So anyway, in 1981 I learned that I had sold my first book, an original STAR TREK novel (called MINDSHADOW – is it just me, or do most first novels contain the word “shadow” somewhere in the title?).
I immediately sat down and wrote another, DEMONS, and sold that one, too, then a TREK take-off on vampires, BLOODTHIRST (you may notice a bit of a dark streak in my fiction). The STAR TREK career took off pretty quickly, and by 1988, I was writing the novelizations for the movies.
So what does this have to do with Mary Sue?
I first learned about her when I went to my first STAR TREK convention, as a (terrified) speaker. It seems that the Mary Sue phenomenon is ubiquitous in TREK. What is a Mary Sue novel? One that features a kick-butt heroine who outshines the male protagonists in the story. (“And there I was, me, little ol’ Mary Sue from Iowa, on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, with Captain Kirk…!”) Some fans scorn such stories, pointing out that they are a less-than-subtle reflection of the author’s personal fantasies.
Well, duh.
I happen to think Mary Sue is one heckuva healthy phenomenon. For those of you who are too young to remember, I grew up in the Dark Ages of the 1960’s, on stories that were only about men and their adventures; it was time for stories that were about people like me… people with, um, vaginas. (My husband urges me to add this bit of history: The year that I wrote MINDSHADOW was the year that American Express first began to run an ad about the radical fact that they were now allowing women to get credit cards in their own names, not their husbands’. Just to give you some perspective…)
So I spent the 1980s writing about women in the future. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that I began thinking about the past. I picked up a copy of a fascinating biography, DRACULA, PRINCE OF MANY FACES, by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond McNally, about the real Vlad the Impaler, the Wallachian prince on whom Stoker very loosely based his novel DRACULA (loosely meaning he used the name and the fact that he had a castle in Transylvania).
I’d always been fascinated by the novel DRACULA… More on that to come later, when I write about my obsession with vampires. So it was that Florescu’s and McNally’s wonderful book inspired me to write a trilogy of vampire novels that were, unlike Stoker’s novel, more solidly based on the history of who Vlad the Impaler really was. I sat down and cogitated on how a medieval prince might evolve over the course of four centuries of undead-ness… and on how he would treat the successive generations of his family. On the very twisted need he might have for the living. Talk about dysfunctional family dynamics – thus, the DIARIES OF THE FAMILY DRACUL were born.
Of course, I had to have the story focus on women. Just a quirk of mine. And so I focused on one of Vlad’s female descendants, and on a distant relation of his, Elizabeth of Bathory (quite a bloodthirsty being in her own right).
And so I began to think about women in the past. All this time, I had been creating fictional heroines – but lo and behold, there were hundreds of amazing kickbutt women who had actually lived.
Some time after I completed the DRACUL trilogy, Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of THE MISTS OF AVALON, died. The fact made me re-read her novel, and contemplate things pagan. It was at that point that my agent (the divine Russell, and no, you can’t have him, girls, he’s all mine, so don’t even ask) said, “Jeanne, I really think you ought to write a historical. You’d be so good at it…” And out of my mouth popped, “I’ll write one, about a midwife in the 1300s who’s being persecuted as a witch.”
Well, okay, I hadn’t decided fourteenth-century France just then, but you get the gist. At some point, I’ll do a riff on THE BURNING TIMES, and all the other books, but for now, it just shows you how I stumbled into the whole historical thing.
From there, it was THE BORGIA BRIDE, then PAINTING MONA LISA (in the U.S., I, MONA LISA)… And now I’m writing a novel called THE BLOODIEST QUEEN (for obvious reasons, in the UK and Australia/NZ, the MEDICI QUEEN), about the much-maligned Catherine de’ Medici (friend of Nostradamus and supposed instigator of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre).
Now, there is no doubt that the hero of THE BORGIA BRIDE, the feisty, high-spirited princess Sancha of Aragon who kicked the Pope’s ass, and Lisa Gherardini of I, MONA LISA who kicked the mad monk Savonarola’s, and Catherine de’ Medici, who fearlessly and ruthlessly kicked France’s, would be termed “bitches.” I dare say they were labeled that in their own times, and would, by many, be labeled the same today. It is my intent, in my writing, to celebrate the bitches of history, to bring attention to them and their causes. For me, history is a bitch, and I would have it no other way.
To Mary Sue, all hail.
