I’m coming into the home stretch of my Young Adult, which after wrangling for longer than I care to admit, I like. After it’s done I get to revisit Selah’s favorite, an unnamed multicultural contemp set in Brazil, which will be published by Parker Publishing next year. I have to admit, it’s a favorite of mine, too and I’m looking forward to arguing with Selah which is where we left off (how loyal must Olivia be to her brother-remember?).
But all of this stops the research for my next ms, and I have to say, this research in particular is mightily seductive, mostly because this book is a long time coming. 22 years I’ve been cradling this one like the most precious seed, learning about the subject, building my world, creating arcs and plots.
It’s funny how some stories you simply write, like yanking a thought out of the air, and other stories you’re pulling in all that you are and know to write them. You realize writing them has been an unconscious journey, and your personal wanderings become knowledge you needed to have brought. Just like a woman who’s waited 9 months to give birth and knows it’s time, now, after all these years of knowing it WASN’T, time-I’m ready. And very excited. It’s a deep excitement and frantic all at once. I want to explode it all over the pages, and yet I want to meticulously craft it as well. It has epic possibilities, this world can last and I haven’t even tapped it’s potential with the first book.
One of the paths I’m researching is Goddess. And it has come about by my own personal wanderings, adding to the threads of plot seamlessly, making me know that this was something I needed to discover. Right now I’m reading GODDESS: MYTHS OF THE FEMALE DIVINE by David Leeming and Jake Page. This is a toe dip in the pool, I know. I have in my huge canvas library bag all of the Joseph Campbell’s I could get my mitts on, and then another 25 (so it seems) books about Goddess. As I go through them I’ll blog about the great ones, I’m sure.
The most interesting aspect is coming from a Christian perspective and noting (so far) that the Hebrew Yahweh’s gender never was up for any gender interpretations. An aside: I left the institutional church because of it’s never ending need of $$ and building projects, and because I didn’t want my daughters learning the absolute submission that was being preached.
I’ve read 3/4 of GODDESS now, and I’m to the part where the authors are telling the stories of when Goddess starts to be undermined in myth. Pandora, once Gaia, now is forced by Zeus to unleash ills that he’d collected instead, becoming the source of all human affliction instead of the giver of abundance.
I remember reading most of by Husain Haddawy and realizing that in every story women were deceitful and treacherous (I stopped halfway, disgusted). I, ignorantly, never realized that most myths were the same- sublimating women- and how can people raised on such Archtypes be any different?
Knowing what I do about romance, I can see why it’s so popular, and so needed. It’s a reclaiming. It goes beyond feminisim to strike at the root of patriarchy, all the way back to the storytelling.
