On Her Shoulders
By
Widdershins
There are
certain individuals in any movement for social change that, although they don’t
start out wanting that pivotal place or to be a catalyst for change, rise to
the surface of the mass movement and become a leader.
In the
days before social media, before personal computers, before human beings walked
on the surface of an alien world, these leaders had less extravagant profiles.
They worked in their own corners of their world and began the changes that we
see around us every day.
Barbara
Grier was one such hero, and she died just a little while ago on the 10th
November. The very day I started making notes for this post. Is it any wonder
that my Muses are Irony and Serendipity?
I wrote
about Barbara on my blog. If you’d like to scoot over there and
read up a bit on what I’m referring to, I’ll wait.
To most
of the world Barbara was invisible. Even I didn’t know who she was, and the
enormous impact she had, until I grew up and began to search for my spiritual
lesbian fore-mothers. Turns out there were a whole lot more of them than I ever
knew.
Sappho wrote prose and poems to and for women.
Radcliff Hall broke a taboo and wrote about love between two women the best way she knew how. Ann Bannon
created Beebo Brinker, a butch, in pulp fiction. Katherine
Forrest sent a whole tribe of lesbians to another world. And many more than I could ever list here.
Standing
in between these fiction artists are the poets, theorists, shamans, political
activists, (the act of being alive is political for lesbians) painters,
academics, to name a few. Lesbians who have broken through the secrets and
shame we placed around ourselves in order to survive, who have contributed to
the beauty in our hearts.
Lesbians
today stand on their shoulders and reach still higher. We paint, we politicise,
we act, we have our own daytime television show, we teach, we Occupy ... we
write.
Could I
do no less?
It
would’ve been easy to follow a formula for my book. To have a villain whose
dastardly plots are foiled by a knight in shining armour, or a shiny spacesuit
(I do write SF/F after all). Or to write a love story. Girl meets girl, girl
loses girl, girl redeems herself and gets girl in the end. (I do write lesbian
characters after all)
I
could’ve had created a story along any of these lines. There’s a reason those
formulas are so popular, they work!
But for
me to honour those lesbian foremothers, who created change by refusing to
accept the roles that were available to them in the society of their time, I
too would have to write outside the standard formulas of my time.
And I did!
Mortal
Instinct: Where magic,
mysticism, and technology exist side-by-side.
Mortal
Instinct: Set
in a world of the Gallery - a vast other-worldly web of corridors spun
from the body of an Immortal Being. These glittering corridors link the
worlds of the Mortal Realm. Anyone brave enough to step through a Portal
can journey through them from world to world.
Something is happening
to the Gallery, something ... mortal.
****
Three friends find
themselves responsible for a mystical Sphere that has the power to destroy or
save the Mortal Realm. Immortal beings interfere, lovers and ex-lovers intrude,
egos and politics get in the way. In spite of all these distractions, they must
achieve their destiny before the Sphere awakens and decides its own fate.
****
An excerpt:
A Portal glowed
fiercely, then shattered. Wind rushed through the broken Hall.
Chalone’s face turned
white. She barged through the fleeing crowd to Liesha’s side. “The corridors
are being ripped apart!” she shouted above the roar of rushing air and an alarm
that no one had thought to shut off.
“I can see that,”
Liesha said too loudly as the sound eased, and picked up the headset the gale
had swept from her head. She’d had no time to reintegrate her implants and used
it to communicate with the ECHO network. “I am going to stop this.”
The alarm finally fell
silent. “You can’t stop it,” Chalone said.
“What do you mean?”
Liesha suddenly grabbed her arms hard enough to cause bruises. Chalone winced
and she released her grip. “Sorry,” she apologized. “Tell me.”
“Mor brought us back
in time to the moment just after we left,” Chalone explained.
Liesha looked blank
for a moment and then she turned as pale as Chalone. “We are witnessing the
beginning of the maelstrom in the Hub!” She looked aghast at the dying Hall.
“Not all of it. Our
Portals aren’t enough to create that monstrosity, but if this is happening
throughout the Gallery…?” Chalone swallowed hard.
Liesha focused inward,
listening to a strident voice issuing from her headset. “I still have to stop
it here,” she said with jagged determination.
“You have that kind of
power? Why didn’t you use it when we were trapped in the Hub?” Chalone accused.
“I was not able to. It
requires many ECHOs, and our communications do not work in the Gallery.”
Vian finished giving
orders for crowd control, organized the evacuation of the nearby houses, and
initiated the clause in the council charter that gave her immediate and total
control of all the resources she ever needed or wanted. She interrupted Chalone
and Liesha.
“Hurry,” she said to
Liesha. “If you can’t hold at least one of the Portals, then we’re marooned
here forever. Everything we’ve all worked for will be lost.”
“I am aware of that
fact,” Liesha snapped back at her.
Chalone looked from
one to the other. “You both knew this would happen.”
“Not exactly,” Vian
said. “The ECHO Hierarchs have suspected something similar for a while. Hence
their frenzied attempts to get their communications working inside the
Gallery,” she said pointedly and pulled Chalone away from Liesha, gathering up
Pirelle and Jalemi. “Let’s leave Liesha to get on with it.”
****
Thanks Ginger, for letting me come over and hang out with you.
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