Cheoyong (處容) is an admired figure in the Korean pantheon, and his dance is performed to this day. According to record, he was a son of a sea dragon and appeared before the King of Silla in the 9th century dancing with his brothers.
Cheoyong remained at the capital to serve the King, who gave him a wife. Yeoksin was smitten with her beauty and Cheoyong came home one night to see Yeoksin lying with her. The dragon's son withdrew dancing and singing without confrontation, which shamed the god into swearing not to cross a threshold if he saw Cheoyong's face.
That was how people came to put up paintings of Cheoyong to repel smallpox, and his dance was performed for luck. I have written more about Cheoyong's story here: https://ljwrites.blog/posts/cheoyong-story/
"When I sit in the alehouse, I am a woman, and I am an exuberant young man. . . . When I sit by the gate of the tavern, I am a prostitute familiar with the penis; the friend of a man, the girlfriend of a woman."
What are some lively metaphorical expressions about awareness and knowledge that are not explicitly or implicitly ableist? I'm fond of "can't make heads or tails," for instance. #WritingCommunity
#WritersCoffeeClub April 24 - When older novels use outdated or racist language, should they be edited for the modern world or left alone and viewed in context?
There's no universal "should" or "shouldn't" in all circumstances, and can smug white people please shut up omg
Honestly the "old books should never be edited under any circumstances whatsoever" and "that sanitizes history" arguments have some big "don't retire Confederate statues because how else will we remember history??!!!one" energy.
Hmm so how DO we remember history if the dedicated white supremacists who took up arms for slavery aren't looming on every major monument, gazing down at Black people? By sticking that worthless trash in dusty museums as shameful history, by educating people, and through plentiful photographic and historical documentation, that's how. You know, like the fact that these statues were mostly erected during the Jim Crow/Civil Rights era as tools of intimidation and a rallying point for white supremacists, not directly after the U.S. Civil War.
This idea that changing books is always wrong unless one is the actual author, or that history will somehow be forgotten unless everything is preserved in amber, is absolutist and intellectually dishonest. Very few responses go into the issue of prominence, for instance, that racist books deserve to be forgotten and not to be brought back and plastered in our faces over and over again. There are so many permutations and nuances that people forget about in their reflexive rush to censorship, which is disappointingly flat, boring thinking coming from people who purport to write and think about societies and people. The amount of mediocrity I have witnessed on this subject today gave me vicarious embarrassment, ugh.
#WordWeavers Apr. 11 - How much power does your MC have?
I have two MCs, one a noblewoman, the other a refugee. The noblewoman has built up political and economic power, but it's power that's derived from her father's lineage, her husband's lordship and, in later books, being her sons' mother. So she's very powerful but that power is limited by being a woman in a patriarchal structure. To overcome these limitations she also finds ways to build up her influence by building well-placed alliances, too.
The refugee peasant starts out heavily disempowered and is left for dead along with her family after violence and pillage. They and the other refugees organize and slowly gain more power at the noblewoman's demesne where they are the lowest of the low, so the source of their power is their mutual connection and community and later, an alliance with the noblewoman who needs them for her own ends. I guess what I want to do with this WIP is show different kinds of power and oppression in the ancient world, especially of women.
I am loving this article for not only the in-depth discussion of John Campbell's racist, imperialist grift in the field of #mythology and #folklore, but also for confirming that #StarWars is a story with deeply ingrained Christian preoccupations and imagery. https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/ (Article CW for sexism, racism, imperialism, sexual violence & slavery discussions)
On the #MythologyMonday theme of metalworking, Yacheolsin (冶鐵神) the God of the Forge and Hwadeok-jingun (火德眞君) Lord of Fire were two gods worshiped as patrons of blacksmithing. A Soeburi (iron-blowing) work song from Ulsan in the southeast of Korea mentions Siwon-seonsaeng (시원선생) the First Master who created the bellows:
You who blow on the bellows,
Know you their history?
Long, long ago the First Master
Contrived to make the bellows
The bellows are still here
But where did the First Master go?
Oh how long ago those ancient times
The First Master isn't around anymore!
Hey lovely nerds, @vicorva has a rad Itch shop https://vicorva.itch.io/ where you can buy their novels (Books & Bone, Non-Player Character, The Beautiful Decay--with more coming soon), their ttrpg Kin created for the NPC novel, and short stories set in the Books & Bone universe. Play fun & chill interactive microfiction for free, too. All of Veo's works feature neurodivergent and queer characters in worlds jam-packed with imagination, wonder, and humor. People would ask about where to find adult autistic and aspec characters, and I'm like magic hands right here! ✨
Remember, Itch gives you the option to tip extra on every purchase, which would be especially amazing because Veo's sweet, loving kitty Merlin is sick. You can also tip them for their great work on Ko-fi! https://ko-fi.com/veocorva
#WritersCoffeeClub 10th March: Do I want to write full time or am I happy for it to be a hobby/hustle?
I kind of do write for a living, since text #translation is a specialized kind of writing. Narrowing the answer down to creative writing, I would be miserable trying to feed my family with it. Fiction is far too uncertain an income, and needs to be done at huge amounts and speed for a chance at livable money. And I won't even bring up poetry in the same breath as money lmao. The economic pressure to produce output and write to what sells would turn my craft into a chore, and I don't want that. I left academia and chose my current life in part to have the time and brainspace to write on the side, and I'm at peace with that choice.
The story of how I wrote 100K fiction words in a month back in 2014 and then crashed out for years afterward: https://ljwrites.blog/posts/nanowrimo-experience/ And that's likely in the low range of what serious commercial writers are expected to do.
In #Korean#folklore and #mythology, dragons are often divine or potentially divine creatures and many #dragon tales revolve around them attaining godhood by ascending to the sky.
In a typically misogynistic take, it's said that a woman commenting on a dragon's ascent or even catching sight of it will frustrate the flight and send it plunging back to earth, where the former sky-dragon candidate becomes a yimugi or gangcheol (the equivalent Western terms may be wyrm, serpent, or wyvern) that harms people and agriculture.
On the flip side though, aren't these stories also testament to the power women have, that a nameless village woman merely LOOKING at a being on the cusp of heavenly power can drop it right back to the ground? Who would win: Dragonling rising to power over the skies and the weather, or one random bitch?
Thinking more about @JessMahler 's critique of conflict-centered stories, it's kind of surreal that "conflict" is just one way--and not always the best way--to categorize some of the experiences people have in life and yet has taken on this outsize importance in Western storytelling. Saying stories should have conflict seems about as meaningful as saying stories should portray hair: Sure, it's likely to happen because having conflicts is as common as having hair, but it's certainly not inevitable, required, or the ur-theory of narrative.
Happy and proud to announce that I have a short story upcoming in the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast's 2024 fiction lineup! https://wandering.shop/@heatherrosejones/111953977084224813 A Very Long Malaise is based on recurring complaints during the Joseon Dynasty of Korea about female palace attendants being in romantic and sexual relationships with other women, with some of them forming factions to leak palace secrets. My story is an imagining of these lesbian palace spies' lives and intrigues, centered around two exes pitted together by circumstance. #WritingCommunity#HistoricalFiction#SapphicFiction
Scholar and writer Gang Jeong-il-dang's collection of writings, published in 1836 four years after her death at the age of 60, is effectively her husband Yun Gwang-yeon's love letter to her. He considered Jeong-il-dang his scholarly and literary partner and advisor in life, and she had composed a number of writings in his name as well. His project to publish a posthumous collection of her writings, including returning credit to her on the ones she had composed for him, was an unprecedented move at the time. This collection is the only reason we have any writings by her, a rare case among the untold amounts of women's writings lost to apathy, loss, destruction, and male attribution. #History#Korea