Vampires Rule

I recently read a novel with an unusual slant on a world ruled by vampires, DAY BOY, by Trent Jamieson. It takes place in a rather dreary post-apocalyptic world. The narrator is a teenage "day boy," a vampire's mortal servant. These vampires suffer from the movie-invented disability of helplessness during the sunlit hours, so they can't get along without human helpers. One thing I admire about this novel is the realistic treatment of predator-prey ratios. The narrator's small town harbors only about five "Masters" (vampires). While they don't normally kill their donors, they still exercise caution about expanding their own numbers.

It's listed on Goodreads here, with reviews, including mine:

Day Boy

Books and films about vampire-dominated worlds too often portray societies overrun by the bloodthirsty undead, with ordinary humans as a small, hunted remnant. There's no way that model would be sustainable unless the vampires can survive on animal blood and/or a reliable supply of bagged blood. For the latter, they would still need human victims to "donate" unless a synthetic substitute has been invented, as in the Sookie Stackhouse series and its TV adaptation, TRUE BLOOD. And even with the artificial blood supply, in that series the undead remain a minority.

S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy, beginning with A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, features a subspecies of Homo sapiens who combine the traits of vampires, werebeasts, and sorcerers, with the power to warp reality in their close vicinity as well as control human minds. They aspire to restore the prehistoric Empire of Shadow, when they openly treated the human majority as livestock and slaves. The vampire-shapeshifter species is a tiny minority of the total population, though, as apex predators should be. For instance, in the present the principal antagonist reigns over her own private village where she's the only resident Shadowspawn. Its human residents are well treated, a few supplying her with blood in regular rotation, while most serve her in other capacities or just keep the town running. The blood donors ("lucies") have to endure only one downside to their pampered lifestyle, their mistress's cheerfully sadistic personality.

A 1991 anthology, UNDER THE FANG, collects a variety of original stories on the theme of vampire-dominated societies, including a collaboration between Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas in which Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain and Charnas's Professor Weyland meet in unpleasant circumstances. You can find copies of the book here:

Under the Fang

Considering that vampires are typically envisioned as solitary predators, it seems likely that if they did take over the world, they wouldn't bother with the day-to-day business of ruling. They would probably control human officials who'd do the actual work, while the structures of society would function much as usual, aside from the obligation of catering to the needs of the vampire lords. As Stirling's evil Shadowspawn princess asks in A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, "Do I LOOK like a bureaucrat?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reviews 9: Sex, Politics and Heroism

Reviews 9:
Sex, Politics and Heroism 
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Heroism is a topic that fascinates me.  It is the core of the "character arc" technique that is so emphatically insisted upon by film and TV producers.

Heroism is just one possible manifestation of a "character arc" exactly as "romance" is just one manifestation of Relationship as a plot-driver.

These are all complex subjects with many "moving parts" so we've been discussing the components of Sex, Politics and Heroism as individual variables a writer can learn to handle, one at a time, as if they were in fact separate components of story.

We've done a series on Dialogue and on Character, as well as on Theme-Character Integration.  Here are some links to these prior discussions:

Dialogue
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/10/dialogue-parts-1-4-listed.html
which now lists 8 posts on dialogue

Character
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

Part 7 of Theme-Character Integration is followed by Strong Character Defined Part 2
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/08/strong-character-defined-part-2.html

This can get very abstract if you are trying to master a skill.  What goes on inside your head when a story first bursts into your mind is the obverse of what goes on inside your head when you READ a story written by someone else.

Encoding and Decoding are two processes which which have to have a common source (the code itself).  The code that story tellers have used since the beginning of language is very difficult to discern and to master because we learn it so very young -- maybe age 3 or 4. 

We learn to DECODE stories told to us, to enter the story, become the character, triumph over the bad guys and attain our goal. 

We learn how stories we love somehow reflect (but don't represent or replicate) our actual reality.  We learn the difference between fantasy and reality, usually without being able to articulate that difference (except perhaps as "that's ridiculous" or "you've been watching too many cop shows."

We can tell when someone isn't living in "reality" -- at least not the same reality we live in.  Their motives for action and assumptions behind decisions just don't match up with our own -- so they live in a fantasy world of their own. 

But ENCODING our own perception of reality into a story that others would be able to DECODE into their personal fantasy-realities is a hard-learned skill for most people.

True, some take to story-telling like a duckling takes to water.  But most professional writers have to learn how to reverse the story in their heads into something another person can decode.

Learning that common-code that we all use with such facility is difficult because most people will assert that no such code exists.  It is embedded deep beneath the level of mind where we keep our "culture."  It's unconscious.

Bottom line: that CODE itself is our ART.

It is at this level that we personalize our lives, our world, and our destiny. 

We share so much yet no two of us are alike.

You want to start an argument?  Bring up Politics -- especially this time of year.

Right now, we are seeing Sex, Politics and Heroism writ large all over the news, so it is a grand time to launch into a study of how our everyday reality relates to the art of fiction-writing. 

Code is a symbolic representation of something. In the case of fiction, the something we are encoding so others can enjoy decoding is THE NEWS.

Understanding the news as a form of entertainment, of fantasy, of a world that is not-here, not-mine, a world to enter via the symbolism of video news clips, you can encode those Events in such a way that your readers can decode them and experience delight at a sudden recognition of something they have seen in the news.

This makes reading a novel by you into a treasure hunt.

What journalists call "the narrative" is the tissue of connections among news items that may occur months apart to create another installment in a story.  Follow "the narrative" to find the deep motives, the cultural assumptions, behind the choices of what is "important" (a clue to the mystery) and what is not important.  Important installments advance the narrative, unfold the story, penetrate the mystery, and reveal that treasured diamond. 

This is true of TV News, Magazine news, blogger-news, and novels.

I have 3 authors to discuss today.  I've pointed you to these 3 many times in this blog. 

These are long-running series of novels.  When you notice an illustration of this "ripped from the headlines" technique in such a long-running series, you know that the series is successful, and can assess the viability of News Headlines as source material for themes, characters, and even plots. 

These 3 installments encode our USA election process, making pithy observations about politics, politicians, and qualities of character (especially heroic qualities that certain heroic women find irresistibly sexy) that are sparkling diamonds hidden deep in the code. 

The most political of these sex/heroism examples is Gini Koch's ALIEN COLLECTIVE



It is #9 in this series, released in May, with #10 due out in September 2014.
The ALIEN series straddles the line between Fantasy and Science Fiction where the Aliens (a huge variety of them) has powers usually attributed to Mages etc in Fantasy.

The series focuses on an Alien male, raised in a secret enclave on Earth, and a human female who become allies and then lovers while fighting for their lives and the existence of Earth's civilzation.  Somewhere in there, they marry and have a child, but alien science changes genetics, and the results are "unpredictable."

Meanwhile, the battle becomes public (amidst huge destruction), and the Aliens attain a kind of Diplomatic status within the USA.  By book 9, the aliens have a Representative in Congress -- and he is being pressed to run for Vice President, even though the Aliens still have a lot of secrets humans wouldn't like.

These novels are practically back-to-back battle scenes, combat scenes, and run-for-your-life scenes, all of which are generated by complex, mysterious, hidden enemies with convoluted conspiracies.  In other words, ripped from the headlines.

Read ALIEN COLLECTIVE during this current election. 

C. J. Cherryh is on Facebook and posts items about current politics, cultural choices, and moral dilemmas.  I KNOW she pays attention to the play of headlines, but digs deeper into the under-currents driving those headlines. 

She has distilled a wide variety of today's World Political Scene -- complete with factions within factions, personality driven "movements" and dynastic considerations fraught with tribal loyalties into the 15th novel in the FOREIGNER series (one of my all-time favorite C. J. Cherryh series.)




FOREIGNER is structured as a series of trilogies, and #15 thus finishes the 5th trilogy, setting up the action for yet another trilogy. It is one ongoing story about one particular character (Bren the translator) and all the humans and native-aliens and aliens-from-another-star that he tries to keep communicating smoothly.

The thematic material is woven from the idea that if we could just communicate, we wouldn't shoot each other so much, maybe. 

In this installment, Bren has to juggle a young alien's desire to have his human friends attend his alien birthday celebration and the adult alien and human political shifts in alliances.  This young alien boy is the son and heir of the ruler of the alien world, and among these aliens (the Atevi) politics is basically done by assassination.

As on Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover world, one must make public and legal declaration of intent to assassinate.  But among the Atevi, civilization rests on the Assassin's Guild and its integrity, for the Assassins both authorize assassinations of leaders and carry out both the legal judgement of guilt and the killing itself.

That is a lot of power for one organization, and it clearly wouldn't work well for humans.

Thing is, maybe because of human presence on the alien's world, the ancient method of trusting the Assassins Guild isn't working.

As with Gini Koch's intricate plots-within-plots, infiltrations, spies, turncoats, etc., the Atevi political world is shuddering under the impact of a traitor in a position of power within the Assassin's Guild.  The Guild is not supposed to have a political agenda.  This lone fellow has been using the Guild's unique power to ram through his personal, anti-human agenda for decades and it is now coming to light.

Hidden agendas "coming to light" (go read up on Saturn transiting the MC of a person's natal chart, and the various transits of Pluto) is a theme etched in high relief in both the ALIEN series and the FOREIGNER series. 

FOREIGNER has less sex, but it is a factor.  Both use procreation and inheretance more than simple sexual attraction to tell the larger story.  Ancestry (and royalty) matters in both these series.  That gives them a Fantasy flavor laced through the serious science.

Now we come to the 26th novel in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Historical Vampire epic, The Count Saint-Germain, titled NIGHT PILGRIMS



This one is set in 13th Century Egypt when Christian pilgrims sought holy spots in remote locations in hopes of healing miracles, or sometimes as penance assigned by clergy for spiritual wrong-doing (or sometimes political mus-calculations).

Yes, a historical vampire novel about political calculations. 

The Count travels with a group of such pilgrims.  It is a story of the unraveling and ferreting out of the past, the secrets, the enemies, and the weaknesses of character in each of the travelers.  Ambushes, ordinary hazards, and the peculiar difficulties of being a Vampire in a sun-drenched landscape spice up the action, which is mostly psychological.

These novels are rich and deep in historical FACT (well, maybe not vampire-facts), but succeed as stories because of the pithy character studies.  The entire series is a bit short on plot -- there isn't that much action -- but the portrayal of the Vampire who is essentially immortal (thousands of years old) seems to me to be the most accurate in literature to date. 

The "plot" fails because St. Germain does not "arc" as a character -- he doesn't change as a result of his experiences.  He acts, yes, often in hand-to-hand combat, in heroic deeds, in taking extraordinary risks for the sake of human strangers, in deep understanding of humans around him, in every way a Hero would act. 

But he doesn't change as a result of the consequences of his actions. 

He passes through History, and though he may be part of the Historic Record we now possess, though he may in fact have affected that record, he is not affected by it.

In this installment, we travel through the wastelands of Egypt, but unravel and penetrate the tangled Religion-Politics interface of Europe.  These Pilgrims are seeking absolution FROM something.  That something is the diamond, the treasure, the reader can seek and find.

So the St. Germain series is a perfect example of the exception that proves the rule -- Hollywood insists characters must ARC (and so do most audiences).  But here is a character who does not arc, and this is the 26th book in this series -- widely reviewed, widely lauded, much beloved, (especially by romance readers), and thus a very successful series. 

If you feel compelled to write a character who does not arc -- study these novels carefully.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 1

Lately, we've been getting into what I consider "advanced" writing lessons. 

"Advanced" doesn't actually mean you can't do it if you haven't done the previous work.  But it does mean you have to be able to walk and chew gum, juggle some plates, wrangle a passel of kids, and shout at the mailman not to molest the dog, all at the same time.

Some people learn better under pressure, some people don't want to know how they do what they do, and some (like me) prefer to read the last chapter of the textbook first, then browse quickly through the first chapter and try the exercises and problems in the middle before deciding if there's anything worth learning in this textbook.

So here we are in the "middle" of learning to craft a novel, Romance or otherwise.  I'm just more comfortable with the Romance plot dynamics than with plain, pure, action, or the kind of Mystery where the detective isn't personally involved in the issues raised by the crime and criminal.

In searching for clear writing lessons for you, I've stumbled on a trilogy of books, published by PLUME an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS (huge, international publisher - this is the big time publishing venue, folks!) which I'm sure the author and the editor believe are novels.  And now a lot of writing students will think so, too, just because these got published by a big publisher (and are selling well.)  They will be imitated. 

If you have objected to my explanations of the importance of structure in crafting a novel, you may consider the high profile publishing of these three books to prove your point.  But you might change your mind about that after you read some of one of these novels. 

Some people, readers not writers or editors, who've read these books think they're novels, too. 

In my judgement, they aren't novels, and I'm going to try to explain why I think that. 

The explanation may not mean anything to you unless you read at least part of one of these books and contrast it to something like, say Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels (or many of her Historical Horror genre items).  But I'm sure most of you have read dozens if not hundreds of good Historical Romances, not to mention alternate history and time travel Romance. 

These books are Historicals, set between 1040 and 1105 C.E.

Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels are set in that period (almost - she uses the 900's as a model) but in an alternate universe.  If you haven't read the Deryni series, you probably need to.  Start with Deryni Rising and move quickly on to see how Katherine's writing craftsmanship developed very quickly -- then contrast that with the 3 novels I'm talking about here. 

Katherine Kurtz structures trilogies correctly.  C. J. Cherryh structures trilogies correctly (though her earliest published work has a few nice flaws that you can learn from). 

This author, Maggie Anton, did not structure her trilogy with that kind of high-craft precision.  She used a different technique, also in wide use, but not nearly as effective.  I don't know if that's because she'd never read Cherryh and Kurtz or if she chose a technique inappropriate to her material on purpose, or if she didn't know there exists a plethora of techniques for handling this kind of material so she didn't know she had a choice to make.  I don't know Maggie Anton personally, though I know Cherryh and Kurtz personally and learned from them (we learned from Marion Zimmer Bradley and I don't know if Maggie Anton ever read MZB or met her). 

Maggie Anton on Amazon

That link goes to the product page on Amazon that lists 4 items by Maggie Anton, this trilogy and a book about the subject.  I couldn't find anything else with that byline, and I don't know if this author writes under other bylines. 

From the list of what I don't know, you can see that I can only discuss this trilogy on the basis of what's actually in the stories and how they are structured -- and what might have been done with the raw research material.  I can point you to where the various techniques I have discussed on this blog were not used, and so you can judge if the lack makes the text awkward or boring. 

The trilogy does contain arranged marriages and true-love marriages, accidentally marrying a gay guy (or maybe he's bi though others he knows are gay), and even a bit of Medieval applied magic to spur sexuality within marriage.  Each novel focuses on one of three sisters who have no brothers to follow in their father's footsteps -- the underlying theme is feminist.  In fact, it's a very strong feminist polemic in spots. 

There are some rather graphically detailed sex scenes, but not many.  If that's what you read Romance for, these books will disappoint. 

There are epidemic scenes where the disease is attributed to demons and the cures include blood letting and amulets against demons, and other standard practices in that time-frame.  Great material for modern fantasy or Paranormal Romance. 

Each of these three is billed as "A novel of Love" -- not specifically genre Romance -- "in Medieval France."  On that, it actually delivers.   

The trilogy seems to me to be even more awkward to market and sell than to write.

I'm going to discuss all three at once here, and I'll be rather more hyper-critical of the writing, the research, and the story itself than I usually am.  I may say some things that might seem somewhat unkind, perhaps undeserved, about the author of this trilogy. 

But I'm not talking to the author, or even about the author or editor since I don't know them.  I'm analyzing a swatch of writing that I think needed more rewrite before publishing. 

The other item in the pitch for these novels is the assertion that the research is good, deep and accurate.  And as far as I can tell, that's mostly true. 

Now to the third element in these novels that you need to keep in mind.

The novels are about the 3 daughters of a Talmudic scholar (the Talmud being the transcription of the explanation of the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible, the story of Moses) that was given to Moses by God, the same explanation that was given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then on Mount Sinai for Moses to give to the people and lead them to the Promised Land. 

This Talmudic scholar, known as Rashi, is studied today, and most printings of the Torah have either footnotes or extensive commentary by Rashi.  Rashi also wrote a commentary on the Talmud, which is studied today.  Rashi wrote the introductory commentary, the elementary and literal commentary (not the esoteric commentary known as Kaballah).  It's almost impossible to enter the study of this material by any other route than by studying Rashi.

Studying Torah without having heard of Rashi would be like studying Geometry without having heard of Aristotle or Pythagoras. Or maybe like studying astronomy without having heard of Kepler.

So Maggie Anton picked out one whopping HUGE and important subject area to write about, the almost unknown 3 daughters of Rashi whose husbands and sons are also almost as famous as Rashi because of how they continued his commentaries, and commented on his commentaries, and founded Talmudic academy traditions of their own.  Their mothers, the 3 daughters of these novels, are lost in obscurity -- and now rescued by Maggie Anton in a monumental feat of research and meticulous deductive imagination. 

The research had to have been as difficult as what Katherine Kurtz did to write her George Washington saga, (during which research, I was treated to a blow-by-blow description of the feats required to gain access to obscure material)



Or her WWII novel about the magical battle for Britain against the Nazis.



To create the Romance novel trilogy, Anton had to create and add a great deal of material, just as these other writers had to do.  My theory is that Anton was in over her head. 

So here are Anton's novels.  In the next parts of this blog-series, we'll get into spoilers, and even note The Sime~Gen Connection to Anton's trilogy.  And there is a connection, but not philosophical.  It has to do with research into medieval techniques for making dye for wool!  Also for making woolen cloth, though I never mentioned that in House of Zeor. 







There is a Kindle version, but it's in that "overpriced" range at $12.99 at least at the time I'm writing this.  There are a lot of used copies, probably because they aren't rereadable or keepers.

I don't think these books are worth their price, in and of themselves.  If you can get them from a lending library, or find a used copy, so much the better.  You may want to take marginal notes as you learn from analyzing this material. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Writing Tips Tweets

Personally, I feel twitter is a fad -- somewhat like CB Radio was/is. Its popularity may be peaking now. It may disappear, replaced by something else, or it may be left only to those who've found a real use for it.

But at this time, I think most people who spend any time phone texting or online will find twitter useful, provided they are selective about the people they link to.

Me, I'm all about writing, reading and screenwriting -- the place of the entertainment media in nourishing the soul (can you think of any better soul-nourishment than a good Romance?)

So projects like this new one below catch my interest.

Jean Lorrah, my sometime collaborator and co-owner of Sime~Gen Inc., ( www.jeanlorrah.com ) has started a twitter.com account to post short tips on writing for writers.

http://twitter.com/tipsonwriting is the page that will show you the list of tips.

You can get these sent to your phone as text messages if you join twitter, or have them sent to your own twitter account by "following" tipsonwriting . Or log into the http://twitter.com/tipsonwriting/ page to see them. And Jean has the feed from the tips account posted on various websites. It's currently on the top page of simegen.com too.

Subscribing to Jean's Writing Tips Tweets could be the quickest way to break writer's block. Just try each day to do what the Tip suggests, in the simplest way you can, not for publication but just a practice swatch for yourself.

You might want to post the results on
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/05/post-tips-on-writing-exercises-here.html
as a comment and get feedback on your exercise. But that might be intimidating so it could be better to just keep it in your own file to be mined for publishable ideas later.

But if you're practicing, just do a practice swatch of words for yourself and presto you'll be writing and then the words will come roaring out.

Jean might take contributions or retweet other writers' tips later. DM her on twitter.

Twitter isn't ONLY for those who have unlimited text messaging on their phones. There are a number of websites around that help you use twitter or publicize your activity on twitter. And there's a browser toolbar you can install on your browser to help you follow your incoming tweets, or send tweets. More brands of browsers will no doubt be getting this toolbar enabled for all kinds of social networking sites.

friendbar is an add-on for the firefox browser. Browse some add-ons here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3794

People are blogging like mad about the tools that make twitter easier to live with.

Here's an article:
http://www.randygage.com/blog/tweet-this-a-twitter-manifesto

Jean Lorrah found http://www.tweetlater.com which helps you manage multiple twitter accounts. Imagine that - MULTIPLE twitter accounts!

These Web 2.0 tools are being invented faster than I can keep track, but their purpose is to relieve the frantic and overwhelmed feeling we all get from multitasking beyond our capacity and to dodge spam floods such as the current worm infection is causing.

A lot of these tools will fail quickly. Much of it is advertising supported with a "free" level and a professional or paid subscription level.

As I said, Twitter is designed to help you avoid dealing with tons of spam in your email box. Dodging spam is a trend among younger people today both because parents want to insulate them from the trash in spam, and because life is too short to scan spam for hours a day. So they connect to a limited number of people they really know, and communicate in depth with that small number. That makes texting and tweeting a very efficient and cost-effective method of establishing and maintaining deep relationships.

But the social networks can waste a lot of time, too.

Twitter has a higher velocity message flow because each message is so short, so it feels like it's less of a burden. The shortness of the messages are like the half-sentence utterances in a real life conversation.

I can hardly wait for a teen romance novel that consists of nothing but tweets, like the Historical novels that consisted of nothing but letters (or like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels, though the letters are less plot-movers than they were in her earlier books.) I loved that format and can see a huge potential for it in twitter.

Can you imagine, for example, a time-travel romance with the two lovers separated by centuries but communicating through a portal that would allow only tweet-sized text messages?

Perhaps I'm intrigued by "short" because it's something I can't do. I don't suppose readers of this blog have noticed that trait of mine ...

The problem with twitter is that it is indeed "faster moving" -- which makes you pant to keep up if you follow more than four or five very taciturn people. Hence these other online tools for "managing" your twitter account(s!)

It's a trend, though, to use one more technological application to cure a problem caused by another technological add-on to an otherwise frantic life, and it's happening in all walks of life. Maybe we should term it Tech-Defense, or Tai Kwon Tech?

For example, some techie noticed how the older generation resists techie gadgets (like digital picture frames) and came up with a digital picture frame application that simplifies shouting over the chasm between generations.

They put a digital picture frame on the household wireless network.

There are quite a few manufacturers of those wireless frames, and already a factory-installed mall ware virus was distributed by Best Buy last year via one of the USB plug picture frames. But the viruses haven't yet invaded your computer over the wireless connection. Maybe next year.

But the deal is this.

Young people can take phone or digital pix and EMAIL THEM directly to grandma's picture frame. The frame logs onto grandma's house wireless (you may have to go install a router), and downloads 40 or 50 pictures at say 3AM. It download the pix you uploaded via email attachment (or other means) to the hosting website.

The next day, a whole new slide-show turns up for Grandma to see and she did nothing to make it happen. She doesn't even have to understand how it works! She'll just grin delightedly at her grandchildren.

I love this concept. It is a subscription product though, and the kids have to take the pictures, upload them to the site which the frame logs onto, and pay for renting the bandwidth on the picture hosting site. Here's an example: http://www.ceiva.com/ is a hosting website that sells its own picture frame. You can also find it by searching ceiva on amazon. They gotta be making a fortune on this! I can handle tech, and I want it!

The Digital picture frame has become one of the hottest products on the market, and there are a number of sites that are set up to share pictures with a frame.

I think it'll be the biggest seller this coming gift season -- because I WANT ONE VERY BADLY! The wireless feature really has me hooked.

But consider both Jean's twitter writing tips and this picture frame all in one breath.

We're looking at a TREND here - tech that cures tech problems. Writers of futuristic or paranormal romance can exploit this concept. Find a problem, any problem that keeps lovers apart, and cure the problem with an application of the very thing that caused the problem to begin with. "Hair of the dog."

Think of this scene. A guy wants a girl to pay attention to him. He swaps the picture frame on her work desk for a wireless frame of his own. Then sends her pictures to sell himself to her? Or maybe he hacks into her frame's download site and intersperses his own pix with those of her cousin's new baby?

Practical joke: swap your frame for someone else's and send them baby pictures of someone you want to embarrass.

Paranormal: Suppose a techie ghost finds a way to impose pix on a wireless frame?

Oh, the story potential is totally endless! Welcome to the 21st Century.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.slantedconcept.com

PS: if you get anything published based on anything like twitter or digital frames, do please be sure I get a review copy and a note referencing this blog! Whee!!! The story potential of those wireless frames is totally endless!!!