I know that title sounds so comic book and outlandish, but this is a serious article, really.
Given that the legendary founder of Wing Chun is supposed to be a nun, I was immediately fascinated about the practice of teaching martial arts to sects of modern nuns and also the reasons behind it. I found this article really empowering.
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. You almost don’t have to work that hard to create a fantasy world when it’s set in China. The names are lofty and symbolic and the legends and folktales are more imaginative than anything I would come up with on my own; from the five sacred mountains to the City of the Dead in Fengdu.
Here’s where my research took me last night. My hero and heroine were headed for the Northern Great Mountain and I wanted some inspiration. Googling for monasteries on the Hengshan mountains leads me to the Hanging Monastery.
The monastery is over a thousand years old and is built into a mountainside suspended over a gorge. It’s the perfect place for meeting a mysterious Taoist master, don’t you think? I did take one liberty of elevating the location to near the summit above the cloudline. More dramatic that way.
I’m having a great time at the PCA/ACA conference in St. Louis. Popular culture studies is the interdisciplinary examination of popular media such as genre fiction, television shows, comic books, music and new media. I haven’t had time to go to sessions other than the romance tracks. Those in and of themselves are absolutely fascinating.
The coolest thing is that these are romance scholars versus writers. The approach and views they have about romance as a genre come from an entirely different angle than how I usually look at things as a reader and writer of romance. As a cognitive science major myself, any time you can look at a topic from a different lens, the overall picture becomes so much richer.
Some snippets that piqued my interest:
A talk on feminist ethics and evaluating the ethics of the romance genre by Jessica Miller (must bump Sherry Thomas to top of TBR pile)
otome games – Japanese video games which operate sort of like “choose your own adventure” romances and are geared towards a female market
Women and feminism in Robert Howard’s Fictional world (think Conan, Red Sonya) – This is one of the topics I couldn’t go to, but I grabbed a copy of the paper. I read Red Sonya way back in high school. Guess I had a thing for sword-wielding heroines way back when
An amazing talk by Pamela Regis titled “The Romance Community: A Room of One’s Own and Écriture Feminine” tying together Virginia Woolf, Smart Bitches, and the concept of a feminine language for discourse. (I was trying to mentally tie in Lisa See’s themes of women and literacy, but I just couldn’t think fast enough. Definitely need to spend a decent amount of time considering this.)
The Popular Romance project – a ginormous undertaking spearheaded by documentary filmmaker and educator Laurie Kahn of Brandeis University involving the building of a web community around a survey of romance that spans ancient times to the present and crosses cultures. The project also includes a documentary film. I’m not synthesizing this very well, but I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out as this project develops.
Amanda Berry, Sela Carsen, and I also finished our author panel on print and digital publishing today. It’s interesting to see the sorts of questions non-writers would ask versus in New England where the audience was all romance writers.
Now I can just enjoy. *happy sigh*
Oh neat! I see that Dr. Jessica Miller has put notes up on the conference on her blog. Much better than my scribblings!
I found this while looking up information about facial characteristics and it was just too fascinating to ignore. Basically this study had Caucasian and Asian subjects look at faces and tracked their eye movements as they performed facial recognition tasks and identified emotions.
It found that when reading emotions, Caucasians tended to look at the face as a whole where Asians focused on the eyes. Thus, Asians in the study would miscategorize negative emotions such as mistaking fear for surprise, for instance. Asians would ignore changes in the mouth that would cue them in.
I doubly found this fascinating because the princess in my current manuscript, a very observant person who’s learned how to survive in court by reading peoples’ intentions, distinctly notes that the hero, a westerner, poses a different set of challenges for her because the way he reacts and displays emotions is so different from what she’s accustomed to. Nice touch, eh? Well, I thought so.
I found several other articles on the same study with some additional insight. First, that this behavior seemed to be cultural rather than genetic as Asians raised in Western cultures didn’t show the same tendencies. Another thought was that this may be adaptive behavior due to the fact that Asian culture tends to look down upon showing negative emotion in public so Asians trained themselves to look carefully at the eyes because facial expressions were not so open.
I’m interested to see what people think of this. Isn’t it a great way to describe cultural differences into a multicultural relationship? There are subtle, ingrained differences in addition to the larger obvious ones.
My critique partners and I were chatting it up last night and the topic of writing historicals and research came up. They asked me how long I researched before I felt ready to write and I told them not much. I just jumped into the story and researched as I went along. Of course, I wasn’t going to set the stories in China at first.
I suddenly had flashbacks — five years of library visits, trolling Amazon, a gazillion internet searches. I have books on horses of the world, on walled cities in China, on the Tang dynasty, the Song Dynasty. Hours and hours on the Chinese History forum. Wow, now that I’m looking at my shelf, I have books on Chinese weapons, the Art of War and other military texts, Chinese landmarks. And I consider myself a “light” researcher. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, I say. (I stole that from my mentor teacher, who always told me “Don’t let the truth get in the way of good teaching” when it came to science.)
Darn, it’s been a long ride. And it keeps going. I’m starting to research Taoism and demonology for my next project. No wonder historical authors want to stick to the same period for a while.
No matter how much you research an actual time, you still worldbuild around it. Or at least I do. Historians do it too. It’s the biased worldview that you start creating based on what you know. I have a loose construct of the regions of the Tang Dynasty mapped out in my head and the political structure. At some point, I have to start filling in blanks and making extrapolations of what kind of situation that would create.
Soon, you find something cool happening. You find that the history matches up with your worldbuilding as you continue to dig. There’s a certain way that empires rise and fall, I suppose. It’s all a feedback loop and, sooner or later, the stuff you’re making up isn’t so far from what could or did happen.
I’m still dreading the day someone smacks me down for gross historical inaccuracies. That’s okay. They would have had to read as much as I have to do it. Anybody that geeky deserves to wield the historical smackdown stick.
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. You almost don’t have to work that hard to create a fantasy world when it’s set in China. The names are lofty and symbolic and the legends and folktales are more imaginative than anything I would come up with on my own; from the five sacred mountains to the City of the Dead in Fengdu.
