Showing posts with label vampire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vampire. Show all posts

Thursday, June 22, 2023

Linguistic Anachronisms

I'm reading an enthralling new vampire novel, THE GOD OF ENDINGS, by Jacqueline Holland. The first-person protagonist grew up in the 1830s in a small town in New York, as the daughter of a gravestone carver. Her parents, her brother, and she herself all died in an epidemic of tuberculosis. Thanks to her Hungarian grandfather, however, she didn't stay dead. Over the course of her unnaturally prolonged life, she seems to have acquired an excellent education. (In the 1980s, she's the head of an exclusive preschool.) The novel's style is a pleasure to read, evocatively descriptive, almost lyrical. So far, I haven't come upon a single grammatical error or typo, a rarity nowadays even from major publishers. But then -- at one point the narrator breaks the spell and outrages my suspension of disbelief by using "snuck" for "sneaked," an irregular form that I don't recall ever hearing in my own youth, much less reading in any older prose regardless of its informal tone. How did the author miss that error, considering the in-depth research that seems to lie behind her story? Is that lapse a case of not knowing what one doesn't know?

THE CHOSEN, a streaming series whose first three seasons I enjoyed very much (and I'm waiting with impatience for the next season, not due until sometime in 2024), made me wince at a couple of points for a similar reason. It's a retelling of the life of Jesus with an ensemble cast, focusing on the apostles and other prominent people in the Gospels. It imaginatively creates personalities and backstories for them while expanding on what little information the Bible supplies. As a side issue, I wonder why every non-Roman character speaks with an accent, as if the Judeans and Galileans are foreigners to themselves. instead, shouldn't the Romans, as outsiders in the country, be the people with the accents? That's not my main complaint, though. To make the characters relatable, the script has them talking in colloquial American English. That's fine as far as it goes, even the inclusion of "okay." We can assume their dialogue is being translated from the terminology of their own culture into expressions we're familiar with. But now and then a phrase or figure of speech that would have been impossible in that time and place shatters the illusion of realism. The most blatant example is a character referring to some action "pushing" somebody else's "buttons." That metaphor could not have existed much before the twentieth century, maybe at the earliest in the era of the telegraph. Cringe.

Of course, sometimes words feel anachronistic when they aren't. The case of "Tiffany," a modern-sounding feminine name that in fact dates back to the Middle Ages, is a well-known example. One anthology editor told me not to write that a character "scanned" a room in a story set in the 1890s because that image referred to the action of a video camera. Later I found out "scan" was indeed used in that sense before the invention of movies. I once chided a fellow author for having an eighteenth-century character in a work-in-progress call another man a jerk; I was abashed when she pointed me to a source that confirmed the word did exist as an insult in that period. Should an author of historical fiction refrain from using a term that's accurate for the period but might sound wrong to most readers?

Do you notice that kind of thing in fiction? If so, how much does it bother you?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 16, 2023

Artificial Blood

Here's an article about an artificial blood substitute being developed by a research physician from the University of Maryland School of Medicine:

Artificial Blood One Step Closer

It's not meant to replace regular blood transfusions, but as a supply in emergencies for purposes such as to "stabilize a patient’s blood pressure or facilitate blood clotting." The goal is "to develop a bio-synthetic whole-blood product that can be freeze-dried for easy portability, storage, and reconstitution." Instant blood, just add water! The main ingredient will be "ErythroMer, the artificial blood product made by KaloCyte, a company co-founded by Dr. Doctor in 2016 with bioengineer and synthetic chemist Dipanjan Pan, PhD, MSc, professor in nanomedicine at Penn State University, and Philip Spinella, MD, a military transfusion medicine expert at the University of Pittsburgh." The two other main components are "synthetic platelets and freeze-dried plasma."

Here's a Wikipedia entry about various kinds of blood substitutes:

Blood Substitute

The most difficult function to duplicate, as well as the most important, is the transportation of oxygen. Several different varieties of manufactured hemoglobin have been tried. Another potential alternative might be growing red blood cells from stem cells in vitro.

As a fan, scholar, and writer of vampire fiction, naturally I wonder whether the University of Maryland's artificial blood product could nourish vampires. Could it serve the function of True Blood in the Sookie Stackhouse series, allowing vampires to "come out of the coffin" as accepted members of society? Whole blood includes many components besides those found in present-day blood substitutes. Which of those ingredients are necessary for vampires to thrive? If the growth of stem-cell-generated hemoglobin could be perfected, that would seem the best product for both medical uses and vampire nutrition.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, August 18, 2022

A Taste for Blood

This week I donated blood, and as usual in that situation, I thought about vampires. (Doesn't everybody?) If vampires have razor-sharp teeth that painlessly produce tiny incisions in the skin, maybe with anesthetic in their saliva like vampire bats, they wouldn't need to leave conspicuous twin fang marks that the donor has to cover with a scarf. (Vampire bats, by the way, make incisions, not punctures.) The puncture produced by the blood donation needle, at least in my experience, is so minute that it's hardly noticeable after the bleeding stops. Usually it has almost disappeared by the next day. The procedure typically extracts a unit of blood in less than ten minutes. Afterward, the donor isn't prostrated from blood loss; the worst I ever feel is thirsty and slightly tired for a couple of hours at most. So much for the dramatic image of a victim languishing on the verge of imminent death.

That's if the vampire takes only "as much as would fill a wineglass," like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain. He's a supernatural vampire, though. For those creatures, we can postulate that they're really nourished more by the life-essence than by the physical components of blood, so they don't need to ingest a large volume of it. Likewise, the absurd movie scenes in which a vampire grabs a victim, bites his her or neck for a couple of minutes, and leaves a body completely drained of blood could be handwaved as magic. No awkward questions as to where all that liquid fits into the monster's body. But suppose vampires evolve naturally and have to conform to the limits of biology? As the vampire Dr. Weyland in Suzy McKee Charnas's THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY rhetorically asks, "How would nature design a vampire?"

How do vampire bats cope with a diet high in protein and minerals but not much else, including a potentially toxic level of iron? This article explains how vampire bats' digestion and physiology have adapted to make them the only mammals able to survive entirely on blood:

Why Do Vampire Bats Have a Taste for Blood?

For one thing, they live in symbiosis with gut microbes that synthesize nutrients not found in their restricted diets. They have other fascinating adaptations for their predatory lifestyle as well, including anticoagulants as well as painkillers in their saliva and the heat-seeking ability to perceive infrared radiation marking hot spots on the bodies of their prey. We could give our naturally evolved humanoid vampires these traits. My own fictional vampires get their bulk nourishment from animal blood and milk rather than feeding heavily on human donors, whose life-energy they need to remain healthy. Still, I fudge the total amount they require with discreet handwavium. Weyland in Charnas's novel gets "good mileage per calorie," and I tacitly assume any natural vampire would have to operate that way.

Unfortunately, in real life vampire bats suffer from an inconvenient drawback as models for romantic haunters of the night. So much blood volume consists of water that the bat has to consume half its own weight to ingest enough calories to support life. Then, of course, it has to get rid of that excess liquid just to reduce its weight enough to be able to fly. Therefore, during and after feeding the bat urinates copiously. Not glamorous at all, alas. So the writer inventing a naturally evolved humanoid vampire typically avoids discussing that problem. (In THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, the blood-heavy bat's plight is mentioned, but that unsavory topic isn't covered in the explanation of how Weyland feeds and digests.)

I'm currently reading a Japanese novel titled IRINA THE VAMPIRE COSMONAUT, set in an alternate-world version of the 1960s space race. Members of Irina's species have fangs, rely mainly on milk for nourishment, have superhuman senses of smell but can't taste most foods, are sensitive to sunlight but not destroyed by it, lead a nocturnal lifestyle, and can endure cold better than humans but are more vulnerable to heat. They drink blood on ritual occasions but don't seem to require it for survival.

The ways authors rationalize science-fiction vampires fascinate me. Some striking examples include, besides THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, George R. R. Martin's FEVRE DREAM, Jacqueline Lichtenberg's THOSE OF MY BLOOD, Octavia Butler's FLEDGING, and S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy (A TAINT IN THE BLOOD and two sequels). I analyze these and many other works in that subgenre in my nonfiction book DIFFERENT BLOOD: THE VAMPIRE AS ALIEN.

Different Blood

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Classics and Monsters

Following the success of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES (2009), numerous mash-ups of public domain classic novels with horror creatures and tropes were published in the few years immediately following. I've recently reread LITTLE VAMPIRE WOMEN and A VAMPIRE CHRISTMAS CAROL. Are such adaptations worth reading except as bizarre novelties? Their main appeal, judging from the types of books that have been adapted, seems to be incongruity, with fiction as unlike the horror genre as possible being transmuted by the insertion of supernatural threats into the original stories. Some others, for example, are JANE SLAYRE, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS, LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES, and WUTHERING BITES.

In my opinion, those kinds of books turn out better if they involve a certain amount of actual rewriting. From what I remember of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, it's fun to read once but not transformative enough to comprise much more than Jane Austen's original work with zombies thrown in at suitable intervals. Granted, though, the image of Elizabeth as a trained zombie-slayer has a certain zany charm. LITTLE VAMPIRE WOMEN and A VAMPIRE CHRISTMAS CAROL, on the other hand, rewrite their prototypes more extensively, although some undigested lumps of Alcott's and Dickens's prose do stand out.

A VAMPIRE CHRISTMAS CAROL raises the question of whether the entertainment value of such crossovers fades a bit when the source text already contains elements of supernatural horror. It strikes me as not too much of a stretch to have Mr. Scrooge stalked by vampires as well as haunted by ghosts. WUTHERING BITES falls into a similar category. Vampiric motifs pervade WUTHERING HEIGHTS, with Heathcliff explicitly compared to a vampire in one line. Turning him into a literal vampire-human crossbreed, cursed by the heritage of his monstrous half, fits fairly well into the original plot. In that case, the "co-author" can't depend solely on the appeal of incongruity; she has to create a believable story with an anti-hero who inspires genuine sympathy as well as horror.

A step removed from those books, which might be considered a peculiar sort of fanfic, we find "secret histories" such as ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, which I discovered to be better than I'd expected. The criterion for such novels is that the action must remain faithful to the historical person's biography as publicly known, while inserting supernatural elements into the hidden corners of his or her life, so to speak. Queen Elizabeth, H. P. Lovecraft, Lizzie Borden, and many others have received similar fictional treatment. A January 2022 release, THE SILVER BULLETS OF ANNIE OAKLEY, by Mercedes Lackey, will introduce magic into the career of the famed sharpshooter. I don't object to this type of fiction as long as the author does conscientious research into the historical background and treats the protagonist with respect.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Shadow of the Beast

My first published novel, SHADOW OF THE BEAST, a werewolf urban fantasy with romantic elements, is back in print after a few years of dormancy, being recently re-released by Writers Exchange E-Publishing:

Shadow of the Beast

This wasn't the first novel I completed. That was the true book of my heart, vampire romantic urban fantasy DARK CHANGELING, first published not long after SHADOW OF THE BEAST and currently available in an e-book duology called TWILIGHT'S CHANGELINGS:

Twilight's Changelings

And as a Kindle e-book here:

Amazon Page

SHADOW OF THE BEAST was originally published by a small horror press that produced numerous attractive trade paperbacks for several years before closing down. My novel was later picked up by Amber Quill Press, which had a fairly long run before it, too, went out of business. I was lucky to find Writers Exchange, which sells its products in both electronic and trade paperback formats, to adopt most of my Amber Quill books. (It's somewhat disheartening to contemplate how many of my works have been "orphaned" by the disappearances of publishers over the years. Fortunately, we now have self-publishing as an alternative in case switching to a new publisher doesn't work out.)

I lightly revised SHADOW OF THE BEAST before the Amber Quill edition was published. The text of this latest version hasn't changed from that one; only the cover is different. The story follows the template of one of my favorite tropes, the Ugly Duckling. The heroine discovers she isn't what she always believed herself to be, and traits that first seem like flaws turn out to be gifts. I've retold that basic story multiple times over the years. My first professionally published work of fiction, "Her Own Blood" in FREE AMAZONS OF DARKOVER, fits that pattern, as does DARK CHANGELING.

Because SHADOW OF THE BEAST retains the text from the previous edition, it features technology that has become obsolete. Since only one scene is affected (where the characters use a VHS camcorder and tape player), the editor decided it wouldn't be a problem and didn't need a disclaimer at the beginning. As far as the plot goes, SHADOW OF THE BEAST has some undeniable flaws. The editing for Amber Quill corrected some of the original version's problems but didn't amount to a major rewrite. The "because line" is weak in places; back then, I didn't realize I was sometimes making characters do things for my convenience as author, rather than from solidly established motives. I've learned better since then, I hope!

What's your philosophy on rewriting older books for re-release or leaving them alone?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Depiction Part 24 - Depicting A Villain by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction
Part 24
Depicting A Villain
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 
Here we come to the main question a writer must answer if weaving a conflict between Hero and Villain: Why Does The Villain Want To Rule Forever?

Here is the index to the previous parts in the Depiction Series:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

By "depicting," I mean show don't tell -- create a visible consequence of what you want to say, instead of saying it.

Saying what you want to say is "telling" not "showing."  In screenwriting, that is called "on the nose" -- dialogue that is the author speaking to the viewer, not one character speaking to another.

Here is the index to Dialogue:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/10/dialogue-parts-1-4-listed.html

One reason we gravitate to Romance, go away and come back over and over, is that the two main characters are not "Hero" vs. "Villain."

The two main characters are both Hero Quality Material -- great novels start before the Hero Quality in either is fully in charge of their decision-making.

TV Fiction is gravitating toward the Ensemble Cast -- a rag-tag group of Hero and/or Apprentice Hero Characters striving to overcome impossible odds to achieve a worthwhile goal.

Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:ToS) did this using mostly the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad, which Roddenberry told us ( in the many interviews we did with him to excerpt for the Bantam Paperback STAR TREK LIVES! ) that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were three parts of his own personality.  This is actually a well known secret of fiction-writing, dating probably way back before the Ancient Greek plays.

It is how you "tell the story" -- "tell" being the operative word. A writer "tells" a story.  That is what it feels like while writing words, one after another.  When you get stuck, you ask yourself, "What Will The Other Characters Do?" and you don the role of that Character.  As all good Character Actors will explain, to don a role you must reach inside yourself for that trait, pair away all the rest of the real you, and bring that single aspect up to the surface where the audience can see it and recognize it.

That is the secret to "targeting a readership," -- find a fragment of a real person and depict that single trait so that a lot of people can understand it and find within themselves the laudable or reprehensible trait which is dominating the Character's decision making.

Here is the Index Post to the series on Targeting a Readership"

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html

Screenwriting manuals give a formula for creating Characters -- identify 3 Traits, specify them and then write that character ALWAYS showing one or two or all three of those traits.

When done mechanically, just following the formula, the procedure produces "cardboard  Characters" viewers do not believe.

This happens more in movies and TV Series than in novels -- which is why some people prefer reading novels to watching TV.

A good case in point is the TV Series, The Librarians,

which is a blatant copy of the TV Series Warehouse 13.

https://www.amazon.com/Warehouse-Pilot/dp/B002GJRP6A/

https://www.amazon.com/Librarians-Season-01-Matt-Frewer/dp/B01L00HWN6/

The Librarians is a TNT TV Series:
http://www.tntdrama.com/shows/the-librarians.html?sr=the%20librarians

Returning to the universe of TNT's hit movie franchise, The Librarian, this new series centers on an ancient organization hidden beneath the Metropolitan Public Library dedicated to protecting an unknowing world from the secret, magical reality hidden all around. This group solves impossible mysteries, fights supernatural threats and MORE...

In Season 3 - Episode 1 - The Librarians And the Rise of Chaos -
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-librarians-2015/and-the-rise-of-chaos-3425989/
we get that wondrous line from the Villain -- " ... and rule forever."

This is delivered (rather well, considering how corny it is) as "on the nose dialogue."

This is what this Villain (adversary, opponent, nemesis ... ) aims to achieve.  It is the statement of the goal.  By that choice of goal, the viewer can instantly identify the Villain as a really Bad Guy (especially because he has enough magical power to make it happen!)

The Librarians is designed to be comedic -- like Warehouse 13, it is very broad comedy, somewhat akin to the TV Classic My Favorite Martian -- which was the only real science fiction on TV for years.

http://www.tv.com/shows/my-favorite-martian/

And from TV.Com --
CATEGORIES
Comedy, Fantasy, Science Fiction
THEMES
witty remarks, planetary explorers, secrets and lies, space travel, outrageous situations

My Favorite Martian is actually a SitCom with Science Fiction elements (but in those days it was considered Fantasy).

In both cases, we have the adversary of the week -- and the team (the Martian and his host human on Earth) unites to defend -- the Guest Martian or The Library.)

From TV.Com
My Favorite Martian first aired in September of 1963 on CBS and was probably one of the first sitcoms with a "bizarre" or fantasy premise to emerge in the early to mid 1960's. It joined the ranks with Mister Ed which began in 1961.

Star Trek: ToS began in 1966.

My Favorite Martian paved the way for Star Trek - and all the Science Fiction Romance that has come out of the fanfic.

The Librarians is ensemble cast, like Star Trek - but has a "story-arc" like Babylon 5.  Star Trek was an "anthology" show - designed to be viewed in any order, with the adversary of the week (usually not very villainous).

So My Favorite Martian and Star Trek were stories about "How To Make Friends With Adversaries - who are quite Alien."  They begin the continuum which has resulted in Science Fiction Romance about "How To Marry An Alien."

One of my all time favorite novel series about marrying an alien (even having the Alien's kids!) is Gini Koch's Alien Series.  The 2016 entry in that series is Alien Nation (yes, the author knows all about the TV Series by that name.)

Gini Koch depicts her Hero, Kitty Kat, a woman with fiery determination to make things right, as having a knack for converting enemies into friends or at least allies against the monsters trying to kill everyone.

In Alien Nation, Kitty manages to convert some of the most voracious monsters into friends.  It sounds ridiculous -- but Gini Koch makes you believe every word.  The secret is in how she depicts what is going on inside Kitty Kat's head -- this great Hero that everyone trusts to avert disaster has no idea what she's doing, and no plan that she knows of.  She has a few clues from a super-being (not a god, but a Being who understands the universe as the creation of God), but Kitty Kat has to figure things out and take chances on the fly.

When things work out well, you believe it could actually happen that way, and it is not just that Kitty is married to an Alien and has acquired "powers" while having his children.

Gini Koch's novel series is not comedy -- it reads more like a well played video-game, with comedic moments, absurdities turned to opportunities, and drama writ large.  The target audience is familiar with Star Trek -- maybe not with My Favorite Martian -- and games.

In the 1960's, we were just beginning to launch orbital vehicles and dreaming of real space travel -- wondering if our ships would bring back Alien Diseases we could not contain.  We were focused on finding Alien Life Out There.

Hundreds if not thousands of novels and short stories had been published about First Contact. The film, The Day The Earth Stood Still, is classic because it addressed all those issues.

Here is the 1951 Classic:
https://www.amazon.com/Day-Earth-Stood-Still/dp/B000UL5YW8/

And here is the 2008 remake:
https://www.amazon.com/Day-Earth-Stood-Still/dp/B001THAS5K/

Again, the 1951 film focuses on how the fearsome, formidable, monstrous Alien is actually a nice guy having a hard day at work.

As with the 1984 classic film, Starman,
https://www.amazon.com/Starman-Karen-Allen/dp/B004ZCM2Q4/
we end up wanting to leave Earth with the Alien -- absolutely smitten with this valiant figure and torn up inside to lose him.

Much of the most famous science fiction of those decades depicts the Alien as a potential friend, lover, ally, advocate, even though the Alien may start out at odds with Earth, or perhaps Earth authorities order an all-out attack on the Alien.

The consensus seems to be that Aliens are not necessarily Villains.

Just like humans, Aliens have a variety of potentials within them.  Some are friends, some are stupid, some are silly, some are immature, some are powerful but inept, some are misinformed - the list goes on.

These very humanistic aliens were the most popular during those early decades.

Then came the pronouncement from unimpeachable experts that there just weren't going to be ANY planets around other stars "out there."  The solar system we are in is unique, and just is not going to have anything like a duplicate anywhere -- probabilities are absolutely against the idea of Alien Life Like Us.

The academic power behind this pronouncement, fraught with every mathematical proof you could name, believed and espoused by the Einsteins of the era, drained most of the funding from NASA, and nearly killed off the space program.

Along with it, went Star Trek and most of the Science Fiction Romance you might see made for large audiences (such as film, or TV).

Then funding was squeezed out for orbital telescopes, and other instrument packages to explore our solar system.  Meanwhile, physics and math marched on.  It takes a lot of very fancy math to slice and dice the information garnered by our orbital instruments, and even our mountain-top instruments.  It takes a lot of computing power to understand that data -- computing power we didn't have in the 1960's.

So recently, the unimpeachable experts are pointing at actual planets around stars so distant it makes no sense to quote distances in miles.

We have a whole new generation of unimpeachable experts publishing in peer reviewed journals, as prestigious as the ones that declared how improbable an Alien Civilization Out There was.  Now, the calculations are trending toward the inevitability of there having been Aliens somewhere.

Of course, we are looking at data that is millions of years old.  Light travels way too slowly for us to have any idea what is actually happening "now" (the very definition of "now" and "time" is changing as we figure out what gravity is.)

So, once again, films and TV depict interstellar civilizations -- but this time, the Aliens are not so friendly.  War is more fun, so we have Star Wars continuing.  And Star Trek has become more about War than Exploration of the Unknown.

But while Science Fiction's depiction of interstellar civilizations was relegated to the absurd, another branch of the Science Fiction genre called Adult Fantasy (Fantasy that is not morality plays for children) has formed and taken off.

Early among the Adult Fantasy entries was Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Series
https://www.amazon.com/Deryni-Rising-Chronicles-Katherine-Kurtz/dp/044101660X/



Reprinted many times over the decades, this series depicts an alternate universe -- set around our year 900 AD -- and involving Royalty.  Every book in this series is about "who shall be King" -- it is about who shall "rule."  One faction vying for rulership is purely human (with all the villainy that goes with human mindset), and the main opposing faction is Deryni, basically human but with "powers."

The worldbuilding behind the Deryni universe includes the existence of "gods" and "demons" and forces and powers both Dark and Light (as in Star Wars).  In the Deryni Universe, there is also competition between Deryni and humans for control of "The Church" -- which is pretty much depicted as if it is Christianity.

The humans are convinced Deryni and their "powers" (of telepathy, fireball throwing, teleportation, etc) are of the Devil.  Deryni understand their powers as being simply Power -- like any capability -- and the "Light" side of their force comes from the God worshiped by the humans in the Church.

So the whole "who shall be King" plot line is driven by the argument over the truth of Religion.

I do highly recommend this series -- it does have some hot Romance laced through it, but like any story of hereditary Aristocracy, pivots on arranged marriage.

This series was one of the earliest in the Adult Fantasy market and helped shape that market, define the sub-genre.

Later, whole series arose depicting Power without God, and God or gods without humans with Power.  For the most part, "The Church" as a governing body and institution commanding the culture was deleted from Adult Fantasy.  Aristocracy, Dukes, Kings and their necessary wars persisted, but the power of God was left out.

That deletion of God from fiction parallels the rise of the atheist movement in today's world.

People want fiction that seems realistic -- and the real world was systematically rejecting the concept of Religion (even though God persisted, the institutions designed to serve God's purposes became despised for hypocrisy and lack of tolerance and diversity).

Political Power became the sole bone of contention in the plots, even when magical power was "real" in the fictional world, and the special people who could wield magic were organized (Hedge Witches or as in Babylon 5, a Guild).

For a long time, ESP (telepathy, telekinesis) was accepted as a science fiction element while "magic" involving summoning demons or angels or praying for acts of God was relegated to Fantasy.

Most recently, though, the Fantasy Genre has emerged as the flip side of the Aliens of the 1950's and 1960's (The Day the Earth Stood Still, My Favorite Martian).  After a couple of decades of mixing and blending ESP and Magic, reinventing the premises behind why they work and who can work them, the Fantasy Genre has focused on angels, demons, djinn, sprites, brownies, fairies, vampires, were-creatures, shapeshifters, zombies, ghouls, all the mythical Supernatural creatures and peoples, to tell exactly the same stories we saw about Aliens From Outer Space.

In modern Fantasy, the Mythical Creatures perform the same role and function as the Aliens did in early Science Fiction -- friend or enemy, opposition, voracious attacker bent on stripping Earth of all its wealth, eating humans, or whatever their objective.

Some of these Mythical Creature adversaries want to "escape" from some other dimension, penetrate the barrier between dimensions, and "rule the earth."

Those are the Villain Aliens.

The friendly Aliens become allies using their power and knowledge to help the human hero vanquish the Evil Supernaturals.

In the 1950's and 1960's, Aliens from Outer Space were either bent on "ruling" Earth or were potential friends.  Potential friends were the most popular.  Gradually, the assumption that anything Alien out there just had to be Bad Guys - so Potential Rulers became the most popular.

Today, some Mythical Supernatural People are potentially friendly, but the prevailing assumption seems to be that Supernatural Creatures are bent on ruling Earth, and therefore any Supernatural that intrudes must be destroyed before it can "take over."

Remember when the Vampire Romance shot to the best sellar lists in mass market paperback?  That sub-genre grabbed enough market share to get spine-labels and logos so you could find them on the bookstore shelves.  It took a while for writers to gear up to produce a lot of Vampire Romance -- and meanwhile, the readership lost its taste for "The Vampire As Good Guy" novel.

As manuscripts flooded into publishers, publishers reduced the number of slots for Vampire Romance.  As the e-book market began to form, many of those unsold manuscripts went to e-book, but the sub-genre disappeared from mass market shelves.

Hot-steamy Vampire Romance still thrives in e-book, with every type of Vampire being the  Hero, and writers inventing new types.

Blending the Supernatural with the Scientific Alien, I did a Vampire-Alien-From-Outer-Space Romance in my St. Martin's hardcover release, Those of My Blood, which has had many reprints.

https://www.amazon.com/Those-My-Blood-Tales-Luren-ebook/dp/B00A7WQUIW/

So, among Aliens From Outer Space, and among Supernatural Aliens From Another Dimension, we find those who want to "rule forever" and we label those with the ambition to Rule as villains.

The blackest of bad guys are always bent on "ruling."

Those with "Powers" want to "be King."  We always create genres around Villains, Bad Guys, Malevolent Forces, Evil Masterminds that want to RULE as the Supernatural creature in Season 3 - Episode 1 - The Librarians And the Rise of Chaos -
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-librarians-2015/and-the-rise-of-chaos-3425989/.

Those who are driven "to rule" are Evil.  That's how you identify Evil - it is determined to "take over" and to "rule."

Good stories are about opposing Evil and thwarting its Rule.

Why is that?  Why do we depict Villains as wanting to Rule?

Why do we know that the Character who wants to Rule Forever is the Villain, the Evil that must be stopped at all costs?

If the Villain does not tell us, "...and I will rule, forever!" how do we figure out that this Character is the Villain?

There are thousands of right answers to that question.  To do Fantasy worldbuilding, a writer has to pick an answer (or generate a brand new one) to why the need to Rule is villainous.  Depict that reason without the on-the-nose dialogue line, "...and I will rule, forever!"  If you can do that, you will show-don't-tell the Villain of your piece.

Creating and depicting good Villains (who are dead set on Ruling) may require a writer to learn more about the inner workings of their own minds than they want to know.

Sometimes, bringing that knowledge to the conscious level creates "writer's block."  And sometimes getting hold of that knowledge breaks "writer's block."  So experiment carefully.

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Vampire Disjunction

I've kept up with the TV series THE VAMPIRE DIARIES despite the heroine's disappearance from the show. (The character was magically consigned to suspended animation.) At present Damon, one of the co-starring vampire brothers, has "switched off his humanity," not for the first time. Under compulsion from this season's villain, an ancient, powerful Siren, he's had to perform terrible acts. To escape the guilt and pain, he "flipped" his "humanity switch" so that he feels no emotions and therefore can't suffer. Apparently all vampires have this capability, since others in the series have done the same thing. With their humanity voluntarily turned off—apparently requiring only a simple act of will—they have intellect, sensation, and appetite but no feelings, positive or negative. They simply don't care. While suppressing one's humanity is easy, reawakening it requires an agonizing intervention by some other person, especially since no vampire who has undergone this change wants it reversed.

The dichotomy between vampires with and without souls on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER functions similarly. According to that show's mythos, the creation of a vampire displaces the victim's soul, leaving the body possessed by a demon. As Buffy tells a character in an early episode, "That's not your friend, it's the thing that killed him." This "demon-animated corpse" thesis becomes problematic with the introduction of Spike, whose personality and behavior seem to have definite continuity with his human life, and he's certainly capable of loving in his own way. Nevertheless, it's established that "normal" vampires don't have souls. Angel appears to be unique in that respect until Spike also becomes re-souled late in the series. As far as we can tell, "soul" seems equivalent to "conscience." Unlike in THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, where suppression of humanity turns off emotions, soulless vampires in the BUFFY universe have a wide range of emotions, often violently passionate even if usually negative.

Both of these plot devices remind me of the junct-disjunct contrast in the Sime-Gen series. A vampire deprived of soul or humanity (which seem to entail much the same thing, allowing for differences between the series' vampire mythos) is analogous to a junct Sime. In these vampire universes, regaining a soul or embracing one's remaining traces of humanity resembles disjunction. Remaining or becoming junct represents the easy way, while disjuncting is usually terribly difficult and painful, just as accepting the return of soul or humanity can subject a vampire to great suffering. One big difference is that junct Simes are still human, and many of them want to disjunct. No vampire who has turned off his or her humanity wants it switched on, and BUFFY vampires hardly ever wish for souls. (Angel finds his a source of torment, since its return awakens his conscience and therefore makes him suffer guilt for the evil he has done.) Spike, the notable exception, seeks the restoration of his soul out of devotion to Buffy. In MAHOGANY TRINROSE, it's discovered that a drug made from the trinrose can ease the disjunction process, so that one of the characters fears Simes might begin to think going junct is no big deal, because "I can always disjunct again." Similarly, Damon on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES has had his humanity switched on and off a couple of times, and Angel regained his soul, lost it, and got it back again. In both cases, we have to wonder how much guilt the re-souled or humanity-embracing vampire should legitimately bear for acts he performed when devoid of soul or humanity. At those times, was he "not himself"?

Neither of these programs explicitly defines what humanity or a soul actually is. In the BUFFY universe, a soul is referred to as almost a thing, a concrete entity that can be removed and replaced like a physical object. When a vampire lacks a soul, has that part of him or her been sent to the "Heaven" where Buffy thought she was between her death and her restoration to life? Does the vampire's disembodied soul have any trace of consciousness, wherever it is? We're never told. In THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, "humanity" seems to be more a state of being than an entity. The "flipping a switch" imagery likens it to an electric current. While it would be more satisfying if these series defined their terms with some precision, at least they do foreground existential and ontological questions in interesting ways.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World Part 11: Terminology in Romance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World
Part 11
Terminology in Romance
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Last week we looked again at Marketing Fiction, and at what sells besides Sex & Violence.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

So today we're going to discuss the part terminology plays in marketing and propose a new term to replace the term "fanfic."  We need to replace the term "fanfic" because of the Changing World in the title of this series of blog posts.

Fanfic has been the driving force behind much of the change, but fanfic itself came from something and has now leaped up to something that makes it require a new label.  That label will open vistas of potential only some of you have seen coming. 

So publishing terminology has its roots inside the fiction that's being marketed, which in turn is rooted in the writer's subconscious, in choice of objectives, in motivation for writing at all.

That's very abstract stuff, but language itself tries to make it concrete.

The classic question, "Why do you write?" is based on the assumption that there is A reason (not a plethora, not a whole personality profile).

Marketing fiction is all about finding fiction that is "aimed at" a specific "audience."  That assumes that a whole bunch of people all share ONE motive for reading (i.e. buying) fiction.

That assumption of a writer and reader sharing just one motivation is the reason that the question, "Why do you writer?" stymies writers. 

There is a why in there somewhere -- but it is not composed of anything you can articulate in a single word or sentence.

Yet all fiction is about that why.

You write a story that is about something (even if you don't consciously know what at the time).  The point of the exercise is not the "something" that the story is "about" -- but rather the "about" itself.  Being ABOUT is what Art is.

As I've discussed in these blog posts on writing craft, stories are Art.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/theme-plot-integration-part-9-use-of-co.html

Art depicts reality - it is not reality, itself.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

And marketing Art shifts and changes, more rapidly now than ever.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-important-book-what-makes-novel.html

Now consider that language, any language, also "depicts" -- the map is not the territory.  Language itself is symbolism.

We've discussed symbolism at some length:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

The essential ingredient in fiction is conflict.  Therefore, the writer must depict both sides of a philosophical argument (a thematic statement) in order for the fiction to be 'about.'  The two sides of an argument must conflict, and ultimately resolve (even if there are issues left over for a sequel.)

The "both sides" structure of a story conflict is artificial.  That division into just two sides is symbolism, not reality.

Sifting two clear, opposing points of view out of the pea-soup morass of human experience so that each side can be clearly depicted is Art.

The process of sifting and defining the two sides is the same as the process of paining a picture.  The graphic artist "selects" certain lines, composition, arrangement, colors, sharp/fuzzy focus, perspective, to "lead the eye" just as a story-writer "leads the mind" via composition.

Having laid out a clean, clear, two-sided conflict, the writer must aim the narrative (a narrative is a beginning, middle, end set of points that are given connection by the writer's composition of the picture extracted from reality).

The narrative must be structured to aim at a particular audience.

If that audience is large enough, the economics of "publishing" (traditional publishing) takes over.  The widely-aimed story becomes commercially viable at a certain break point.  That break point is constantly changing.  It used to be the volume of cardboard consumed by China dictated that break point by dictating the price of newsprint paper used to print paperbacks.

China at that time was just beginning to become a manufacturing powerhouse, and needed boxes made from cardboard to ship finished product.

So trade treaties with China (politically controversial because of China's Communism) governed the subject matter and narrative structure, the composition, of mass market paperbacks, and thus of hardcovers that could be re-published as paperbacks reaching a larger readership.

Then came our "changing world" that I've been writing about here since 2007.


With the advent of usable e-reading screens, the e-book market which had grown via PDF download, dedicated reading devices of dubious worth, html websites posting fanfic, just plain exploded.

It pretty much caught traditional publishers by surprise.

They hadn't followed the growth of hits on fanfic websites. 

And for various reasons, traditional publishers had always been way out of touch with what "readers want" -- and more in touch with what a reader will buy based on a cover, or cover-blurb, or based on what books are placed in a bookstore window or "dump" carton in an aisle. 

Book sales are all that matter to a publisher.  And book sales don't matter at all to a reader, as long as the reader gets satisfaction, or can find the next book in a series they're following.

Book sales matter to a writer only insofar as their income stream is satisfactory.  When income is satisfactory, the matter of sales fades from the writer's consciousness.  The writer is concerned only with ABOUT, with the urge to DEPICT the world in a revealing light that makes sense out of chaos.

To a writer, only the story matters, only the narrative matters. 

That's why writers are so hurt and bewildered when a traditional publisher turns down the next book in a series.  The writer is about finishing the story.  The reader is about finding out the ending of the story.  The publisher is about efficient use of resources to make a profit. 

So with the advent of usable reading screens, the readers who wanted to finish reading the story, and the writers who wanted to finish publishing the story, and some entrepreneurs who saw that connection, founded small publishing via e-books.

The first commercial level explosion of e-book sales for such small publishers was in the Vampire Romance.

Traditional Publishing started this trend -- some might say, Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire started the trend, but I think it appeared first in YA novels about a Vampire who turns up in a High School, either as a student, a teacher, or on the periphery.  13 year old readers become adult readers in about 5 years.

And it was about 5 years after the popularity of YA vampires that we saw the Vampire Romance emerge onto bookstore shelves, buried inside the Romance genre paperbacks.

A  couple years later, Vampire Romance got a label on the spine, different labels from different publishers.

Sales peaked, then started to fall off as other sorts of Paranormal Romance appeared sporadically.  How do I know sales peaked and fell?  Because I was marketing my own material via an agent at that time, and Manhattan lunches gleaned proprietary stats and reports on how the purchasing editors were thinking.

I found that by the time I wanted into that Vampire Romance market, the publishers were saying they were over-bought on Vampire Romance, had more than a year's worth in stock or under contract, and would not even consider another submission.

They ran out of Vampire Romances, and by then other sub-genres were selling better. 

There's a perverse logic in the publishing business model, rooted in the disconnect between the objectives of a writer and the objectives of a publisher.

So when Vampire Romance readers suddenly could not find any more paperbacks to suit them, they quickly learned on the grapevine that Vampire Romance was alive and well, thriving and growing in the e-book market.

That demand for Vampire Romance, in part, drove the demand for readers that drove the technological improvements in screens.  Improved screens increased demand for e-books, and other varieties of novels, and now even non-fiction, are all e-book.

And of course, you've all heard of the contretemps between Amazon and Hatchet and other publishers over the price of e-books.  Readers have been saying for a long time that e-book prices are about double what they should be.

Small publishers are consolidating (buying each other), and refining the business model.  Many, many publishers that started up in the nascent e-book market have closed.  And now the traditional publishers used their marketing strength (and Amazon & B&N) to yank the e-book market away from small publishers. 

http://www.booksandsuch.com/blog/amazon-hachette-battle-matters/

So writers who wanted to reach their own readers self-published.

Many self-publishing writers are New York Times Bestselling writers, taking back the rights to their NYT best sellers, re-publishing them by themselves or through small e-book publishers, and then finishing their series.  Sometimes they bring out new books in new series.

Meanwhile, a lot of writers who could not sell to traditional publishing went with self-publishing.

Some of these had honed their craft on fanfic websites, getting feedback from readers, learning to use beta-readers, and grow into a skill set that works to produce good novels that hit their readers nerves squarely.

Other self-publishing writers learned as they went. 

There's an organization for e-book publishers and writers something like SFWA or RWA, complete with genre book awards and cover art awards which I joined years ago when I had my first e-book out, Molt Brother.  Now it's in paper, e-book, and also audiobook, along with the sequel, City of a Million Legends.



http://www.epicorg.com/  is the website of the e-book professionals organization and it also has an active forum where people exchange a lot of information, writers find publishers, and so on.

These are the people generating the change in the world of publishing.

So we are seeing an increasing level of quality in self-published books.

Historically, Science Fiction Fandom invented fanfic -- fiction written by fans for fans.  For the most part, science fiction fanzines never published fiction, but rather discussed conventions and novels.  But fan fiction thrived in smaller circulation, often on carbon paper, though usually not using established characters of a professional writer. 

With the advent of Spockanalia and T-Negative, Star Trek fans discovered the joys of fanfic written to expand and expound on the TV characters.  And gradually, fan writers created original characters to interact with the established characters, revealing new depths to the shallow TV depictions.

That evolution of fan fiction is the main subject of my Bantam Paperback STAR TREK LIVES!



STAR TREK was the first TV Series to engage the fertile imagination of organized science fiction fandom.  Yes, organized.  There were (and are) clubs with constitutions, slates of officers, and annual elections, plus dues and publications.  The World Science Fiction Society holds the annual World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) and awards the Hugo, as well as other Awards.

Science Fiction fandom was (and is) organized and connected.  Today it's connected via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  Then it was snailmail and telephone.

From STAR TREK LIVES! and the New York Star Trek Conventions, the media picked up on the term fanfic (especially slash), and popularized the term FAN, fanzine, fan fiction, and eventually the term FANFIC. 

In that term, FANFIC, may lie the barricade between self-published Romance novels and the prestige they deserve.  It may also give us a clue as to where the resistance against Romance comes from in the general population, even though they flock to films with a tear-jerking Romance, and give awards to the RomCom (the romantic comedy) -- yet shy from Romance per se.

Terminology is key to changing people's assumptions, or prejudices.  We changed from the term "nigger" to the term Black to indicate elevating the prestige, the potential value of a person. 

The terms Liberal and Progressive, Communist and Socialist, Independent, etc etc are continuously redefined, and then changed. 

So let's examine the origin of the term "fan" to see what it is telling the world about us.

The media, and now dictionaries and major sources, keep insisting on a misconception about the origin and meaning of the term "fan."

They insist that the science fiction fan is a FANATIC (i.e. not sane but obsessed.)

That is the label that was slapped on science fiction fandom way back before it was organized, and even afterward for decades.

A fanatic is a person who is not in their "right mind."  And usually, being a mild conditiion, the fanatic "out-grows it" or "gets over it."

Can you imagine out-growing or getting over Romance?  Come on! 

But they are saying that science fiction is a "phase" that some teens go through and therefore it is negligible, and can safely be tolerated and disregarded.  There is nothing in it (they said in the 1930's) that has any bearing on reality or the future.

30 years later, that generation sent men to the Moon. 

The next generation of science fiction fanatics invented the internet and the web.

The next twenty years saw the advent of the cell phone, then the smartphone.

Fanaticism is a mental disorder suffered by teens, like measles was considered a childhood disease you just had to suffer through. 

Fanaticism is a disease.

Today they say of the same age-group that Videogaming is "addictive."  That's it's unhealthy for teens to communicate with each other via social media.

In the 1940's they said the same thing of that generation's teens who were communicating with each other via telephone.  The picture of the teen monopolizing the ONLY phone-line in a household, holding long conversations with fellow teens (often of opposite gender) was a feature of life in the 1950's, tolerated and scorned by adults.

If you're a writer intending to grab a market-share for your work, watch what teens are doing now.  It takes about 5 years to write a novel, from Idea to published, and in 5 years today's teens will be at peak entertainment consumer years. 

But they may pick up the scorn associated with terminology used when talking about Romance Genre novels, and never explore the rich, complex, and satisfying worlds Romance writers build.

Or, if they do browse mass market paperbacks, they may never discover the worlds being created by writers using small publishers or self-publishing in e-books.

I get a couple of newsletters pitching free and 0.99cent e-books, Romance genre, Mysteries, etc. 

https://www.bookbub.com/home/

I often see books pitched as having many hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

The star-review has become the self-publisher's marketing tool, and yes, there is some fraud associated with this statistic, even though Amazon tries to prevent that. 

Still, read some of those reviews.  Even if you would scorn the book because of typos or need for editing out inconsistencies and filling plot-holes, look at the comments by readers who focus entirely on the payload, the way the STORY made them feel, not the technical flaws in the writing craft.

Those 5-star reviews are typical of fanzine reader responses to fanfic based on a TV-show. 

Get that free newsletter, click through to Amazon on a title with lots of 5-star reviews and read carefully.  And while reading, think about this.

Self-publishing is hard (writing the novel is easy by comparison).  The odds are against you selling a single copy to anyone you don't know personally. 

But there are associations of self-publishing writers who can teach you how to connect with cheap promotional strategies that might work. 

There is very likely an audience hungry for what you want to sell them.  You finding them, them finding you, or "going viral" is a long-shot.  Finding and serving a market is what publishers do -- their business model is suited to that process.  Writing uses a different business model.

But because of the adequate e-reader screens now available fairly cheap, there is a readership starving for what you write.  They just won't recognize it when starting right at it. 

What do we need to get that instant recognition?

We need a label, a symbol, a TERM which describes what this kind of fiction is, where it comes from, why it deserves their attention, and most important what it actually delivers.

The term self-published has gathered scorn because of the missing editorial steps people have become used to.

The term fanfic has gathered scorn because of the old (and inaccurate) term fanatic. 

What other artform besides writing has, historically, been a source of pure satisfaction and meaningful entertainment (and information)?

Think about the music industry.

Commercially available music has its origins in the Bards taking news, information, and historical Events and gossip from town to town, presenting it all as song. 

Isolated towns had their own youngsters who sang and played music.

Think about the old West.  Whoever in town could saw on a fiddle played for the square dancing. 

Along with all this, came one of the oldest artforms, which became known as Folk Music. 

Here's a wikipedia article on 1940's folk music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_folk_music_revival

In the 1960's, people like Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, Woodie Guthrie, Johnny Cash, and people you've never heard of because they only played and sang at weddings and birthday parties.  Yesteryear's Garage Bands.

You can get this old music on Amazon, iTunes, and other websites. 

http://www.last.fm/music/Peter,+Paul+&+Mary/+similar

http://tropicalglen.com/Jukebox/Genre/FolkMusic/NewChannel.html

Yes, politics grabbed the folk song and ran with it.  Theodore Bikel's concert records have patter that reveals all that. 

But folk music reflects the life and times of those who perform and those who foster it.  It's folk, not professional.

In the 1960's it became big time professional, and highly respected -- because it made money for the music industry in records and concerts (and movies).

Country Music is the professional development of old, folk music by people who farmed and lived too far away from cities to associate with city folks.  Country was isolated because transit was slow, and internet didn't exist.  Today, many places only have satellite service if that. 

A lot of money has been made from Country Music -- and don't forget Elvis Presley came from that venue.

Today the term folk music doesn't carry the opprobrium that fanfic does.

But, if you examine folk music down to the roots, you will see that folk music and self-published novels (from people who were nerve traditionally published and actively do not want to be traditionally published) share a similar kind of popularity. 

And if you juxtapose real folk music (by folks not getting paid to do it) with professional music (by people who do it for profit), you will see an artistic similarity between folk and professional music that exactly parallels the similarity between fanfic and traditionally published fic.

Trace origins and development, find the driving force behind music, and trace how that force generated the Music Industry, and then do the same for novels.

Go back into the 1800's and study women's Gothic novels, circulating as hand-written copies among housewives.  That was fanfic.

I expect you can do the same study with Art.  There are Great Artists who are "Great" because we've heard of them.  And we've heard of them because they had Patrons and got commissions to decorate famous places (like the Cysteine Chapel, for example).  And there are folk artists whose work is left to us only as fragmentary remains on pottery sherds dug up by archeologists.

There's commercial art -- advertisements, book covers -- and there's fine art shown in galleries.  And then there's folk art, which you find in people's homes, done for the pleasure of their families.  Think about quilting, and going out to "the Country" to buy handmade quilts to hang on the wall as art. Those quilts are folk art, and they are respected.

Today, we also have Fan Art published in fanzines. 

All of these art-forms have a folk version, and a professional version.

Why shouldn't fan fiction and self-published fan fiction be the FOLKFIC of our world?

Self-publishing is so closely parallel, and often related to, fanfic devoted to underlying works and  published on websites for free reading, that the only difference is the homage paid to the underlying work.

Fanfic writers introduce original characters, and re-interpret existing characters, sometimes take them to new worlds, tell parts of a story not treated in the professionally published novels, but it is original writing.

You all know how much fanfic my Sime~Gen Universe novels have generated.  There are millions of words posted on simegen.com alone.

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/

Also, on simegen.com we have posted some classic Trek fanzine material.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

You might note on that /startrek/ index page that we have a new addition, the Scholastic Voice Magazine Star Trek Story Contest Winner from 1980.  It was written by a High School boy,  Thomas Vinciguerra, who went on to become a nationally published journalist, and who wrote many articles about Star Trek.  You can find links and the story at:

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/contestwinner/

Here's a 2014 contest on marketing on the internet.
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-public-library-internet/
-------quote---------
As part of its ongoing Seattle Writes initiative, the library has partnered with self-publishing and distribution platform Smashwords to encourage local writers to package their writing for an audience. The eyeball icing on the finger-typing cake? A contest, open until midnight on October 15, in which up to three entrants who publish via Smashwords will have their eBooks included for circulation in the SPL eBook collection.
The fine print is hardly daunting. Have an SPL library card. Be 18 or older. Publish your eBook (for free) with Smashwords on its website. Enter the contest.
Oh. And write the eBook.
....
-------end quote------


Also a new addition to the simegen.com/fandom/ section is a short novel by a Sime~Gen fanfic writer, Mary Lou Mendum, done in Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire universe, using some of Catherine's characters, and a whole cast of original characters.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/skolianempire/ 

Mary Lou is an example of a writer who specifically does not want to write professionally.  It's a hobby, and she does it to please specific people.  In the case of the Skolian Universe novel, it was done to entertain someone while ill.

She's an example of a folk-writer, writing folk-fic.

Or perhaps it should be called filkfic as akin to Filk Singing.

The term Filk to describe the original lyrics sung to popular tunes done at Science Fiction Conventions dates back to a typo in a con program book.  The term was immediately adopted as a badge of honor, though what they did with music was one of the oldest traditions in folk music (new words to old songs, variations on old tunes to adapt to new lyrics).

Folk Art is the baseline creativity of humanity singing the song of the universe.

Commercial Art (mass market paperbacks) is Folk Art leveled to the lowest common denominator, made accessible to all.

Fanfic and self-publishing are both types of folk art, folk-storytelling.

The material is popular not because an insane person created it, a fanatic, but because perfectly sane people with experiences in common resonate to it, enjoy it, and elevate the performers of it to local celebrity status.

The folk of the town admire and reward the local bard, the story-teller who teaches morality to children, the shaman who teaches history to children in rhyme, and the artist who draws pictures of local events.

Fanfic and Self-published works resemble Folk Music both in content, and appeal and business model. 

But "Folk" carries a much higher prestige than "Fanatic." 

The most powerful force in civilization is the folks, not insanity or teen phases.

You don't tolerate the folks.  You admire them.   Discount the power of the folks at your peril (or so the rulers of France discovered to their tribulation.  England had a problem with those pesky colonists and their Boston Tea Party, too.)

So I propose replacing the term fanfic with the term folkfic or Folk-fic, or some variant so it includes self-published original universe fiction.  Here you find the stories the folk (the largest market there is) really want. 

The More Things Change; The More They Stay The Same.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Reviews 7 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Reviews 7
by 
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

With Volume 8 in her Alien Series, Gini Koch is opening out her canvas to reveal a huge story behind her story.

It fits with the theme of "What's Really Going On Here?"

And oh, given the current political season in progress, you just have to be asking yourself that question about your real world experiences.  Nothing is as it seems.

Against the backdrop of our "real" world, these novels become even funnier.

Yes, they are Action-Romance, but they are also fraught with humor just as Star Trek was (and is, and will be, I expect.)

Last week, I posted the Index to a long series of long posts on Theme-Worldbuilding Integration:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

Koch's ALIEN Series is a marvelous example of what you can do with a well-integrated junction of theme and worldbuilding.

Koch has taken one character, Kitty Kat, given her a "life-story" or recurring theme and a coping strategy that works on a vast variety of problems life throws at her.

From that firm platform, Koch has built out a huge universe.  In Volume 8, we are getting a glimpse of a universe behind these stories as large, thematically rich, historically relevant, and philosophically sizzling as E. E. Smith's Lensman Series.

When Lensman was first published, you couldn't have Romance in a galactic action story.  E. E. Smith (Doc Smith) did it, though.  The Lensman romance inspired me to write SFR, and now Gini Koch has taken it all one step further.  She has built a world based on the most modern theories of space-time, and revealed the philosophical questions those theories ask.

This structure would collapse (e.g. become boring, incomprehensible, nonsensical, or meaningless) if it didn't have this integrated platform underneath the drama.

The setting is contemporary Earth -- with excursions to other planets.  But mostly the plot devices include incursions into Earth's environment from other planets.

Then bit by bit over the first 8 (of what I hope will be many more) novels, the larger universe outside Earth is revealed.

In Alien Research, a new character is introduced whose existence doesn't change the Situation -- but does give us an AHA! moment when we finally begin to understand "what's going on" here.

You might want to look at my review posted on Amazon:



From a technical, craft standpoint, you can study these novels as examples of a manuscript which I see as in need of perhaps as much as 20% line-cutting.  There are wordy phrases, dialogue loops, and speeches that could be rewritten to be more incisive dialogue.

But the plotting is exemplary, the visuals are penetrating, the cast of characters is huge but each is vividly drawn so you do remember them with only the slightest prompting, and the main character is someone you might actually like to BE.

This is a great series, and after eight huge novels, still shows signs of becoming greater.

The ALIEN SERIES is Science Fiction Romance at the genre's best.

Generation V by M. L. Brennan is a Vampire Novel I might have missed.



I met M. L. Brennan as she was signing autographs at Worldcon in San Antonio in 2013, and only just got around to reading the book she autographed for me, Generation V.

Now I see there's another one available on Amazon:



I'm thrilled, but I haven't read IRON NIGHT yet.

Generation V is tightly crafted, smoothly written, well paced, and an all around satisfying read, whether you like Vampire Romance or not.  Though romance isn't in focus in this novel, the potential is there.  More than Vampire Romance, though, the potential of this series is for Alien Romance -- the women in this hero's life are not, hmmm, all human.

Although Generation V is a Vampire novel, urban fantasy with a dark and bloody side to it, the overall tone of the point of view character's take on the world is more on the "light" side.

The main character's name is Fortitude, and he definitely has that virtue. 

His family is rather typical of today's urban fantasy vampires -- bloody, murderous, and blythe about the supernatural. 

There is not a lot of deep substance showing in this first novel.  None of the characters seem to be interested in puzzling out "what is really going on" -- which in this case would be an intersection of the fantasy/magic world of mythic creatures with our everyday Earth (instead of aliens from outer space, as Gini Koch is dealing with).

But the potential for such depths of mystical theory are wound deep into the springboard of this first novel.

Fortitude is well educated, but has a lot to learn.  He has skills, talents and abilities that can be "re-purposed" (you did read my review of ALIEN RESEARCH on Amazon, didn't you?) just as Kitty Kat has.

He is a fish out of water and does not know it (yet). 

In this first novel, Fortitude begins to come into his heritage as a Vampire, and learns how vampires are made. 

Generation V also gives us a hint of the politics of supernatural creatures co-existing among humans, and that has a potential to rival Washington D. C.

If the theme-worldbuiding integration is done as well for this new fictional world as Gini Koch has managed to do so far, M. L. Brennan has a winner on her hands.

You will want to be in on the ground floor to watch this universe being built.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Settings Part 3 - Dreamspy in E-book

Last week we discussed a bit more about Settings, and I mentioned how closely connected Setting and Genre are, as topics. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/04/guest-post-by-j-h-bogran-settings-part-1.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/04/settings-part-2.html

If you're writing for a Western market, your Setting has to have horses, wagons, Sheriffs, rattlesnakes, guns, desperadoes, muddy streets, maybe a herd of cattle.  The Western Romance was a growing sub-genre at the time Those of My Blood and Dreamspy were first published. 

About three years before Those of My Blood came out, the first novel in my Dushau Trilogy won the Romantic Times Award for Best Science Fiction.  That was so long ago that the credit for it is not on their website!  I still have the trophy, though.

Dushau is science fiction romance without Vampires. 
http://www.amazon.com/Dushau-The-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B002OSXNM8/

If you can sell Western Romance, why not Science Fiction Romance?  They just couldn't encompass the concept.  Editors were convinced "mixed genre" just could not be sold -- and the evidence before their eyes confirmed that resoundingly.  They had just begun computerizing sales data, and they believed the computer printouts. 

A writer may know, absolutely, that there are readers who want the kind of story they have to tell, and they may be correct, but if marketers don't know "where" to reach those readers, they won't try to reach them.  And the marketers are right about that.

I've seen, lately, several self-publishing writers wailing on Google+ and Twitter about how they can't sell copies of their books - even giving them away, or charging only 99cents, they can not sell books that the few who've read those books rave about.

Writing books and pleasing readers is one thing --- selling books is something else.

Here's a tweet from twitter:
--quote------
twliterary 10:42am via Web (Literary Agent who has nearly 5k followers)
http://www.twliterary.com
Author whose submission was rejected just EM that book pubbed to nice review. Truly happy for you, even w/ gratuitous "nyah nyah" note.
-----endquote------

LESSON: don't crow when you score against the establishment, just bank the check.

So how does a market change?  First comes the publication of a daring new genre, or mix of genres, or an exploration of a Setting (Ancient Egypt?  Victorian England?  The Moon?).  The mix-mixing of a new setting with a type of characer who doesn't belong there (as far as marketers know) has to start with a few books that are marketing failures.  Those novels have to get good reviews, even though they don't sell. 

Then comes an imitation or two, and there's a pre-built tiny market.  Then "word" goes viral, and the new genre gets a name and an identifyable market to publicize to.  Then big bucks get spent on "marketing" another new item designed to appeal to that market, and that's when you hear about this new item. 

This creation of a genre is a slow, tedious process, but the e-book is speeding things up. 

To find out how to achieve this result, study how it happened in the past, change the parameters that technology and social networking has changed, and launch a project into that new non-market.  Become a market maker.

Those of My Blood and Dreamspy are good examples.  Original first printing Those of My Blood has sold for $400-$500 in collector-quality condition (that means unread).  Now you can get Those of My Blood for $3.19 and Dreamspy for $3.99 (I don't control the price, the publisher does.)






So how do you think of what to mix up with what to create something "new?"  Or something you haven't ever encountered before? 

Think about popular SETTING, and inject a character that doesn't belong there, living through a story that's familiar from a different setting. 

The same old worn-out Western story can be told in Science Fiction if the Setting has Stars, Space, Spaceships, spacedrives, and space-type hazards to take the place of rattlesnakes, guns and desperadoes.  To be good science fiction, the story needs hazards that aren't now possible.  The characters have to solve problems that can't possibly exist by getting over their notion that the problem does not exist. 

A Vampire on the Moon, in Those of My Blood -- that is just such an "impossible" problem.  The  Vampire is Fantasy element injected into a Science Fiction Setting, then twisted from the Horror Genre into Romance -- another genre where Vampires don't belong  (according to marketers in the 1980's). 

So when venturing to innovate where marketers fear to go, mix-and-match Settings and Characters. 

So suppose instead of a Western, you had a Romance with International Intrigue and Vampires.  But you set the story in the midst of a Galactic War.  The Setting becomes Space, but the Romance drives the plot.

There was a time the marketers didn't know what to do with such a novel. 

I wrote two such orphan-genre novels (Science Fiction Romance) for the St. Martin's Press hardcover SF line in the 1980's.

Both got marvelous reviews, but St. Martins withdrew all advertising efforts from their Science Fiction line for strategic reasons.  The strategy was to publish the hardcover just to distribute to newspapers and magazines for review (because at that time, certain widely read venues would not review a paperback original). 

So they printed only a couple thousand hardcover copies (hence the collector price) and never distributed to bookstores.  You could buy (the month Those of My Blood was published) several hardcover and new paperback Vampire novels by very big name writers who got award attention for their novels. 

But Those of My Blood, a brand new hardcover hailed as my breakout novel, was not on any store bookshelves (except the Independents) the month it was published.  Where Independents special ordered it for those who knew it was forthcoming, they ordered only for the customer who wanted it and didn't put any on the shelves. 

And then neither Those of My Blood or Dreamspy ever made it into Mass Market. 

Eventually, another publisher picked them up, and they did pretty well, getting reprinted several times but only in trade paperback, and finally going out of print.

Then Wildside Press picked them up and now both novels are available in trade paperback and e-book editions. 

There are no sex scenes the way you'd expect now, but at that time sex scenes were not allowed in Science Fiction.  Marion Zimmer Bradley and Ursula LeGuinn changed that, but notice how their sex scenes differ from today's.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Vampire Archetype Flashburned Into Memory

Before we start, look at the graph on this blog tracking the meteoric rise of Vampire Romance by number of titles per year over 10 years.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

I found this via the following post on Twitter which I retweeted (I don't know who Michele Hauf retweeted here):

RT @michelehauf: RT Track the meteoric rise of vampire romance over the past decade at VampChix! http://bit.ly/ycx0r

That's a shortened URL going to the whole blog - the long URL above goes directly to the specific post with the graph that tells it all.

And if you haven't investigated my Vampire Romances, take a look at http://www.simegen.com/writers/luren/ to sample free chapters and look at what other Romance writers have said (I can still post more comments if you have any you want linked back to your own website.)

OK, now that you've done your interesting homework, come to class, sit in your chair, fold your hands and prepare to be bored out of your mind with one of my insanely long posts -- which is worse this time because I have to brag or there's no way to make this point, and the point is really, really abstract and you probably don't want to know, and maybe it really ought to be kept a deep, dark secret.

--------Skip If You Know All About Archetypes-------

We've discussed archetypes before, and I've always assumed everyone knows what they are and how they work and why. But maybe not. If you know all about archetypes you can skip this section of this post and still understand the point. Look for the dashed-line divider below that says SKIP THIS SECTION IF. to see if you need to read that section.  That would be two whole sections of this monster that you can skip and still get the point.

The thing with archetypes is that they don't look like whatever manifestation you're seeing them inside of.

They don't seem "real" and have no absolute specifics about them. It takes some practice to walk the world and spot interacting archetypes in the people around you and their biographies.

People are so different, no two alike, and the differences matter to us. The similarities, not so much.

How can you say one person is "just another version" of another person?

But that's what successful Romance Writers (and other genre writers) do to make their characters (and dialogue) Flashburn into reader's Memory.

Some really successful writers don't even know (and shouldn't know) they're doing that at all.

Learning a little (very little) bit of Astrology can help sort the world around you into archetypes, but that's the lazy woman's way of learning it.

You can't make a diagram of an archetype (though that's what Tarot cards are and that works for some people). You can't do an animated gif to show what archetypes are. They aren't tangible or visible.

Archetypes are psychological patterns of non-manifested FORCE or ENERGY. They are templates for reality, not reality itself.

Yes, an archetype is a little like a web page template. It's not the template that matters to the page visitor, it's the color, sound, motion, words, videos, links, that make this page different from that page, and that is all that matters to a visitor, "what's here that's different from what's there."

But web designers know that what makes all the content accessible and high-impact on visitors (stopping surfers mid-click), conveying the meaning that is within the content is the underlying pattern, the design, the composition, the template.

Fictional characters are just like web pages in that sense.

If the template design shows through you get a stereotype. If the template design does not show through, you get a living, breathing, psyche-penetrating, communicating, real character who seems like a real person and "lives" in the reader's memory, dreams, and even manifests in their lives (yes, I have testimonials from my readers about how my characters have affected their real life decisions and results - to the good, thankfully!)

New writers need to learn to percieve this dual level of reality (template vs. content) because what matters to people is the specific manifestation of the archetype, not the archetype itself. "Happiness" is achieving a specific manifestation of whatever archetype is operating in life (and none of the other possibilities within the archetype), and nobody cares what the archetype is as long as the specific desired manifestation appears.

People and thus characters prefer to ignore the fact that an archetype encompasses their reality. It's irrelevant. They want what they want.

For example: In Astrology, Tarot and in Archetypes, there is no distinction between "winning" and "losing" -- between succeeding and living or failing and dying. These are polar opposites to us living beings, but irrelevant distinctions on the level of archetypes.

I'll leave you with that concept for a while because it's so nonsensical to our ordinary consciousness it takes a while to sink in. But it's the main clue you will need to understand a couple of future points I hope I can make on this blog.

Archetypes exist on the astral plane, or in Kabbalah Yesod represented by The Moon in astrology.

The best show-don't-tell I've ever seen for "the astral plane" was the Star Trek: The Original Series episode SHORE LEAVE (also written by Theodore Sturgeon, one of my favorite authors and I knew him well enough to know that he understood the astral plane well enough to have encoded it in this episode deliberately, though I don't know if he did.)

Here's a reminder about the episode on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shore_Leave_%28Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series%29

What you think, wish, dream, what just crosses your mind, what you subconsciously fear or want, becomes MANIFEST on the astral plane. Your psyche is the template, and energizes your personal reality. On the Astral Plane, anything you want (or fear or don't want) will surround you.

The Kabbalistic trick is to understand that the astral plane is the foundation of our actual concrete everyday reality. And our reality actually is influenced starkly by what we think, dream, feel, and subconsciously hold dear.

Archetypes are the pattern of illusion and delusion, and they're plastic.

In addition to your personal manifestations of archetypes in your own life, archetypes have attributes defined by the human Group Mind that downloads and pours content into them, content that is displayed on that Group Mind's homepage.

Maybe all archetypes are eternal and the same ones arise wherever humans are. The Magician. The Mage. The Vampire. The Maiden. The Mother. The Crone. The King. The Queen. The Youth. The Outsider. The Alienated Hero. The Warrior. The Shaman.

Which are you living inside? Living with? Playing publically?

You can recognize archetypes manifest in something you're familiar with. A badly handled archetype becomes a stereotype, just as a badly handled "foreshadowing" becomes "telegraphing."

Last week we discussed Sharon Green's WARRIOR WITHIN starring Terrilian.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (which post is mis-named, it is Astrology part 7)

Remember what we discussed and think about The Female Warrior Archetype - Amazon? - Marion Zimmer Bradley's Renunciates?

Archetypes do change how they manifest over generations. Yet the more they change the more they stay the same. Still, the available options you may choose from in your life or your novels change with the Group Mind.

You can change your options list by changing what Group Mind you belong to. Think about how a person can change when they do something drastic in their life - such as a religious conversion, joining the Army, graduating and leaving the "old neighborhood" losing touch with all the kids from class and finding new friends among co-workers. Consider a Rock Star fan who moons&moans, then cuts loose and goes Groupie, following the star around the world, associating with the Star's friends and forgetting family. Same person: different manifestation.

Today the female image has shifted markedly from where it was in, say, the 1940's before women contributed to the USA winning World War II. Now some women have become (or been brainwashed into becoming) suicide bombers, and there are more acts of violence against women in TV fiction than ever before since anyone started counting violence on TV. But at the same time, women are combat trained and gaining combat stripes in the armed forces, rising to high rank where that was prohibited before.

Something is changing in our Group Mind, and that change is accelerating.

But that's all very theoretical and abstract. Worse, that quick reprise doesn't even scratch the surface of what we can see once we are able to sort the world around us out into archetype and manifestation. But seeing doesn't accomplish much.

What can we do with this concept of the archetype?

Can we make our Group Mind change its mind about Relationships, and thus consequently about the merit of the Romance Genre in general and all its variants in particular, and possibly even the entire notion of what constitutes "peace" in this world?

----SKIP THIS NEXT SECTION IF...--------

...blatant bragging offends you or if you're already familiar with the origin of the Sime~Gen Universe novels and all the Star Trek connections underlying them, and how this all spawned Vampire Romance.

You can happily skip this section, and still probably get the point anyway. Scroll down to the next line of dashes where it says POINT.

In the Bantam paperback STAR TREK LIVES! on which I was the primary author, we discussed the then popular theory that "Spock" was actually a new Archetype - The Alienated Hero but heroic because of Intelligence not Brawn. In retrospect, it's clear that Spock actually raised the prestige profile of the Geek, the outcast Class Brain. Spock was considered sexy! The Group Mind attitude toward the Geek, The Brain, the Egghead changed in much the way we would like to see the prestige profile of the Romance Genre raised.

It's unclear whether the Archetype illustrated by Spock caused the change, or emerged because of the change sparked by Star Trek -- possibly this Group Mind/ Archetype Manifestation process is as interactive as the manifestation of Violence on TV vs. Violence in Society. Think of bootstrapping, or climbing the inside of a rock chimney. It's not either/or. It's a little this, a little that, until change manifests.

Smart men weren't considered sexy in the 1960's, any more than smart women were attractive.

The book STAR TREK LIVES! (which was published in 1975, six years after my first SF story sale and a year after House of Zeor, my first novel) blew the lid on Star Trek fandom and brought in (via the Star Trek Welcommittee) hoards of new fan writers brim full of stories to tell.

Some of those new fan writers had grown up reading Romance and though they may have watched the same TV screen with the men in the room, these women saw a different Star Trek. They saw hot romance sizzling in the background and sub-text of every scene, and that is what they wrote about in fanzines.

They literally invented from scratch what has become the genre of SFR or Science Fiction Romance.

The first Inspirational Science Fiction Romance is posted for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

And as published Relationship Driven HEA Trek, they lured many readers into the genre until it finally (after several sad failures) burst into the Romance genre scene with THE VAMPIRE ROMANCE.

Huh?

What has VAMPIRE ROMANCE to do with SFR? With Science Fiction?

Vampires are FANTASY. Paranormal. Aren't they?

Vampires are supernatural EVIL, so they have to be FANTASY right?
Vampires can't be Science Fiction?

Vampires are Horror. That's the vampire archetype. Right?

How many posts have I done on this blog explaining the paradigm and trope underlying genre fiction, and how a new writer breaks that trope at peril of life, limb, reputation and career?

Romance trope requires the couple find each other attractive (if not at first; eventually).  Real attraction often first manifests as repulsion, and that makes a good Romance, but ultimately it must transmute into an attraction the reader can relate to.

And how can anyone love something EVIL?

Evil isn't sexy.

Surely not?

Oh, our predecessors soooo lacked imagination!

Or did they?

When and where did SFR and romantic Vampires actually begin?

Margaret Carter, one of our staunch contributors on this blog is the expert on the history of Vampire literature, so I'll let her point you to the answers on that. It was actually longer ago than you might think.

Major classics of Great Literature aside, though, look again at that graph I pointed you to at the beginning of this post.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

It only goes back to 1997 which is ancient history for most readers of this blog. But I'm discussing the manifestations of the Vampire archetype in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's. That graph would not be parabolic had there not been 30 years of cultivating of the Group Mind's taste before 1997.

The Romance mass paperback publishers found there was a sudden market in a certain age group for Vampire Romance.

The Vampire did, however, turn off a lot of romance readers.

It disturbs people. Even today you say "I write Vampire stories" in a full room and listen telepathically and you'll hear "Evil" and all the religious people will leave the room or try to convert you.

OK, so the Romance publishers started putting VAMPIRE ROMANCE or something similar on the spines of those certain, slightly different, romances -- romances with a supernatural dimension, edgy romances flirting with the issue of Evil -- to warn off their more sensitive readers.

Meanwhile, in Science Fiction and the budding Fantasy field (yes, before STAR TREK fanfic, there really wasn't much of an adult Fantasy field - "adult" not meaning graphic sex scenes, but fantasy that was not aimed at 10 year olds) there was a flood of Vampire novels published.

Concurrent with the Science Fiction genre was the Horror Genre, often confused with SF, and most all the Vampire novels ended up labeled Horror even those with Good Vampire Heroes. That was when I started reading a lot of "Horror" even though I dislike the Horror genre. Non-Horror genre novels were published under the "Horror" label because nobody else would have them -- they contained a VAMPIRE!

A genre example.

Star Trek was the first real SF on TV. When it was cancelled after the first 3 years, and went into syndication so successfully, producers began to search for a way to lure the Star Trek audience to a new show.
They presented Star Trek fans with SPACE 1999, thinking they had the combination. But SPACE 1999 was actually HORROR FANTASY, and SF fans just don't respond to Horror (or if they do, it's with a different part of their literary taste buds.) SF fans at that time were somewhat allergic to Fantasy as well because most of the best selling Fantasy writers were women (SF editors wouldn't buy SF from women, so women went and made their own genre. So what else is new?)

This was such a hot-button issue in the 1970's that when I was nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1973 for my Star Trek fanzine universe Kraith (up for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/ ) there was a big political flap in SF fandom at Worldcon, and that was before K/S emerged.

Kraith plays with telepathic bonding and all the Theodore Sturgeon elements, Vulcan culture and its being shaped by telepathy. But those who voted against Kraith did so because it was Star Trek and was nominated by Star Trek fans who happened to be Worldcon members.

The feeling was that Worldcon was being taken over by "those people" - actor groupies who'd never read an SF novel. The disdain had a similar feel to the disdain focused on Romance and Vampire Romance. Today, Fantasy out-sells SF. If you graph the stats, I'll bet you find the same parabolic curve seen in the graph we're studying here on Vampire Romance titles.

In Science Fiction, the Hero prevails. The ending (as with Romance) has to have a specific flavor -- winning; triumph; achievement; understanding; satisfaction. Romance needs the HEA, the Happily Ever After, ending, and nothing else sells quite as well as an HEA.

An HEA can't actually be generated by a heroic success -- it isn't "Happily Ever After" if one partner forces the other to love them. That makes a good middle, but not an HEA.

SF needs the success ending, whatever success is. It has to be a definitive success and it has to be brought about by the Protagonist's personal actions which must proceed from the protagonist's ability to THINK CLEARLY. And preferably in an application of the scientific method, to resolve the plot's conflict via scientific reasoning even if the problem isn't actually a science problem.

SF became "Action-Adventure" because cerebral stories don't sell well, so publishing demanded that the SF novel end with a VICTORY imposed by FORCE of some kind - i.e. action. It wasn't enough to solve an intellectual puzzle any more. There had to be a physical problem with physical action and a physical resolution.

In the Horror genre ending, the protagonist must not prevail over Evil.

Evil can never be destroyed. The most you can achieve is to cram it into a coffer, a closet, a cave, and seal it with a magical seal that will hold for centuries, or millenia with luck. You have to leave the problem to your descendants. You can't win. That's the message of Horror. And SF is all about winning definitively, and that total triumph when a definitive solution slams into reality and changes everything.

The Horror premise is that evil is a property of reality, and reality wouldn't exist without it. Good and Evil must always be at odds, always in conflict, but neither can ever win.

The premise of SF is that humanity will prevail.

And that, as Gene Roddenberry said so many times, is the premise of Star Trek. We will go where no man has gone before, and we will prevail. We will prevail by intellect, compassion, and by wisdom. (He used that word, Wisdom, a lot in everyday talking, not just in speeches before throngs -- "When humanity will be wise ..."  )

It's a philosophical difference that the producers of Space 1999, and the next TV offering to Star Trek fans (marketed specifically to Star Trek fans) Battlestar Galactica (the original), just couldn't grasp.

And so both shows failed to capture the Star Trek audience which continued to grow and grow, through an animated Saturday morning cartoon version of Trek, through books and the films, and into several TV series, with convention after convention making headlines everywhere, even on TV news. What an embarrassment.

Eventually, Ronald D. Moore succeeded in creating a Battlestar Galactica remake that grabbed Trek fans - he had the experience.

Here's his comment on my theory of Intimate Adventure:

http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventurecomments.html

That link reveals that Ronald D. Moore is a Sime~Gen reader, maybe fan, and it's posted with his permission. I did send him a set of Kraith Collected at his request.

Here's Ronald D. Moore's filmography on imdb.com

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0601822/

So after Anne Rice's first novel INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE became such a runaway best seller, Horror genre re-exploded with a new wave of Vampire novels. But they were horror vampires, bent on evil, destructive killers, not to be reasoned with, and with no shred of humanity left.

Then the Romance Genre pretty much invented THE VAMPIRE AS GOOD GUY and those books flooded the market for years. Then all of a sudden (about the time I was writing Those of My Blood - 1985-ish) you couldn't sell a Vampire Romance. Editors said don't send it, we're overstocked.

Everyone thought that meant they'd never publish any more, and the genre was a failure. I finished Those of My Blood anyway, and after more than 20 submissions (the only time that ever happened to me, and my agent was adamant that it would sell) it sold to St. Martin's Press for Hardcover. St. Martin's touted it as my breakout book. It was published in 1988. The paperback came out in 2003, but the new publisher refused to label it Vampire Romance because it takes place on the moon and so nobody would buy it. The graph we're studying begins in 1997.

Those of My Blood - Amazon Page.

Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series started with Guilty Pleasures in 2002, and either rode or created a contemporary urban fantasy Vampire Romance/Horror genre mix. Look at 2002 on that graph.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show was on the air as TV beginning in 1997 when this graph begins.

Archetypes keep creating this kind of chicken/egg problem. When you can't solve a problem, as every math student knows, it's because you haven't stated the problem correctly.

OK, so what happened with the archetypes from Star Trek (1966) to now (2009)?

That's over 40 years, two generations.

These kinds of Group Mind archetype changes span generations. See my post on generations and taste from October 2009 which really is Astrology Part 6 (the November 2009 one is Part 7) -- on Pluto and the generations:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

Think about that post on Pluto because there's more to say about how Pluto manifests via the Group Mind and why it's so clear that Astrology is utter nonsense. Let the notions soak in for a while.

Archetypes are always shifting and changing in the way they manifest, but there is (by definition) a core pattern to each archetype that is somehow inherent in all humanity and unchanging through millenia.

These patterns turn up in all cultures over all times that we've any record of. The Vampire myth is everywhere in one form or another. It's always been there, just not the subject of popular fiction. (of course "popular fiction" and "mass market" are new phenomena, and are now melting away under the force of the specialty niche market ebook!)

So what happened between the advent of Star Trek fan fiction (STAR TREK LIVES! was published in 1976 but it was based on 5 years of research in Star Trek fan fiction) and the explosion of Vampire Romance novels that continues today in a rapidly evolving form of Paranormal Romance, SFR, and Time Travel Romance, etc etc.

How could Science Fiction spawn the Romance Vampire?

Science Fiction readers tended to loathe the Romance field. Romance readers tended to loathe Horror. All vampires are horror genre.

What happened?

Before there is a runaway best seller in any new sub-genre, there has to be what Heather at http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/ called in her post
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/10/does-science-fiction-romance-need-gene.html
a "Ground Zero" where the explosion of a genre happens.

Before we get to that Ground Zero, there are usually a number of novels that do pretty well, but just don't attract any attention. Audiences build a taste for a genre slowly (actually as we're seeing here over generations), and then BOOM something hits big time. Commercialization interests notice the small following, and promote it using sly, sneaky, underhanded but effective advertising tools that cost a lot of money.

And its a generational thing. In the 1980's, there were a series of children's books for pre-teens and tweens set in High School and featuring Vampires -- evil ones, and not-so unreasonably evil ones. They conditioned an entire generation to be willing to try things with fantasy and urban fantasy - and set the stage for Harry Potter.

In 1974, my first novel, House of Zeor was published.

It's the first novel in the Sime~Gen Universe, but my first sale is a Sime~Gen story that appeared in the January 1969 issue of WORLDS OF IF Magazine edited by Fred Pohl.

House of Zeor was reviewed by Jean Lorrah with the title of the review being VAMPIRE IN MUDDY BOOTS.

The Sime~Gen Universe is built on the Good Guy Vampire with a core of pure DANGER.

As a child, I had read a number of SF works with Vampires as aliens from outer space, or otherwise built on the Vampire archetype.

But I always felt there was something wrong, something missing, something just plain out of FOCUS in these SF universes. Very often they were published as SF but would have been published as Horror if they didn't have science fiction in them.

I wrote Sime~Gen to fix what was wrong with the portrayal of Vampires. The first story, Operation High Time, is available on the Web for free reading (It's not very good, but it is short.)

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/oht.html

From 1970 to 1975 I was working on STAR TREK LIVES! researching Star Trek fanfic (and writing tons of it in Kraith which you can read online for free at http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/ ) and meeting Marion Zimmer Bradley, and marketing HOUSE OF ZEOR.

I was also raising two kids. I don't know how I did it all.

Sime~Gen, complete with Vampire archetype to the letter, came from the mid-1950's, long before I knew anything about archetypes, but I did know Vampires from SF.

I know now that what was totally missing from those early SF Vampires that I so needed to "correct" was Relationships as the plot-driver.

So that's what I wrote into House of Zeor - Relationship as a plot driver.

It's about Vampires in a Science Fiction Universe with a framework of a Romance plot, a solid love-story in every novel, a love-story that eventually shapes the way things turn out.

Sime~Gen has a hidden Fantasy premise (ESP, Magic, and the supernatural that comes out later in the novels). Because of ESP and Magick, it is disqualified as SF.

It's mixed genre with the mixture hidden so it could be published as SF (because no other genre would allow the SF part). But House of Zeor is actually a non-Horror Vampire novel with a love-story plot driver.

House of Zeor was written during and after I did a close analysis of Star Trek, Star Trek fan fiction, and why fans wrote (and read) Star Trek fan fiction.

The lead character of House of Zeor is Spock, but he's not the POV character. He's a scientist in a non-scientific world struggling to solve a problem with scientific thinking. So the book really is SF. But he's a Vampire with all that implies - except he's not supernatural, he just has supernatural Powers (but he doesn't know that).

I sold 65 copies of House of Zeor on a money-back guarantee in the expensive hardcover edition to Star Trek fans who liked Spock, and never had one returned.

I wrote House of Zeor to prove the validity of the hypothesis I set forth in Star Trek Lives! about why fans wrote stories about Spock. That's why House of Zeor had to be published before Star Trek Lives! (to see if what I said in STL! was true.)

House of Zeor connected. It was in print continuously for over 20 years, and came back in the Omnibus SIME~GEN: THE UNITY TRILOGY.

Meanwhile, Jean Lorrah joined me collaborating on Sime~Gen novels, and writing on her own in the universe, too. Many readers prefer her touch on Sime~Gen.

Further proof of my theory about the connection between the Vampire Archetype and Star Trek -- and thus the nature of the SF genre -- was supplied when fans of Sime~Gen began writing their own stories in the Sime~Gen Universe, spawning at one point, 6 publishing fanzines of fiction and non-fiction about Sime~Gen.


Much of that fan written material is currently available online for free reading, and new material is still being added at http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/

which is an index page full of links to huge sections of Sime~Gen fan activity. To read fiction, see Rimon's Library at the bottom of that page.

To read free chapters of the published novels and find links and background information on Sime~Gen see
http://www.simegen.net (net not com)
or
http://www.simegen.com/writers/simegen/

So just as Star Trek spawned fanzines of fiction (prior to Star Trek, SF 'zines contained NO FICTION, but only non-fiction, letters, opinion, personal updates, the kind of thing you find on blogs -- and like fanzines, blogs have evolved to carry fiction), so Sime~Gen spawned fanzines full of fiction, and a little non-fiction.

The Vampire is still my favorite archetype, but as GOOD GUY.

------------POINT-------------------

At last, to the point of it all.

On this blog, I've been discussing various philosophical nooks and crannies, plus a whole lot of intellectualized analysis of story telling techniques.

I've discussed marketing, and genres, and social networking and the changes wrought either because of ebooks or that ebooks are the result of other changes in the publishing industry (such as a major change in the tax laws that killed the mid-list).

And each of these individual points I've made are defining a universe of discourse for solving the problem of the attitude of the general public toward the Romance Genre, and SF Romance and Paranormal Romance, Vampire Romance, Alien Romance.

I've told you a lot about writing technique, simply asserting that doing it this way assures your story will be forgotten and doing it that way will assure that your story will be remembered and called a classic.

I've never offered any evidence that I know what I'm talking about.

But I stumbled upon a bit of evidence in the last few weeks. I only realized what it was evidence OF a couple days ago.

Sime~Gen keeps getting mentioned on various websites, even blogs. So? That's nothing new.

When my sifting tools turn up one of those mentions, I try to find time to drop the blogger a note.

I found a blog a couple weeks ago that mentioned Sime~Gen. It was fairly typical, though outstandingly articulate and well written.

http://freyashawk.blogspot.com/2009/11/sime-gen-authors-query.html

On that blog entry freyashawk says:

"Some time ago, I wrote an article about a series of books that impressed me deeply when I first read them. They were novels about the Sime-Gen universe, created by Jacqueline Lichtenberg who, with the collaboration of Jean Lorrah, then proceeded to weave an elaborate tapestry depicting an alternate future of the human race based on a strange mutation.

Rather to my astonishment, Jacqueline Lichtenberg read my article and responded with a comment a few days ago. She wrote:

'Thank you for the nice words about the Sime~Gen Universe novels.
Please let us know what format you'd like to see these novels in next.'"

And a bit down the page, it says:

"I re-read the entire collection of Sime-Gen novels and stories last year, after recommending them to some one else who, like most of her peers, was infatuated with the 'Twilight' series. To me, the Sime-Gen universe depicted the same sort of social conflict that occurred between vampire and human, with concepts of prey and predator being turned upside down by love."

FLASHBURNED INTO MEMORY

Do you see my point? These books, read decades ago, persist in memory and get REREAD, then recommended to a new generation because they compare with something very current, like THE TWILIGHT SERIES.

Freyashawk did a second post that answers my question where she is staunchly advocating the necessity of producing reprints ON PAPER because ebooks are too ephemeral:

http://freyashawk.blogspot.com/2009/11/ongoing-correspondence-with-jacqueline.html

"Use the internet by all means to promote the Sime-Gen series and network with other writers, but find a way to PRINT the books at a reasonable cost. If you do not wish to organise that aspect of it yourself, I would expect that there are countless writers' groups and small publishers who would be more than pleased to assist in this project if the behemoths of the book-publishing world are too short-sighted to involve themselves. The reputation of any small publishing venture would be enhanced greatly if it were to produce a new edition of these Classics as well as new novels in the series."

This response from readers happens because of the techniques I have described in previous posts here, starting with the 20 posts on Tarot, through all the Writing Craft posts on theme, structure, plotting, story, conflict, etc etc.

Remember Archetype and Template as discussed above in this post.

The techniques of writing craft are like the archetype or template, but it's the content -- the specifics of the story -- that matter to the reader. If those specifics matter too much to the writer who then mis-applies the template, the reader will never recieve the message, the imagery, the content that matters to the writer -- for the same reasons cited above in the section about archetypes.

These writing craft techniques when applied to archetypes that are currently changing in a Group Mind's manifestation of them (Vampires-are-Evil to Vampire-as-Good Guy, is still Vampire Archetype), produce ReReadable Books, books that are remembered for decades and recommended to new generations.

Sime~Gen so easily gets flashburned into the reader's memory because the universe premise asks questions using the Vampire archetype, questions about real world current issues that the readers don't usually know, consciously, are really bothering them. But as Gene Roddenberry taught me, don't answer the questions. Just ask.

When you ask those obtuse, difficult, ellusive questions at the nexus of change in an archetype's manifestation, you capture the attention of those to whom the content matters but the delivery vehicle does not.

The Vampire Archetype manifestations (not the archetype itself; the manifestations) were morphing with the culture through the 1970's, '80's and still are even today, reflecting cultural changes such as the role of women, of racial prejudice, sexuality, the toxicity of violence.

How do you get your way? How do you get satisfied? How do you survive a crumbling life situation? What right do you have? How do you get what you need? And even though you have a right, do you have the right to exercise that right over everyone else's objections?

In Astrology, it's all bound up in 1st House/ 7th House matters, obstructed by 4th House / 10th House matters. That's another essay, but there are the 4 archetypes that quarter our existence.

It could be that the entire paradigm underlying our world culture is shifting more massively than anyone now knows.

The element that could be shifting is all about how one gets one's needs met -- taking your fair share from whoever's trying to keep it from you; exploiting the labor of others (slavery was abolished but continued to evolve via underpaying wages spawning Labor Union's battles); Charity and giving your fair share to taxes as a means of ensuring that Charity is done properly.

Think sweeping meta-history -- history about history. Get an orbital perspective on it all.

Giving and Receiving, the biggest, most abstract (dry, boring) concept behind Kaballah.

Shifts are happening generation to generation on that most fundamental level of the asbsolute structure of the universe.

Is "Evil" a fundamental component of our "Reality" -- or can it be vanquished forever? If we vanquish EVIL, will it take GOOD with it?

Do a quick run through some video games to check subject matter and problem solving techniques. What constitutes the problem in the most popular games? What's the conflict? How is it resolved to the benefit (high score) of the player? Much of gaming is about Good and Evil at War. Primal. Nothing new there. Shades of gray would spoil the fun.

The video game is today what the Vampire novel was to kids growing up in the 1980's. An obsession. I knew it then. My Vampire Romance hardcovers, Those of My Blood (1988) and it's sequel Dreamspy (1989) are still available now in paperback.

The "Vampire" is a perfect amalgam of the issues disturbing the deepest levels of our culture, the issues where the underlying archetype of human nature is changing the way it manifests (not the actual core of human nature; just the way it manifests, the part that matters to us living creatures, is changing. 2009's Halloween included Vampire films with awesome FX.

The Vampire is still popular, more popular as Horror, but go back again and just stare at that graph of Vampire Romance titles.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

Think about what that means and we'll dig into it more in future posts.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com