My very first nonfiction book is out in the world!
This is, I have to say, more nerve wracking than fiction. Anyway, I hope if you’re intersted in why you enjoy my books and comforting books like them, you’ll give this a try.
The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers and Fans of Pop Culture offers up an alternate model of story telling to the Hero’s Journey that applies to books, TV, movies, and much more. I designed this book to give you a foundation, history, and guided step-by-step process to understanding the Heroine’s Journey. It will train your eye to spot it, but also how to write it, or fix your story with it. Also it explains why it’s so critically disenfranchised.
You can see why it took a whole book?
Anyway, the content laid out so you can skip to whatever part is most relevant you and your desires. But it’s also a fun read cover-to-cover.
So as it’s already an informative book, what extras could I offer? Here’s what I came up with:
Special Extras!
- Check out the table of contents and read the introduction?
- Here’s the post where I talk all about coming up with the cover, why I chose the elements I chose, how it’s different from designing a fiction cover.
- Here’s my Heroine’s Journey Pinterest board with lots of fun mythological graphics.
- Starla of Designed By Starla did the cover.
- Shelley Bates of Moonshell Books did the copy editing (plus multiple beta readers). But I should say that she specializes in historical genre fiction, not nonfic.
- The book is formatted for both electronic and print using Vellum. I’m particularly proud of the print edition’s formatting. It’s very slick.
Reference links
Primary & Main Sources
- Budge’s Book of the Dead translation.
- Nagy’s Homeric Hymn to Demeter translation.
- Plutarch’s Morals: Theosophical Essays
- Wikipedia’s entry on and schematic of the Hero’s Journey
Articles
- “The Heroine’s Journey” by Maureen Murdock (Published in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion edited by David A. Leeming, 2016)
- Attribute to Campbell (mis)quote: “Joseph Campbell and ‘Women Don’t Need To Make The Journey“
- “Romance Novelists Write About Sex and Pleasure. On the Internet That Makes Them Targets for Abuse” by Julia Carpenter
- “The Heroine’s Journey: When your compromises make the world a bigger place” by Nicola Baldwin
- Data on 2018 library circulation drawn from this article: “Circ Shift” by Barbara Hoffert
- ROMANCE READERS BY THE NUMBERS article on Nielsen
These are all in the citations section of the book. In the text I used redirects as the best option for this so they would be short and easy to type out of the print edition, and so that if the site of origin went down, I could find a new link relatively quickly.
Praise Quotes
“The first book on writing structure that’s ever truly resonated for me and made sense of the way my favorite stories work. I’ve thought back to this book so many times since reading it, and I know I’ll be reading it again!”
~ Stephanie Burgis, Author of The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart
“A lot of educators are going to be very interested in this. The heroine’s journey narrative structure aligns with positive parenting and the anti-bullying programs’ goals and techniques. Their preferred stories emphasize team building and non violent conflict resolution. Understanding that this is a long standing historical and culturally relevant narrative structure will help them find more stories that resonate with their programs, and help defend the programs from more patriarchal critics. ”
~ Janis Wright
“Okay, look…I’m not sure how you can just rewire my brain to see the heorine’s jouney like this and then expect me to make coherent, thought-out comments about the text when all I want to do is hold it in my twisted little grip while I shove it at people screaming like a madman and pointing at passages, but I guess that’s what I’m going to do. ”
~ Author Beta Reader
“I knew that my stories didn’t neatly fit the mold of the Hero’s Journey, but it wasn’t until I read this excellent resource on the Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger that I finally understood why. Now I understand not only how to reliably write in this form, but also how to better position my stories for readers and agents. ”
~ Ethan Freckleton, Author & Host of The Fearless Storyteller podcast
Yours,
Miss Gail
- Did you miss my latest release announcement? This book was available to my Chirrup members 2 weeks early and $2 off, because I love them bestest. Sign up here.
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BOOK DE JOUR!
The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Fans of Pop Culture
PICK YOUR VENDOR!
Direct from me?
My first non-fiction book! How to use ancient story structure to understand and crack bestselling genre fiction.
Upcoming Scribbles?
- Vixen Ecology ~ Interstitial short story featuring Mana and Lovejoy, follow up to The Enforcer Enigma, you should read that first. May be a Chirrup exclusive, will definitely be announced there first.
- Need to know what Gail is writing right now? That’s also in the Chirrup.
Gail’s Daily Tea Party
Tisane of Nifty
Writerly Tincture
Expand Your Vocabulary With This Site of Untranslatable Words
I would like to add:
Faen (Thai) – Gender neutral lover/partner/special someone. Faen is more significant than a boyfriend/girlfriend but also not as legally binding as spouse.
Book Nibble
Quote to Sip
That Alec quote is so good.
Also, I visited the Eunoia site and and it’s really cool! But I would recommend that not everything you find there is taken at face value. I thinks it’s probably based on voluntary submissions, and not always by native speakers (sometimes of either language). I checked what they had in Swedish, and a few of them were not correctly translated. For example, solkatt (literally: “sun-cat”) is given the meaning of “The glimmer that reflects the sunshine off a wristwatch”, which is both too specific and not very clear. It is the speck of light, often moving about erratically, that appears when sunlight is reflected off something small and shiny, like a mirror, a piece of glass, or polished metal. (The glass on a wristwatch can certainly produce a solkatt, but it’s not the only thing that can.)
Vabba is translated as “to be at home with the kids”, which is also not entirely correct. It means “to be [legally] home from work with a sick child”. The word is fairly recent and comes from “VAB”, which is an acronym for the Care of a Sick Child legislation (Vård av sjukt barn).
There’s no single word for just being at home with the kids.
Also: One of the words in the list is not actually Swedish, but Norwegian… XD
Faen is a great word. I’m currently reading Kris Ripper’s latest book, The Love Study, where the protagonist is dating a genderqueer person, and at one point in the story they are talking about what word they should use since neither “girlfriend” or “boyfriend” works. I immediately thought of faen! Sadly, because it’s originally a loan of the English word “fan”, loaning it back into English would make you sound like a conceited tool if you used it about your Special Someone.
Also, I’m a bit bummed that I completely forgot about the preorder of The Heroine’s Journey.