​​When I was a child I loved, and I still love, stories of women and girls triumphing over adversity. Books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women were among my favorites. I have also always loved adventure and fantasy stories. As a young girl, I read and reread Treasure Island, The Hobbit, Gulliver’s Travels, and other epic tales. 

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As I got older, I realized there was little overlap in adventure stories and female-centric stories. I started to wonder why women weren’t going on adventures. In the stories I read about women, they reached adulthood, got married, and that was it. That was the end of their story. If a woman was present in the story, it was not her story, she was the one being rescued and/or she was a love interest to be won at the end of the grand and perilous journey.
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I wanted to read about girls, and later women, like myself. I wanted a female in science fiction and fantasy stories, as the hero, as the main character, and as someone fierce and real. So, I started writing those stories. When I was young, writing women wasn’t revolutionary feminism; it was natural to write main characters the same gender as myself.

When I reached adulthood, I had another realization: even when the main character of a fantasy or sci-fi is female, she’s almost always a girl or a teenager. There were hardly any adult women going on fantastic adventures, and there was no similar shortage of adult men fighting their way through far-off galaxies and exotic landscapes.

In the past few decades, there has been a reversal of this men-and-girls-only trend, but we still have a long way to go. When I’m asked in interviews why I write so many women characters, I always answer “women are fifty percent of the population, so they should be having fifty percent of the fantastic adventures.”

​Mythology has been a cornerstone in my life, and world myths were the basis of my first novel, Honey. Later this week, on 5/24 from 2-5pm, I’m taking over Facebook’s Fantasy and Science Fiction’s Readers Lounge with the theme of Fairy Tales and Mythology, so I figured I’d write an on-topic blog. 

​My father was an artist who specialized in mythological subjects. The painting above, The Birth of Medusa, was from his series on the life of Medusa. He painted, sculpted, and carved mythological figures from Greek, Roman, Norse, and Native American traditions, among others.
 
I noticed that many of these pantheons had gods with different names, but similar functions and stories. For example, both Zeus and Odin topple giants to earn their status and kings of the gods. I wanted to know how all of these cultures, from different times and places, had the same stories with the same people. So, I read them ALL.
 

​These myths must be true. That was the conclusion I came to after extensively reading world mythology. It’s the only thing that explains the prevalence of mythological people and themes. Do I believe that there is a chariot pulling the sun across the sky? No, I think we are all are Helios, toiling through the day and resting at night. Do I believe that Persephone’s return to Hades brings winter? No, winter is a dark time for all of us. Upstate New York snow absolutely is hell.
 
The god of communication, Hermes, known as Mercury in the Roman pantheon, can fly very fast because he has wings on his sandals. But, why not wings on his back? Because information travels quickly only sometimes, like when it’s a salacious story or when the messenger is well-paid. Otherwise, the message may not have wings, like when it’s a hard truth or an obscure fact.
 
Some might say that myths were just ancient people’s way of making sense of the world. Another common idea is that religious tales were used to keep the population cooperative; chill out or Zeus will chain you to an eternally burning wheel. While these ideas are probably partially correct, ancient storytellers still drew on their own, mortal experience to create these myths. Perhaps the perpetually burning wheel was what it felt like to labor in poverty while the rich few luxuriated – punishment, from on high, for merely existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

​The story of Pandora’s Jar is similar to the African myth of Anansi’s Pot. Both vessels held all of the world’s knowledge, which was released due to the reckless actions of a passerby. But, each of has a world of myths and stories inside of us, bubbling around with all of the knowledge that we’ve accumulated over our lifetimes. Maybe some myth, or story, or passerby will be the catalyst that inspires your ideas to spill out into the world.