Guest post written by author Maxine Kaplan
Maxine Kaplan was born in Washington, DC. She and her twin sister spent their early childhoods trotting behind their journalist parents as they traveled around the world, eventually settling in Brooklyn, NY. Maxine graduated from Oberlin College in 2007. Following a long stint in the world of publishing, she has worked as a private investigator since 2009. She lives in her adopted hometown of Brooklyn, NY, with her dimwitted, but soulful cat. Her first novel The Accidental Bad Girl received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and will be available in paperback January 5, 2021. Her sophomore novel, Wench, is coming in January 19, 2021. Follow Maxine on Twitter @MaxineGKaplan
When I was a teenager, I was a compulsive fantasist. Don’t get me wrong, I still love fantasy; but by the time I was 13, I was imagining myself into fantasy worlds at a professional, even Olympic level. I barely even considered what I was doing imagining; what was happening in my head, all day, almost every day, was more akin to laying out a very type A travel itinerary than it was to daydreaming. Something in me was convinced that, if I could just construct the right scenario, that I could will it into being.
Spoiler alert: That never happened. But what did happen was that, in order to keep up with the frantic demand for new worlds in my head, I read a ton of fantasy. And I was aching to find myself, in any of these worlds—worlds that felt like coming home.
I hunted through countless beautiful clerics, depressed elves, morally questionable mages, fierce warriors, but I never found anyone I could believe could be me. They were all too fantastically athletic, frighteningly beautiful, epically gifted, or chosen in their blood. I was none of those things.
Every good fantasy quest begins in a tavern, and every tavern has a serving wench. Join me in a thought experiment: close your eyes and picture a tavern wench.
Open them. I’m going to bet that most of you pictured the exact same person. You pictured a curvaceous girl in a low-cut top. She’s sassy, isn’t she? Competent? She’s even likable, but really, she’s just there to pour drinks to the people who actually matter to the story.
This girl is in the background of so much fantasy. She is replicated across dozens of fantasy taverns, in hundreds of worlds. She is generic, easily replicable, and therefore disposable.
And then, once—just once—I found a tavern wench with dialogue. She was clever, funny, and generous. The heroes liked her. Even without magical powers or noble birth, she was one of the gang. She was the only one I could imagine actually being, without having to fundamentally change everything about myself.
And then she disappeared. Apparently, the author had concluded that she had nothing of value to contribute to an adventure.
The message I received in my feverish reading and daydreaming was that, in order to matter to a story, I needed to be special; that in order to have an adventure, I needed to be, somehow, chosen.
But what if I could be a force in the world without being a warrior or a mage or a princess? What if I could go on a quest just as myself; a limited, ambivalent, disgruntled, flesh-and-blood person, with some ordinary real-world talents, and even more ordinary real-world problems?
And what happens to a fantasy world when someone who is just ordinary has an agenda that the powers that be are forced to take seriously? What does it look like when that person starts to effect change?
These were the questions that fascinated me into writing Wench. I wrote the book I always wanted to read: Wench sends Tanya, a tavern wench pro exemplar, on a quest to reclaim her tavern from the Queen.
Tanya isn’t special. She doesn’t have a destiny.
But she makes one.
