Characters

My son's young personality was pretty much set before he ever met the man who would become his stepfather, so I'm constantly amazed at how alike they are.  They fall into these patterns...for instance, they love to communicate while apart, which is most of the year since the boyo lives with his dad in a distant state during school.  Then they spend the summer bumping heads, so much alike that living together makes them batty.  Now I know what my relationship with my dad must have looked like from the outside.

I call my daughter "My Little Demon."  She's a planet sized ball of willful energy squished into a skinny six-year-old package.  Even when she's being good, she's pushing.  She's completely her own person, yet shares a lot of traits with her brother that, I'm told often, were not inherited from her father.

My mind holds all these little facts, like any parent's, about my kids with no effort at all.  I don't have to think hard to recall that, while the Wee One (my girl's other nickname) likes tomato slices and loves fried pickles, the Boo Man (a name he's outgrown, but I haven't, and that serves well enough to not spread his identity around the internet) hates tomatoes and thinks fried pickles are the grossest things he's heard of that don't come from an animal.  I know their strengths and weaknesses, the music they like, the shows they are likely to watch...

It's like that with my characters, too.  Or, rather, it's like that with the protagonists.  I haven't written out what Quinn did for his tenth birthday, but I know him well enough to guess (can't really be wrong since I did make him up, but you know what I mean).  I haven't taken the time to figure out Wade's favorite food, but just thinking the question, I know immediately that this chick is meat eater. The spicier, the better.

My antagonists, on the other hand, tend to be closed books to me.

Stories usually come to me from the character; some voice that isn't mine will seem to speak to me, or a physical/psychological quirk will stick in my head and I'll end up building a person around it.  Then I'll discover what story they belong to.  Unfortunately, that often leaves me with "insert bad guy here", with which I create a story that's never fully cooked.

Realizing that is a good thing in a G.I. Joe sort of "knowing is half the battle" way.  But even when I was a  kid, I always responded to that with, "Yeah, but it's the easy half."  Figuring that out didn't mean that I could fix it.  Trying to redo my villains following the hero template just made me feel bad for them; I couldn't help but want to write kinder, gentler versions....

I may have gotten the reality check that I've needed during last weekend's drunken celebrations.

Long story short, the liquor flowed and conversations turned to places they might not go while everyone is sober.  I learned that my ex had told a nasty little lie about me, and to my family no less.  The truth is simple yet complicated, and illustrates the character flaws of each of us.  The narrative he created manages to paint him both as victim and hero, and makes me a bad, bad person.

In a life that I've gone through great pains to make drama free, he became my villain with that stupid, selfish act.

As a woman, I was furious.  As a writer, something clicked.

Here's where my thinking gets convoluted, but if you've followed me this far, hold on!  When I was a kid, my game of choice was D&D {Dungeons & Dragons Core Rulebook Set (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying, Three Book Slipcased Set)} with it's character alignments that dictated behavior.  Lawful good characters were basically the white knights with good intentions.  Lawful evil finds it's modern equivalent in the corrupt district attorney, following the law, but happily putting it to bad ends for a profit.  And as good opposed evil, lawful personalities found their opposite in chaotic alignments.  Chaotic evil characters were the baddest of the bad with no regard for anything but their own desires.  Think serial killer, but not Dexter (Dexter: The First Season) since he does have a code--a sense of being more lawful evil--to live by.

I was once invited to a different game that I, alas, never became too familiar with.  But it did introduced to a different way of viewing alignments; a system not so much of good vs. evil, but varying degrees of selfishness.  I hadn't thought about that for years.  Decades.  Til my ex's lie was exposed.

Let's use him to build a better bad guy!

He's a regular guy.  He's got his good qualities and bad.  Yeah, he did plenty to contribute to the break up of our marriage, but that's enough water under the bridge that, after a few days' of deliberation, I accepted his Facebook friend request.  The fact that he also friended my dad and brothers is creepy, but no biggy.  The lie he told makes him an asshat, but not the biggest in the world.  Not much of a bad guy in real life.  But fictionally, those things are just the start.

Maybe he plays the part of the old-lover-turned-good-friend so well that, when little things start to go wrong in our heroine's life, she thinks it's all a coincidence.  One small, self-serving act that he got away with leads to another; he's sure that he's right all the while, never seeing the has crossed the line until the climatic end.  It can be all about recovering his lost love--psychological thriller; romance if his misdeeds are the obstacle between her and her new hero.  Maybe befriending her was just a means to get to a family member--mystery or mainstream.  Or maybe there's a supernatural element behind his selfishness--horror, urban fantasy.

OK, so the genre stuff is, perhaps, a red herring.  The nut that I needed to crack was that I start at the end, with them filling in the space of evil; knowing how they get to that point might breath new life into my antagonists.

No matter what I do, Friday keeps coming

Soon, school will begin again.  I'll need to get up around the time that's been passing as a bed time for me, and the whole cycle of not-sleep-enough, get up, get the kid ready for school, somehow manage to get myself ready for school, come home study/cook/find time to write then not-sleep-enough will begin on Monday.  I will join all the others who breathe a sigh of relief on hump day and eventually get to thank God it's Friday.

But for now, whether I settle onto the blog window or not, Friday means I'm looking at my writing productivity and lack of it.

....And, like now, sometimes that means I quickly do something else until Saturday.

That's not true, really.  It's not that I go into avoidance mode, it's that I get stuck in what I *have* to do--and how silly is that when I don't have to post here at all?  I don't have a boss who will pay me or not depending on what I produce.  Can't tell you how much I appreciate my recurring readers, but I don't think your weeks are incomplete until you check out my latest babble on reading and/or writing.

Theoretically, I could write about anything (hopefully, but hell, not necessarily within the scope of the blog).  Yet, I don't.  I think "I have to get this down" or "I've gotta tell them this" and "ugh, I haven't mentioned that project in a long time..."

And since I don't give a crap about any of that at the time, I go on to read someone else's blog(s) and watch a season of La Femme Nikita, or something.

My writing is like that, too.  The Hidden (generally known as Quinn's story to all you lovelies who have read chapters), might end up really being my first published novel....or it'll be the one in the bottom drawer forever (it doesn't suck, but it's got a fatal flaw that I may or may not be able to fix).  My need to have it ready for the world and sent out is a good one.  No one ever got published by leaving a work unrevised on her hard drive. But being unable to fix that flaw and unwilling to move on means nothing gets done.

Solution?  Do something.

Not just any something, since for me, that can mean playing three hours worth of Plants Vs. Zombies. But if I'd written down all the ideas that have come at any given time while I wasn't blogging, I'd have enough to post for the next two months.  While I was running around like a nut before my MiL came, I (in the true spirit of procrastination--in this case doing something productive to get out of doing something else productive) started two stories, each in a (slightly) different genre.

My new trick will be to build on that.  The next time I've got the kid in bed with hours to go before the spouse expects attention, and I'm NOT revising The Hidden,  I'll be writing something else.  Anything else, so long as  it's meant to be shared..no, sold.  I have a funny resistance come up when writing that, which tells me that I need to call on my inner Harlan Ellison*.

I am, have always been, a storyteller.  This is a truth of my being whether I ever make a living at it or not.  It's like being right handed; it just...is.  That gets all mixed up when the notion of money comes into play.  "You should be focusing on the work, the craft, your ability to entertain and, in the right circumstances to enlighten" meets "What?  Are you doing this for the money now?  If it's about money, you should just quit!"

Bullshit.  Yeah, the initial work needs to be for me, for the fun of a good story and the other joys I get from writing.  But if I *can* succeed at it, I *deserve* to be paid for my work, just like a builder or doctor.  Too many of us artsy types let ourselves believe that our work is worth less.  I'm officially taking myself out of that trap.

So...If three hours are scheduled to write fiction in hopes of a sale, then that's what's going to happen for three hours.  No blogging, gaming, or whatever instead.  If it's time to blog, then I'm blogging.  No fixating on blogging something I don't want to be bothered with because I got it stuck in my head that I HAVE post about that.  Got it?  Good.

*Ellison is famous for a lot of great spec fic writing, infamous for a couple of minor scandals that I don't currently care to seek out and link to, but perhaps best well known to me (besides for Deathbird Stories) for being out and loud about getting paid as a writer.

Links! Some yah gotta get before they're gone!

"The law isn’t about justice, Malcolm. It’s about the law."  ~Anita Blake


If you've been thinking about checking out Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series (Smart Pop), the Melissa Tatum article on Anita and the law is available for free reading just until Tuesday the 17.


Great Thea Gilmore video.  Even if the music style isn't to your taste, take a few minutes to imagine along.


Are you a U.S. or Canadian citizen with a young adult novel that's done or will be between October 1st and December 31st?  If it's not under consideration from other publishers or agents, you might want to send it to the Delacorte Press Contest for a First Young Adult Novel  Makes me wish I'd paid more attention to WriteOnCon.


I'd forgotten around Heinlein's business rules:
1) You must write.
2) You must finish what you write.
3) You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.
4) You must mail your work to someone who can buy it.
5) You must keep the work in the mail until someone buys it.


I just found them again at Dean Wesley Smith's Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.  There's a lot more that I'm going to check out in there before bed.  Take a look!


ETA: Something weird has happened to the formatting so the links look like regular text (of course this happens in a post all about links, right?).  Wave your mouse on other the whole thing, or the bits that are likely to be links.

Friday on Facebook, or at least the fun parts.

If you really know me, there are some things that you are aware of.
1. I'm not a social creature.
2. Time only has real meaning to me when you are interrupting mine.
3. I'm a lousy housekeeper.

These factors have me running around today in a haze of OMG, my mother in law is coming!  I can't stand yet another party right now, so what are we going to do for the Wee One's birthday?  Crap!  It's the 30th, and I haven't done any of my critiques for the writer's group!  Oh my friggin' gaaaaaawd, my mother in law is COMING HERE!!!


With that playing on loop in my mind, I came up from the basement, put away some things that I purposely placed in my computer chair to force myself to not leave them where they should not have been, and thought: "I watched reruns of The Vampire Diaries and Moonlight last night, so it must be Friday again."

Ugh.  Friday again, and I haven't done the research for the post that would cover not only Kelley Armstrong's books, but also what tidbits I could pick up from her on writing and the industry without reproducing the major posts on plotting and etc. she's put up for the writing members of her site (cuz she rocks like that).

Having skipped the last Friday post, I felt like I had to produce something.  I thought, "Hey, I can scan Facebook for all the author news that people not on FB--or who are on but not following a lot of authors--might not know.

Ah, the best laid plans....I believe I mentioned that I'd finally given in to FB and followed blogger Tez and Kelley Armstrong over to the site, only to be "friended" by a bunch of authors who, either assumed I had to be good people if I hung with them...or who at least thought maybe I'd buy their books.  Some of the others from the writing group friended me and introduced me to those obnoxious FB games that we all complain about when we're not playing them.  To advance in those games, you often need a large number of fellow players, so I found myself adding hundreds of people that I don't actually know to my friend's feed.  To be able to keep up with those I do know, I created a filter for friends and authors...

......I've got dozens of authors in that filter, but, I realized as I went searching for updates to post, there are also tens of second cousins twice removed and scores of people from my high school....

And then, the author posts are sorted out, they aren't all or even mostly about writing.  Do you really want to know that Devon Monk (Magic to the Bone (Allie Beckstrom) ) wrote: Great. Mutant spider's on the loose on my desk. Sprayed it w/bleach, didn't faze it. Think it flipped me off as it skittered under computer. 


Yeah, so do I!  Maybe it's feeling like your favorite authors are accessible, or the joy of glimpsing the person behind the words, but I enjoy the status updates I get daily on Facebook and when I remember to log in to Twitter.  So let's have some fun!

Gerrie Ferris-Finger (The End Game: A Mystery) linked to The E-books Article Drinking Game.  In my defense, I was also sick of the articles, but had to add my two scents when I got an e-reader of my very own.

Mark Henry (Happy Hour of the Damned) turned friends and fans on to funnies.

RG Alexander did a cyber Snoopy dance over a pic of her (?) new release shelved early at a certain Borders.     It's much like these other covers....    that are all primed and ready for me to put up, so you get the idea. I'm going to stop scanning updates because I feel a rant building.  I mean, why aren't more covers like this?  Not that I need all my books to be stamped with muscular men....one or two will do nicely.  But if they're going to keep telling us that Urban Fantasy is a woman's genre, what's without all the female body parts on the cover?  I'm rereading Dime Store Magic (Women of the Otherworld), which now has a nifty new cover.  But I'm reading the original:
 What the hell?  Not only does the leg not make the book more appealing, but if you read just a chapter or two, you know that sure as hell isn't the narrator's leg!  Poor Paige, replaced by some skinny witch.  I'm not going to make the post too image heavy, but the urge is to show the sea of midriff and tramp stamps, broken up by the occasional over sized breasts or sexy thigh.

Humphf.  Rather than talk about the mixed messages of kick-ass heroines that have to look like sex kittens (even when they don't), I'm going to head over to R.G. Alexander's webpage to try and figure out if any of the paranormal romances come close enough to urban fantasy...or look sexy enough to keep me distracted from the fact that my mother in law is coming!

Bad analogy, good idea

Two Christmases ago, the regular Spades players in my generation of family taught me to play.  We've pulled out a deck of cards at most social gatherings, and until recently, my team has always won.  Sure, my teammate is always more experienced than I am, but I make dumb mistakes.  Not to mention that I'll play with others and still cream whomever had won with me.  I've beaten people in my generation who have been playing for at least a decade, and my parents generation who started playing a good decade before I was born.  Until two weeks ago, I was undefeated, with little skill and nothing to explain it but beginners luck.

I thought of that the other day when agent Nathan Bransford asked why it's so hard to tell if our writing is good.  Writing to me, is like that in a way.  I've talked to a lot of creative people who are natural storytellers, but when you talk about writing, they're so sure they can't because their grammar sucks or they can't spell to save their lives.  And others have gotten beyond that and learned the grammar, embraced word processing with spell check, but hold on to the "I can't" mentality that keeps them from finishing or sending out their work.  (I may resemble that.)  On the other hand, I've searched my soul for diplomatic critiques and some sort of honest encouragement for people--sure that they're the next big thing in fiction--whose work makes me think, "Dude, really?  There's a story in this mass of words and semi-colons?"

OK, written out like that, the analogy is ridiculously thin...

But people from either group can fill in for me, never really sure of strategy, forgetting to count the cards that came before, but applying themselves and kicking ass.  We don't know if we're good...or bad...because there's no real measure.  We can't count adjectives like spades (I got on this metaphor and I'm gonna ride it til the wheels fall off, damn it!) and declare that we're "trump tight."  So some of us sit on creative goldmines sure that no one will like our work while others come up with the lamest excuse for a story and know we'll be the next big thing.

I think we should take a page for the (in their own minds) writing superstars.  They finish their stories and send them out.  So what if an agent or editor doesn't like their work?  The next one will.  Since this is advice that I'm really force feeding myself, sure there will be lots of rejection, but the superstars are on to something. When the boy I feel in love with in college dumped me for a so-called friend because she put out, that was rejection.  I lived through it.  A few dozen, "sorry, this isn't for me" notes could hardly compare.

Breaking the Block

A week ago Thursday, I decided that the Friday-post-that-never-was should start with: "A year from now, I'm going to write a post filled with all the good advice that I don't know to use now."

Thinking of that, I realized how much advice I've taken in over the years.  And that advice you don't take isn't particularly helpful...

Everything, from seeing a shot of Vin Diesel as I channel surfed to waking up with the chorus of a once heard song in my head, has been giving me ideas for characters and setting.  Meanwhile, the collaboration was staring at me with accusing eyes and a stagnant word count.  I told myself to focus...and ended up playing a lot of Plants Vs. Zombies and Bejeweled. 

Growing desperate, I desperate, I dusted off the my copy of The Artist's Way and started to do an exercise that had given me success in the past.  It's a long term recovery sort of thing, so I also started to follow my own advice.  "Just one line."  I had a few days in a row where that's as far as I got on my little section of story.  Then someone had posted what I'd been ignoring: use the ideas that you have.  Instead of blocking out the inspiration that was coming to me and sitting on the story that was blocked, I wrote the ideas down.

It wasn't exactly a floodgate, but when I went to write "just one line" that afternoon, I was able to write to the end of the chapter.

Somewhere in there, you know, if you happen to be stuck, is my advice to you.

Books have gender? (Or 'Watch An Stick Her Foot in Her Mouth')

I was looking up a certain interview to respond to the wonderful gentleman from Falcata Times when I stumbled upon Angry Chicks in Leather by Lilith Saintcrow.  

What defines urban fantasy?

That's simple, you might say. Chicks kicking ass. Well, leather-clad chicks kicking ass. Leather-clad chicks kicking ass in an urban environment where some form of "magic" is part of the world. There. That’s about it.

The sound you just heard was the grinding of my teeth.  It's just the old resistance; I grew up with the old UF that was really fantasy set in a modern, urban setting.  It was bad enough when any urban setting got lumped regardless of time period (cuz no high fantasy has been set within a city?), and worse still when paranormal action adventures, not actually having a genre of their own with that title, became UF, but leather clad chicks kicking ass...Basically none of the original UF is UF.  Fine for De Lint...he's long called his work "mythic fiction" rather than urban fantasy, but what about the...others who wouldn't give a damn to know that I'm defending their honor?  On to what really got me to post...

But that's not all there is to it.

Urban fantasy, they tell me, is "hot" right now. Paranormal romance (vampire/werewolf/something girl meets vampire/werewolf/something guy, wackiness or danger ensues, happy ending happens) is just as hot, but the "romance" tag keeps it from being literature. The "fantasy" tag keeps urban fantasy from being classified as Serious Literature as well.

It reminds me of Tom's Glossary of Book Publishing, where LITERATURE is "Designation applied to titles judged unsaleable", and MAINSTREAM FICTION is "The pretense that there is a group of readers who can be reached through writing that is sufficiently unspecific as to exclude no one". There's just one thing lacking from this set of definitions--the fact that Literature and Mainstream Fiction are seen as highbrow.

They're genres you don't have to act ashamed of writing in. But romance or urban fantasy? You might as well start embroidering your own scarlet letter, honey.

Paranormal romance is considered lowbrow and trashy because it's female. Despite the fact that it's a multibillion-dollar business (and every dollar a woman shells out for it costs more because let's face it, we earn a lot less), it's still that pink-jacketed crap for bored housewives. Tom Clancy is supposed to be Real and Hard-Hitting, even if his "novels" are thinly-veiled technical manuals. Nora Roberts is supposedly less Real because she writes about feeeeeeelings. While we could debate the relative merits of Clancy vs. La Nora all day--and not agree, mind you, because Roberts is just plain the better writer--the fact remains that Clancy has a better shot at being considered "serious" because his is MAN'S FICTION.

Smell that testosterone, baby.

Urban fantasy is mostly women's fiction too. (Yes, I know there are significant exceptions, like Jim Butcher, Simon Green, and Charles de Lint. We'll get to that.) There's a lot of crossover between paranormal romance and urban fantasy. I like to say that UF is PR without the HEA (that's Happily Ever After, for those just joining us.)

I know that's a really long block of text to quote, but I really don't want to chop it up and remove context for anyone who chooses not to open the link (which, of course, you should do). Let's ignore my own Clancy vs. Roberts opinion.  We can even ignore that I nearly fractured my jaw grinding my teeth on "UF is PR without the HEA."  (What. The. F...no, I said I'll ignore and I'll genuinely pretend to.)  The women's fiction bit hits the same "dude, what?!" bell with me as "no one reads any more" and "men don't read."


No one reads any more.  All the bookstores we city dwellers pass all the time, and Amazon plus all the lesser known online bookstores are entirely products of our imagination.  If no one reads, no one buys books, so there are no bookstores.  (Of course, this has nothing to do with what Saintcrow wrote.  In fact, my rant at her text is nothing that changes my adoration for her work. Like I said, though, it all rings the same bell.)


Men don't read.  Those genres aimed specifically at men as well as those rumored to (like sci-fi) are place holders in the imaginary stores that don't exist because no one reads.


Those false facts have bugged me for a long time.  I'd hear--or worse, read--someone going on about nobody reading and want to shake the silliness out of them.  Now, lots of people don't read (er, beyond what's necessary to function).  I don't understand these folks, but they exist.  And while Jason Pinter wrote a really good article on why men don't read, if the actual words were true, how could there women's lit?  Wouldn't it just be...lit?


Of course Lili's (it's how she refers to herself, it's how I think about her...'til I'm disagreeing and distance myself in case she reads it and gets annoyed) statement that urban fantasy is mostly women's fiction isn't as senseless.  But it is...disempowering.  


On the one hand, OK, a lot of it is written by women and/or  marketed to women, so what else would you call it?  On the other hand...WTF?  I've written and deleted the following, rewriting it differently, many times over.  I think I can divide it into two more hands...


1. There is an unfixable wrong in naming romance women's fiction.  I come from a speculative fiction background, as do many of the woman who write UF rather than PR, and the fans who read one over the other.  We have tits and ovaries.  We're demonstrably as female as the women who read PR interchangeably with UF or who prefer all manner of romance, but a good amount of us hate that stuff.  Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to start calling romance "fiction for a large group of women and a handful of men."  It's irreparably labeled as it is.


2. A lot of men like UF and other spec. fic. with female leads.  It's anecdotal, but I want to use one of my brothers as an example.  He was, for a long time, a scary dude.  I'm not going to put all his business out there, but ...yeah, scary dude fits.  He turned his life around and followed in our dad's footsteps to become a big, burly fire fighter.  He is, in short, one of the alpha males that most romances require.  Hanging out at my place, he glanced at a certain book, and later couldn't get it out of his mind.  He had to read it, then he had to have the whole series.  With no one telling him it was women's fiction, his testosterone had no need to keep him in his usual non-fiction mode.  


Why shouldn't he?  Great characters, fantastic action, and being UF rather than PR, there were deep and complicated relationships beyond the romantic ones.  


Aaaand (since this really isn't about Lilith's post so much as my angst each time I see these labels; she just happened to write in a way that allowed me to examine the reaction), does money from men have cooties?  On the off chance that my fiction doesn't suck and I get over the issues that keep me from sending it out, could we please not convince men that the genre isn't for them until after I get my royalties?  I'm just saying.

Part of what makes this so fascinating to me is the fact that female UF protagonists are almost without exception extraordinarily tough, and that violence is acceptable for them to use. This is a huge revolution in the type of stories our culture tells itself. Violence in our culture is a man's game...

Bat Girl.  Rogue.  Storm.  Marvel Girl (though I've always thought that such an unfortunate name).  Firestar.  They and countless other comic heroines who don't make my list because they aren't mostly good (like Cat Woman) or are fall to late in my awareness 'cause I'm thinking pre-UF (Witchblade)  or because the list is long enough (Scarlet Witch, et all)... all tough females for whom violence is acceptable for them to use.  All from a "classically male" genre. 


It's not that I think there is no room here to talk about the marginalization of women or that I don't think that's still a very real thing in this day and age.


But.


Every genre sucks.  The day I moved beyond See Spot Run, I dove into spec. fic., augmented by the occasional good mystery, and that has barely changed in the decades since.  It's how I'm wired.  That same wiring gives me a huge distaste for all non-paranormal romance and most mainstream.  All spec. fic. lovers have had to deal with highbrow lit. fic. lovers lecturing about the useless escapism of their genre, and none of us like lit. fic. either.  And while we make obnoxious comments about one another's genres, those who prefer non-fiction think we're all filling our minds with junk.  


Hmmm...maybe it's time we all stop alienating one another and focus those who can't appreciate a well written fiction of any type.