The Page 69 Challenge

Turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book.

That was Marshall McLuhan’s advice anyway. Barb Taub invites readers to submit their own or other works (pg. 69 only of course!)
http://barbtaub.com/2015/04/13/page-69-challenge-excerpts-from-leaning-into-love-memoir-and-its-a-nightmare-dystopian-feminist-fantasy-fiction/

It’s a Nightmare (The Gold Stone Girl, Book 1) by Nicole Quinn

Genre: Dystopian feminist fantasy fiction

Mina, a rogue DreamWeaver, is born in the Off-grid of the Night Mare’s Winkin City, a world, where human females are kept as cattle, and licensed as domestic pets. She’s found inside a willow tree, alongside lygaeidae hibernating as larva. Mina lives the life of a human-breeder, who discovers that in order to survive, she must change everything.

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Page 69 (BlueBarnProductions, May 11, 2014)

The voice inside my head pipes up, Pilar was raised as cattle, always intended for trade or sale. Stooped Helga has survived three owners already, while Chinaka’s people want the evil spirit beaten out of her, before they’ll accept back. Soo doesn’t talk, so she’s never heard. You have known humanity.

Day after day we sit on our cushions in yurt #13, watching Pater Dick strut his
lessons. In the winter, it’s freezing. The Pater’s meager government allotment of wood he reserves for his personal use, while he sends us out, harnessed together like a pack of hounds, to hunt for felled branches. In the summer, it’s sweltering, both inside and out.

Nicole Quinn is a WGA writer. Her feature film Racing Daylight (writer/dir) stars Academy Award winner Melissa Leo and Emmy winner David Strathairn, and it’s streaming everywhere.
Nicole won the Harper Audio contest to read on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. She has produced a dozen AUDIOBOOKSand narrated as many, It’s a Nightmare, The Gold Stone Girl, book 1, has been nominated for a Tiptree Award.

“The three stones you choose at Registration are the predictors of your behavior. What we will expect of you. Gold, silver, vermillion, yellow, blue, grey, scarlet, green, pink, and white. Each color has a meaning, to help us identify and weed out the trouble makers early. To understand which of you deserve preferment as pets, and perhaps as media.” He looks around at the five of us.

“No, I guess not.” He says with a snort. Pater’s Dick’s feet stop in front of me. I don’t look up. After a pointed pause, he moves on.

“The most sought after stone, of course, is the gold, which trumps all other stones in its value to society. There is no greater honor for a breeder than to pull the gold stone.

That lucky girl gives her life to the Night Mare, in reparation for our sins.

“The most recent gold stone pulled, however, was a fake. Several hundred cycles back,” Dick tells us.

Sounds good? Get more information or your copy of It’s A Nightmare from:

Nicole’s blog | Amazon | Audible

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I would really love to feature your Page 69! Use Contact Form here to submit your favorite Pg 69 (your own or other’s work) 

Sh

Against Type: Rewriting the She-Ro

http://www.rewritingmarysue.com/rms/rewritingtheshero

April 5, 2015

When I discovered that baby girls were being thrown away, I needed to write about it.  I wanted to understand a society where that could happen, where females were complicit, where it was of the culture.  To venture so far into the dark, I needed hope, and someone to embody it.  I needed her to be someone I would want to follow from fear and darkness, into the light. 

Mina, the protagonist of my epic trilogy, is a rogue Dream Weaver, recast in the Night Mare’s government-church dogma as, The Gold Stone Girl.  She’s the human sacrifice the Night Mare, the demon ruler of the world, must consume to renew the planet, and herself.  It’s not a light burden. 

In characterizing her, I wondered what decisions I might make in a restrictive society. What if I could be boiled in oil by a drug lord, or tortured to change my religion?  Have acid thrown in my face for being too enticing, or too confident.  A bullet put into my head for going to school?  What if rape were a common occurrence when I had to forage for food and kindling, or if I walk alone at night, or if I let a guy buy me dinner?  What if girl babies were put to death as an everyday matter of course all around me?  What if my labia and clitoris were removed just before puberty, as a cultural tradition? What might I sublimate of my own will just to live?  This is the world I gave Mina to survive.  

Mina is found inside a tree, and raised by outsiders, Off-gridders, which allows us all to get to know the Night Mare’s horror from a distance, at least in the beginning.  Then I gave Mina the task of having to save the whole world, in order to save herself.  Ultimately everyone has a stake in her success, or failure, even the Night Mare. 

Mina’s a reluctant hero who slips through the cracks of the Night Mare’s system, a system set up specifically to find her.  She wants to be normal, like everyone else, except for being owned, and abused.  So in order to find a new normal, Mina has to undertake the extraordinary, she has to discover who she is, from inside herself, as all record of her legend has been expunged by her enemy.  

I wanted to create the type of confident woman I’d long admired in novels about housekeeping, Jane Austen heroines, and such.  Women who aspired to lives that were not allowed to them.  Even if the perceived stakes weren’t high, will I marry on my own terms, in partnership, in love, or will I not marry at all, in a world where marrying meant you were property, and, not to, meant spinsterhood, financial ruin, and familial shame.  It was a time when widowhood was the only state in which a woman could own her own life, though not always her own property if it was entailed away to the next male in the family line.

I didn’t want Mina to be the she-male of gamers and graphic novels, hyper-sexualized and hyper-violent, something to be caged and tamed, before she’s killed.  I wanted someone less two dimensional.  Someone flawed, who makes mistakes and grows from them.  I wanted her to understand how to physically defend herself, and others.  I wanted her to know how to survive the planet. What doesn’t kill her does make her stronger, but in her heart she's flight, not fight.

Mina’s greatest gift is in her ability to separate her own self-worth, from the stereotypes by which all females on the planet Blinkin are prescribed by law.  Mina’s journey is to turn a perceived weakness, her ability to dream, into the basis of her strength and confidence.  Mina’s magic is belief in herself.  She doesn't dream of rescue, she dreams of rescuing herself.

Nicole Quinn is a WGA writer.  She's written scripts for HBO, Showtime, and network television. Her feature film, RACING DAYLIGHT, (starring Academy Award winner Melissa Leo and Emmy winner David Strathairn), is streaming everywhere. She won the Harper Audio contest to read on Neil Gaiman's 10th anniversary full cast audiobook American Gods. She has produced a dozen audiobooks and narrated as many. Her plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.

Are you a writer, like Nicole Quinn, with female characters who defy tropes and overturn expectations? Why not submit your own essay to us? We would love to hear how your #UnabridgedWomen characters are rewriting stereotypes!

Against Type: The Wicked Mother

by Nicole Quinn

http://www.rewritingmarysue.com/rms/againsttypewickedmother

March 1, 2015

When villains are female they’re often unsexed, or hyper-sexed.  Cast as stepmothers, wicked step mothers, they are rarely maternal.  The bad girl’s tragic flaw often stems from a man who done her wrong, or a childhood trauma.  Seldom is it pure lust for power, a common motivator in the male villain.  

When I went looking for an anti-hero I'd already cast the protagonist as a dreamer.  Her opposite, a nightmare, I found in stories of old, as a she-demon who sits on men’s chests while they sleep, sucking at their dreams.  She seemed tailor made.

Anka is the anti-hero of The Gold Stone Girl series.  She’s the ruler of Winkin, a one city world where human females are bred like cattle, and licensed as domestic pets, while human males fare but slightly better.  She’s the Night Mare, a title conferred on her in the long ago, when she was first given the job to be the negative polarity of the planet, the polar opposite of her sister, Alma, the Dream Weaver.  Anka killed Alma in the long ago, to rule alone and forever.

The Night Mare defies the stereotype of gender, even as she imposes gender strictures on her subjects.  She’s filled with contradictions, as most are when rubbed up against convention.  She’s not nice, she’s not feminized, and yet she’s decidedly female, and also a mother.  She’s someone who exercises the limits of her power with confidence and gusto.  Evil is not gendered, nor is consciousness, and that is the point Anka makes in codifying a world predicated on the one which preceded hers, ours. 

The Gold Stone Girl story is inherently feminist.  I didn’t want to scare off half of its potential readers by making it a them and us society, with an evil man subjugating women.  I’m trying to de-gender behavior with Anka.  I wanted a humanist point of view, where we all have to stand in judgment of the actions, and not the gender of the perpetrator.  Anka subjugates human males as well, but she makes them superior to women, as happens in the world now.  She makes human males abusive, by law, and  human females legally 3/5 human, just as the US government classified African slaves, to rationalize that atrocity.  

Anka employs horrors that already haunt us. She institutionalizes them, she makes them normal. It’s a Nightmare, book 1 of the trilogy, starts a million years into Anka’s rule.  These behaviors are entrenched in the culture. No one questions the dogma of the Night Mare’s government-church now, they just live by it.  It’s been long enough into this nightmare forever, for it to seem like a long time, even to Anka.  Even she’s ready for a change.

I wanted the anti-hero to have the capacity for change, what is a world of extremes without forgiveness?  I’ve given her a child,  because it’s a side we don’t often consider.  It’s the side we trivialize as weak, simply because it’s female.  Even monsters have children.      

Anka never meant to carry her child to term.  Demons normally embed their fertilized eggs into the planet. But when she saw how the humans did it, with all the blood, and the mewling, she thought she’d breeze right through it.  She was screaming for the child to be murdered less than three centimeters in.  

Anka loves her son, Reve, sired by Boreas, the North Wind, in a tempestuous relationship.  Anka worries about her son, the way all mothers worry, is he safe, are his socks dry? Yet, she’s the reason he has never evolved beyond the two dimensional heroic villain he plays, the role he’s been assigned in her society.  He’s a matinee idol who rescues human females from the clutches of his mother’s monsters, on the screens.  Anka wrestles with her motherhood, with her softer side, while her son wrangles with who he might be on his own, outside of his mother’s world.  

Maybe that’s why females love their children so, the old demon muses, because we risk own lives to give them theirs.  The ungrateful wretches.”

What I’ve come to, in the writing of these polarities, is that no one wants the job to which they’ve been assigned, no one wants to be categorized by the extremes on a spectrum forever.  The Night Mare wants to dream, and the dreamer must choose to be strong, or be eaten. Both characters are ultimately questing for a place where good and bad can become something less rigid, something more like, not all good, and not so bad, more human.  An interesting quest for demons to take on our behalf.

Are you a writer, like Nicole Quinn, with female characters who defy tropes and overturn expectations? Why not submit your own Against Type essay to us? We would love to hear how your #UnabridgedWomen characters are rewriting stereotypes!