Navigating The Shadow World , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Liv Spencer

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160 pages

English

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Spencer recounts Cassandra Clare's journey, from journalist and fan fiction writer to superstar author; explores the cast and crew who brought the first book to life in the film The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (Sony Pictures), premiering August 2013; and delves into the TMI fandom, a passionate community that is anything but mundane. From the Clave to Chairman Meow, demon pox to dastardly ducks, Navigating the Shadow World is an insightful introduction to the world of Cassandra Clare.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	11 juillet 2013
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781770904453
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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One must always be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.
— Tessa Gray, CLOCKWORK ANGEL

INTRODUCTION
I f you had to describe the Shadowhunter Chronicles to someone, you might be tempted to start with the supernatural elements: Angelic warriors! Demon battles! Magic runes! Vampires and werewolves and warlocks and faeries! And certainly Cassandra Clare has created a complex and fascinating world, one in which all the stories are true and yet surprises abound.
But of course it’s not only the rich mythology that has turned this series into a bestselling sensation. The Shadowhunter Chronicles are populated by wonderful characters (who doesn’t want to party with Magnus, watch anime with Simon, or talk literature with Tessa and Will?), and what makes the series truly shine are the ways in which their struggles reflect our own mundane reality. The books are about self-discovery, choice, goodness, hope, loss, and all the many wonderful and wretched permutations of love: whether shocking, inconvenient, all-consuming, uplifting, maddening, forbidden, unconditional, unbidden, unrequited, or all of those things at once. And it’s not all romantic love. Perhaps the most powerful love is the kind that forges bonds stronger than blood ties. In a world fixated on lineage and alliance, the strongest and most resilient families are those the characters create themselves.
This sense of family extends beyond the page to the Shadowhunter community among us mundanes. There are few fandoms that can claim such dedication, enthusiasm, and incredible passion. We don’t need runes of initiation or fighting gear, we just need the books and another fan to talk/rant/rave/debate with. Someone who has glimpsed Cassandra Clare’s Shadow World and understands the agonies and the ecstasies of having the Sight. The Shadowhunter community is a chosen family, one that welcomes all kinds.
Though many readers will know the ins and outs of this fictional universe, hopefully between these pages are some unexplored corners: from Cassandra Clare’s incredible story, to an examination of each book in the Mortal Instruments and the Infernal Devices, to the making of the City of Bones film and the cast who brings these beloved characters to life, to the fandom that keeps Clare inspired to write book after book. Navigating the Shadow World is for that ever-growing family of Shadowhunters.

T hough Cassandra Clare has sold millions of books by spinning fantastic tales that draw from myth and legend, when it comes to actual writing, she is nothing if not a realist. She dismisses moments of golden light inspiration or a romanticized calling. “Inspiration, when it does come, doesn’t come from outside of you. It comes from the work that you do, from the process itself,” she wrote. She sees writing as a serious commitment, as a series of choices. And it’s that hard work and practical dedication that have taken her from a girl who read fantasy novels to a woman who writes them.
Cassie was born Judith Rumelt, July 27, 1973, in Tehran, Iran. She traveled all over the world with her parents, Elizabeth and Richard, and had been a resident of England, France, and Switzerland before she turned 10. As she moved from place to place, sometimes attending school and sometimes being homeschooled, books were her constant companion, and she often found herself dipping into her father’s science fiction and fantasy books, though she read in a variety of genres. She was introduced to oral storytelling by her father, who found ways to make stories part of daily life. Cassie recalled, “My father was a great storyteller and he used to be able to bribe me to do whatever he wanted — finish my homework, do the laundry — with stories. It made me realize the great motivational power of fiction!”
She described her younger self as “really, really quiet, which is always a shocker for people who know me now.” She elaborated, “I was the quiet kid in the corner, reading a book. In elementary school, I read so much and so often during class that I was actually forbidden from reading books during school hours by my teachers. I’ve always thought that was something of a counterproductive measure. I mean, shouldn’t you want kids to read? Admittedly maybe not during biology class.” At age 12, when she got her first computer, she started writing books, experimenting in various genres: “I wrote a terrible vampire novel and a terrible mystery novel and a terrible romance novel and a terrible Arthurian novel,” she said.
When Cassie was in high school, the family settled in L.A., where she kept reading and writing. At age 15, to entertain her friends, she even wrote a thousand-page novel called The Beautiful Cassandra , based on the Jane Austen story of the same name. (That story eventually gave her part of her pen name; her adopted last name is her grandmother’s middle name, as well as the county in Ireland she came from. Clary’s name was also a tribute to the courageous, quick-tempered Irishwoman.) “One of the great joys of being so young and writing for fun is the lack of pressure and the freedom to write whatever you want,” said Cassie. She credits a dedicated creative writing class as a huge boost to her development, noting, “It allowed for a lot of personal attention being paid to each student’s work and a lot of critique.”
Cassandra took more writing classes in college, but they didn’t have the same impact, and while she still loved writing, she assumed she wasn’t cut out to write fiction. She became a journalist instead, writing for various tabloids and entertainment magazines. She didn’t love the subject matter or the hours though, and she found her mind drifting back toward fiction.
Needing a creative outlet after her day job, she returned to the fictional worlds she loved and wrote fan fiction under the name Cassandra Claire. Her Draco trilogy offered an alternate-universe take on Harry Potter, starting with the Boy Who Lived switching bodies with his loathed classmate Draco Malfoy. The series offered a sympathetic hero in the canon’s villainous Draco, a characterization that became known as Fanon Draco, or, after a scene Cassie wrote that had the character in tight leather pants, LeatherPants!Draco.
Her fan fiction was enormously popular, but after she published the second book of the Draco trilogy, it also became enormously divisive. Cassandra suffered accusations of plagiarism — namely that she had borrowed expressions, dialogue, and scenes from other books and TV shows without properly crediting them. While fan fiction convention allowed borrowing from other work, it was expected that individual passages would be cited, so original writing and borrowed pieces were distinct. Cassandra hotly contested the accusations, pointing to her opening disclaimers listing works she mentioned or incorporated. She argued that her work was a “pastiche,” a form that intentionally imitates other work, and that using others’ material made an Easter egg game for her readers, who would try to identify the borrowed passages in the comments after a post. Since she was working as an entertainment journalist during the day, she argued she was well aware of copyright laws, and that one of the reasons she liked fan fiction was that it offered more freedom. After all, fan fiction operates with the intellectual property of others as a foundation, so she saw it as a gray area that supported this particular writing style. Regardless of her defense, after the plagiarism charges, Cassie’s account was deleted from FanFiction.net, where she had been posting her work. The author refused to let this incident deter her from writing, however, and she found a new home for it on FictionAlley, a Harry Potter fanfic site. There she released the third volume in the Draco trilogy, Draco Veritas . Unfortunately, Cassie has since removed the books, explaining to the Wall Street Journal , “I felt like it was juvenilia.”
She created another popular fanfic in The Very Secret Diaries , which gave The Lord of the Rings a Bridget Jones treatment, bringing Bridget’s signature style to diary entries written from the point of view of LOTR ’s major characters. An example from Aragorn’s diary: “Day Six: Orcs killed: none. Disappointing. Stubble update: I look rugged and manly. Yes! Keep wanting to drop-kick Gimli. Holding myself back. Still not King.” Like the Draco trilogy, The Very Secret Diaries was wildly successful, and, since it appeared at the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring ’s 2001 theatrical release, it drew many fans who were not fan fiction readers.
These online outlets became a place for the author to hone her fiction writing skills, forcing her to learn by doing and also exposing her to constant feedback from betareaders — the work’s first editors, who give it a rigorous once-over before release — and regular online readers. Cassie’s return to fiction was also fostered by a part-time job at a children’s bookstore, where she found herself revisiting books she loved as a child. Soon her own ideas for novels started bubbling to the surface, and she decided to move to New York City to pursue her dream of writing fiction.
FINDING THE SHADOW WORLD
Established in the Big Apple, a city that had always inspired her, Cassie was actively searching her new surroundings for stories. She was energized by the cityscape, and she explained, “New York is such an enormous, vibrant, and dramatic city. It feels like it has a living presence of its own, and that’s very magical.” Like Clary learning to see the Shadow World beneath the veil of glamour, the author got her first glimpse of a secret world she could create while visiting a tattoo parlor in Greenwich Village with a friend. This parlor had a unique feature: the footprints of all its former tattoo artists on the ceiling in paint. Gazing up at the footprin