Spring & Summer Celebrations in Fantasy

As spring slips effortlessly into summer, I started wondering about these seasons in fantasy. How are they celebrated? How do they effect the story?

Growing up in Hampshire, England, down the road from Stonehenge, I'm used to the celebrations and rituals of May Day, with Morris dancers, May Poles, and cheese rolling. Even donning masks and dressing up as animals, as depicted in The Wicker Man.

And such celebrations of the coming of Spring, the return of the sun, growth of the crops and fertility - Easter eggs and maypoles occur all across the world. So why not in world fantasy literature?

In fantasy, rituals and settings place an important part of world building. The seasons reflect challenges and emotional journeys, weather itself can become a character so in the same way rituals, or celebrations can add depth, intrigue and texture.


But it was way harder to find any references than I thought it would be..

My first thought was GREENWITCH by Susan Cooper - which is set in Cornwall - an ancient place rooted in Celtic tradition, with an awesome ritual of weaving a Greenwitch from twines and flowers, and throwing it into the sea, around Spring. But it may be that Susan Cooper is such a fantastic writer, she just convinced me that was a real festival as I can't find the real roots anywhere. Cornwall does have many celebration though including May Day! So, the feel of her setting was spot on!

Then I remembered the bear festival in TENDER MORSELS by Margo Lanagan, where the young men of the village dress in bear costumes and run around the village harassing the young women. Now, that is based on a real festival, la journée de l’ours (the day of the bear).

The Bears!

Prats-de-Mollo's town website says, 'The young people of Prats meet up at Fort Lagarde, for a boozy meal during which the bears, chosen several weeks before, are prepared for the festival. Some will play the bears (usually the fittest amongst them!) and others will be the hunters.' It happens in late February - early March.

Trying to reach out further than my Anglo-Saxon roots I thought of Holi - a Hindu celebration that takes place in spring, a jubilant festival celebrating and renewing relationships and friendships.

In MOLLY MOON - by Georgia Byng, which I've stretched to be fantasy, Molly travels back and forth in time through India, and experiences Holi first hand.

Next, I combed through THE OWL SERVICE, Alan Garner, THE NEW POLICEMAN, Kate Thompson and THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, Neil Gaiman - I was convinced the Macabray was based on a real yearly event - but not one I could find! I think it may just be a twist on the Dance Macabre which would be more Halloween-ie anyway.

So, I went to the Inkpot!

Amy Greenfield (CHANTRESS (McElderry/S&S, April 2013)) shared some of her Oxford memories,

I live just north of Oxford, which has a fabulous May Morning festival every year...I can remember standing in the crowds on Magdalen Bridge listing to the choir, glimpsing a Green Man in the hubbub, hearing the jingle of Morris dancers everywhere, watching fire-eaters by the Bodleian, and being offered fertility cake from a man’s sword. Good food for the imagination. She also came up with more titles!

Laura Lee Sullivan’s UNDER THE GREEN HILL is a recent one. Julie Hearne’s The MERRYBEGOT (called The Minister’s Daughter in the US) is another from 2005. And there’s Mary Stewart’s WILDFIRE AT MIDNIGHT, but that’s a real oldie.

Amy also mentioned Nowruz, 'the spring festival celebrated in Iran (and elsewhere)...It's rooted in the Zoroastrian religion and marks the spring equinox and the start of a new year. I can't think of any book connections, though.

Lena Coakley (WITCHLANDERS) shared these pictures from a recent trip to Oxford UK.

(The man with the cheese on his head is the "fool" a traditional character
in Morris dancing who causes havoc and gets all the steps wrong.)

Lena Coakley

And William Alexander (GOBLIN SECRETS) told me something I never would have thought about his home town of Minneapolis...

One way that we cope is by banishing winter with a huge parade and puppet show. Mayday!

May Day is a spring holiday. The sun is coming back, and this is cause for tremendous relief because there's nothing like a Minnesota winter to make you doubt your knowledge of our heliocentric solar system and believe--if only a very little bit--that mythic wolves might actually devour both the sun and moon. But then warmth returns, and one of our local theater companies builds an enormous sun puppet and paddles it across a recently thawed lake. Everybody cheers as though the puppet were actually the sun, as though it really could chase away arctic wind, as though everything might be okay from now on.

Which just sounds like an amazing event looking for a fantasy story to appear in!!

So, it's over to you. Can you think of any spring or summer celebrations, real or invented, in children's fantasy writing? Not including, of course, the really obvious one I forgot to mention by a certain Bard!

Shameless Celebration!

YAY!  Lots of news this week.  I love weeks like this.  :)

Starting out with a bang, Lena Coakley's WITCHLANDERS is a SCBWI Crystal Kite Award winner!  Chosen by SCBWI members, this is like being voted prom queen by your peers!  Such a huge honor.

We have another book with honors this week: Dawn Metcalf's LUMINOUS was picked as a Top 40 Pick for the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association.  What an awesome line up of books!!!

In foreign rights news, Nancy Holder sold Polish rights to WICKED, the NYT bestselling YA series she writes with Debbie Viguie. Copies of WICKED: WITCH, the first novel in the series, arrived on Friday.

In blurbage news (hee), William Alexander landed an amazing blurb for GOBLIN SECRETS from none other than Ursula K. Le Guin!

"It was hard to stop reading Goblin Secrets, and I didn't want the book to end! The author's imagination is both huge and original, taking us to a truly new place, rich with lively, vivid scenes, fascinating people, and marvelous inventions. He doesn't explain things, yet everything is clear. And he tells his fast-paced story in language that's a pleasure in itself -- subtle, tricky, funny, beautiful. More, please, Will Alexander!"

And perhaps most excitingly of all this week, long time Inkie P.J. Hoover has not one, but TWO book deals to announce!

P.J. Hoover's SOLSTICE, about a near-future global heating crisis and a Texas teen who uncovers the strange untold ending of the Persephone myth, only to find that she is part of the story -- and that her choices in love, in family, and in friendship will determine the destiny of her world, to Susan Chang at Tor Children's, for publication in Spring 2013, by Laura Rennert and Lara Perkins at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (NA).

P.J. Hoover's TUT, in which a young immortal King Tut, who has been stuck in middle school for over 3,000 years, must defeat an ancient enemy with the help of a dorky kid from school, a mysterious Egyptian princess, and a one-eyed cat, to Susan Chang at Tor Children's, for publication in Winter/Spring 2014, by Laura Rennert and Lara Perkins at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (NA).

Excuse me while I squee all over myself.  :D

Hmm.  There's something else.  Something I'm forgetting...  Oh yes, winners in the Tu Book drawing!  I gots them:

Natalie Aguirre
Julia@ThatHapaChick

Congratulations!

Interview with Alethea Kontis, author of ENCHANTED

I’m thrilled to welcome to the Inkpot Alethea Kontis, author of Enchanted, which apparently is the monster of all fairy tale retellings. I mean, why retell just one when you can retell them all, right? Read on and find out….

Enchanted isn't a retelling of any particular fairy tale -- rather, it's a mosaic of many of them. Was there any particular fairy tale that got you started? Or did you intend from the beginning to borrow from as many fairy tales as possible?

The original story that Enchanted is based on was an entry in a fairy tale contest the Codex Writers had in the summer of 2005. The stories had to be inspired by at least one of four "seeds": "Fundevogel," "The Princess and the Pea," the Irish legend of Cú Chulainn, and the nursery rhyme "There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe." I couldn't choose between them, so I chose them all...as well as all every other fairy tale and nursery rhyme that was suggested. They just all fit together so well, you see...

I hate the "where did you get the idea" question as much as anyone. And yet: Where did you get the awesome idea for seven sisters named after seven days of the week?

That particular tidbit came from the "Monday's Child is Fair of Face" nursery rhyme. As a Sabbath Day child myself, I've always been slightly disappointed in my generically optimistic lot in life as prophesied by that poem, so I instantly had a great deal of empathy for Sunday. The reason anyone would have so many children in the first place would surely be the goal of a "seventh child of a seventh child" legend, and this dovetailed perfectly into the old rhyme of counting magpies ("One for sorrow, two for joy"). Sevens and threes are very powerful numbers in fairy tales.

I happen to know (looks mysterious) that the original title of the book was Sunday, the name of the main character. And having gone through title changes myself, I know there were probably a bunch of titles you considered before you hit on Enchanted. Care to share any of them?

Yes, the original title of the novel was Sunday, which was the name of the novelette of this tale as it appeared in Realms of Fantasy in 2006. The publisher was afraid that this title would not immediately convey a fairy tale sensibility, so they suggested something "more like...Enchanted." I had about two days to come up with new title ideas, which included: Blithe, Fanciful, Dreamer, Glister, and Perchance. But by then, Enchanted had already settled in everyone's brains, and there you have it!

You are also the author of the bestselling picture book, Alpha Oops: The Day Z Went First (side note: my kids LOVE that book). Obviously the writing process is different, but how similar or different the process of getting a picture book published vs. getting a young adult novel published?

*hugs* I love you and your kids! Thank you! Oh, yes, I learned an incredible lot during the production of the first AlphaOops, not the least of which was that writing a picture book was far more like writing a script than a short story or novel. There is so much one doesn't need to say in prose when given illustrations, and there needs to be room left for the illustrator/collaborator to step in and shine on his/her own. Almost like in acting, where the words in the script are a guideline by which the actor bases his or her motivation and fills in the blank with talent, imagination, and personality. Thankfully, I've had some little experience acting on stage and television, so when I sat down to write AlphaOops: H is for Halloween, I wrote it as a script rather than in story format. I think the editing process for that book went a lot more smoothly.

All that said, the award for strangest format in which I've ever written a story goes to "Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome," a month-long twitter serial illustrated by Eisner Award winner J.K. Lee. Because of the 140 character limit on each daily mini-story, it was easier to construct the project on an Excel spreadsheet so that I could see the stories one on top of the other and keep track of the characters all at the same time. It was an odd endeavor, but the unorthodox approach ultimately worked out to everyone's advantage. My advice to writers: Always keep an open mind. We live in an ever-changing world, and you'll never know what hoop you might be asked to jump through next!

So true! As long as they’re all fun hoops, right?

You can read more about Enchanted at http://aletheakontis.com/about/enchanted/. You can also go out and get it if you want – it went on sale yesterday!

More YA covers: Eye catching!

They're diabolical, these YA cover designers. They have to be: They have a tough, tough job.

First of all, obviously, they have to be pretty accurate about conveying a book's essence: There's nothing more annoying to a reader than buying a book with a soft, romantic cover only to suffer a bloody chainsaw murder on page five.

Also, a designer wants to drag you to a book across a crowded store. Once the book's in your hands, he wants you eaten up with curiosity about what's inside. (CINDER wins that award, in my opinion.)

Today's post explores a few of the techniques designers have been using on covers in the January-June publication season. Cue the eyeballs!

The covers are after the break. Which ones work for you? Why?

Spring YA fantasy covers take wing!

Angels and mermaids still rule in young adult fantasy, and cover artists have to exercise all their creativity to come up with new ways to depict them.  (The creators of wings--whether angelic or fae--were especially inventive this season.)

Meanwhile, YA covers continue to love gorgeous dresses and tresses. (Who doesn't?) Also one-word titles. Unearthly light. Well-toned torsos.

And, of course, nothing says "uh-oh" like a good mist.

This spring's round-up includes books whose pub dates were January through June. Once again, we're so overloaded with wonderful cover art that we're going to spread this post over two days. Tune in for more great covers tomorrow!

In today's groupings, I admit to a fondness for the kick-butt females in the bottom grouping--not to mention the GRAVE MERCY lady who has both a great dress and a crossbow. (You really won the sweepstakes on that one, Robin!) On the other hand, you can't beat DRAGONSWOOD for sheer weird resplendence.

Click "read more" to see the covers. Which ones are your favorites?