Roughly equivalent, right? Maybe??

I sent another story through critters.org and got back a lot of helpful commentary. Isobel and the Mammoths is going to be a teaser for the series I am currently working on – Isobel the Bear Eater. This particular project is going to be an interesting one. I am from Alaska, and have a degree in Russian, which gives me an insider view to the pan-Arctic culture that I am both borrowing from and creating, but leaves me really open to making references that are obvious to me but obscure to most everyone else. The critters pointed that out several cases where I had done this.

I’ll be working to make things clear to a general audience, of course, but there’s a part of me that delights in these small confusions. It’s payback, you see, for when I was reading stories as an Alaskan child, and there were plenty of references that were alien to me. (Except for maybe the Moomin Trolls. But obviously the Finns understand.)

What was a firefly? A toll bridge? A badger? A thirty-story apartment building? How could you tell a garter snake from a rattlesnake?

Robin Hood was always hunting deer, an animal I knew only from brief glimpses when visiting relatives in Pennsylvania, part of that vast territory that Alaskans refer to as the “Lower 48” or simply, “Outside.” I enjoyed Beatrix Potter, but it was moose that ate things in our garden, not rabbits, and I understood that hedgehogs were like porcupines, but smaller.

Botanical references were off, too. I never saw a weeping willow until I went to college in Connecticut. Tulips grew the floral department of the grocery store, not in fields. There were no cultivated fields – we never went on road trips and drove past fields or corn or cows or anything. Dogwood is a flower, maybe 8 inches high, not a tree. And while we’re at it, flowers on trees? What is this madness?

Dogwood versus Dwarf Dogwood. Wha?

One of the pieces of advice I see over and over is “write what you want to read.” So that’s what I’m doing. I want to read something in a world familiar to me. A world where summers are blinding light and endless adventure and winters are a time for telling stories next to a wood stove. A world with bears and berries in the woods, with salmon and sea stars in the ocean. Grumbling porcupines. Roiling ash clouds. Long crimson sunsets over the ocean; clouds streaked fluorescent orange over the mountains in the morning. Sea otters rolling in the water, scrubbing their hair just like you do in the shower. The way that cold snow squeaks underfoot or the spaceship noises that ice makes.

I could go on, but I think I need to get back to Isobel. There’s this spirit-fox that has been following her and she’s trying to figure out why…