Continuing my theme of strong female characters in Fantasy, here is the heroine of A College of Magics, Faris Nallaneen. Faris is Duchess of Gallanon, next in line to inherit, but under age so in ward to her uncle, who has paid well for her to attend Greenlaw College to study magic – and assigns a bodyguard to keep her there, out of way of his schemes. She doesn’t want to go to school but is intrigued by her admissions interview, so stays. At first, Faris is skeptical about the magic but is forced to abandon her skepticism when she has to rescue her bodyguard – who has been turned into a cat – and inadvertently uses magic herself. Before she can learn more, her uncle demands she abandon her studies and return to Gallanon and the marriage he has arranged for her. Instead of returning immediately, she and the bodyguard – who has transferred his loyalty to her and become more than a bodyguard – stop in Paris, where she learns that she has a fate beyond Gallanon.

This story is comprised of three parts: Faris’s time at school, where she learns about friendship; her time in Paris, where she learns about her destiny; and what happens when she returns to Gallanon. I was reading a review of the book this morning, and the reviewer liked the book but didn’t like the ending. However the ending is the one part of this book that stuck with me because, to stabilize the magic that keeps the world in balance, Faris sacrifices everything she has, including her identity, keeping only her responsibility to the magic.

When you are trying to generate change, I often advise inviting change by priming the pump with a little change in a different area by, for example, walking a different route to work or wearing a color you don’t usually wear. I can’t tell you the mechanics of why it works but it does work.

The reason I mention this is because we often think about change as gaining something – as Faris changes throughout this book, she gains knowledge, she gains friends, she gains insight, she gains responsibility, and she finds love – but sometimes it’s about giving something up. To be successful with a promotion, for example, you have to give up what made you great at your previous position; to be successful when you get married, you have to give up aspects of your independence. Faris gives up everything and I sometimes find myself wanting to prime the pump of change by giving up things that are important to me.

Somewhere I still have a copy of a SFF magazine from decades ago that featured a swashbuckling woman, crouched by a fire, loosely holding her bow and arrow, her eyes haunted by memory. Something about this cover resonated with me; and I wrote a short story about an adventurer who needed to give up her role as a warrior – and all the memories of the horrors she had witnessed and performed in battle – to return to civilian life. One by one, she feeds her clothes, weapons, and memories into the fire, until there is nothing left but her, standing unclothed in the smoke from her fire. Only when the smoke from her ceremony clears can she return to her family and accept a new role in her community.

Faris and my woman warrior force the unfreezing process by giving up all of their possessions and their experiences, their pride and their personalities. But this is a brute-force method for generating change and isn’t always successful. When my mother died, I had limited time to get the house on the market and sold, and emptied the entire place and got it on the market within 2 weeks. I’m glad I did so – otherwise it would have sat, uninhabited, unsold, and full of the smell of dog until the following summer. However, it was also my way of avoiding the long and interminable state of slushy change which mourning is, where one thing has ended and the next has not begun. It’s a scary place to be because you don’t know, with any certainty, what the end-state will be. And I don’t like uncertainty.

I don’t advise this approach. Faris didn’t have a choice – she had to save the world – but the rest of us should be more temperate in our approach to change, and just wear a different-colored shirt.