Monthly Archives: August 2024

3 posts

Reading is Fun! (damental)

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XianeBlog

I started reading so early that I have no functional memory of life without it.

My family was poor but we had full bookshelves and both my mom and gran [who we lived with] were voracious readers. Mom read to me and had books for me from the very beginning, and I took to reading easily and with much excitement. I think being curious and having a deep desire to know helped, but having a reading culture modeled for me was the most important part of the equation.

Mom knew that she could get toddler me to behave when we were out in public by offering to buy me a Little Golden Book. My relatives were encouraged to buy me books as gifts, and when they saw how happy that made me, they were thrilled to keep up the tradition. My beloved Aunt L, who had more money than we did and was always kind and generous, bought me some of my most treasured books–ones that Mom would have struggled to afford, like sets, collections, and encyclopedias of knowledge. I think she loved doing it because she understood what an impact her gifts made on me.

I mention money here because books are expensive, always have been, and it takes money to have one’s own library. As a kid I had more books than some adults I knew! I treasured my Collier’s Junior Classics, where I got a taste for folklore and mythology that would fuel further exploration and then the books I write today. I had an encyclopedia set of animals [bought by Aunt L] that sparked my obsession for wildlife and helped me spout facts at my partner whenever we watch animal videos or go to the National Zoo. All those books I owned helped form who I am today.

And don’t get me wrong, I went to the library religiously and would emerge with armfuls of books every time. I am an extremely fast reader so I would blaze through my pile and then read everything that Mom took out, too, even if it was “too old” for me. If I had questions, I’d ask Mom or use the dictionary to help me. My intellectual curiosity was fueled by not being restricted in what I could consume, and not being shamed if I asked a question that might be uncomfortable or that others might brand as too advanced for my age or experience. I had a safe home, in that way. I was encouraged to learn everything I wanted to, at my own pace. [This was a problem for me in school, unfortunately, and I was often bored and frustrated, forced to adhere to the pace of my peers. Not that I was any smarter than them, I just had an insatiable curiosity and lightning fast reading speed.]

Thing is about the library: it is an important–crucial!–resource, but having books in the home, at one’s fingertips whenever wanted, is important for keeping young minds invested in reading. These days, we’ve got the Internet to answer all our questions, but when I was a kid, having a big dictionary and encyclopedia was formative for me. I spent a summer reading the entirety of them from front to back, which explains a lot about me if you know me in person. You can’t force that kind of obsessive need for info, you can only nurture it. Getting an early start at reading, in a home that valued education, was vital.

And let me be clear here: my family was lower class blue collar. Until my mom and I went to college [at the same time!] we didn’t have anyone in the immediate family who had done the same. When I learned to read, I lived in an apartment with my mom, her sister, and their mother–my grandmother. We struggled, and I even shared a bed with my gran for years before my mom got married and we moved up in status a bit. But there were always books, always reading, always great value placed on learning things.

What’s my point in all of this?

We need to start kids reading early and enthusiastically foster the love of it by modeling a reading culture. Doesn’t matter if it’s a paper or electronic book; what matters most is the unfettered access to reading material and an unfaltering support for exploring whatever sparks a child’s curiosity. Don’t depend on your kid’s teachers to do this for them! It needs to start well before they hit their school years. If you’re like me and don’t have kids, gifting books or reading to young people is a good way to help. I think of my Aunt L, who invested in a kid that wasn’t her own, and what it helped to support. You can make a difference.

Also, there are programs like RIF – Reading is Fundamental – which make sure that kids, especially kids in less secure financial circumstances, get access to books in their own home. You can donate money or time to them, or organize a book giveaway with their help. They’re not the only organization that does this! A quick online search will reveal many more.

Investing in our future means investing in kids, because they are the future. One way to do that is to encourage curiosity. Reading opens so many doors. Let’s give kids every opportunity to walk through those doors with all kinds of possibilities in front of them.

The Author Gets Nostalgic for…

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XianeBlog

Diary-style blogs, of all things.

What do I miss? The kind of personal blogging that hit its height in the early 2000s, on Blogger and Diaryland and Livejournal, where people would pour their hearts and thoughts onto an electronic page in equal parts of honesty and cringe, or would write banging, impassioned long-form essays about both the most important and trivial of things.

Dear reader, I was one of those folks and I loved it.

Did I overshare, whine, and ill-advisedly spill my feelings in ways that had personal blowback for me? Oh yes.
I also wrote some of the best things of my life, met people I’m still friends with thanks to bonding over our overly-honest shares, and felt more connected online than I have at any time – thanks to my blog.

I was real and messy and complicated and so were most of the other people on those platforms. For every moment that I can look back at with some regret there are a hundred other ones that I treasure.

Everything online feels fragmented these days. Formats get shorter and people breeze by each other in the faster-moving platforms that are popular now. It’s not just nostalgia that moves me to feel like this. I pose that deep connections are much harder to come by online, and that didn’t used to be the case. We have shorter attention spans, too, and that’s showing up in a lot of ways. [I miss songs that are over three minutes long!]

The reality is this: I can bitch about it, or I can do something about it. Well, in this case I’m gonna bitch and do something about it, ha. I can’t necessarily influence the world into changing with me, but I can put out into the world what I want to see. That’s been my driving principle for everything I do! You want it, you make it happen. So here’s my plan: I’m going to start old-school blogging here, along with my regular posts. Welcome to my blog!
What I write about won’t be as uncensored as I’d like, for obvious reasons. But I want to share more of me in ways that people don’t do as much anymore, and a “micro-blogging” or newsletter-based subscription service just ain’t gonna cut it. Also, I’m not dependent on algorithms or support from platforms that throw their hands in the air when it comes to hosting fascists.

I’ll tag everything with #xianeblog and put it in its own category, XianeBlog. That way it’s easy to read in order or ignore!

If you’d like to join me, let me know! Maybe we need to bring back Ye Olde BlogRing, hahahaha…oh no I’m going to turn into dust soon, aren’t I.

Writing the [Mostly] Real World

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A Third Kind of Madness Cast A Shadow Of Doubt In Sleep You Know On Creating

One of the things I always mention about my stories is that they’re set in Baltimore, MD, USA. I was born, raised, and lived a chunk of my life in Baltimore. It’s a vibrant and delightfully weird city, oft-maligned; it definitely has problems but also has some great people and energy. It’s been struggling to find it’s footing for a while and has slowly been shifting in personality – yes, cities have personalities – and growth is rarely easy, which can make the more skeptical folks think everything’s a mess, when really, it’s change happening. All of these things make for a compelling backdrop and character to use in my stories!

Also, even though I know the city well, writing about it has allowed me to learn even more beyond what I’ve known and experienced about Charm City, especially since it has changed a lot in my lifetime. I can’t just count on memories to fill out a scene, I either have to double check myself against what’s the truth now, or make a conscious choice to warp reality a little to fit my vision.

So now that I’ve said that…

If you’re from these parts, you might have guessed or recognized some of the locations I haven’t outright mentioned in the books. I name the neighborhood of Hampden, where Lucee and Cullen have a lovely date and then get into some trouble, and that’s pretty much exactly as it is currently in the non-book world. The Round Falls area also is the same, and that bit is actually based on a true experience I had there. The community garden that Vali does a mural for doesn’t exist outside the books, but that neighborhood around Greenmount Cemetery is pretty accurate otherwise. The thoughts that Vali mentions about changes in the neighborhood, positive and negative, are valid. Wyman Park Dell is more or less the same in both versions of Baltimore. I describe the building known as The Belvedere as characters pass by it, and I talk about Mount Vernon Place in great detail as it’s a big part of the setting in A Third Kind of Madness.

Writing about the farmers market under the JFX was one of my favorite parts in ATKOM, by the way. I’ve had people ask me if that’s a real market, and how could it be held under an expressway? Folks, it’s real, it is awesome, and you should definitely visit it if you’re in town. I actually used to vend there, selling my handspun yarn and handmade products!

And then there are places I invented completely, like the Frisky Bean. The Bean gets it’s believable feel from my deep experience with that kind of coffee house, but sadly there isn’t a place I can point out in the Mount Vernon neighborhood that matches that vibe. House Mirabilis and Tiennan House don’t have specific inspirations, but Baltimore has plenty of old houses that could stand in. The Compound has an address [sort of, I don’t really obscure where it’s located] and if you look it up using online maps, you can get a visual for the outside, at least. The interior layout, I based on judging from the outside and using my experiences from being inside similar buildings, with my own whimsical additions of course.

Some spots what I’d call book-analogues to actual places that exist, but under different names. Club Marcada on Charles Street is an amalgam of a couple of different clubs I’ve known, but it’s absolutely set in the same block as Club Charles and The Depot. [And The Depot certainly gets some quiet references in the description of Marcada, IYKYK] The Maithe also could be put in this category, but I think it needs it’s own, for reasons I’ll explain below.

The Maithe is special [duh]

First off, let’s discuss the one very specific thing I changed about my version of Baltimore: Park Street.

There is no Park Street in Mount Vernon.

There is a Park Avenue, and yes, I know someone from here might read the books and think “Oh, Xi doesn’t know what they’re talking about, they messed that up.” Nope, sorry, that was a deliberate choice that will mean nothing to people not from Baltimore but to locals [and me] it signals that we are stepping outside of the “real” world and into a different version of the city. Basically that entire street, which happens to house the Frisky Bean, Denny’s studio, and The Maithe, is a magical corridor that lies just slightly off from the world we move in. So if you’re in Mount Vernon and you happen to be walking down Park Avenue, you’re just a sidestep away from where so much of the story takes place!

How do you shift over to Park Street instead? Well that is a good question… isn’t it? šŸ˜‰

Trivia point: my very first apartment, of which I have no end of ridiculous tales, was on Park Ave. in Mount Vernon. Living there and observing a lot of the odd, amusing things that happened regularly was part of the inspiration for setting the story in that area.

That “slightly off” mirror world, the Baltimore that could be if we sidestepped through the veil unexpectedly? That’s where you can walk from the Bean and spy magical graffiti in an alleyway before you come to the end of the street and the great building that dominates it: The Maithe. Yes, The Maithe is inspired by a building I know, The Brexton, now known as a hotel. No, it’s not the same in this world…as far as I know. It doesn’t house a great, seemingly unending forest in its center courtyard. Indeed, there’s no courtyard at all, though in my opinion there should be! But the staircase? That’s there, and the triangular shape, and the towers on each end. I think The Maithe probably deserves its own post, because I have personal anecdotes I could share as well as a lot of background about how I envisioned the layout inside, which is quite different than the building it’s based on. And as time’s gone on, The Maithe has revealed secrets about itself and those are fun to talk about, too.

I keep promising a video tour of the Eleriannan’s version of Baltimore, and I promise it’s coming soon! The weather’s been too hot and unsettled for your pal Christiane, but as soon as I’m feeling up to it, you’ll have it. Part of the joy of writing these stories is sharing my city with you through my eyes and imagination, and can’t wait for you to see the places that inspire me.

More to come, including in-depth details about The Maithe!