One From the Vault: Queens of the Jungle

In anticipation of the release of Book #3: EVELYN ILLUSTRATED on January 17, 2020, I'm re-posting a Book #1 blog.

Re-Appropriating Symbols of Masculinity in YA Literature

Symbolically, animals play an important role in THE REVENGE ARTIST, and one especially reoccurring animal symbol in the book is that of the lion. 

The symbol of the lion is introduced early on in the story when Evelyn’s art teacher, Ms. Shipley, gives the class a presentation on prehistoric cave paintings. Evelyn is captivated by the images, especially those of the lions leaping across the ceiling of the cave. Even more so, Evelyn is empowered by the idea that the cave painters were not painting pictures of past hunts, but using their artistic abilities to influence the success of future ones. “The hunters hunted, but these cave artists had another job,” Ms. Shipley explains. “They could see the future and they could make it happen.” 

Symbols are such powerful storytelling devices because they utilize a common language of imagery, emotion, and understanding that can often communicate volumes with only a single word or phrase. Just as effectively, symbols can convey negative biases and reinforce gender stereotypes without a reader always consciously aware of the messages being sent. 

Traditionally, lions are symbols of power and authority because of their dominance in the animal kingdom; however, because it is the male lion’s role to protect the pride while the females hunt, the lion is often viewed as a symbol of masculinity. As a result, such lion-like qualities as strength and courage are reinforced as exclusively male attributes. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Evelyn is attracted to the symbol of the lion. She is drawn to these lion-like qualities in others and she aspires to them herself. This becomes evident in her art, in her female role models, and in her choice of friends. 

It is not surprising then, that when the students are asked to paint self-portraits using the theme of masks, Evelyn chooses the image of a little girl wearing a plastic lion’s head, “standing alone in a field of grass, barefoot and wearing a sun dress. Her arms are raised in the air and her little fists are curled like cat paws.” The image celebrates her femininity, while at the same time revealing her inner strength and courage. She is delicate and powerful, gentle and ferocious. As conflicts between Evelyn and her bullies escalate, she struggles with these two sides of herself. And as Evelyn attempts to find her balance, the painting will go on to include the disemboweled corpse of a boy wearing a zebra mask, and eventually an angry mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks. 

Hopefully, the lion symbolism in THE REVENGE ARTIST manages to undermine some of those gender stereotypes about what girls can and can’t be and maybe even openly challenge them a bit. It is Evelyn’s fiercely protective friend Karen that is probably the most outwardly lion-like character in the story. When the girls decide to venture out from their usual lunch spot behind the art rooms and brave the main food court, Karen quickly puts one particular sexual harasser in his place by verbally emasculating him with a very explicit insult traditionally—and anatomically—reserved for the boys. In the jungle that is sometimes high school, Karen definitely shows herself to be one of the dominant animals.

Luckily, I Happen to Know an Amazing Illustrator

In between books two and three of the Revenge Artist series, I tried my hand at writing for comics. I completed the script of the first episode of a projected series along with many pages of notes detailing the overall story concept, character background, and other technical information (it is a sci-fi dystopian tale, after all). It’s called The Adventures of Red Literal and the Apocalyptic Twins. Episode #1: For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I want to say that writing for comics is easier than writing a novel; however, I won’t because I wouldn’t want to take anything away from, well, writers of novels like myself … but it does take less time. This makes sense, of course, because writing the script is only half the job. Someone still needs to illustrate it (and I want to say that illustrating may actually be more than half the work, but I won’t, because I don’t want to take anything away from, you know, writers of comics).

Luckily, I happen to know an amazing illustrator, my sister, Theresa Ysiano.

After discussing my story concept with her, she immediately agreed to partner with me on the project. Only then, and with earnest (the intent, not the person), did I begin to write (Theresa appreciates a good pun).

The next phase of the project is currently in her very capable hands. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little behind the scenes work.

Red looks like she could be in her late teens or early twenties, but she behaves like someone much older and wiser.

Imagine a young, Last Crusade Indiana Jones, only he’s a girl. Physically…think, Daisy Ridley as Rey in The Force Awakens, but with hips.

Here are the first three pages of the script, accompanied by some of Theresa’s sketches:

RED LITERAL AND THE APOCALYPTIC TWINS EPISODE #1 FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS WRITTEN BY: PHILIP HOY ILLUSTRATED BY: THERESA YSIANO
PAGE ONE
SPLASH PAGE:		Close-up of RED wielding sword. Her face is revealed clearly. It is a beautiful face, but it is the determined, manic face of a killer. Her long black hair is pulled back in a ponytail. What kind of enemy RED has just sliced through is not necessarily obvious, though something humanoid. There is blood splashed across her face and sword.
1.     CAPTION:		Her name was Red.
2.     CAPTION:		At least that’s what her friend had called her.
3.     CAPTION:		Michael had watched her kill over thirty of them, maybe more.
PAGE TWO
PANEL ONE:		In the foreground is the silhouette of RED as seen from behind sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, holding a sword across her lap. Just the edge of her cheek and face are visible. In the background on the other side of the campfire from her are MICHAEL and GABBY wrapped in sleeping bags. MICHAEL is watching RED through half-closed lids. GABBY seems to be asleep.
4.     CAPTION:		Now, it just didn’t seem possible.
PANEL TWO:		Close-up on RED’s face. The long black hair that had been pulled tightly behind her head that morning is now loose, tangled and hanging wildly over her shoulders and about her pale, oval face. There is a faraway, unfocused look in her enormous dark eyes.
5.     CAPTION:		She looked too young, too fragile…
PANEL THREE:		Close-up of MICHAEL and GABBY, better revealing their age and the similarity of their features. MICHAEL is watching RED intently, pretending to sleep. GABBY is more obviously asleep.
6.     CAPTION:		…too beautiful to be capable of such destruction.
PAGE THREE
PANEL FOUR:	Medium shot from MICHAEL’s POV of RED aglow in the firelight sitting cross-legged on top of her sleeping bag and wearing no more than her jeans and t-shirt. With her left hand she is holding the sword across her lap and with her right hand she is sliding a small, square whetstone not much larger than a matchbox along the length of the blade.
7.       SOUND:	S-h-i-n-g
PANEL FIVE:	CLOSE-UP of her hand lifting the grey stone toward her face.
PANEL SIX:	EXTREME CLOSE-UP of the stone held to her chin as she spits saliva on it with the tip of her tongue.
PANEL SEVEN:	MULTIPLE IMAGE SHOT of RED sliding stone along the length of the sword.
8.       SOUND:	S-h-i-n-g
9.    CAPTION:	As she steadily, rhythmically, slid the stone along the length of the blade, the sound of scraping metal rose and receded like waves on a beach.
PANEL EIGHT:	CLOSE-UP of whetstone on sword in the extreme foreground with MICHAEL’s face looking on in the background.
10.     SOUND:	S-h-i-n-g
11.  CAPTION:	Each time the stone left the tip of the blade there was a delicate, distant ringing, like the sound of a faraway bell carried on the wind.
PANEL NINE:	MOVE-IN on MICHAEL’s face, eyes closing.
12.     SOUND:	S-h-i-n-g
13.  CAPTION:	Like the sound Michael and his sister had heard that morning, the sound that had led them…to her.

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For more Theresa Ysiano: Here is her Website and her Instagram.

LATELY THESE IMAGES (As Told to Me by My Father)

“He said he came upon a traffic accident to find a young woman, a girl really, seventeen years old, thrown face down in the middle of the street.”

My father has held many jobs in his life, he trained police dogs in the Air Force, broke wild horses in Texas, and was a carpenter, police officer, teacher, labor commissioner, school board member, police chaplain, and Deacon in the Catholic Church (to name a few). But for as long as I can remember, he has always been a writer. Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting alone at the dining room table tapping away on his little white and brown typewriter. Amazing, when I think about it now, that he could actually get his thoughts onto paper that way, surrounded by a house full of noisy children (my parents raised nine of us, four girls and five boys). Maybe it was the constant clackity-clack-clack-clackity-clack of that tenacious little typewriter with its intermittent ding-and-zipp of the carriage sliding home again that helped to drown us out.

His first creations were shorts, ghost stories mainly, then he began his first novel, a historical romance set during the American Revolution that probably took ten years to finish. Now he has well over a dozen novels published, most of them romances taking place during the 1700’s, but also several westerns, and one set in the 1920’s. He’s not one for self-promotion (he really needs an author page), but he does have a large and loyal group of readers that grab up his titles as soon as they become available.

Many people have asked my father, myself included, why none of his stories are about his experiences as a police officer, but he just smiles and shrugs away the suggestion. My guess is that most of those stories, even after all these years, may still be too difficult to share. He did share one of them with us one evening last summer. Before going to bed, I wrote it down.

Lately These Images (As told to me by Wayne M. Hoy)

Tonight, Dad described a memory from when he was a policeman. He said he came upon a traffic accident to find a young woman, a girl really, seventeen years old, thrown face down in the middle of the street. She was wearing a metallic green pants suit, something fashionable at the time. He remembers her hair, long, red, spread out against the asphalt as if someone had neatly brushed it that way. Not until he drew closer and viewed her from the other side did he see that part of her head was torn open, half missing.

“She was a beautiful girl,” he said. Then maybe considering what he’d just described, added, “I could see from the photo on her driver’s license.”

She had veered into the other lane and was struck by an oncoming semi, the trailer tearing through the side of her car.

Why had she gone over into the other lane at that deadly moment. “You ask yourself, you know, the who, what, when, where, why, and how … I could see how it happened, but why?”

“It was a narrow, two lane road. Avenue 54 where it began to curve as it came around the base of the mountain coming from La Quinta. I could see that she had veered to the right and her front tire had gone off the road, had hit the dirt, and then she must have overcorrected and thrown herself back into the oncoming lane and the path of the semi. But why? What had caused her to suddenly veer like that?”

“I had to know. I even drove it myself, matching her speed. I remember nearing the spot of the collision, with the curve just up ahead, seeing a truck suddenly coming toward me in what for just a moment appeared to be my lane. I tensed, ready to swerve to the right, then realized that the truck was not in my lane, but that the curve of the road had only made it appear that way. The same thing must have happened to the young woman, only she had swerved.”

“Lately, memories like these have been coming to me, vividly, these kinds of images, just as I’m falling to sleep. I thought I’d put them away, left them in their box, but now, after so many years, they’ve returned.”

June 26, 2019

Find most of my Dad’s books here: Books by Wayne M. Hoy.

Oh, and by the way… while my father may not have written about his law enforcement career, his wife certainly has. My mother, a dedicated diarist and letter writer pulled from her daily journals to publish this a few years ago: A Good and Faithful Servant by Judy Hoy. Where she found the time and space to write on a daily basis while raising all of us is the true mystery and miracle of our family.

I’M BACK… and Oh, Have I Been Busy

You know when you go so long without talking to certain people how it seems to get harder and harder to reestablish those connections? And sometimes you never really do. Often though, it just takes getting past a few awkward exchanges — Hey, so how’ve you been? Are you still with so-and so? Still working at such-and such? — and then it’s like no time has passed at all.

Well, my friend, how about we just skip all the awkward catching up and ditch the many (however valid, but in the end irrelevant) excuses and cut to the chase … I’M BACK… and oh, have I been busy.

So, I spent much of this past summer finishing the third book in my Evelyn Hernandez series. Well, this fall I signed the publishing contract with Evernight Teen and I have a projected release date of January 2020. It will be titled EVELYN ILLUSTRATED and it picks up very close to where book two left off. Here’s the official blurb:

Around school, Evelyn Hernandez is known as the Revenge Artist, or la bruja, the witch. She’s the girl who out-bullied her bullies. The one with the long dark hair and blunt cut bangs who only wears dresses and is forever drawing in her mysterious black book. People say she can help you with your own bully problems … for a price.

Evelyn is content to ignore the gossip. Let people think what they want. She won’t be a thug for hire. But when a little girl is found running down the middle of the street late at night in only her nightgown, the police enlist Evelyn to sketch a mugshot of the child’s suspected abductor.

What happens next sends Evelyn into a downward spiral of self-doubt. She makes bad things happen by drawing them, but does it always have to be this way? Can she use her abilities to create and not destroy? Can she be a voice for the voiceless without losing herself in the process?

Without giving too much away, I can tell you Evelyn has a chance to really evolve as both a hero and a friend in this third story. In book one, The Revenge Artist, as a victim of bullying, her ability to make bad things happen by drawing them empowers her, sure, but does it make her a better person? And in book two, The Dream Diaries, when she tries to help other victims of bullying, avoiding her abilities only leads her to new and darker discoveries that actually endanger the lives of the people she is trying to help.

In book three, once again, the hero inside of her refuses to remain silent. Her instinct to protect an innocent and defenseless child leads her to fully embrace her dark talents, and when she does the results are immediate and irrevocable. The question all along, it seems, is whether her gifts, even when used for good, are still not more of a curse than a blessing. Can Evelyn separate her artistic talents from her artistic powers? Is there a difference between the two? And should she even try?

Besides all the superhero soul-searching, the book has plenty of other surprises. There are several new characters (some friends, some enemies) as well as a familiar ghost (of sorts) from the past. There’s more art, more literature, more violence, more magic, and I even manage to squeeze in a pep-rally, a swim meet, and a school dance!

Can't wait to share it with you!

All my best,

Philip Hoy