<cross-posted from my LiveJournal>

Hello, all, and welcome to another installment of the Drollerie Press blog tour. I’ve sat out the last couple of months, because real life has been a lot of work, but I’m back in again this month because I just couldn’t resist the topic: dangerous writing. You can find my post at E.G. Diehl’s blog.

E.G. Diehl is a phenomenal writer whose poem “The Roadseller’s Trade” will appear in the Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic anthology (for anyone thinking of submitting, there are still 15 days left to the deadline, but we’ve received some stories–and so far only one poem–so good that we knew they were making it in no matter what else came). Her novel Kinlea Keeper is available from Drollerie Press now.

And I have the honor of hosting  , aka Angela Korra’ti. Anna organized this blog tour in the first place, and an earlier edition of the blog tour includes a hypothetical encounter between Tamneth Ellheuin, from my Shadow of the Antlered Bird, and Christopher MacSimidh from Anna’s phenomenal debut novel Faerie Blood. I’ve been seeing a remarkable amount of buzz around Anna and her writing, and if you haven’t heard of her already, then you probably will hear of her again. So, without further ado, here is Anna the Piper, writing about dangerous writing:

Dangerous writing, you say?

I guess that depends on your point of view. Personally, I don’t feel that most of what I write is dangerous, or even terribly controversial. Certainly compared to a lot of what shows up in fantasy novels these days–and in popular media in general, really–I’m arguably quite vanilla. I don’t do over-the-top violence or gore. I don’t do explicit sex scenes, nor am I explicit in describing on-camera romantic connections. The fact that I have a gay male couple as secondary characters in my first published novel isn’t even very unusual anymore, given how male-male pairings are becoming more common in speculative fiction these days.

Still there are certainly those in the world–like oh, say, the sort who would ban Harry Potter books from school libraries–who’d take issue with the fact that I write about magic. Or about inhuman beings and creatures. Or four people of diverse religious backgrounds, Christian and pagan and agnostic, taking a meal together and none of their religions being a big deal. Or, yeah, well, queer people. Especially queer people in an established, healthy relationship every bit as strong as the straight relationship between my heroine and hero.

By those standards, then, probably the most dangerous thing I’ve written to date is “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen”. The core idea for this came into my head as I grew aware that several folks in my social circle both online and offline were transgendered. As part of processing this into my own view of the world, I came up with the idea of a story about a princess who woke up one morning to find herself transformed into a man, and who had a young (female) servitor in love with her real self. This princess would have to make the call about whether to stay in her male shape, which would arguably get her more social freedom and power and even a shot at marrying the young servitor–or being true to herself and to her servitor and finding a way to turn back into a girl.

I never actually wrote this story, though, until a friend of mine invited me into an anthology he wanted to do, one that involved a) queer themes, and b) magic spells. Now, up until this point I hadn’t even seriously considered writing short pieces. I prefer writing novels. But Cerridwen’s story, at this point little more than a core concept and a title, seemed like it would fit into this anthology very well.

The anthology never materialized. But I still have the story, and with it, the strong suspicion that Cerridwen and Damhnait have a greater part to play in the history of their world than even the brief glimpse I’ve already given them. If you’d like to check it out for yourself, you can find it here. Thanks for reading!

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Angela Korra’ti is the author of the Drollerie Press novel Faerie Blood and the short story “The Blood of the Land” in the anthology Defiance. This is the last stop on this month’s Drollerie Blog Tour! But if you’d like to head back around to the beginning, you can visit John Rosenman’s post hosted by Sarah Avery over here.

Recently:

• Where to find me online
• Drollerie Blog Tour: Anna the Piper on Dangerous Writing
• Upcoming publications
• Straying from the Path
• Drollerie Press book sale
• Drollerie blog tour: Cindy Lynn Speer talks about music
• Call for Submissions: Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic
• Updates to appearances
• Because nothing goes with chocolate like excess…
• Celebrate Chocolate Day–20% off The Chocolatier’s Wife