The Importance of Gender in the Marionettes Saga

My friend and I were once walking down the Great Hill of Despair (AKA, our high school was built into the hills, and her mother parked down at the bottom because traffic was always atrocious -- which often meant a long walk in unbearable chaparral heat). She had been reading the first iteration of the Marionettes Saga, and she asked me in her signature forthcoming way, "Is Yuuhi gay?"

I was all a-stutter then, because he wasn't gay. He had tendencies that weren't the norm for traditional masculinity, but I didn't know how to argue this when I was only seventeen and Tumblr didn't exist yet. How could I defend something I didn't yet understand?

The second iteration provided a more profound Yuuhi, and I say "profound" because he was twice as much himself, freer about his interests and what he liked. He still wasn't gay. I still couldn't explain it.

Even as I was writing the current iteration of the first book, I still didn't quite understand it, and I had pretty much given up trying. But after Tumblr happened in my life, I finally understood. A friend of ours, and now one of our critique partners, read the near-final draft of Dance in Shadow and Whisper, and she was also just as frank when she asked, "Is Yuuhi gay?"

By this point, I could finally explain him. FINALLY. Not once had I ever tried to change him (he certainly wouldn't let me), but now I was in the right place to say, "No. He's gender fluid."

In traditional YA, especially of the urban fantasy and paranormal romance kind, the love interest(s) tend to hit the usual tropes when it comes to masculinity and sexuality. Yuuhi doesn't. He dresses nicely and could predict for you what will be "in style" for the upcoming season, and he knows how to balance a silhouette in his fashion doodles. He enjoys shopping and he could put on a mean dress and rock some mascara.

But that doesn't make him gay.

(Yes, he's bisexual -- he knows what he likes and he's 100% open about it, but it's safer to say that he likes everything.)

It took me a long time to understand that gender identification does not equal sexual orientation. Once I finally got to this point, I could confidently explain why he is the way he is. He knew it all along, which was why he never let me change him -- he just had to wait for me to catch up.

Most of the characters in both the Marionettes and Monsters series don't have rigid sexual orientation, that part was easy to figure out. The harder part was finding out how they saw themselves when it came to the signs on public bathrooms that marked the women's and the men's.

Kali was my guide in the first book in helping me understand how she identified her gender. Her sister acts as her sole feminine role model throughout her life, and while Kali emulates her, she's also self-conscious about how she doesn't look quite like her sister, and she gets it into her head that dresses don't look the way dresses should on her body.

Kali does a lot of physical training and toning, and it shows on her body. Her sister, however, is slender and more like what Kali thinks is supposed to be feminine. So, when she dons a dress, she feels like she's playing dress-up. That doesn't mean she doesn't like to wear dresses, but it does mean that she isn't confident in the way she looks in dresses.

I love this part of Kali, and it gets tackled throughout the later books. She has to find out that there is more than one kind of beautiful. It's definitely a message that I needed to hear in high school. I wished I'd had.

I'm stoked that the inclusiveness of gay characters is starting to gain traction, what with gay characters getting less side treatment and also dying less, but the theme of gender is often largely ignored in mainstream YA fiction. I can't tell you how many times I picked up an UF/PR book hoping to find a gay main character, but I can tell you I haven't yet picked up an UF/PR book thinking I might find a gender fluid main character.

At least I get to write about them.

How do Victoria and I write together?

Firstly, as of yesterday, we officially finished book 1 of Monsters! After the third installment of Kali with Marionettes, Monsters begins with this book. Seriously, the cast in this book really did some things that we were not expecting. Victoria had planned the ending to go a very different way before one of the characters decided, "Hey, umm, I'm gonna do this thing right now. Good luck."

Yeah. Thanks for that, character.

But, either way, the ending killed us. It KILLED us. I mean, we're over here trying not to cry and crying anyway. I can't wait to make you all cry too.

What happens next is Victoria's first time revising a full manuscript. At least she has a coach who's very experienced with the art of revision! Tralala.

So, we've had plenty of people asking us, "Exactly how are you guys writing this?" Who writes what and how does it all work?

Victoria and I have been writing together for a heck of a long time. Maybe about ten years now. Even while I was over here in California and she was in Pennsylvania, we were writing together. So, we've had a very long time to develop our styles and learn how the other thinks and writes.

Basically what we do is roleplay. I have a cast of characters that I play, and she has a cast that she plays, and when we write a scene where these two casts mingle, we trade posts. Sometimes a post is a single line. Sometimes a post is paragraphs. The key is to make sure that our posts flow together like any other narrative, so that there's no break in continuity. A lot of this is fixed during revision as well.

(Sometimes we'll write a little extra than necessary and edit it out later, or we'll explain what a character is doing or what something looks like specifically so we have similar visions of what's going on.)

It also helps that we have very similar writing styles and voices, that way we stay consistent throughout the story.

Plotting is also a big deal between the two of us. We spend a LOT of time plotting. For the first three books of Marionettes and the first three books of Monsters, however, we plot separately. I do all the story planning and outlining for the first three books of Marionettes, and she's just along for the ride. She didn't know what I had planned while we were writing.

When we get to later books, especially after one series ends and the other continues, we plot together, and we pretty much do it everywhere we go -- in the car, when we take our walks, when we go out, when we're with people who have no idea what the hell we're talking about -- we're always discussing what's going to happen.

But sometimes we can't always plan for what happens. Characters often surprise us (like I mentioned above) and do something completely unexpected. Or, sometimes we just know to anticipate that we don't know what the characters will do, so we'll plan a few steps and then write ourselves into the answer.

So, in the end, co-writing takes a lot of work and dedication in order to be successful. We're a perfect match because we keep each other from slipping into slumps like writer's block and we have very similar brains. As long as one of us is super excited about the story, it usually doesn't take much coaxing to get the other pumped up!

Next, I'll be taking about a week's break from the writing blog to focus on revising book two of Monsters. Hopefully the proof for the first book will be here by Friday or Saturday!

A bit more about the series

Victoria completely finished her read-through and we smacked our heads together to finish all the editing rounds. We're now officially DONE as if we weren't excited enough before, now we're insufferable. So, yesterday I worked on setting up everything with our B&N and Amazon accounts.

(Seriously, the Barnes and Noble Nook Press made it SO EASY. They had this Scrivener-like program where you can edit your file directly, so while we initially had problems with the uploaded version not making sense of the chapter headers, we fixed it all in their program. The KDP program is more like, "Hah, you don't have any chapter headers and your book has five-thousand pages lololol you're gonna have to start from the beginning and do it OUR WAY." So...I'll be figuring that bit out today.)

Anyway, soon we'll be posting the first chapter for everyone to preview. For now, a bit more about the series. Aw, yis.

This saga has had three iterations so far. Three full, complete iterations. Yep, I'm on my third version of writing this from beginning completely to the end.

The first version began back in my sophomore year of high school. That was about '03 or '04 -- ten years ago. Holy cow. I didn't even realize it was that old.

I remember the conception of the idea as clearly and poignantly as a punch in the teeth. Up until then, I'd been writing all my stories about a main girl who is super important and everyone must help her fulfill her destiny so that she can save the world. I mean, how many times could I write that?

Well, then I had the epiphany during my English class as I was staring out the window instead of paying attention to "The Tale of Two Cities", a book which I had read only the first page of (and somehow got through the class by only reading the first page of back in a time where CliffNotes was still definitely not on the internet), when I decided how to mix up my traditional formula utilizing inspiration from Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, and subsequently created one of my most favorite characters ever.

The saga started out as only a trilogy then, and since I wrote it during a bad time in my life, the story soaked up a great deal of everything I was going through. It was, however, the first trilogy that I had ever finished.

I did terrible things to those characters.

The second version began multiple times. I went through a period between junior year and several years after my graduation where finishing something on my own became a struggle. I wrote mostly for therapy, and that was fine. It got me through more bad times.

But in about '07, when I was 19, working an office receptionist and filing job, I began version two, and I was determined to strip the ugly from the story that high school had tainted it with, though particular life themes did end up in the story that I certainly didn't intend.

Seriously, each version reflects my life in some way. Such is fiction.

I ended up adding a fourth book to the trilogy to make it officially a saga, but I had many breaks, oftentimes months at a time, in the time it took me to finish it. Many breaks. Like, I finished two years later in '09. Nowadays, that's pretty weird for me. But, I finished, and I didn't expect it could do anything for my publishing career, so I left it alone.

The third version began when I decided, "I just want to write it and I don't care that I won't be able to publish it." Victoria was getting into rewriting her part of the series, which had twined with mine in the second iteration, and I couldn't resist the itch-inducing bite of the inspiration bug.

So, in 2012, I began rewriting Kali again, but with a twist to the world that Victoria and I built upon so it was a level different than typical urban fantasy fiction. We did a lot more than ever before to build on this world and the characters and stories -- and it was a beautiful thing.

But I still had my doubts about her. For any writer, it's a natural vice. Good days and bad days. I painted the above sketch of Kali on one of my bad days...y'know, when I was feeling "blue". Ahahahaha.

Anyway. 

Writing the three books (plus a separate book in-between, as well as co-writing a few books with Victoria) took less than a year. I had almost decided to start querying a non-related project, which would have technically been Project Get Agent: Number Six. But Victoria and I talked and we decided publishing our series independently was something we really wanted to do instead of something we felt we had to do. This story does things to us that no other story has -- I seriously can't get excited about other things like I do for these characters. I draw my own fanart. I draw my own fanart.

Can you even draw your own fanart?

Yes.

Because I do.

Ugly, horrible fanart that causes me gross sobbing.

So, in the end, this was the avenue we chose because it was the best choice for these characters that we love so much. I've already started painting the posters for the second book and I've already put together the composition for the second cover (and the third cover, eheheh). This route allows us to go at the speed we normally go, and thank the gods for that, because now you can be tortured like us sooner.

About the Series

[The Marionettes of Myth is a series that begins with three books, and then the Monsters of Myth series begins and runs congruently. These two series are written to fit together like building blocks, featuring different characters of the same world and showing them in spotlights that are unique to their particular series. Read more about the origin of Marionettes here and read the first chapter here.

One series will come to an end while the other carries on, but whether it's the Marionettes or the Monsters is a secret.]

 

The Steel City of Pittsburgh is a Superhuman Metropolis

The steel mill industry ignited with the boom of the industrial revolution, drawing mass migrations of the superhuman species to jobs that would take them when the rest of the human world wouldn't. Communities flourished and the city expanded all along the great three rivers, merging cultures, peoples, magics, and darker things.

Secrets lurk in the city's seams. Magics of vanished peoples hide in its pockets. Rumor even has it that forgotten gods come to the city to die. It might seem that the city itself is a living, breathing beast, flexing the dangerous muscle and sinew of its people.

But not all beasts can be tamed.

Dance in Shadow and Whisper

Kali has always been obedient, but when she takes her first step onto a protected “humans only” high school in suburban Pittsburgh, she knows she was the wrong choice for this mission.

Ever since the murder of her parents when she was too young to remember, she’s been sheltered – and trained. She can swing a sword with expert precision, but studying popular human teen magazines hasn’t taught her how to masquerade as seventeen years old.

Jason is the target of the mission. She and Yuuhi, who was also designated by his own people to be her partner, must find solid proof that Jason is, in fact, a supernatural phenomenon. Yuuhi sees little more than a socially inept emo kid dressed in conflicting shades of black, but Kali only touches Jason’s hand, and she feels the sting of something dark and deadly. Jason’s shadow is bigger than he is, and if the leaders of Yuuhi’s people find out, Jason won’t be human much longer.

The goal of the mission is to protect him, but Kali will find that the only way she can do just that is to break every rule she’s been conditioned to follow. She’ll have to learn how to disobey.

Beginning with Kali’s point of view and then shifting to the eyes of other characters, the Marionettes of Myth series introduces Pittsburgh as a superhuman metropolis, a world both wild and conquered by the monsters buried in its seams and darkest shadows.

And those monsters will be watching her.

 

The Marionettes of Myth Saga is a young adult urban fantasy series that begins with "Dance in Shadow and Whisper" and is available on the Kindle. The paperback is available through the Amazon store and will soon be available through Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble || Amazon || Goodreads

The story continues, the stakes rise, and there's more to lose than ever in the exciting sequel "Fracture the Spider's Web", available in Nook and Kindle formats. The paperback is available through the Amazon store.

Barnes & Noble || Amazon || Goodreads

Not all sediment settles between the end of "Fracture the Spider's Web" and the beginning of book three in "Interlude", a short novella that explores a few favorite characters in first person point of view. Digital editions will be available for free on the blog, but will also be available for purchase, along with the paperback, this October.

Barnes & Noble || Amazon || Goodreads

She stepped through the doors of eternal night. Now the king of the night won’t let her go. "Taste a Thousand Deaths" is the third installment and currently available on the Kindle.

Amazon || Goodreads

The Monsters of Myth Saga is a new adult urban fantasy series that begins after the first three books of the companion Marionettes series. The characters featured in Monsters is a closely guarded secret, and details of this series will be revealed later.