Guest Post: Benjamin Appleby-Dean - Author of The Stickman's Legacy

Benjamin Appleby-Dean, author of The Stickman's Legacy, stopped by the Howling Turtle to talk a bit about folklore and fable and how it has influenced his work on this book. Had you heard of any of this fairytale trivia before?

Guest Post

I’ve always been fascinated by stories – not just the actual reading and hearing of them, the beginning-to middle-to end rush, but by the pieces of them and how they fit together. Why we have heroes and villains, antagonists, and protagonists, morals and happy endings or tragedies that can’t be averted.

I tried to write stories of my own almost as soon as I learned to read, starting with simple tales of heroes and monsters – but even then I wondered why the monsters had to lose.

As I grew older and read more widely, I discovered Joseph Campbell and his beat-by-beat formula for heroic journeys. I noticed the similarities in folklore and fable across different continents – the version of Cinderella that goes back to ancient Egypt, the sunken-city myth that persists from Greece to India to China, the enduring archetype of little people living underground that recurs in country after country. I read about the changing of even our best-known modern fairy tales – how the Grimms rewrote their own collections to remove Rapunzel’s pregnancy and switch abusive mothers for stepmothers; how Beauty and the Beast once had elaborate backstories involving rival fairies; how Tom Thumb originally joined King Arthur’s court and battled giants.

Most of all I came to understand how much of what we are is built upon the backs of these persistent narratives – stories informing our language, our relationships, our aspirations, our ideas of good and evil. Stories woven through our basic ideas of self.

What would happen if someone tried to use them as a weapon?

I wanted to write a story about stories – but not in a postmodern, ironic, poking-fun kind of way. I wanted to drill down into how they worked and how they could be made to work. I wanted to see what happened to the survivors. How far an ending could be made to stretch.

Most of all, I wanted to tell the story of a girl who refused to give up.

The first ideas for THE STICKMAN’S LEGACY came to me nearly fifteen years ago. I spent seven years taking the ideas and building on them, trying to fit them together until they made sense. I read up on folk history from every country I could find, spotting new patterns and obscure fragments. I took six months writing a detailed, blow-by-blow plan to make sure my strange, experimental plot actually fitted together and then another two years finishing my first draft of the book.

But as many older, wiser writers will tell you, the first book you write is never any good. 

I wrote other books afterwards – simpler, less ambitious ones. I even got some of my other works into print. Then I came back to my unwieldly first manuscript, finally became aware of my mistakes, and spent another year re-writing it from scratch. I eventually cut out 60,000 words (the length of a short novel in itself!) and was left with leaner, better-paced book – still saying everything I wanted to say, but in 70% of the page count. 

It took me five years to find a publisher for THE STICKMAN’S LEGACY, and it’s still the most complex and ambitious thing I’ve ever tried to write.

I can only hope that some of you find it worth the wait.

About the Book
Mary never knew her father until he died and brought his enemies to her doorstep. Searching his house for answers, she unearths an ancient nightmare and is drawn into a world of corporate magicians, subterranean kingdoms and living architecture, all of whom have history with the Stickman - and their own sinister agendas for his daughter.

As a secret war breaks out across London with her at the centre, Mary finds fragments of her own past resurfacing, and has to understand the true nature of her legacy before it's too late...

Find it on Amazon
Add it on Goodreads
Author's Twitter

Disclosure: this post contains links to an affiliate program (Amazon), for which I receive a few cents if you make purchases.

Review: Dream Eater

Title: Dream Eater (A Portland Hafu novel)
Author: K. Bird Lincoln
Page Count: 219
My Rating: 3.5 TURTLES: A very enjoyable read, I recommend you check it out.
*I got this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
Amazon

Description:
Koi Pierce dreams other peoples' dreams.

Her whole life she's avoided other people. Any skin-to-skin contact--a hug from her sister, the hand of a barista at Stumptown coffee--transfers flashes of that person's most intense dreams. It's enough to make anyone a hermit.

But Koi's getting her act together. No matter what, this time she's going to finish her degree at Portland Community College and get a real life. Of course it's not going to be that easy. Her father, increasingly disturbed from Altzheimer's disease, a dream fragment of a dead girl from the casual brush of a creepy PCC professor's hand, and a mysterious stranger who speaks the same rare Northern Japanese dialect as Koi's father will force Koi to learn to trust in the help of others, as well as face the truth about herself.

Review:

I got an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley a while back, and now that it has been out a while I have finally gotten to reviewing it. I got pretty far behind in reviewing this semester, but my winter break has given me some time to slowly get caught up. I became aware of Dream Eater through the publisher’s newsletter, which I have been on for a while, and the premise really grabbed me. I love fantasy books that use real mythology as its starting point (Rick Riordan remains one of my favorite authors) and it is set in my hometown of Portland, so I was intrigued by the setting too. Also, the cover is gorgeous and badass.

I really liked how the mythology was used in the book. Most of it that is in the book is Japanese and Native American with some Middle Eastern mythology woven in, but I got the feeling that the myths in this world go far beyond that. I loved how the different powers of the different creatures manifested and how well thought out the politics of the “Kind” were. I’m not sure if this is going to be a series, but there certainly feels like there is a lot more to explore here.

Another thing I really appreciated about the book was its diverse cast of characters. The main character, Koi, and her sister, for example, are of Japanese and Hawaiian descent and the two other most important characters are also Japanese. I checked my Goodreads page just now, and out of the 62 books I read this year, only one other book had its main character be of Asian descent and just a few more had important secondary characters or authors of Asian descent, and while I don’t have exact numbers, I know my sample of books is indicative of a larger pattern in publishing. As many of you likely know, there is a huge lack of non-white main characters in Young Adult/New Adult novels. Thankfully, this has been changing somewhat recently, but many groups like Asian-Americans are still very underrepresented. As someone who knows how important being able to see aspects of one’s identity in media is, I really appreciated the representation going on in this book, particularly since the novel highlights Koi’s cultural heritage and makes it important to who she is as a character. I hope to read many more books like Dream Eater in that sense in the future.

Another thing I really liked about the book was how well thought out the setting was. I knew the author really had a map of the city in her head (or in front of her on Google Maps) as she was writing. It was especially engaging since, as a native Portlander, I have been to and could picture many of the places in the book.

Having said that, there were some aspects of how the setting was portrayed that I wasn’t a huge fan of. In a way, it felt like the book really wanted us to know how well it knew Portland, so there is a lot of namedropping of places in Portland. A lot. And while I might know that Uwajimaya is a super awesome Asian superstore, the vast majority of people reading this book will not and might be confused when Koi mentioned that she goes there sometimes and gives no context for what it is. This odd specific namedropping didn’t just happen with places. Koi mentions several times that she is craving chocolate or that chocolate will improve her mood, but instead of saying “chocolate,” each time she says a different specific bar from a specific brand. Sometimes the bar name would be five or six words long, and it felt like more specificity than I needed for a hypothetical candy the character thinks in passing she is in the mood for.

There were a few other instances where the novel went a little overboard with making sure we knew it took place in Portland. For one, it kept telling us. The weather wasn’t just the weather, it was the “Portland weather” which, to some extent could have made sense since many Portlanders do think of rainy/misty weather as “Portland weather,” but there were other things labelled as “Portland” that didn’t make sense. For example if Koi falls, she lands on “Portland moss.” There is no such thing, there is moss that is in Portland, but at this point in the story, we already know where we are, and the repeated reminders felt like overkill.

Also, on top of the namedropping and the unnecessary labelling of things as “Portland”, Koi apparently can’t even think metaphorically in a way that isn’t Portland related. Instead of saying “I was so tired I felt like I had run a marathon” or something else more general or widely used, she said “I felt like I had swum the length of the Willamette” (which is a river that runs through Portland, though I don’t think the book ever mentions that) or “I felt like I had just run the Portland Hood to Coast marathon.” First of all, it isn’t even a marathon, it’s a 200 mile relay race from Mt. Hood to the Oregon coast, second of all, it isn’t the “Portland” Hood to Coast, it’s just Hood to Coast. I think the route might go through Portland, but again – 200 miles, Portland is just a stop along the way. Also, the only two TV shows that are mentioned in the book are Leverage and Grimm – both of which are filmed in, you guessed it, Portland.

So while to some extent I really enjoyed being able to completely picture where every place in the story was, at times I also felt a bit like rolling my eyes at the overkill of it sometimes. I’d be curious to see if it is as obvious to someone who does not know the city as well or if it was just me.

While this book had its ups and downs for me, overall I did like it and would likely read the sequel should one come out. If you are a fan of New Adult, mythology, or urban fantasy, I suggest you give it a go.


Disclosure: this post contains links to an affiliate program (Amazon), for which I receive a few cents if you make purchases.