Sherlock Holmes in High School

A guest post by my friend Tammy Garrison about her new YA book:

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As a kid, I picked up a hefty volume called The Boy’s Sherlock Holmes from a grade school that was closing, and was liquidating its library. It looked like something I would be interested in, despite being obviously labeled as being ‘for boys.’ But that was the way of most things I liked; Batman, Star Wars, hockey, you name it. I know now that this was not my experience alone, that girls and women felt alienated from geek culture, and before the Internet, there wasn’t an easy way for a teen of limited means to meet up with like minds.

I didn’t pick up this book just because it was ‘for boys.’ I had a genuine interest. I’d spent my fair share of Sundays watching old Rathbone movies, not to mention various cartoon incarnations of Sherlock Holmes that I had a fair idea of what I was getting myself into. But going back even further, my first and formative introduction to the world of Sherlock Holmes was a CBS movie of the week entitled The Return of Sherlock Holmes that aired when I was seven years old. It took place in the modern day, and Watson was a woman. It was an accessible gateway for a grade schooler who always had to be He-Man when we played after school.

The stories held my fickle attention from cover to cover, but there was really one thing missing from most of those tales: women. I was hardly a child feminist, in fact I had grown up in a confusing era where Barbie could be an astronaut, but women were still continually implied to be lesser than men, and the male experience to be superior to the things women were supposed to like and do and be.

Most girls just accepted that we’d never be Luke Skywalker, that regardless of how cool his lightsaber was, we’d be better off liking Princess Leia with her many hair and costume changes. I just barely managed to hold onto my dream of being Batman, regardless of my youthful crush on Tim Drake’s Robin, and the existence of Batgirl. I didn’t want to be the lesser spin-off character. I wanted to be The Main Guy. Since, y’know. Guys were more important than girls.

Everything comes back around again, and at a low point in my adult life, battling severe and debilitating mental health issues and the crushing self-esteem blow of unemployment, I sat down on a warm and sunny November 1st, at the start of National Novel Writing Month with only one goal in mind: to write the most self-soothing, self-serving thing I could possibly produce. If the world didn’t care about me, then I didn’t care about the world.

I decided to write not the story that I wanted to read, but the story that I had needed growing up, and still needed now: the story of a girl Sherlock Holmes, brilliant but alienated, surviving the ins and outs of high school with her best friend, a Watson who was athletic and smart, but maybe less noticeable than she thought she should be.

Over thirty days, I came up with a story that was exactly what I needed in high school to tell me that I was ok the way I was, that my interests weren’t wrong or weird and that, in fact, there is nothing lesser about girls and that they can do anything, even be self-involved detectives. It became a bit like shojo manga, but without the love interest, since one of my peeves is every young adult story needing to have some sort of romantic plot, preferably the dreaded triangle. It was all of the elements I wanted in a story involving one of my childhood heroes, and I was absolutely certain no one would ever read it.

It took me forever to edit it and get through two more drafts. Years, even. Due to this terrible fear that I was somehow wrong for writing it, and anyway, who would publish an alternate universe Sherlock Holmes story where Sherlock Holmes is a teenage girl in modern America?

Eventually you get sick of looking at a story. You want to murder it, or burn every copy and chastise yourself for ever wanting to write the thing. That is the point where you send it to others. After the usual rounds of reading, typo fixing and comments, I decided to pull the trigger and fire it off to MX Publishing, a house I was familiar with, due to the number of pastiches I had read over the years. Crazily enough, they also decided that shojo teenage Sherlock Holmes was something they wanted to add to their catalog.

And that, my friends, is how the story of an awkward girl who grew into an awkward adult who wrote the book she needed to read.

The Twisted Blackmailer: Watson & Holmes Book 1 is available directly from the publisher: http://www.mxpublishing.com/brand/Tammy+Garrison

Or from Amazon as a paperback and Kindle book: https://www.amazon.com/Twisted-Blackmailer-Watson-Holmes-Book/dp/1787050246

The e-book is available now, and the paperback is available December 9th.

From the back of the book:

Nothing's ever easy when Sherlock Holmes is involved. Joanna Watson needs sports and academic scholarships if she is going to make it all the way to med school. That means keeping out of trouble, and her school record squeaky clean. But upon befriending the mysterious New Girl, Joanna has her perfect record ruined, skips school for the first time in her life, and finds a blackmailer aiming a gun in her direction. All she knows is that she's going to get grounded... if they get out of this alive.

For more information
http://tammygarrison.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4050764.Tammy_Garrison

Gender Roles

I've always very conscious of the roles/career choices of my characters. Part is definitely due to the time period in which I grew up as well as the character gender roles in a lot of the fantasy and science fiction stories I read or watched at the time. Which is why I'm going to react here to a post by N.K. Jemisin "The Limitations of Womanhood in Fantasy" and some of its comments. You can read it for yourself, but what I took away from it was the impression that some think the pendulum has swung too far in regard to the reaction of many writers trying to write strong women characters: i.e., that there are too many swordswinging female characters in fantasy.

Now, I realize that what one considers 'too many' may be due to when one starts reading. I grew up at a time when female main characters were rare. Females were always background characters - part of the crowd scenes or the prize at the end of a story. Fantasy did have some strong female characters in the Oz books (one did not mess with Glinda or Ozma) but in The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn, valued for her manor-keeping abilities, had to disguise herself as a man in order to be the person she wanted to be - and then she was given away as a prize at the end. [imho]. Females in general were valued for their cooking or sewing or manor-keeping skills.

Then women started to become the fighters as well as the keepers of the hearth. Girls who watched Uhura and Nurse Chapel in the original Star Trek (excuse the sf example) could find role models for their daughters in Princess Leia and Captain Janeway and even Xena. Lessa of Pern was a dragonrider as well the manager of a weyr. As someone who was told repeatedly both in person and via stories and media that I couldn't do something because I was a girl, to me this change was very welcome. For me, there can't be 'too many' stories with strong female characters or characters who choose a career or role outside of the 'normal' gender role. Or even within, so long as it is their choice and not something society forces on them. I hate it when people automatically decide that the female in the story, whether on a quest or in a village, has to be the cook or the child rearer.

Sometimes it seems as though the writer has to create an ensemble cast, much like the friends in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, in order to keep the critics at bay. For every female character that likes adventure but disdains "frou-frou"s (Applejack and Rainbow Dash), you also have to have the fashion expert (Rarity) and cook (Pinkie Pie). Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series has something similar with characters able to handle different types of magic: thread (which includes weaving), plant (which includes food as well as medicine and crops), lightning, and fire (metal-working).

Some of the commenters were unhappy with books where the female character can't sew and 'thinks she's better" than other women because of it. Couldn't this character be a role model for those who can't sew and were continually put down because of their lack of this so-called essential female skill? Why is the lack of a skill suddenly shorthand for someone 'thinking she's better' than someone who possesses the skill? Would it be better if someone who couldn't cook felt miserable all the time because of that? Or wouldn't you want a character comfortable enough with herself to be able to admit she's not good in a particular area? Though, if that was the point of the story - the growth from 'I can't do this' to 'I can't do this but that's okay because I can do this other thing' - that would be different.

Fortunately, YA fantasy usually focuses on a young person learning what they can do. For every young girl wanting to become a knight (such as in Tamora Pierce's Alanna series or Protector of the Small series), there's a young girl whose skill in decorating hats leads to her discovering her own magic (Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle). For every girl who wants to learn about magical beasts (such as in Patricia McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld), there's another who just wants to learn magic (okay, in Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin, the young girl is a griffin, but there's also Diane Duane's Young Wizards series or Hermione in Harry Potter).

I definitely agree with the conclusion of N.K. Jemisin's piece, that what is needed is more variety of female characters. Writers to write them and readers to want to read about them. Discussion is a good first step.

Do you have any favorite female characters in fantasy?