the box set from Barnes & Noble. You all know the story of the boy who lived. By the end of 2011, so did I.

Rowling took the pain of her mother's death, her clinical depression, her suicidality, and she made something lasting and good and real out of it. She spoke openly about her struggles. She is confident, and passionate, and so smart. Knowing she was my age when she caught a break kept me writing. Most of what I wrote was crap, but the act itself was cathartic, and I found my voice.

Six years on, I am eight months sober and starting to heal. Inkshares will publish my first novel this summer. More people will want to publish my opinion on more topics, and I do not intend to sugarcoat anything. Rowling's honesty about her own dark days kept me alive through mine, and her speaking out against global injustices continues to inspire me. That is the sort of writer, and woman, I want to be.

Malena Watrous, author of Sparked (September 2017): Choosing one influential female author is impossible for me! Confession: I almost exclusively read female authors. I feel sexist admitting that, but it's important to me to find strong, nuanced female characters in books, and female authors nail that more often than men. (And yet female authors don't seem to have a problem writing men, right?)

In classics, I'm most inspired by Charlotte Bronte, particularly Jane Eyre, a character so vivid that she almost seems like an old friend (I've also read the book many times). From her tragic beginnings to a relatively happy ending, Jane remains stubbornly and recognizably herself, even though she also matures. She makes choices that some might think are "wrong" but she deals with the consequences, moves on and gets stronger. It's in no way moralizing and totally riveting.

In contemporary fiction, I want to name Ruth Ozeki, who wrote one of my favorite books, My Year of Meats, and more recently the wonderful A Tale for the Time Being. I'm inspired by the way she manages to be philosophical and funny and poignant all at once, by the way she plays with form, and I also share her interest in Japanese culture, and love the way that she brings it to the page.

In YA, I adore both Lauren Oliver and Rainbow Rowell. They're very different but both create amazing female characters who are, again, "flawed" but in ways that make me connect with them. I like authors who take risks, and one risk is making a character not everyone is going to "like." To me, "likable" is a little insipid. I prefer complicated women!

JF Dubeau, author of A God in the Shed (June 2017): Jacqueline Carey for two distinct reasons. First and foremost, her books taught me how to write strong female characters without falling into the trap of giving male characteristics to them. She dodges out of the trope of injecting testosterone into the women in her stories, making them either violent or murderous as a substitute for strength. This opens the door to a much wider variety of characters each powerful in a different way and capable of evolving and developing, like a person should. I credit Carey with whatever hints of depth the women in my stories have.

The second reason I picked her as an inspiration is her approach to world building. Carey favors a subtle approach to the fantastic elements in her stories, preferring nuance to spectacle. While I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a better way to write fiction, it’s one that I’ve embraced for A God in the Shed, giving more room to the characters, their interactions and their evolution through the fantastic and horrific events that surround them.

It’s these two elements combined that has opened the door to creating the varied cast that populate the village of Saint-Ferdinand in my book and I owe them to Jacqueline Carey.

Mark Dowie, author of The Haida Gwaii Lesson (July 2017): My first, and still my favorite co-author, was Barbara Ehrenreich. We worked together on an investigative report about the export of birth control armentaria (high estrogen pills, Depo Provera and the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device) that had been banned for use in the US because they were killing so many American women, but purchased and sold overseas by nasty corporations and population control zealots. The article we co-bylined won a National Magazine award in 1979.

Like so many millions of readers, I came to deeply admire everything she wrote after we worked together, particularly Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (which she wrote with my former boss and close friend Deirdre English), For Her Own Good (also with Deirdre), Fear of Falling, Nickel and Dimed, and last but not least, Living with a Wild God. She is one of the world’s greatest living reporters and essayists, but today prefers to describe herself as “a mythbuster by trade.” She already knows I love her, so I’ll say it again here.

Scott Thomas, author of Kill Creek (October 2017): I discovered Shirley Jackson the way most people do, by reading “The Lottery” in high school. What blew me away wasn’t just the amazing reveal, it was the way she turned the ordinary into something profoundly horrifying. She made every day life something to fear by uncovering the complicated, bone-chilling darkness lurking beneath a deceptively simple premise. The Haunting of Hill House only confirmed this: a straightforward haunted house story that is actually the complex character study of a troubled soul. Shirley Jackson showed me that true horror is being forced to face the darkness in our lives. The terror doesn’t just come from the supernatural; true horror is being forced to accept how fragile the strings holding our world together really are.

Helena Echlin, author of Sparked (September 2017): The woman who made me fall in love with stories was English children’s author Joan Aiken, mostly because of The Wolves Chronicles, a series of fantasy books set in an alternate Victorian England. At a time when a lot of children’s books featured boys having adventures and girls at ballet class or boarding school, Aiken created Dido Twite, a tough-as-nails ragamuffin with a Cockney accent and a penchant for boy’s clothes. She gets knocked unconscious and tied up in a sack in pretty much every book, but always keeps her cool and makes a clever escape. She’s just a scrawny, barely literate girl, but she saves the king himself from being assassinated—several times.

Aiken’s plots are deliciously outrageous—who else would dream up a hundred-years- old queen who extends her life by eating the bones of young girls? Aiken never lets reality stand in the way of a good story, but however absurd the story, she manages to make it convincing through her use of detail. Those bones, for instance, are eaten in the form of a “gruel, which was of a very thick consistency and perfectly white.”

I co-wrote Sparked because Aiken made me want to write about a girl who is unexpectedly heroic and who battles the force of evil when the adults in her world do nothing. But most of all, Aiken taught me how it feels to be utterly captivated by a wild tale—and she made me want to captivate others in the same way.

[sabbybrina]

To my surprise, Barqueil L'Envers grinned, and kissed his niece on the brow. "Take care of yourself, Ysandre, you make a damned good Queen. We'll do our best to see you stay one." He nodded at Joscelin and me. "Keep these two with you, will you? They seem to be damnably hard to kill."

Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Dary

[sabbybrina]

The poets do not sing of this either, how death begets the urge toward life. I, who knew how to take pain, took Hyacinthe's. Pain and delight I took from him, and gave him both back, until we understood, the both of us, how they are intertwined, how one does not come without the other."

Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Dart

[sabbybrina]

Joie to all on the Longest Night.