Boys with Embedded Singularities and Deciding When to Write
My 15-year-old nephew suffers from an untreatable condition shared by many young men his age. He has a small singularity – a black hole, in everyday parlance – embedded somewhere in his anatomy. No matter how much he eats, he’s always starving.
My son has the same condition, though his singularity is gradually easing into a sleep phase. When his black hole was at its most active, he could eat his weight in everything a growing boy needs, then complain of hunger pains before we’d even cleared the table. And he never gained a pound that didn’t go straight into trying to reach his uncles’ Nordic height.
While my nephew was chowing down on his third plate of spaghetti and meatballs yesterday, he stopped inhaling his food long enough to say that we should do like Buddy did in Elf and sprinkle candy all over our food.
While I shuddered at the thought of flavors that were never meant to combine being tossed together will-nil, my sister commented that the movie-makers had done that to show that Santa’s elves, like the Big Guy himself, have a sweet tooth the size of his sleigh. It’s part of their worldbuilding, part of the impression they wanted their viewers to get of the North Pole community. Santa’s enjoyment of a couple cookies at every house is just the tip of the iceberg that is the North Pole’s sugar consumption, where each member of the community eats enough sugary treats to put a human into a diabetic coma.
Santa is very different in my Christmas stories, of course. Santa doesn’t need candies or even cookies, although of course he loves a good snickerdoodle. And his favorite drink is (naturally!) hot chocolate. In an as-yet-unpublished story of mine set in the 2200s, we even learn that (by then) Santa takes his “with an Olympus Mons-size dollop of whipped cream from the northern lowlands of Mars and a light dusting of fresh-ground cinnamon and nutmeg from Océanus.” He likes to vary his “diet among the best cacao bean varietals in the Terran solar system or nearby space, melted into a hot blend of rich Maraldi milk and pure water.”
[For the sake of anyone unfamiliar with the breed, the Encyclopedia Solaria (2203) tells us “Maraldi cattle [are] a famous breed of cattle, bred on Mars in the first century of its colonization. While some attributes were bred into it from other breeds, the Meraldis got most of their genes from the Angus and Jersey Terrestrial breeds. These two breeds of cattle were famous in their time, the Angus for the quality of their meat (though their milk was also exceptionally rich and creamy) and Jerseys for the richness of their milk. Maraldi cattle have long horns; large, heavily muscled bodies, and are usually black or brown, sometimes with large white patches. They are known for their placidity and can eat virtually anything, including the wiry grasses that were among the first Terran plants able to survive outside the domes while Mars was in the process of being terraformed. The breed name comes from an early (Proctor) name for the Maria Sirenum, where they were first bred by Musk Labs in 2108.” The milk is so rich and creamy that it is seldom drunk whole. Even diluted 1:1 with water, it’s more like 2020s-era Terran “half and half” than it is their “whole milk.”]
And yes, Maraldis bear more than a passing resemblance to the Texas Longhorns that I saw at the Johnson Space Center last time I was there. I think they’re related.
Even before my Santa Claus joins the wave of colonization headed out into the solar system, he is a far cry from the cartoonlike figure from Elf or even the businessman-turned-legendary-figure from The Santa Clause franchise. Why is that? Because, while we all started with the same Santa Claus legend, we each took it in a different direction. Either of those other directions would have just been wrong for my interpretation of Saint Nick, and mine would have been wrong for theirs.
Highly successful IPs (Intellectual Properties, like Star Wars, The Santa Clause, and Lord of the Rings) tend to spin off a wave of copycats, both good and bad. Who wouldn’t want to produce something that they already know audiences are craving? And it’s easier to convince a publisher or movie producer that your work will sell to consumers if you can point to an IP similar to it that’s doing phenomenally well. If I went to a publisher that publishes urban fantasy (a subgenre Jim Butcher basically started) and told them I had an idea for a series like the Dresden Files but with just enough different that we didn’t have to worry about getting sued, they’d basically just need to see proof that I could and would write that series. They’d already know it would sell. The same goes for any other major IP and any other author.
But how do you know when to focus on creating something completely new and when there’s space on the shelves for your urban fantasy series about a magician in central Florida who doesn’t have much of a vampire problem (because she lives in the Sunshine State, duh!) but gets to deal with all the monsters of the Deep South as well as those of the Caribbean and Gulf? There’s enough space when your work is different enough from the IP that you can describe it without referring to the big IP. At all. Refer to the original legend or legends, not someone else’s interpretation of it. Put your own spin on it.
If I describe the Santa Claus in my Christmas stories, I’ll mention that he was a bishop from Myra in what is now Turkey, who develops into the embodiment of the Christmas spirit and becomes a supernatural being whose purpose is to be a reminder to love each other, share beauty, and bring nature and color into our lives during the darkest season (figuratively and literally). I can mention how children know instinctively who he is, or that he reminds a fifteenth-century princess of her father. I can describe how he collects gifts for the poor on his feast day in order to give them out on Christmas Eve or mention the theories certain children come up with to explain him. And none of that requires mentioning Elf or even The Santa Clause.
But if I decide that my Floridian wizard knows about the different types of vampires… and one type is the legendary succubi and incubi… and they maybe work in a certain industry and wear a lot of white… and another type is basically the classic nosferatu from the oldest horror movies… and another type can make themselves look good and has close ties to the Aztecs… As you might guess, that aspect of my Floridian wizard’s story isn’t ready to be told – at the very least! If I can’t look at another author’s work and think “But that’s not how [BLANK] is. It’s like [BLANK]” in some significant way, then my own work isn’t distinctive enough from the other work to be worth writing. So my Floridian wizard will just have to wait till I know what makes her story distinctive before I share it with the world.
Be distinctive. Be yourself, and let your characters be themselves. Make your work worth reading.