Vemödalen
a vocab word that’s a source of endless frustration for me.
To literally this current day.
~
I was trying to find a long compound German word that means ‘the frustration that comes from all your great creative ideas being published and successful by other people first, even though you had the idea first.’
There’s got to be one, I’m sure—any German speakers out there, step up and let me know. Anyway. I couldn’t find that specifically, but what I did find was a fresh vocab word that stemmed from a couple Swedish sources, meaning:
The fear that originality is no longer possible.
Which is not *exactly* the meaning I’m looking for, but close enough. A second choice would be Gluckschmerz, which is sort of an opposite of Schadenfreude: it means ‘pain at someone else’s success.’ But I feel like the ‘originality’ part of Vemödalen’s definition is why I prefer this word to echo the sentiment I’m looking for. So, Vemödalen it is.
Oh, the Irony
Guess where I found this cool and interesting word, along with a lovely and poetic short piece of nonfiction prose underneath it, to explain its meaning?
It’s in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, a recent book that I picked up out of curiosity. What’s it about? Well, it’s a series of new and unusual words to denote different emotions. Kenopsia is one of them. What else?
It’s a NYT bestseller, for one thing. It started as a blog, before it blew up and morphed bigger on YouTube. John Green gave it a favorable nod. It gained wider notice and got picked up by a Big 5 publisher from there. Because of course it did.
Now, my vocab word Fridays here on Zuko’s Musings don’t really seem all that special anymore, do they?
At least I know this sort of thing is popular with publishers and readers. Or can be. Or is already, for this other dude. Sigh.
But you guys. This is not unusual in my literary life. This happens to me all. The. Time. I have talked about this phenomenon before in my re-annotated Popination about The Trident Café, but let’s look at some of the uncanny details which make me feel such potent vemödalen, shall we?
Exhibit A: Assassin’s Creed
Back in grad school, some of my favorite lectures I ever experienced were those that Peter Lamborn Wilson delivered on the history and mythology of the Hashisheen. Lamborn Wilson was better known as revolutionary leftist writer Hakim Bey, and I enjoyed reading his book T.A.Z. (which I appropriately stole from the bookstore) as much as his real-name-penned academic work on renegades and pirates. He also did a really cool fun lecture on symbolism which culminated in an analysis of the dollar bill. That one was super popular among the students. But I had never heard much of the hashisheen myth before his lecture, and I was enthralled.
They have a compelling, fascinating history, which he was researching for his next project, which was being paired with a music group from the country of origin of his studies. I was fascinated with them for two reasons: 1) I was in ninja martial arts training at the time; 2) I was obsessed with phenomenal video game series Thief, and even experimented in writing about it and doing some novelisations of the stories, etc. The hashisheen were very ninja-adjacent: they followed their charismatic leader with a dark devotion, ceremonially smoked weed, were able to disappear and become one with the shadows. Their leaping off of the tops of buildings at their leader’s command was a central part of their ninja-esque mythology; they were magical warriors and unstoppable assassins (in fact the word ‘hashisheen’ is the basis for our ‘assassin’). I loved the myths surrounding them and I loved the idea of them. They were ninja-cool, Thief-cool.
In my grad school notebook during one of Lamborn Wilson’s Hashisheen lectures, I wrote down the following: ‘cool idea: Thief-like immersive videogame but centered around the hashisheen.’ I wrote this note by hand in my notebook in the summer of 2000.
In 2007, the first Assassin’s Creed game was released.
I couldn’t believe it: Mythic assassins and their magic-seeming leaping off of buildings? A shadowy underground society of ninjalike killers who are on the right side of justice, if not the law? In this game, the bad guys were the Knights Templar of the establishment, a system of right-wing knighthood that Thief’s fictional Hammerites took a healthy swath of lore from. Everything about Assassin’s Creed was the same as my Thief/Hashisheen idea except for the DNA-memory sci fi aspect of it. The Assassin’s Creed series became my Thief replacement after those games stopped and I switched to console gaming, my game-worthy PC being too expensive to keep up with.
Exhibit B: El Cazador
At the end of my MFA experience, alongside my official poetry manuscript and thesis, I worked one on one with esteemed author Jenny Heath on my pirate novella. Actually a trilogy of longish short stories, this rollicking (and well- and happily researched) romp centered on two main characters: a lady pirate and a dashing red-bearded master thief who worked the salons in a fictional France equivalent. It was set in a fictional world that sucked much lore and backdrop from early-1700s Europe (and of course the 7 seas). Most of the over-arching and interlocking stories centered on my saucy pirate protagonist, with one story mostly from the ginger thief’s POV. Though it takes place in a fictional world with a couple weird unexplainable magic-adjacent events, it was at the same time meticulously researched and when I tell you that some of the funnest study I’ve ever done has been pirates, do believe me.
My inspirations for this work were as follows:
The movie Cutthroat Island. I unironically love this movie. I will be taking no questions at this time.
Old folktales about master thieves and rogue tricksters (I was writing my MFA thesis on The Trickster at this same time but I’ve always had a love for this mythical figure).
Somewhat, a YA book called Mara, Daughter of the Nile even though it takes place in Ancient Egypt.
All kinds of pirate research, including women like Grania O’Malley, Anne Bonny and Mary Reade.
When finished, I thought that maybe instead of a novel that’s too short, it would make a good comic series or graphic novel (the Crossgen series of multiverse comics was popular at the time), so I talked to a couple of my artist friends about helping me convert it, and even began morphing it into comic script form until they both flaked out on me. So I polished the prose instead and put it on a back burner to warm it. Just as the second artist bowed out of the project, though:
Enter El Cazador: a very popular (though short lived) series of comics, featuring a lady pirate and a red-headed thief first at odds and then romantically involved with each other. Sigh…
Exhibits C & D: Wizard Schools and Vampires
I was going to bring up vampires here, on account of my moody, sexy vampire horror/romance novelette based in Seattle didn’t get any kind of traction, and then a big vampire media boom happened. But said boom didn’t occur until several years later, and so it didn’t feel as much like an immediate thing I was doing, more like an organically developed trend, not right on the heels of mine. So I’ll mention it here, but I don’t really count it in my litany of ‘what the hell’ moments.
I had written my version of the mysterious and rather tortured vampire falling for a brilliant student, set in the gray spookiness of Seattle, because I wanted to do that story in a modern setting and to do it my way. I was inspired, of course, by the Anne Rice vamps, and though mine wasn’t quite as taut and queer as hers, it did get kind of delightfully meta, as my vamp wasn’t hot after a high school girl, but an adult art student, who researched vampires as a hobby, and whose brother was a sort of ghost-hunter-pseudoscientist. I had a fantastic scene where, after the woman discovers what he is, they have a conversation about vampire lore: what’s the folklore and what’s the reality, etc. This turned into a one-act play that was produced several years later in a 24-hr theatre festival in Boulder, and to be brutally honest, it was better than the sprawling and moody original of mine. But, sexy Seattle vamps and Twilight? Other than the timing, it’s sort of there.
But the real kicker was: my wizard school story.
Schools for magic-users weren’t popular back when I first found interest in the motif and started writing my own—this was in the early 90s, as I was writing a series in high school and early college surrounding a Chosen One character who’s escaping his Dark Lord father, and his love interest who’s a princess in hiding from rapists in a gnarly political situation. They meet at magic school and both work on their talents and become close. Raven symbolism, Deerskin vibes, and of course, the meeting of two young and extraordinary minds all played a part. A beloved Friar Lawrence type teacher figure named Feldspar is, perhaps, the thing I miss most about this early foray of mine into Fantasy construction.
Inspirations for my wizard school project included:
Roke from Wizard of Earthsea, of course. The O.G. as far as I’m concerned.
Mary Stewart’s Merlin series was a particular obsession of mine at the time, too—I appreciate her treatment of Merlin’s magical ability as a combination of heredity and engineering knowledge, and his mysterious birth and background as more political than supernatural.
McKillip’s ridiculously intricate Riddlemaster of Hed was inspiring to a lesser degree, but I adored and admired two of her later works: The Book of Atrix Wolfe and Song For the Basilisk, much more. The Riddlemaster series was just incomprehensible, though intriguing to a certain degree.
My old childhood love of the Dragonriders of Pern series with their guilds and prentice halls, etc. surely found its way in there, as well.
But! I gave up on my wizard’s school story because it was too derivative and I just couldn’t fix it well enough to make it original.
So like, obviously THAT was a great idea, because the first Harry Potter book came out almost immediately after I’d given up. And it’s not like it’s one of the best selling book series ever written, nor is it shamelessly derivative. Great choice, Jenn. Awesome. Way to go. No notes.
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I am enjoying the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows very much, actually. It’s lovely. This is the thing that happens, though: with the exception of Harry Potter, all those bastards that did that thing that I thought of first, all did it really well when they did it. To this day, Assassin’s Creed is one of my favorite game series, and I’ve got the El Cazador omnibus right there on my shelf next to my pirate research books. It’s not like I begrudge good art being out in the world, it’s just… I mean. the Harry Potter thing in particular did make me have to laugh (albeit a bit bitterly) at the whole situation, though I’m honestly a little spooked by the specificity of the Assassin’s Creed thing. Like, what the hell.
How do I do this to myself? I’m obviously well attuned to the collective unconscious and even, dare I say, the zeitgeist. But I’m finding a similar thing is happening to me here on Substack—I finished my memoir last year and came here to build my audience into something good looking enough for an agent to find representable. I’ve been blogging for like, over a decade, too, but my Substack experience admittedly is better than that has ever been. But it also seems that I’ve gotten here just the tiniest bit too late. Too late to really explode here, too late to be discovered over the many many publications jostling for a view. If I’d only gotten here juuuuuust a little earlier…
All I can say is: if I find a NYT bestseller filled with personal essays that are also pub reviews, that’s the last straw. I’ll have to find a piano to bash my face into…