rhodrymavelyne

I’ll never forget the version of The Nutcracker ballet I saw performed in San Jose. The battle between the Mouse King and the Nutcracker got quite suggestive, involving a dance-off with a lot of pelvic thrusts which somehow went perfectly well with the music.

Seeing this sparked the inspiration which would become my story, Seven Tricks (written as K.S. Trenten).

This wasn’t the first time I’d been inspired by a classic. I wrote a short story called A Symposium in Space which mirrored Plato’s The Symposium. A gathering at dinner spoke of love as in ancient Athens, only this party was all female in a futuristic matriarchy called the Intergalactic Democracy. Alkibiadea (the feminine equivalent of Alciabiades) was actually a space pirate, chasing Sokrat (the female version of Socrates), literally right into the symposium. The narrator of the story was Phaedra, a young woman involved in a torrid and toxic relationship with Pausania, another one of the guests. I took great pride in inverting Pausanius’s exquisitely misogynist speech about the Heavenly and Common Aphrodite, allowing Pausania to turn it on its head, infused with all of her matriarchal mythical leanings.

A Symposium in Space was later expanded into a novella and republished by Nine Star Press. This gave Phaedra more of a voice, more time to explore her relationships with Pausania, Sokrat, and the Timea; her speaceship she gets attached to. The Timea becomes a metaphor for finding herself, learning to love herself.

Classics and fairytales reinterpreted are specialities are mine. Fairest and At Her Service (which I’m trying to republish on a more permanent basis in an expanded form) are fairytales reimagined. I deliberately gave Wind Me Up, One More Time the feel of a fairytale, a myth reimagined. Toys, industry, and turning to gold became metaphors and myths made real in the hearts and minds of the characters.

I dive deeper into these themes in Tales of the Navel (which I often posted about in Conversations with Christopher and other blogs at inspirationcauldron.wordpress.com). People create myths with their beliefs and legends, raising the shadows of the lost to the status of gods. At the same time former gods like Jupitre and Juno dwindle into shadows of themselves as people forget them. Hebe was always an overlooked goddess, something she feels and internalizes in a cycle of cup collecting and destroying. The various forces drumming up faith, hope, and trying to feed upon them made themselves known in Web of Inspiration, the fourth book in Tales of the Navel. (Yes, there are novels I’m working on self-publishing, which I’m trying to cultivate interest in with all the freebie stories I’ve posted at my blog.)

These are themes I’m attracted to and inspired by again and again. It’s why I can’t stop watching and re-watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Hannibal the TV series. Not only am I spellbound by the specific beauty of these series, but they’re infused with mythical elements which fascinate me. It’s what draws me to Renaissance and Baroque art. Similar themes, similar myths are depicted again and again, yet expressed differently through individual prisms of perspective. We draw on a communal pool of myth, yet we imagine it in different ways. We’re linked by this pool, yet we interpret it with a fiercely individualistic or a uniquely communal eye.

The pool fascinates me. Like Christopher in my stories, I’m drawn to it again and again. I gaze at the images, feel ideas swimming through my own imagination to meet them.

Here’s hoping those ideas never stop swimming, even after I do.