Author: R. Jean Mathieu (Page 7 of 21)

Over on the NaNoWriMo forums, we had a prompt to write a letter FROM one of our characters to us during quarantine. I chose everyone’s favorite aristocratic Latina space archaeologist, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano, and here’s what she had to say…

M. Mathieu,

You and your peoples have built for us, your children, a utopia. Plagues here are contained within hours, tamed and woven into the ecosystem around them. Quarantine is a matter for ships and domes, in some tragic cases for cities. The worst I have seen in my life was the Crisis of Prithvi, and even then, mate could reach out to mate and clasp hand, shoulder, cheek, lip.

I suppose it would be declassé to ask for your experience and feelings, even for anthropological science.

These “are the days worth living for,” as your Edith Keeler says. And they are indeed coming, the days when the deserts bloom and the hungry are fed and their diseases cured, and all souls share hope and a common future. Even now, the people of Earth are clever and kind, and can solve their problems as long as they retain hope that problems can be solved.

And where human talent alone will not do, there is the bounty of nature…a partner with you, not an enemy. You know this: your sourdough bubbles on the table, your cabbage becomes sauerkraut, and your first instinct when cooped up at home was to plant a garden. To plant a garden, to raise seeds to be planted out of doors in a few short weeks! I do not need to spell out the metaphor for you, writer, or my admiration of the hope it suggests in you and all my ancestors. Fungus, plant, animal, and human are all family together, and they are more than willing to help us if we help them. We are earthclan, we all live in abundance together, or all die alone.

Ah, does it all seem so large? Yet the plague is so small, a microscopic machine that is almost alive. And in weight, it and its rancid cousins weigh half the beetles of the world, that’s all. But only remember your L’Engle, and her lights. Every small victory against the darkness is a victory for light. Every strike for human potential and earthclan harmony are strikes toward the future. Your worlds upon worlds of community gardens are not so far off. Only practice your hanzi, practice your karate, water your plants, ranch your yeast, love your wife, and ask “let me help” (as Allende de Mars so beautifully said).

Use this crucible to forge the things you could not before. Begin training at home, begin making cheese, begin a systemic course of reading. I care not what, only narrate it to me as you can.

Because out of such buds do blossom the days worth living for.

Je t’en prie…

Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y Veracruz

The three photos above are all of the same man.

Bayard Rustin was a multifaceted gem. A Quaker, a black American, a pacifist, a gay man who “ain’t never heard of no closet,” a Communist, a civil rights organizer, the eminence gris to Dr. King, a gay rights activist, a devoted boyfriend to his partner Walter Naegle, a singer, a writer. Most of those things got him jailed, ostracized, or beaten at least once in his long, long life.

God help me, I have tried to tell his story about six times here. I’ve not sat in as many Quaker meetings as Bayard Rustin, but I’ve sat in enough to know when vocal ministry isn’t mine to give. Guided by his inner Light, that of God in every soul born into this world, black, white, young, old, Anglo, franco, every soul, he tried to fuse the Quaker peace testimony, the socialism of A. Phillip Randolph, and the nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi to resist oppression everywhere and for every soul.

Here’s a man who absolutely lived his truth, without compromises, and shows us how we can do likewise.

If you can’t get a hold of Lost Prophet or Time on Two Crosses, listen first to the man in his own words.

Then, let Christina Greer give you a sketch of his story.

Rest in Peace, Friend Bayard.

I apologize for the late update, but I promise it’s with good reason.

Yesterday, I sent off the manuscript of “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)” to Cantina Press’ Silk & Steel: An Adventure Anthology of Queer Ladies.

This particular story has been a bit of a journey. I have of course been working with Doña Ana Lucía in her debut novel, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano …To the Future!, for a year or two. At the end of NaNoWriMo, where I went on vacation to do a contemporary SF/mystery young adult novel about a blonde Southern hivemind of alien squid, I saw the call for submissions. I realized I could do a pretty good 6,000-word pulp story, Lester Dent style, with Doña Ana Lucía, both because it would be fun and because, as Dean Wesley Smith says, “short stories are marketing where they pay you.”

The call for submissions recommended up to 7,000 words. So, over the course of December and into the New Year, I wrote a first draft of seven…

…teen…

…thousand.

Thanks to the good graces and patience of my first readers (and thank you, all of you), I was able to carve down to about 10,500. But something else happened in early January.

That’s right, you found me. By statistical inference, you, right now, are probably someone who found me thanks to the “aristocratic Latina space archaeologist with a sword” comment, or its knock-on effects on Twitter. All of a sudden, I couldn’t name every person who visited RJeanMathieu.com. Claire-Marie Brisson contacted me about an interview over my previous story, “Glâcehouse.” Things began to happen. Apparently, some of you even contacted Silk & Steel on my behalf, without even reading the story, something I don’t think I’ve ever heard of before!

And all the while, I was still trying to carve down another thousand words.

This has been the first story I’ve written, even partially, in public. The first one with real emotional stakes if the market I wrote it for accepts it or not, and not just for me, but for all the people who know about the story and care about it. I’m gonna be honest: I’m still not sure how to handle that. But I’m glad you’re out there with me.

So, finally got it out the door as of yesterday, at 9,900 words. What next? Well, tonight’s Shabbat so my wife will chant her millennia-old Jewish prayers as I light the candles. Tomorrow, I’m seeing Call of the Wild with Pops and Grand-papa, since we’re all three such Jack London and Harrison Ford fans that there’ve been times that London’s books were all the civil words my father and I could speak to each other. And after that?

After that, it’s time for me to go back…

To The Future!

With permission from the first (!) comarade patron (y merci!), I am publicly posting their letter here to give all of you an idea of what you can expect from becoming my patron on Patreon. Mon comarade requested a letter from Doña Ana Lucía, and at the end of their one-paragraph prompt, asked a single question:

How would you seduce me?

Queridos [                      ]:

Firstly, thank you for writing. It is always a delight to hear from admirers.

Secondly, let me be clear: I do not seduce. I romance, and only with the consent and blessing of all involved. To do otherwise invites la vergüenza.

It is unbecoming of a lady and a scholar, but indulge me in answering your question with my own: How would you serve a dinner or dig a site? How would you hollow an asteroid into a terrarium, and make it a home? How would you seed a biodome to see it thrive? I think you see where I lead. Each meal, each site, each rock, each dome, are unique and subject to their own strict factors and airy whims. Lovers are just the same, him in his place, her in her spot, they in theirs.

Each seduction must be an adventure, or it is no romance at all.

In your prompt letter, you spoke of your love of knitting, animation, and heists. This is all I have to go on of you, queridos [                      ], but I have some training in the social sciences to aid me. I think the way of roses and chocolates is not for you, except perhaps as a fine gesture while the real romance is on. I think instead I would bring some of my mother’s old things, priceless vintage, and tell you stories of where each bit of cloth has been and you tell me stories of what each piece you are working on is becoming.
I am not very adept with proper cooking, as much as I discern it at table, but I am fair-handed as a camp cook. With your consent, I would make something new of the things around your kitchen. Consent, because the kitchen of a proud cook is a very intimate place.

And you would sit and sip your drink and tell me of the animations you love. My specialty in historical pop culture are the telenovelas of South America of the early 21st century, it will not take you long to find the canonical animation that makes you strike your face I have never seen it. After dinner, we could watch it together. And, with your consent every step of the way, perhaps more.

And as for heists, I could tell you some of the things I’ve seen and done and retrieved…but I think perhaps this is too public a forum for such tales.

Would you like to hear those tales somewhere more private, perhaps?

Besos,

Doña Doctora Ana Lucía Serrano y Veracruz

“Fieldwork isn’t something to be taken lightly. Relics of Earth, our Earth, our shared heritage and our shared vergüenza, are priceless to all humanity. To restore relics to the people who can best caretake that heritage is a noble calling, nevermind the risk to life and limb.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. If there is no dancing, playing, or lovemaking, then what is the point of adventure?”

— Doña Doctora Ana Lucía María Keiko Maximiliano Ghaziyah Hector Luz Serrano y Veracruz, in an interview with Archaeology Orbital

(credit to the magnificent PockToffee for her artwork. Merci encore!)

So, you may have heard me referring to “aristocratic Latina space archaeologist with a sword” or words to that effect. A lot of you (a lot of you, I think I got more likes on that comment than in my entire previous year on Twitter, wow, thank all of you!) seem to like the idea. Now that I’m wrapping up the submission for Silk & Steel, I’d like to introduce you to the woman I’ve been spending the last year and a half of my life with, and some of her Six Worlds.

Amigos, may I present Doña Doctora Ana Lucía María Keiko Maximiliano Ghaziyah Hector Luz Serrano y Veracruz.

Professor of Archaeology at the Great Madrassa of Indirabad-Angang on Prithvi, Mistress of the Blade of the Golden Moon, the woman who recovered the Lost Probe of Ganesha and the Jade Monkey. Calls herself “the Six Worlds’ most public Latina.” Always dubbed “confirmed bachelorette” in the network tabloid-feeds, right before they speculate on her next choice of partner(s).

In the Six Worlds of Earth, dear departed Earth is nigh-legend, and relics thereof priceless. Archaeology is again a business of firefights in dusty digsites for the Glory of the people or the dome or the museum who backed the diggers and sing their praises.

And Doña Ana Lucía is one of the best. With her swordcane and her handcannon, she retrieves relics from distant snowy peaks of the far side of Ganesha or from within the halls of Uffizi Station itself, because:

“It does not belong in a museum!”

In “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la caja de Venuswood,” Doña Ana Lucía hangs under a cloud, forced to hunt down a bit of estate auction flotsam by some sinister power who hold her darkest secrets in their hands! She tracks it to New Trivandrum, on Sati, where she winds up rescuing the dead man’s daughter, the silver-haired, sardonic Annika Talavalakar. But as they alight the Triozini Rajput grav-train back to the nearest spaceport, two sets of sinister forces alight with them, one to open the box and exploit its secrets, the other willing to do anything to close the box and silence Ani Talavalakar…forever.

Next week, Solarpunk Winters hits the newsstands, and with it, my story “Glâcehouse.” As I said before, “Glâcehouse” is the story of two Canadian girls (one French, one English) trying to bring winter back from under the glass and out into a Republique du Québec where it’s muggy and rainy in Montréal in December. It’s about ecology, and how the seasons form culture and identity.

But most of all, it’s about language.

Mackenzie and Marie-Pier speak in a canadien patois that ebbs and flows between English and French on the turn of a syllable. Mackenzie’s shaky French creates a barrier between herself and the people around her in the heart of la Republique. Marie-Pier’s French shifts between “carefully international” and politic and the near-incomprehensible Sanguenayan drawl. When and who and how a character uses French says a lot about who they are, in this ‘verse.

And I had to write it entirely in English, because that’s what Solarpunk Winters is published in.

This isn’t the first time I’ve played with multilinguals, but I feel it’s my most successful. Looking back over my work, it’s rare that I wrote a monolingual anytime in the last decade, and only a handful of times I wrote a monolingual Anglophone. And I don’t gloss over it, I do everything I can to write multilingually…

…in English.

Here’s how I do it.

Handling individual words and phrases, anything less than a sentence, is advice you’ll find in any decent How To Write SF/F guide.

“Si on veut indiquer le sens…” He said. If you want to indicate the meaning…

“Then you can use italics.” She replied.

You can alternately use tried-and-true Poirot Speak, with certainly has a, ‘ow you say, je ne sais quoi. It only asks un poco words and phrases to salt through the dialogue or narration. But yes, do not be ashamed of it, I had Gooch speaking fluent Poirot back in No Time.

But what, I kept having to ask over and over this last decade, do you write a character’s thoughts, a whole conversation, even a whole foreign point-of-view …in English?

Let’s ask Mackenzie and Marie-Pier:

“There’s a story” Marie-Pier said, “brought from la Finis-terre to la Fin du Monde on the other coast of the Atlantic. It tells a little like this:

There was a time before Paris, when a splendid city carved itself into the Atlantic, past the rocks of Brittany. They called it the City of Ys, Ker-Ys in the Breton tongue, and the Celtish king Gradlon ruled it. He inspired you English your King Arthur, isn’t that so.”

“Pardon me, I’m not English, I am Albertan.”

“You cried at Queen-Mother Meghan’s funeral, you’re English.” Marie-Pier smiled. She switched back: “She was a beautiful, shining city, her land reclaimed from the white waters of the Channel, the sea kept out by great locks which only Gradlon could open, with the key around his neck. For a time, she was good, but soon her glory rotted to debauchery, and one night, someone took the key and opened the locks, flooding the city beneath the Atlantic waves. Some people, they tell it was Gradlon, which is unjust to me. Some tell of his daughter Dahut, the fallen woman, who Gradlon threw her from his horse into the hungry waters as he fled. Some tell it was the Devil himself, because he is everywhere in these stories.”

She switched to the English: “But always there is a king, a key, a city, and the sea.”

“The history of Atlantis.” Mackenzie replied. “The Deluge. A history in every culture.”

“Goddamn on Atlantis!” Marie-Pier said, with unusual force. “They do not tell this story in English, or Polish or Chinese. They only tell it in French.”

“And Breton.”

“Yes, and Breton.” Marie-Pier smiled at being corrected, her usual savoir faire falling back into place.

There were certainly some places where I italicized, because la Finis-terre (“World’s End” in Bretagne) and la Fin du Monde (“World’s End” in Québec, also a very good beer) is a pun that doesn’t work without the original terms. But instead of mass-translating and doubling everything up, I rendered it into English…a very French English.

“She was a beautiful, shining city” rather than “It was.” “Some people, they tell” instead of “Some say.” “Which is unjust to me” instead of “which seems unjust.” All of those reflect the grammar of a French speaker without imitating it. It’s proper English (mostly) but, as my mother’s professors always told her, “only you would ever phrase it that way!”

Judicious use of French-Canadian turns of phrase help, too: Marie-Pier refers to the evening meal as “supper” with other Francophones but “dinner” to Mackenzie. Mackenzie “alights” Marie-Pier’s Prius. They “do snow-shoeing” and Marie-Pier makes a bilingual comment about having “a Devil of a time” sneaking around at night.

Mackenzie’s dialogue in crooked French, especially her long technical description on the way to the river, is replete with perfectly rendered technical terminology like “refraction index” and “albedo,” but she struggles with basic terms and says things like “very much worse in the here.” Because, as a speaker of four living and three classical languages, that is exactly how it works, especially when you’re trying to speak a second language close to your own which shares much of the technical language, like French and English do.

In the example above, I tagged when the code-switching happened, but later on dispensed with it. All my readers so far have been able to detect the switch when Mackenzie says “This sweater’s too darn thin! Thank you much for the coat of you.” In other stories, my Spanish speakers use the plainspeech (a trick I stole from Hemingway, who had similar problems to solve in A Farewell to Arms), Mandarin-speakers drop superfluous pronouns, Cantonese-speakers shake hands and ask ‘eaten today?’, and speakers of perfectly intelligible Indo-Nigerian English stare with bemused wonder at a Yankee’s incomprehensible, archaic dialect.

Before “Glâcehouse,” I think my favorite multilingual performance was a story I wrote where the POV character thinks (and narrates) in Mandarin, and when she speaks English to the Anglophone antagonist, it comes out stiff and formal but perfectly good, but when he speaks Mandarin…it’s You No Take Candle. The fact that he was a pompous (and subtly racist) ass definitely helped.

When I was seventeen, learning French, one of the greatest gifts my langue paternelle gave me was another set of glasses. In English, the world is colored red, mais en français, c’est bleu. Mandarin has an Imperial yellow lens, Cantonese is qing. And when I switched glasses, and switched back and forth, I learned I had been wearing lenses my whole life…and the world had so much more color in it than I ever knew.

These are some of the ways I’ve been able to convey multilingualism, and convey something of that color of life in many tongues, using only one language. Especially when it comes to non-European languages, you have to be aware of how you sound to others, but drawing down the grammar, the underlying logic, of the tongue your character speaks with and letting it infuse the English you’re writing in…that’s the only way I know to really live and breathe in that world without living there.

PS: There’s still three days left to sign up for my Patreon early! In addition to the other lovely lagniappe my patrons get, if you sign up before the 6th, you can also get a postcard from the likes of Gooch, Mackenzie, or Marie-Pier. Help support my fiction today!

You requested, and I delivered. R. Jean Mathieu is now on Patreon, at patreon.com/rjeanmathieu! You, too, can help me create more of the speculative fiction you love while feeling like a Medici. And there’s lovely lagniappe to be had in the bargain:

As an ami(e), you’ll get a look at all my Murdered Darlings and never miss another story going live. For matelot(e)s, there’ll be exclusive Lagniappe content here at Innerspace and polls on new projects. Comarades can have Letters from Characters addressed to them in particular or a chance to make it into a new story alongside them. Full Mathieuvien(ne)s will get the keys to my private wiki and the audio stories I record for my parents and grandpapa.

…of course that last is for patrons who donate $100/month, but I also value my privacy.

As an opening offer, I will send out the first Letters from a Mathieu Character, physically written on postcards, to any matelot(e), comarade, or Mathieuvien(ne) who pledges their support before January 6. So if you’ve always had a burning desire to hear from Gooch or get Marie-Pier Corriveau’s advice, now is your golden opportunity.

Become a Patron!