By noreply@blogger.com (Alexandra Sokoloff)

–> Today is International Women’s Day. And tomorrow A Wrinkle in Time opens in theaters nationwide. So I thought I’d combine those topics and write about the book, before I line up to see the movie tomorrow. And then of course I can talk about the movie adaptation!

But first, the book. And women. And writing.

A Wrinkle in Time is the story of thirteen-year-old misfit Meg Murry, who on a dark and stormy night is visited by three mysterious and iconically eccentric women who transport her, her child prodigy brother Charles Wallace, and her high school crush Calvin O’Keefe, on a cosmic adventure to rescue her scientist father from the evil forces holding him prisoner on a distant planet.

Famously, when author Madeleine L’Engle finished the book in 1960 (pre-YA is putting it mildly!) it was rejected by at least 26 publishers, because it was “too different”, and “because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was really difficult for children, and was it a children’s or an adults’ book, anyhow?” Oh, and “It had a female protagonist in a science fiction book.”

I’m eternally grateful to whatever forces of light were looking out for it.

When people ask me why I write what I do, or even just why I write, instead of rambling on, I could just as well just say A Wrinkle in Time. Countless female author and screenwriter friends, and a good number of the men as well, have said the same thing to me over the years—I suspect just about every woman genre writer who came of age pre-Harry Potter. Meg Murry wasn’t just our Hermione – she was our Harry Potter, too. She is every smart girl who ever lived. We didn’t just read that book—we lived it. We are Meg. And I’m thrilled that through the casting of Storm Reid, the new movie is bringing even more girls into the universality and outsiderness of Meg.

I’ve read just about everything L’Engle ever wrote, fiction and non. Once in a while I realize I’ve missed something and it’s always a treat to add that book to my shelf. She was a huge part of my extremely random spiritual education… in fact she might have been singlehandedly responsible for any spiritual sense I did have in my childhood and early adulthood. I was raised with both no religion and a smattering of a large number of religions. My parents took me and my siblings to Native American ceremonies, Orthodox celebrations, and Hindu holy days. If I spent a weekend night with a friend whose family had a religious practice, they’d drag me along to church or temple. But I was never sold on the idea of a single male God (I mean, come on, really? I love men in general, but omniscient? Let’s just look at the facts, here!).

Then A Wrinkle in Time introduced me to the concept of the Goddess, in the three “witches”: Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and the very intimidating Mrs. Which. That powerful, eternal feminine triumvirate, whether you describe them as former stars, guardian angels, messengers, centaurs (don’t you love that scene where the three children try to explain them to Mr. Murry?) —is to me the Triple Goddess. It was the most positive depiction of spirituality I’d ever encountered, and the one that made the most sense to me: that the universe manifests itself in guardians, and we are watched over, and we are loved.

(L’Engle herself was a devout Christian, yet the book often appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books, because of references to witches and crystal balls, because it “challenges religious beliefs”, and because Jesus appears on a list of “names of great artists, philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders”.)
L’Engle’s equally profound influence on me (it’s inseparable, really) was as a genre writer. I always gravitated toward the spooky, the thrilling, the fantastical, the twisted, in my reading. I discovered A Wrinkle in Time when I was in sixth grade and something in my mind said – “THIS is what a book is supposed to be, do, feel like.” It’s a thrilling adventure with flawed but deeply moral characters, fighting for cosmic stakes. While you’re reading you experience it as a breathless, nail-biting ride, but the moral implications imprint on your soul.

In fact, I was so obsessed with the book the year I first read it that I wrote a movie adaptation of the book. This was a pretty radical and prescient thing for me to have done (at age ten!), considering a lot of adults don’t even understand that there is such a thing as an adaptation process from book to screen. I had no inkling at the time that I would grow up to work as a screenwriter and make a living adapting novels for screen. And no desire to, either.

It was just that book. I wanted to live in that book. I wanted to somehow create the world of that book around me. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything ever since (except, um, Hamlet) that feels as perfect in every way – character, theme, structure, dialogue, action, spectacle, catharsis – every single layer and detail.

I’ve read it dozens, maybe hundreds of times, and I learn something new about how to tell a story every single pass. And not just about the how of it, but the WHY as well. It makes no sense on the surface to write as dark as I do and say that I aspire to the spirituality of that book, but it’s true.

As L’Engle said:

“Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

I struggle with every book of my Huntress Moon series (currently on Book 6, somewhere in the swamps of Act Two, Part 1…). These are very dark books. They confront crimes so heinous that I think they can only be called evil. My FBI protagonist is often on the verge of giving up entirely; he feels so powerless in the face of what he’s being exposed to. But these crimes exist. Someone must face them and fight them. And once again, I’m looking to A Wrinkle in Time to remind me that even in the darkest abyss, the universe manifests itself in guardians—and we are watched over, and we are loved.

There are other books of L’Engle’s that shaped me as a writer, an author, a genre writer. She wrote thrillers: Arm of the Starfish is a wonderful YA spy thriller, again with a profound spiritual dimension, and even her dramas have such an thriller edge – I’m thinking specifically of A Ring of Endless Light – that I’d almost call them cross-genre. She put urgency and cosmic stakes into everything she ever put on paper.

But A Wrinkle in Time is a masterwork… and I guess it’s always in the back of my mind, the question – will I ever be open enough, focused enough, skilled enough, mature enough… enough anything – to write something that is everything I could write, in a perfect world?

I don’t know. But at least I have a light to guide me on that path.

So how about you, readers and authors? Do you have A Wrinkle in Time experiences? Or was there another book that most influenced your childhood and/or writing?

Are you seeing the movie this weekend?

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All five books of the Huntress/FBI Thrillers are on sale in the UK: 99p through April 1 on Amazon.
This really is a series that needs to be read in order, so this is a fabulous way to get started.
Audiobook listeners – you can add RC Bray’s award-winning narration for $3.99 and under!

Via: Alexandra Sokoloff

By noreply@blogger.com (Alexandra Sokoloff)

February is Black History Month, which I’m happily observing this week by watching Lena Waithe’s fabulous The Chi on Showtime; reading the time-travel classic Kindred, by Octavia Butler, visiting the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum in Joshua Tree; and lining up for Black Panther.

February is also Women in Horror Month. I hadn’t remembered that until today, because, well, it’s been Women in Horror Year, now into Year Two of the horror.

But my name and books always pop up for Women in Horror month in my Twitter feed and on my Facebook page (like this review of Hunger Moon in Cemetery Dance) because that’s where I started as an author, and did quite a lot of as a screenwriter before that. Being a woman in horror gained me some instant recognition, because there are so few of us writing if. In fact, I was just at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA this week, and the “Horror Vault” (a literal bank vault) consisted of shelves of male authors plus Anne Rice, whose books I love, but to my mind she’s not really a horror writer at all.

And neither am I, any more, for many reasons.

There’s definitely a bias in the industry against female horror authors. It doesn’t affect me in a practical sense because I’ve moved into writing very dark thrillers rather than overt horror. I love both genres; I went back and forth between the two, or crossed the two, as a screenwriter – and I’m a full-time writer, so I’m not about to struggle against a genre that disparages women AND doesn’t pay as well as the thriller genre.

Beyond that, I’d really rather not use the word “horror” to describe even my four supernatural novels because I think the genre has been brought to a very low, base level by torture porn. I find it disgusting and harmful. It doesn’t deserve to be listed with the true psychological horror of Jackson, Lovecraft, Shelley, King, Poe – the great explorers of the dark side. I don’t write torture porn and I won’t read or watch it, either.

But there’s no question that part of my brand as an author is mixing elements of horror with crime. I started that with my witch thriller Book of Shadows, which crosses a police procedural with an exploration of modern witchcraft practice and the possibility of demonic possession and satanic murder.

But I really found my stride with the Huntress Moon series, which confronts the existential horror of sexual abuse, sexual assault and sex trafficking in a realistic FBI procedural. The collective evil of sexual predation and the laws and social systems that defend and perpetuate sexual abuse take on an almost supernatural presence in the books, without ever becoming overtly supernatural.

I use techniques I learned writing horror for both books and film to create that creeping sense of suspense and evil, and it gets readers turning pages ever though I’m writing blatantly social and political themes and confronting real legal deficiencies and institutional atrocities.

It’s made the series quite successful as books and led to a TV deal, because this is just the kind of edgy boundary-pushing that is finally, finally popular in television now.

Using horror to explore social and political issues can be powerfully effective, as we saw last year in Jordan Peele’s razor-sharp, game-changing Get Out.

And I just read Kindred, the classic, brilliant, brutal time travel/neo slave narrative novel by the Grande Dame of science fiction, Octavia Butler (my way of celebrating both Black History and Women in Horror at once).

Kindred takes its 1970’s African American heroine, Dana, on a harrowing time trip back to the 1815 plantation where her ancestors were enslaved, and she must both survive the and guard her white plantation ancestor from harm in order to preserve her own family line.

Now that’s horror – the horror of slavery that we’ve never healed as a nation, so evident in the racism which is rising up around and apparently in us again today. (People in my neighborhood got it delivered right to their doorsteps this week: racism not only in the headlines, but in the white supremacist flyers that someone had slipped into the newspapers).

And of course, using horror to explore philosophical and political issues of the day goes back much, much farther than that. Consider Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein is being feted all over the world on its bicentennial anniversary. Her themes of the moral implications of scientific exploration and the failings of the patriarchy still resonate powerfully today.

So how about you authors out there? Have you ever considered using the conventions and sugarcoating of genre to deliver the themes that are most important to you?

And readers, do you have favorite genre-benders that carry a potent social or political or philosophical message?

– Alex

All five books of the Huntress/FBI Thrillers are on sale – $2.00 through February on Amazon US.
This really is a series that needs to be read in order, so this is a fabulous way to get started.
Audiobook fans – you can add RC Bray’s award-winning narration for $3.99 or under!

Book 5: in print, ebook and audio. Buy here,

In the new book, Roarke and his FBI team are forced to confront the new political reality when they are pressured to investigate a series of mysterious threats vowing death to college rapists… while deep in the Arizona wilderness, mass killer Cara Lindstrom is fighting a life-and-death battle of her own.

For thousands of years, women have been prey.

No more.

Via: Alexandra Sokoloff

By noreply@blogger.com (Alexandra Sokoloff)

How about a love story post for Valentine’s Day?

I spend a lot of time here and in my Stealing Hollywood workshops breaking down story elements that are applicable to any genre.