Guest Post: I'm a Geek Girl

Today, I'm pleased to have Joy Preble, author of the Dreaming Anastasia series, here today with a guest post about being proud of your inner geek!

Yeah, I’m a Geek Girl: Live With It!

Joy Preble

(Author of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series from Sourcebooks: DREAMING ANASTASIA, 2009; HAUNTED, 2011, ANASTASIA FOREVER, 2012)

People often ask what my inspiration was for the DREAMING ANASTASIA series. And part of the answer, of course, is my fascination with the tragedy writ large that is the Romanovs. Like so many people, I have always wanted to believe that there was more to it than political assassination and a girl who died before she could be what she could be.

But then there’s the other part of the answer. The part of me that wrote Anne because I’d grown up with a love of genre fiction and then cut my writerly teeth on the work of Joss Whedon.  That girl is an unrepentant geek. A nerd. And so of course I’d end up writing a book with witches and mermaids and soul jar trope dudes who can’t be killed and a romantic hero who’s handsome and blue-eyed but really kind of a doofus at heart. We geek girls write stuff like that. It’s in our DNA or something. We memorize the titles of Buffy episodes and we go with our friends to the opening day of Serenity and when Adam Baldwin guest stars on Castle with Captain Mal himself, Nathan Fillion, we squeal with geeker joy. And we Tweet that our husband just quipped, “Hey. I hope they run into the Rievers.” And the other million geeks who follow us on Twitter tweet back that this is the greatest line they ever heard.

And stuff like that.

So I present to you: You Know You’re A Geek Girl When. With geeky bullet points and everything.  And yeah, it’s all true. Get over it, folks. This is the real me.

You Know You’re a Geek Girl When:

• You agree to appear at Comic Con in Austin with your fellow geek authors. In a mermaid costume. For two days.
• Your favorite moment of the above is meeting James Marsters who played Spike on Buffy. And getting a picture. Signed. (Which you babble about for two days, at least when you can get a word in over Tricia (PJ) Hoover’s rambling about her photo op with Kevin Sorbo.
• Did I mention the seaweed boa?
• You put physics and economics jokes in your manuscript and your agent tells you that maybe this is not as funny as you think it is. But you believe that giving a character a t-shirt that reads ‘Fission Chips’ is hysterical. And that the joke “Two protons walk into a black hole… that’s the joke” is also the funniest thing ever. Really.
• You Google ‘nerd t shirts’ while you’re eating your lunch. More than one day a week.
• You still know the titles of every BTVS episode. And can still quote lines. And if someone says anything close to ‘dance of joy’ your first thought is of Season 2 of Angel when the gang went to Pylea.
• When you realized that you now knew and worked with the blogger who used to blog as Moonrat, you were happy for like a million days. Maybe more.
• You saw The Avengers on opening weekend.  And you knew that you had to stay seated when the final credits rolled because it wasn’t really over.
• You also saw The Cabin the Woods. And chatted with your fellow geeks about how it was a meta-horror genre movie. Possibly too meta. But whatever.
• You played viola in the high school orchestra. And were first chair. And dated the 1^st chair bassoon player.
• You own a full collection of the paperback novelizations of the original Star Trek series.
• You used to write Star Trek fan fiction. Before there was the Internet. Yes, you and your geek friends exchanged yellow legal pads of manuscripts. Mostly about Mr. Spock’s love life. You now believe that if only you had titled it Fifty Shades of Spock, you would be on easy street now.
• You continue to believe that there is such a thing as a tesseract.
• You wish there were more people who would get excited about the Baba Yaga episode on Lost Girl.
• You screamed in horrified delight at the end of this season’s Vampire Diaries.
• You have worn socks with Birkenstocks. In public. But maybe only once.
• You could continue this list for another thousand pages.

Thank you Joy for an amusing look at being a GEEK GIRL!  I'm quite sure that I have an inner geek girl trying to get out!!

Guest Post: Top Ten Things to Know about Baba Yaga

Top Ten Things to Know About Baba Yaga the Witch

Joy Preble

Author of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series, Sourcebooks

(DREAMING ANASTASIA, 2009; HAUNTED, 2011; ANASTASIA FOREVER, 2012)

1. She is the most famous witch in Russian fairy tales/folklore.  In most (maybe all) Slavic languages, ‘Baba’ means ‘old woman.’ The ‘Yaga’ is also from Slavic roots, but it’s a bit more varied in the stories of its etymology. But the easiest way to think of her name is Grandma Yaga. In the DREAMING series, I have Anastasia refer to her as Auntie Yaga, which I thought an interesting little twist. I imagined the witch as asking her captive Anastasia to call her this, perhaps as a joke, perhaps to give Anastasia the sense that the Baba Yaga is gentle, perhaps even benign, which couldn’t be farther from the truth!

2. Many authors have used her in their stories—from picture books like Babushka Baba Yaga by Patricia Polacco to genre fiction by Orson Scott Card and Neil Gaiman. There’s even a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelization with Baba Yaga in it! She’s in movies, cartoons, anime… you name it and the old girl has appeared in it! My books are in very good company.

3. Baba Yaga lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs so that it can help her evade her enemies. (This is such a great visual that it’s been taken over in other stories too. If you’ve seen the anime film, Howl’s Moving Castle, Howl’s house also runs around on chicken legs! This is the folklore that image comes from) In some stories, including mine, pikes with the skulls of her enemies surround her house like a fence. Cool, huh?  And when she travels, she rides in a huge mortar (that big black that you use to grind spices… those big black bowls they put guacamole in sometimes look like it, too!) and she stirs the air with a huge pestle. (That’s the grinding tool)

4. The idea of ‘grinding’ from that pestle in #3 connects to another fact about Baba Yaga: her forest is a place of change and transformation. Once you enter her forest, you will not come out the same… even if you survive. Baba Yaga is all about duality both in appearance and behavior.  Like all strong women, she’s complex. She may use her considerable power for good. Or she may grind your bones and stick your head on her fence. She’s mercurial and powerful and she can’t quite be defined. I found this particularly fascinating in terms of women and power, which is definitely a motif that runs throughout the series. Societies tend to marginalize old women, to define them by beauty lost, to de-sexualize them. But Baba Yaga won’t stand for that and I love that about her. I thought about this a lot in building her backstory, which continues in ANASTASIA FOREVER. I wanted to know exactly how she became who she is when Anne meets her. Exactly why she agreed to protect Anastasia for the Brotherhood. And I loved the complexity of what developed from that!

5.    Lots of people have written amazing articles about Baba Yaga! A good place to start if you want to read more is here: http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/rrBabaYaga.html

6. Physically, Baba Yaga is very tall. She has iron teeth and a huge nose and these enormous removable hands that detach from her body to do her bidding. I use all of these physical factors in my series.

7. In many Baba Yaga tales, she has three horsemen who serve and protect her. Each rides a different color horse – one black, one red, and one white, reflecting different times of the day.

8. In most of the folktales, Baba Yaga has boundaries that she cannot cross. Although I do have her appearing in Anne’s real world, this is still a factor in the DREAMING series, both literally with a river that runs through her forest as well as metaphorically in terms of Anne. There is only so much Baba Yaga can tell Anne. The rest Anne must figure out on her own terms.

9.  In her stories, she is never defeated. Ever. She always comes back!

10. And here is how I envisioned Anastasia first talking about Baba Yaga, my version of the Vasilisa story that used in DREAMING ANASTASIA:

"In the story, there was a girl. Her name was Vasilisa, and she was very beautiful. Her parents loved her. Her life was good. But things changed. Her mother died. Her father remarried. And the new wife - well, she wasn't so fond of Vasilisa. So she sent her to the hut of the fearsome witch Baba Yaga to fetch some light for their cabin. And that was supposed to be that. For no one returned from Baba Yaga's. But Vasilisa had the doll her dying mother gave her. And the doll- because this was a fairy tale and so dolls could talk - told her what to do. Helped her get that light she came for and escape. And when Vasilisa returned home, that same light burned so brightly that it killed the wicked stepmother who sent Vasilisa to that horrible place. Vasilisa remained unharmed. She married a handsome prince. And lived happily ever after.

When I listened to my mother tell the story, I would pretend I was Vasilisa the Brave. In my imagination, I heeded the advice of the doll. I outwitted the evil Baba Yaga, the fearsome witch who kept her enemies' heads on pikes outside her hut. Who rode the skies in her mortar and howled to the heavens and skittered about on bony legs. Who ate up lost little girls with her iron teeth.

But the story was not as I imagined...."

 Thanks Joy for the insight into Baba Yaga!  

Make sure you check out the final installment of the 

Dreaming Anastasia Series: ANASTASIA FOREVER 

You can find Joy Preble:

Website   Twitter   Goodreads   YaHous FB    YaHous Blog

What's Love Got to Do With It

I'm very excited for the upcoming release of Joy Preble's Anastasia Forever.  If you haven't read this series yet you are missing out on beautiful writing and wonderful characters  that will likely spark an interest in old Russian folklore.  Today, Joy has written a guest post to help you understand a little about Ethan and Anne.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?: 

The Anne/Ethan Romance

Joy Preble

  

The guiding force of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series is the relationship between Anne and Ethan. Anne knows from the second she catches blue-eyed Ethan stalking her at the ballet that there is just something about him. And in fact, he proceeds to turn her life upside and sideways because it is Ethan who peels back Anne’s normal world and reveals a world of Russian fairy tales brought to life, of a hidden princess and an illegitimate royal son driven by vengeance. When they touch – and I always knew that their story would begin with a physical touch setting things in motion—everything changes.

Anne is no longer just the girl who dances ballet and goes to school and mourns the death of her brother to cancer. She is a girl with power to save a princess, power to right ancient wrongs and ultimately, the power to break a curse that is holding her birth grandmother captive. But power comes with a steep price. And when Anne accepts Baba Yaga’s bargain so she can save Ethan in book 2, she steps into the witch’s forest in a way she has up until then refused to do. Of course, I wanted her to do this for love, even if she has trouble admitting that’s what it is.

This is problem for Anne and Ethan: they do not come easily to loving each other. Or rather, Ethan comes easily to loving Anne, even if he feels that he does not deserve her or a second chance at life. Which is exactly what she gives him when she rides out of the witch’s forest with Anastasia, allowing Ethan to regain his mortality. While Viktor yearns to live forever, Ethan wants only to have what he lost for a cause that was never what he believed it to be: to live and die in the proper time. That he has found the love of his life makes him both deliriously happy as well as guilty as hell.

And Anne, well, she’s a smart girl. Even when she’s not, she has Tess watching her back, making sure she sees things as they are. Anne sees loving Ethan as an impossibility. He is too old even if he looks young. He has secrets and a long, long past. She is only sixteen. And yet I think she loves him from the moment he tells her his story. But she holds back; she is indecisive. In fact, these traits hurt her in all aspects of her life. She has trouble committing. Ethan, on the other hand, is an all-in kind of guy.

So what did I do to these two? I made them inhabit a reverse fairy tale. It is Anne who ends up saving Ethan over and over. It is Anne who is the hero. And ultimately, it is Ethan (no spoilers for book 3 quite yet) who needs redemption and forgiveness before he and Anne can be together. A happily ever after, but hard won. And not without suffering and sacrifice. This is after all, a Russian fairy tale. No one knows endurance like the Russians.

And so it goes: Ethan and Anne, circling and circling love, each running from the other, each doing the hero’s job. The question becomes, will they figure out that they belong together before it’s too late?

Of course they will!

But with these two, love isn’t simple. I think that makes them equal parts of smart and stupid. Not forbidden love. Not crazy love where the passion burns out everything else—and I think we all need some of that in our lives.

When Anne and Ethan finally figure out that they belong together, it will be a love that entwines them like two puzzle pieces, marveling at how perfectly and easily they fit. And how foolish they were not to know it.

 Check back tomorrow for a deleated scene from Anastasia