Random Thursday: The Skin-singer Stories

I didn't get my act together to get my second guest-blog post up this week, and only have one in the can at the moment, so I'm scheduling that for next week and then taking a guest-blog break until after New Year’s because I don't think it's fair to schedule someone for a holiday when readers will be more distracted. So I needed a topic for today (that I could compose on the fly) and hit on a recap of what’s behind my current writing project: the final story in my Skin-singer series.

Back in late 1992, I was laid off from my job at XOMA Corp, (along with a quarter of the company)—an event that might have been devastating except that I was already planning to give notice because I was planning to start graduate school the next year. This left me casting about for a part-time job that would be compatible with school and it landed in my lap in the form of a phone call from a friend who was leaving her job as general dogsbody at the office of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine and had recommended me as her replacement.

There’s nothing quite like hanging out around the fiction publishing industry to re-engage one’s writing aspirations. I’d done a great deal of writing in college and after but had never gotten as far as placing any of the results (if you don’t count my song-writing career). So in 1994, when the office was filled with chatter about the upcoming Sword and Sorceress submission season, I latched onto a piece of inspiration and wrote “Skins” (S&S XII, 1995). I always feel a bit weird talking about how that story came to me because it ends up sounding very woo-woo and I’m definitely not a woo-woo sort of person. I had a dream, and in that dream two of my favorite SFF writers appeared to me and told me the plot of the story and told me to write it. Yeah, right. (But the experience gives me greater insight into people who take such things seriously.) The plot-outline from the dream combined with a poem I’d previously written about transforming into an owl using a cloak of feathers. The essence of the story is that an ad hoc family of closeted shape-shifters are on the run in a generic medievalish secondary fantasy world from a man who wants to steal their magical skin-cloaks for his own use. “Skins” established some of the basics: the shape-shifters (kaltaoven) see themselves as a group apart, but the changing ability lent by the skin-cloaks is not restricted to them (hence the reason why an outsider might want to steal one) and it is not innate. A skin-cloak is constructed by a specialist who composes a song that converts an ordinary hide and enables the user to access its power. The viewpoint character, Laaki, is one of these skin-singers but the process is very laborious for her and part of her handicap is that she has so far failed to create skin-cloaks for the two boys in her care. The conflict is relatively straightforward and resolved with a sacrifice, leaving the characters in much the same position as before but no longer being hunted in a targeted way.

In the next three years I wrote three more stories in the series. (Oh, right, obviously the story was published.) Each came out of a sort of “what happens next” brainstorming. “More Than One Way” (S&S XIII, 1996) sees my original trio finding an isolated village of skin-changers and tentatively negotiating to settle down there. This story introduced a motif that will recur later: the fate of a kaltaoven clan if they no longer have a resident skin-singer to make new cloaks. The cloaks (and their accompanying songs) can be inherited after death, but with no new inputs, the possibility of attrition, and a greater than replacement birth-rate, this creates the potential for some individuals not having access to this part of their cultural heritage. MTOW also introduces the importance of ritual exchange-bargains in kaltaoven culture. Laaki is hesitant to reveal that she is a skin-singer because there is an obligation laid on her to craft skins for any who ask and she fears to be trapped by that obligation. But when she’s drawn into deadly social politics around skin-cloak allocation, Laaki has to devise a multi-part bargain that resolves the conflict in an entirely different direction to everyone’s benefit. This is the beginning of a continuing theme in the series: rejecting the superficial options in a crisis and demanding the right to choose new and better options.

The third story, “By the Skin of Her Teeth” (S&S XIV, 1997), takes up where “More Than One Way” left off, with Laaki training an apprentice skin-singer for her new clan (one who rapidly outstrips her in ability). The isolated peace of the village is threatened when a fugitive arrives who not only is not kaltaoven but brings the threat of pursuers in her wake. On something of a whim, Ashóli the apprentice skin-singer crafts a skin-cloak from the stranger’s horse which died of exhaustion in the flight. Although theoretically possible, this action goes against all tradition and creates a rift between teacher and student. When the impending pursuit arrives, intent on vengeance, Laaki and Ashóli need to use their arts to throw them off the track permanently. This story introduces Ashóli’s impulse to think and act outside the box of tradition that will have ripple effects down the line.

“Skin Deep” (S&S XV, 1998) moves to being Ashóli’s story as she and Eysla, the stranger for whom she made the horsehide-cloak, set off together on something of a wanderjahr. Ashóli begins to understand some of the consequences of giving the skin-changing ability to someone who has no cultural heritage to give the experience context. Ashóli is also beginning to deal with a romantic attraction to her companion, complicated by Eysla’s different understanding of the relationship of human and animal forms. In their travels, Eysla succumbs to the desire to visit her family of origin in disguise (i.e., wearing horse-form) though they believe her to be dead. But—as might be understandable for people who breed and train horses for a living—the shape she wears is recognized as Eysla’s mare and a conflict ensues that requires her to reveal herself in human form. Eysla’s relatives are wary of shape-changing magic in general and horrified at the thought of one of their own having been drawn into it. Ashóli uses her expertise in crafting new skin-forms to help them both escape, but this time it is Eysla who demands the right to new options—ones that will enable her both to reconcile with her family and to save both her own and Ashóli’s lives.

And then I was deep in the throes of working on my PhD dissertation for a number of years and—as I was no longer working at MZBFM—there was less of that infectious urge to get a story submitted to every anthology. (I was working on several novels during this period—ones that I may go back to at some point—but didn’t have the trigger for targeting short stories to specific markets.) Time passed, MZB died, and the fate of the Sword and Sorceress series became uncertain as the last of the material acquired under her name came out. But just around the time I got my degree and started a new career, Diana L. Paxson took up editing the series (for a single volume, as it turned out, after which DAW Books dropped the series) and the call for submissions inspired me to another story in the series: “The Skin Trade” (S&S XXI, 2004). Ashóli and Eysla are delivering horses, sold by Eysla’s family to the Marchalt of Wilentelu – the king’s governor in a relatively newly settled region along the Wilen river. (I have a sketchy notion of the historic back-story of the political geography of the region, but best not to get too specific in case I need to alter it.) Exploring the novelty of the walled city of Wilentelu, they encounter a family of kaltaoven who have settled there and have trading connections with other kaltaoven clans in the region. One of the family has also taken service with the Marchalt as a messenger in bird-form and has encountered difficulties in extricating himself from this contract now that he wants their growing children to have a chance to live among their own kind for a while. In something of the spirit of adventure, Ashóli bargains to take over his contract with the Marchalt but finds herself having to dissuade her prospective employer from a sudden ambition to turn all his soldiers into shape-shifters.

A couple years after DAW declined to continue the series, Elizabeth Waters took up the project, publishing with small press Norilana Books and I once again took up the invitation to submit a story. “Skin and Bones” (S&S XXII, 2007) looked at an even darker side of the consequences of the isolation and attrition among kaltaoven clans. The Marchalt has begun an active program to reach out to the kaltaoven and encourage them to interact more with “human” society (note: the kaltaoven are, of course, human but both groups often make this distinction in terminology for convenience). Ashóli is sent as an ambassador to make contact with an isolated clan who are desperately concealing their lack of a skin-singer. When a young man elects to return to Wilentelu with her, he inadvertently (or not) brings with him a skin-cloak that the clan can’t risk losing. In return, they kidnap Eysla to pressure Ashóli, who then learns of the desperate abomination they devised to continue their way of life. As part of the resolution, Ashóli becomes entirely committed to the Marchalt’s plan to contact and gather in the various kaltaoven clans so they can establish a more stable and robust future. The Marchalt, of course, has his own reasons and ambitions, but they mesh with kaltaoven necessity. What is implicit in this story, though not overtly touched on, is that the present situation of the kaltaoven diaspora is a relatively recent solution (no more than a couple centuries?) to cultural pressures in the more established lands to the south where they were subject to suspicion and persecution. They were among the forefront of expanding settlement to the north (where all the stories have taken place) but in the process became more scattered and separated than was good for cultural survival.

I was not entirely happy with continuing the skin-singer stories under the Norilana label. Even apart from the mismanagement issues that eventually came out, the books had essentially no formal distribution and I didn’t see publishing there as a good return on investment. I had some initial ideas about how to wrap up the series and knew they would involve something longer than a short story, so I made vague plans to use the concluding work as an anchor to put out a collection of the whole series of stories. Finding a publisher for the idea would be a problem, though. Since I don’t have a “name” I couldn’t really imagine DAW being interested in the idea. If Norilana had been a more viable company, it might have been a possibility. After my first novel came out from Bella Books, I pitched the idea of the collection to them but they weren’t interested which isn’t entirely surprising. The lesbian themes are fairly background and don’t appear in the first three stories at all, and with the advent of e-publishing the market for short story reprints has largely moved in that direction. So my current goal is to try to make the final story (“Hidebound”) viable as a stand-alone, sell it to some online short fiction market (which is where most of the action is these days) and then self-publish the collection in e-format only. I hope to have “Hidebound” ready to start shopping around in the beginning of the year and then we’ll see what happens.