Monday, November 24, 2008

Writing Tip #2: Smiling, We Wrote This…

Like Tip #1 last week, this bit of writing craft experience comes from teaching two back-to-back weekends of writing workshops. And in between all that, reading three ARCs (Advanced Review Copies or Advance Reader Copies, whichever floats your boat) for quotes. ARCs are often only slightly tidier than first draft manuscripts. So at times it’s heartening to see that other authors do the same stupid mistakes I do in their first drafts, and have the same brain farts.

That’s what crit partners (fresh eyes) and copy editors are eventually for.

But if you’re not yet published or if you’d like to earn the gratitude of your copy editor, you can use these tips to ferret out some of the clunkier parts of your prose.

My smiling blog deals with the (over)use of the gerund. The “ing” form of the verb. Smiling. Thinking. Reaching. Turning. Rising. Sitting…

Browne and King, in their excellent Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (yep, I’m mentioning the book again—I must think it’s good) files the overuse of the gerund under their chapter entitled “Sophistication.” As in—NOT. That is, overuse of the gerund form in commercial genre fiction (well, it would annoy the hell out of me in news copy too but you don’t usually see it there) is an alarm that the writer still suffers from amateurish constructs. So Browne and King say. I tend to agree because when I come across this particular problem, it grates on my ear like the ubiquitous fingernail and blackboard.

Noted SF author CJ Cherryh files the overuse of “ing” words into a different category: simultaneity errors.

We’ll tackle both here.

Good prose, like good music, has a tune, a cadence—a definite rise and fall, push and pull, lull and surge. Sentence length should vary. All long sentences in a piece are a boring as all short. Sentence beginnings should vary.

She walked into the room. She picked up a book. She opened the book. She read the page. She, she, she, she.

Not.

How beginning writers (and some published pros!) attempt to avoid this is through use of the gerund. Unfortunately, they simply end up committing a different error:

She walked into the room. Reaching, she picked up the book. Turning the page, she read it. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked back to the hallway. Sighing, the looked back at the book.

Okay, not that bad but close. I’ve seen pages where every paragraph on the page starting with the “ing” version of the verb…plus some additional gerund thrown in mid-paragraph.

Browne and King note: “[The] ing construction…[is] grammatically correct and express[es] the action clearly and unambiguously. But notice that [this] construction takes a bit of action and tucks it away into a dependent clause. This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant. And so if you use these constructions often, you weaken your writing.”

I couldn’t have said it better. Plain fact: it’s weak writing.

“The participle construction has a particularly amateurish flavor when placed at the beginning of the sentence.” (Browne and King, pg 157).

I couldn’t have said it better. (As an aside, yes, Renni Browne and Dave King do have the street creds as former senior editors for major NY publishing houses to make such statements with authority.)

Oh, they also point out rewriting the gerund participle phrase to us “as” is equally as problematic:

She walked into the room. As she reached for the book, she picked it up. As she turned the page, she read the words…

I just seem to see a lot less “as” phrases than I do “ing” phrases.

The other problem with the participle phrase is simultaneity.

From Cherryh’s Writerisms:

-ing. 'Shouldering his pack and setting forth, he crossed the river...' No, he didn't. Not unless his pack was in the river. Implies simultaneity. The participles are just like any other verbal form. They aren't a substitute legal everywhere, or a quick fix for a complex sequence of motions. Write them on the fly if you like, but once imbedded in text they're hard to search out when you want to get rid of their repetitive cadence, because -ing is part of so many fully constructed verbs {am going, etc.}

Logic errors like this are so easy to create and so easy to overlook. Your mind (at least, my mind) knows what it wrote. It knows what it wants to say. So when it reads the page, it often fills in logic that’s not there.

Trust me. I’ve done it.

Setting the cup on the table, she ran for the door.

Unless she had a really really long arm, no, she didn’t. She did not set and run at the same time.

Rubbing her nose, she turned toward the window.

Yes, she did. Those are legit simultaneous actions. Placing and running aren’t.

A quick check I use—if I’m not sure I’ve created a logic error—is to turn the two verbs around:

Running for the door, she set the cup on the table. Threw the cup, maybe, but not set.

Turning toward the window, she rubbed her nose.

Perfectly fine.

Take Cherryh’s example above and turn it around:

Crossing the river, he shouldered his pack…


Okay, sensible but that’s not likely what the writer meant to say. The writer wanted to show two actions. First, he put his pack over his shoulder. Second, he crossed the river. Crossing the river, he shouldered his pack…doesn’t say that.

But it’s just a minor difference in meaning, you wail!

Yes, it is. And that’s what being an author of a story is all about. The usage and meanings of words that clearly and definitively create the experience known as the story. The novel. If “good enough” is good enough for you, keep writing. But don’t set your sights at being a published author. Words as are much an author’s tools as spices are a chef’s. The wrong spice, too much of a spice, and the dish is unpalatable.

The same is true for writing.


Mark Twain said "The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between the lightning and the lightning bug."


Smiling happily, she ended the blog.


~Linnea

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Editorial Ass: C[r]ash Flow (Or What Went Wrong in October in Book Publishing)

Editorial Ass: C[r]ash Flow (Or What Went Wrong in October in Book Publishing)

Problem-Solving Sundays .... the future of Chain Bookstores

Who better than speculative fiction authors and a few romantics with their heads in the stars (and the warp drive) to set the world to rights?

So, I thought I'd float a trial balloon here.

Have you ever seen a problem, and had an idea for a fix, but no one to tell? Moreover, your idea wouldn't fit into any science fiction or fantasy work you have in progress? If so, please comment. I'm looking for some guest blogs to put up over December/January.


Bricks and Mortar Chain Bookstores

I'd like to sort out the bricks and mortar book chain stores, such as Barnes and Noble, Borders. They've become glorified warehouses with a few comfy chairs, a coffeeshop, and soft toys and confectionery. While it isn't impossible to find any book that ought to be in stock, many books might as well not be there. They're at ankle level, or you get a crick in your neck looking up; they're spine out and jammed together. If they're autographed, no one can tell.

Honestly, my local Borders Books is like a really bad website. A booklover has to know what he or she wants before he or she goes there, and the chances of being distracted or frustrated and leaving without buying are quite high.

My local library is much more welcoming. At least, I'm allowed to use the computers to help me find what I'm looking for.

Computers!

Barnes and Noble, Chapters.Indigo.ca, Amazon (not that Amazon counts), Borders. Books-A-Million all have websites and online stores. Some offer book clubs. Some offer discussions and forums and book-related social networking. Some are well done, and some are not very easy to navigate.

The only problem with buying a book on the internet is that you have to wait until and while it ships, and you may have to pay postage (and even tax). The advantage of your local chain bookstore is that you don't pay postage, you get your book immediately as long as it is in stock, and you can read as much of it as you wish to make sure you've a good chance of enjoying it.

So here is what I envisage as the future of chain bookstores:

Barnes and Noble (et alia) as a book-related internet cafe! (Warehouse attached).

I foresee lots of chained-down, but free-to-use computers all around the perimeter, and in a central reservation, too. I mean LOTS!

Booklovers would go to a comfy captain's chair, log in with their Barnes and Noble card number (or not), check their own emails (because we all do, don't we?), then migrate to the B&N bookclub and bookstore online...

Or, they'd simply type in the name of their favorite author, or the title of the book they want, and call up covers, back cover blurb, first chapter, last page, author's blog, author's website, author's booklist, book-trailers, reviews... all that useful stuff.

Of course, this could be done from home, too, in the same way that we can buy a flash drive at a compelling price online from Circuit City, then drive fifteen miles to the nearest participating store to pick it up.

Books could be sorted by subgenre. Award-winning, humorous futuristic Romances with plus-size psychic heroines (such as Insufficient Mating Material) could be virtually "shelved" in all six categories.

Book store patrons would choose, click, discover where the book was shelved (or else, they'd order it from the comfort of where they were sitting and a bookseller would fetch it from the stacks and have it waiting at checkout), pay online, then maybe finish their beverage, check their email again; pick up their purchase, and leave.

Local authors might take advantage of the facilities and actually write in the bookstores. (And be available to autograph books on site). Virtual signings could be a snap.

Anyone with a power outage or ISP downtime (or unpaid cable bill) could use the bookstore computers. What a service!

It could take book related social networking to a new level. Hey, the bookstore might replace the bar, though nothing could ever replace Linnea Sinclair's Intergalactic Bar and Grille.


What do you think?
What's your beef? And what's your solution?

Rowena Cherry

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Work with Boundaries

I thought about Linnea's remark on the neat-o, peachy things about writing after raking three bags' worth of leaves Monday. I don't normally rake the yard or hire somebody to do so, although I'll accept the work if anyone wants to volunteer. (Our oldest son sometimes does when he drops by, oddly; maybe he thinks his aging parents are decrepit and need the help.) Raking seems to me a waste of time and energy. Leaves biodegrade and fertilize the lawn, and while they're on the ground, I think they look prettier than dried-up fall and winter grass. Also, raking is one of those jobs that have no limits. There are always more leaves. So I imposed an arbitrary limit of three bags, mainly to remove the leaves from the driveway, because they get slippery after rain.

I was reminded of a housecleaning advice book I had years ago, called NOBODY SAID YOU HAD TO EAT OFF THE FLOOR, blurbed as the psychiatrist's wife's guide to housekeeping. I used to read lots of guidebooks about housekeeping in search of the magic formula that would enable me to keep the place clean with no work. Likewise, I find it hard to resist buying yet another instruction manual for writers, in hope that one of them will contain the secret of writing a bestseller with minimal effort. Anyway, one of the first principles this author propounded about cleaning the house was, "You will never get it all done, because it is infinite." After 42 years of marriage, I've learned to put that principle into practice along the same lines as my approach to raking the leaves. I've decided which elements of housecleaning are really important to me and how many hours a week I'm willing to spend on those activities. (Not many.)

One thing I like about my day job as a legislative editor is that the work is not infinite (although sometimes it looks that way during the January crunch of the General Assembly session). Eventually a bill gets printed and either advances to the next stage in its life cycle or gets killed. The work has a limit. Similarly, that's one of the things I like most about the craft of writing. The work has boundaries. It is not infinite. More leaves will fall. The dog tracks up the kitchen floor several times a day. The bathroom gets dirty every week. A book, though, reaches a point where I can declare it finished. It gets printed (or formatted into an e-book) and offered to readers. To show for my effort, I have a concrete object I have created. While the creation of order, even on a domestic scale, is a wonderful thing, the product is inevitably ephemeral. The order produced by means of the words in a book lasts somewhat longer. In my case, it may not be the Great American Novel (which my father once asked me when I was going to write), but it's a visible and tangible accomplishment. Within the past week I finished—for the present—two short pieces of fiction and submitted them to editors, one of whom has already sent an encouragingly worded revision request. Now, that's a welcome ray of warmth in a cold season!

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Gift: Giver: Recipient

There has been a fascinating discussion in the comments on Linnea Sinclair's post:

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=26974492&postID=9182509849010315555

That's the link to the comments page. If it doesn't work, try this:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/buddy-system.html

There are 12 astute comments, so far, on Linnea Sinclair's THE BUDDY SYSTEM.

The basic subject of Linnea's post is how does an unknown, beginning fiction writer "break in" or make the contacts, get the advice, find the KEY to getting into the fiction publishing market. She gives very practical advice, all of which I heartily endorse - but being of the "brief is better" school of writing, she only tickles the surface of the real subject and never actually names that subject.

That tiptoe around the core of the matter has left some readers feeling bewildered about how to apply her advice. Of course, now I'm going to make everyone even more bewildered.

The philosophical or magical or even maybe religious category that The Buddy System discussion belongs to is all about the epistemological place of Giving and Receiving in your own life, and what that "place" has to do with your Art and how you "See" the Universe. All this philosophical fol-der-ol is just way too abstract to discuss.

Let's try Linnea Sinclair's advice in her post WE WAS HAPPY!
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/we-was-happy-writing-tip-1.html

SHOW DON'T TELL THE INTANGIBLES OF EMOTION. (right, yeah, sooo easy)

So OK, let's get concrete instead of philosophical and abstract about "how to break in" to whatever field of Artistic Endeavor you aspire to.

My life has indeed been surpassing strange in this regard, which set my analytical mind off on an endless trek through Tarot and Astrology and Ancient Wisdom from a dozen or more cultures (a lot of which I've used as worldbuilding fodder for my novels).

Nobody could do it the way I did it. You can not follow in my footsteps. You can NOT do the actions I did and have your action produce the same result my action produced.

To readers of my series of posts on Tarot on this blog, that statement should immediately explain the point I'm trying to make with this post. If you "get it" you need not read any further.

This is the story of "how I did it" -- or no! It is the story of HOW IT HAPPENED TO ME.

And that's a key point I need to get across to any reader of this column trying to "break in" to any profession, but especially those involving The Arts.

Our scientific, Aristotelian Logic based, Hellenistically influenced, culture puts blinders on children early in life, to parse the universe ONLY in terms of cause and effect.

The ARTIST must throw off those blinders to understand the world via a different paradigm and explain that paradigm in their Art.

For my entire rant on Hellenistic traces in modern American culture, see my non-fiction book NEVER CROSS A PALM WITH SILVER, #1 in the NOT SO MINOR ARCANA series -- or subscribe to the rss feed for this blog for notification of when it will become newly available. (I hope.)

This rant is about a principle underlying the process of breaking into a commercial art field -- it applies to all the Arts, but it also applies to many other kinds of fields of endeavor because Art subsumes all human life. (because Art is the language of Magic).

I could start the story of HOW I MET MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY AND SHE BECAME MY CRITIQUE PARTNER AND MENTOR -- of how I attracted the attention of that Great Writer -- with the point at which I graduated from the University of California at Berkley in the middle of a recession that hit my prospective profession harder than this recession is hitting the financial sector.

The class before mine was snapped up by industry at top salaries. Mine - nada. And I was a mis-fit, just about the only woman in my graduating class in my major because it was a man's field - no women allowed.

There's karma in the timing of my graduation. Because a professor got sick and couldn't give a particular class during a particular semester, my graduation was delayed an entire semester.

After nine months and well over 120 resumes, dozens of interviews, I got a phone call from a person (male) whose company I had not applied to and was offered the job on the phone -- landed it at the first interview. (FIRST!!! (yes, Linnea I read your post about multiple punctuation marks)) It was a job rated BELOW my degree level. I pondered. I took it.

That job gave me the contact that saved my life and put me in the job where I met my husband (the same one I'm still married to). He had just returned to his job after a year away -- my delay of a year put me right where I had to be.

Because I had that husband, I ended up living in the only place where I could make direct contact with an active fan who knew Marion Zimmer Bradley's address. (sans Relationship, I was headed for a TA job in Iowa, but HE changed the destination to New York.)

I had been an MZB fan since SWORD OF ALDONES was first published. WORLD WRECKERS had now just come out a year or so before.

I used the address (on Staten Island) and the intro of the fan-friend's name to write MZB a 12 page, typed, single space, letter detailing everything that was "right" and "wrong" with WORLD WRECKERS and how it should have been written.

She wrote back detailing how all that happened. I wrote back and apologized for excoriating her work and explaining that it's because I love it and read every book until I've about memorized every comma because I'm trying to replicate the effect she creates on me. I told her about HOUSE OF ZEOR in MS being my first attempt to generate the MZB EFFECT.

She wrote back and said to send her the MS and she'd see if she could suggest anything. I did. She said it needed a tweak here and there (details), and if I did that she'd show it to her editor. I did. She did. It was turned down (after a year or so), but the editor told me which editor in Manhattan was in the market for that kind of book. I subsequently submitted it everywhere else but there. Finally, I tried his suggestion and a year later, HOUSE OF ZEOR was bought by Doubleday for library distribution. I started writing that book in, I think 1969 and it made it into print in 1974.

WRITING the book is something I DID. Had I not done it, nothing would have "happened." But every direct, pro-active, planned, sensible, logical thing I did to market the book failed.

Because I graduated during a recession and couldn't get a job in 1965, I sold my first novel in 1973 -- and the events that "caused" that to happen were not LUCK and had nothing to do with my goal. They were not the result of what I did or intended. They were things that "happened to me" which at the time I considered real BAD. (not getting a job meant having to live in my parents' house - rrrealll bad.)

THUS I can "see" in my epistemology how it is that LOVE CONQUERS ALL. Because I fell in love, I sold my first novel. And nobody but me can see the because-line behind that. Nobody can do the deeds I did and get that same result. (no, you can't have my husband. He's MINE!)

Now let's really get mystical. (you can stop reading now - this is the boring part, but it's a secret)

In our culture, a marriage is symbolized by the giving of something of intrinsic value - a diamond ring, gold, platinum. Today, people exchange rings, though it used to be just the woman who would be given the token.

Giving and Receiving -- the pair making a concrete transaction on the material plane which is mirrored Above on the non-material planes -- has a mystical significance. That completed transaction actually changes the Universe, leaves an indelible scratch in the Akashic Record.

Among the varieties of human cultures, there have arisen a number of diverse customs, and many SF novels have been built around Alien cultures that impute odd significances to the exchange of gifts.

A case in point is how in some cultures, if you save someone's life, you are thereafter responsible for them -- hence it isn't a good idea to pull someone out of a flooding river.

The transmission of ownership is felt by all human cultures to require ceremony and to have lasting significance.

BUYING (giving something of value in exchange for something of value) is not at all the same thing as GIFTING.

But note that in our society, the distinction has become blurred. Man and Wife exchange rings, instead of the Gifting going only one way to make the magical connection valid. We have a "List" to buy holiday gifts for -- and Heaven Forfend that you GET a gift from someone you didn't GIVE one to -- and what a gaffe if the values don't match!

In some cultures. brides were owned. Or grooms. There was a Bride Price. Men would buy a bride, and hence own their wives and her children. We want to destroy that symbolism, and so reciprocate items of value so ownership is mutual.

Thus the marriage transaction becomes a purchase, not a gifting. There's a big difference magically speaking.

Giving means nothing without Receiving. The transaction is not complete without both actions.

In order for a Gift to be Received, there must be no reciprocation. Nothing GOES DIRECTLY BACK to the giver. Otherwise, magical receiving hasn't happened. After receiving happens, yes, the receiver can (and should) GIVE something, but not BACK. It has to go ON and around the Circle of Life -- then it comes back three-fold as the saying goes.

Yet we say it is more blessed to give than to receive.

How can that be?

Giving is enabled (in the co-dependent sense of the word) by receiving.

When the transaction is complete, the world has changed significantly. Ownership has been transferred. A connection of some sort, sometimes only mystical, has been established between the two parties.

Marion Zimmer Bradley "gave" me all those books she had written and I had read-to-death before I connected with her on the material plane.

But I had not "received" them until I connected and wrote back to her explaining (by praise and criticism) exactly what had come to me via her writing.

That fan letter (not mentioning House of Zeor or my aspirations, but just explaining what I see in her writing) completed the giving transaction. I did not give a gift back. I did not give her something NEW (i.e. my own writing). I ACCEPTED HER GIFT, which I PASS ON with everything I write. Not "back" but "on."

My acceptance made a VESSEL that was finally able to hold the Blessing I was asking for - selling the Sime~Gen Universe novels.

A GIFT that is not being ACCEPTED (i.e. RECEIVED) is not a GIFT.

Charity is a form of gift-giving - though not all gifts are charity.

But there is a magical principle behind all this - writers of fantasy universes where magic is real need to understand this principle to replicate it in a made-up universe. When properly replicated, this single principle behind giving and receiving can make any crazy nonsense seem real enough for a reader to "get into" the story.

We are Commanded (a Mitzvah) to GIVE CHARITY.

That means that those who RECEIVE CHARITY are doing a Commandment, a Mitzvah.

You can give forever and not achieve the mitzvah of giving. Someone, somehow, has to RECEIVE to complete the transaction.

The mystical concept is that Blessings are raining down on us all the time, omnidirectionally, like a monsoon deluge. The Creator of the Universe is Giving - always, constantly, incessantly, and asks of us only that we Receive.

But the monsoon hits and runs off and disappears into material reality without a visible trace unless we MAKE A VESSEL to catch it -- do something concrete in the material world that can "hold" that blessing. Nothing happens until we, ourselves RECEIVE but to do that we must make a Vessel.

And Receiving is much, much harder than Giving.

Just think of a panel discussion at a convention, or a town Council meeting, or any committee meeting you've been at. Everyone wants to GIVE their opinion, point of view, or ideas. The Chair asks for questions and gets polemics instead. There is a feverish desperation in the American population to express their opinions. It's EASY to grab the floor and regale the captive audience with your opinions. How many of them fall asleep? How many can follow your arguments? How many of those who started to read this blog entry are still reading?

LISTENING and HEARING are way harder than yammering out your own opinion. Giving is so much easier than receiving.

When was the last time you made the effort to Receive?

Writing the actual manuscript comes from the place inside you that needs to GIVE. You have something to say, and you pour it out. But then you prepare the manuscript for market by rewriting and crafting it to market specs, and that's another process that is hard work. Do re-read all my Tarot posts to this blog because I explain this principle as best I can in those posts.

The entire process of crafting an object you can offer for sale (well, the rights to which you offer to license) is creating a Vessel. The actions of marketing it also "create a vessel" -- but so does everything else you do in life.

Creating Vessels requires Action in the real, material world.

Now at the time I graduated and sold my first story and then my first novel, I had no idea about any of this mystical stuff. It was MZB and another Star Trek friend of mine who introduced me to Astrology and Tarot and that led to other things. (I had already been into Kabbalah since college, but didn't understand it.)

You don't need to know what you're doing to do it. In fact, it probably helps to be ignorant, unlike in the scientific view of the universe where the more you know the more likely you are to succeed.

But look closely at the outline of my story above. I DO one thing -- over here -- and something I want comes to me -- not back along my line of action, but from OVER THERE -- from another direction.

The cause-effect scientific model of the universe simply can't handle that, can't parse it. And in fact, readers reading novels can't parse it either because of the way our schools teach about the universe. Readers need to have it explained up to the point where they can see the "poetic justice" but not beyond that point (not to belabor it).

In the magical view of the universe, the universe responds to WHO YOU ARE, not to WHAT YOU DO.

Or, put into the model of Giving and Receiving -- when what you Give over here is Received over here -- you have made a Vessel that can hold what is pouring onto you from over there. Your challenge is to be ready with a Vessel strong enough to hold that blessing raining down on you.

When the Give/Receive paradigm is completed, the completion creates a Vessel which can then fill up with the largess raining down upon you. Truly, your cup runneth over, always. Just sometimes your cup has a hole in it or just isn't big enough to hold what you want.

Your "cup" is the Deeds you have done, especially the Commandments. If almost all your Deeds are Gifts, or giving, then try Receiving half the time. Listen inside yourself for the anxious little voice that gets antsy when you Receive and impels you to try to get even by Giving something.

For example, we're all taught to say "Thank You" when we receive a compliment. But if, inside you feel you don't deserve it (or deserve even more) then you didn't Receive.

EXERCISE: Read Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel of the Circus during World War II, CATCH TRAP. Understand the Flying Santellis and what makes their act so special.

If someone comes along and tells you what's wrong with you, your inner impulse is to defend yourself -- it's not so, or there's a mitigating circumstance - etc. You squirm.

When you've practiced the easy stuff, try practising Receiving ill-meant criticism.

Receiving is really, really hard! I can't say that often enough. I been there. Done that. Have the T-shirt. It is really REALLY hard.

But practice and you may find you suddenly have something you really wanted.

Now what about the "giving" of Love? It's not a material object, yet it is a component of our Identity, a component which can be given.

"Unrequited Love" is defined as love that isn't "returned" -- that is, the loved person doesn't also love the lover.

But is that actually the source of pain in unrequited love?

Perhaps the real anguish in unrequited love is that the LOVE that is given is not received?

A person who has received Love is forever changed by the event.

This is clear from examining all the psychological documentation on those who have never received Love. Even if they were in fact loved, they didn't manage to Receive it.

And then there are those humans who are being offered Love and who reflexively refuse it, fend it off, duck, run, laugh it off.

For a really deep examination of this personality trait and its possible resolution in RECEIVING, see the incredibly complex fantasy universe background by Jessica Andersen, showcased in her FINAL PROPHECY series, NIGHTKEEPERS and soon forthcoming DAWNKEEPERS.

I just finished reading and reviewing DAWNKEEPERS (for my June 2009 column) and have not read NIGHTKEEPERS, so I can say you can easily read the second book without the first.

REVIEW to be posted at: http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/

DAWNKEEPERS on Amazon at:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451225759?tag=rereadablebooksr&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0451225759&adid=1C2VKGVB3GT42XVRKZ5X&

In DAWNKEEPERS we get deep into the mind of a man who is refusing the knowledge of his magical powers, and with that also refusing true Love. Jessica Andersen takes us through the harrowing lessons that teach him what he's doing wrong.

Yes, it's fiction -- and really wild, far-out urban fantasy-Romance -- but there's a life-lesson in it. The harder you fend it off, the bigger the hammer that hits you until you learn to Receive. Why not skip the bludgeoning (we're talking Pluto Transit here) and just learn the lesson?

This is prime fodder for the conflict line of Romance Novels of all sub-genres, not just urban fantasy-Romance.

A giver must pair up with a recipient or the gift can't be transferred and so it isn't yet a gift.

It sounds obvious, but it's a principle like the Laws of Thermodynamics, which can be applied to the mystical world as well as the physical.

Now consider a human woman (who lives in a reality where givers need recipients) and an alien (non-human) male who does not live in such a mystically based universe.

How could a human woman explain the "blessing" -- the mystical dimension -- of giving or receiving to such a male?

If, for him, there existed no mystical dimension, how would he view her antics? How could he learn what a gift meant? How would he learn that she was validating him by receiving him?

Suppose the fate of two planets depended on it. How could she open him to this mystical dimension? And if she found a way to do that -- should she? What "unforeseen consequences" might be generated by forcibly changing the way he sees the world?

The curious should also see my March 2009 Review Column when it's posted in March where I discuss the Karma of World Prominence via Noel Tyl's astrological discovery of the signature of prominence in a natal chart.

Study the natal chart of George Lucas, (see his biography published years ago). Notice how the plot of Star Wars is mirrored in his Natal Chart but not his Life? Note Noel Tyl's comments on World Prominence coming with the "fulfillment" of the promise in the Natal Chart. Look at your Natal Chart and find what promise you have fulfilled and what you are really "about."

And remember, in the scientific view of the universe, if you do "the right thing" you will succeed. But in the magical view of the universe, if you "are who you really are" you will be fulfilled. Which is the "right" view? Which is your view? How do you apply that philosophy to the practical necessity of life?

Now, I bet nobody read this far. This post is just way too long and too abstract for a blog. And it's barely a tenth of what I have to say on Giving and Receiving!

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

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

Monday, November 17, 2008

We was happy!!!!! (writing tip #1)

I’ve spent the past two weekends, back-to-back, teaching writing workshops out of town for two different writer groups. (Yes, that is me on the bridge of my starship--the only way to travel these days. And Daq cat agrees.) One Saturday I was in Tampa with the local RWA (Romance Writers of America) chapter. This past weekend I was in Ft Myers with the Gulf Coast Writers Association. One of the neat-o peachy keen things about teaching writing is that it forces me to again study the craft of writing.

Not that that’s something I don’t do a lot. I’m an admitted research junkie (I’m also a word slut but we’ll get to that at another time). I have an unending curiosity of why things work (or don’t). So I have an entire bookshelf devoted to craft of writing tomes.

I used just about every one of them for my last Saturday’s three-hour workshop. (I also quoted a lot of Jacqueline Lichtenberg but then you all know I worship at the Great JL’s feet.)

One of the easiest and yet often overlooked tips I shared was one I found in Browne & King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (a totally excellent book). It’s so simple yet it addresses one of the problems I frequently see in unpublished stories. That problem is an emotion is NAMED rather than SHOWN.

Let me give you an example:
Lois was happy to see Clark at her front door.

WAS HAPPY is not only use of the passive (was) but it’s naming the emotion (ie: telling the reader) rather than showing the emotion in action. And good fiction writing is all about showing (in action) rather than telling (in narrative and in passive voice).

Why is that not good writing? Well, honestly, it’s not bad writing. It’s grammatically correct. It gets the point across. But it’s not engaging writing and it’s not effective writing, and to compete in today’s commercial genre fiction market, you need to be engaging and effective. Writing guru Dwight Swain penned years ago that “it’s the author’s job to manipulate the emotions of the reader.” The lovely Jacqueline Lichtenberg reminds us on her Worldcrafter’s site that “fiction is drama.” Well, it’s rather hard to manipulate emotions and create drama in the passive voice, and without action.

So while Lois was happy to see Clark at her front door, the editor, agent or reader will not be happy reading that sentence. They won’t be feeling Lois’ happiness as much as they could because that kind of sentence doesn’t manipulate reader emotions.

What does? Showing. Action.

So we take “Lois was happy” and we give the reader (and agent and editor who are going to read those lines long before any reader does) the visual. “Vividness outranks brevity,” Swain says.

Lois peeked through the small heart-shaped beveled-glass window set in her front door and her breath caught in delight. Could it be…? Could that actually be…? Yes, it was, it was Clark. She let out a little squeal, a girlish and joyful sound…

Okay, supremely overwritten but I hope you get the idea. Instead of naming the emotion for the reader (happiness), the writer describes the sensations and thoughts and actions that most humans (since we assume humans are your readers) recognize as indications of happiness.

I know. You’re saying, yeah, that’s obvious. But you know what? I bet you dollars to doughnuts that if you go through your current work-in-progress, you’ll find at least three instances where you cheap-out and name an emotion instead of showing it, instead of letting the reader experience it.

I did. And I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.

Obviously, you can overdo this. You don’t detail every emotion every character feels in a story. The story would feel cartoonish. But you should at least be aware of whether or not you’re doing as much as you should in key scenes that have (or should have) a strong emotional element.

By the way, I did a handout (actually, I did about ten handouts) in that class with a SHOW THE EMOTION exercise. And it was interesting (and fun) to see the variations people created from:

Janet was unhappy that Roger walked by her desk without mentioning her birthday.

From sobs to slumping shoulders, from narrow-eyed glares to hurling of iPods, Janet showed her unhappiness (SHOWED) with Roger in an interesting variety of ways. Without ever TELLING the reader that she was unhappy.

One more writing tip—do not use multiple punctuation marks. Ever!!!! Do you hear me?!?!?!? Ever. Multiple punctuation marks make editors and agents very unhappy.

~Linnea

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Gunk punk (Looking back on America's auto industry)

I'm a Science-fiction Romance writer. I look at History (which repeats itself) also current events, and I wonder What If...?

Not that I write it, yet, but Steampunk is where the writer changes one invention from the time of the industrial revolution, such as H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine". That was the "age of steam", hence steam punk.

More recently, there is "cyber punk" which I suppose relates to choices made in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. One of the hallmarks of punk writing is that it explores the road not traveled and the consequences of a different decision whether made by a scientist, a businessman, or a politician (I assume).

I'm using "gunk" punk because if steam is what the Nineteenth Century machines are remembered for, then gunk might be what petroleum-driven cars leave behind. Or maybe I've been watching too many STP commercials.

Gratuitous decoration



This is a car made by my husband, with his own hands and the help of a few people he contracted with privately. He burned his hands on hot clay, he came home with his eyebrows covered in dust from sanding... he lost 10lbs from all the exercise. This photo was taken at SEMA by Jonathon Ramsey for Autoblog.com http://tinyurl.com/5kv9jf


So, what if... in the 1940s American didn't have a manufacturing industry and depended on Germany and Japan? I'd probably be blogging in German, right?

History is being made right now, that's why I'm laying claim to "gunk punk" (unless someone has already thought of it, or someone has a better name). Peter M DeLorenzo of autoextremist.com
http://www.autoextremist.com/current/ may have done so, but he doesn't write fiction as far as I know. He has a jaw dropping rant going on.

Peter is also selling an alarming book (non-fiction) titled "The United States of Toyota."

Alarming cover art.


I am now imagining myself as a writer in, say 2020 (hindsight pun!) looking back on the third week of November 2008 when Congress made a catastrophic vote NOT to make a loan to the last American car companies.

It's a "Mad Max" world now. Or perhaps it's Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" world with a touch of "1984". The Jesuits and the Japanese rule. We have an Emperor. And a Pope. And a third Minister of some sort, because good things come in threes.

Onstar speaks to us in Japanese in our cars. We cannot turn it off. They got Murdoch, too. And Comcast. All our Direct TV has Japanese subtitles. We cannot turn it off. Big Brother looks a lot like Vladimir Putin with Botox to get rid of the ugly Western crease in his eyelids. He tells us what to think.

America is bankrupt. When the world bank foreclosed, one of the creditors took Hawaii, another took the island of Manhattan, another took the Great Lakes for the water. No one wanted Detroit... I could go on. In a grim way, this is rather fun.

Maybe my imagination is overactive. I hope so! I was having trouble fitting any kind of Romance into my budding novel of milieu.

My point is, pay attention to the information that is available, and store it up for future reference. (Thank goodness for flashdrive!). There's a massive dissonance right now between the truth and what people are saying in the media.

If interested in GM's version of car myth vs fact visit http://gmfactsandfiction.com/

Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Thursday, November 13, 2008

The Machines Are Taking Over

In this week's "Dilbert" comic strip the company's spam filter has attained self-awareness and taken over the company. It has assumed control of all e-mail, decreed the creation of killer robots, and restructured the organization chart. One character informs another, "Apparently you now report to the microwave." That's how I feel this week.

Tuesday afternoon my editor informed me that two RTF files I'd sent her arrived as unreadable computer garbage. When I checked the same files myself, that's what I found, too—even though they were transmitted FROM this computer TO the same computer. I tried converting them to DOC files and sent them in that form. They opened all right for me, but they were marked "read only." She said they came to her as text files. My theory is that AOL either has developed a grudge against me or is engaged in a feud with this computer. Or maybe a gremlin has possessed my word processing program, and it needs an exorcist. Another RTF file I mailed to myself a few days ago, by the way, transmits fine, just as they always did before. I haven't downloaded a new word processor or browser or anything of the kind in the past week. Clearly I am cursed. I resorted to mailing the files through gmail instead, solving the immediate problem.

If it weren't for the fact that two of our sons are computer wizards (one of them a professional web designer), my husband and I would be doomed to a Luddite existence. When the youngest eventually moves out, we'll be in deep trouble. He offered a plausible explanation for this file problem, that AOL has recently made behind-the-scenes changes in its web mail system.

Which leads to my perennial lament: Why can’t anybody leave well enough alone? The rulers of the commercial realm seem to think customers want perpetual novelty. I don’t! I want the merchants, products, and services I depend on to reach an optimal point and STAY there. (For instance, my life would be much improved if our local Giant would stop discontinuing grocery items as soon as we get used to regarding them as indispensable staples.) Newest, latest, and greatest—bah, humbug.

Margaret L. Carter (www.margaretlcarter.com)

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I Love Web 2.0

I just read Linnea Sinclair's note in the comments on her post The Buddy System.

Linnea wrote:
-----------------
If one person has survived it, you can survive it.

One person.
------------------

Rarely have I heard a summation of the basic theme of "our" kind of literature, the binding theme between SF, Paranormal and the general Romance field.

Heroic Fiction belongs to the "Romantic" category -- in the literary sense of "larger than life" -- and that's how most people view stories about those first, or only, "one person"s Linnea is referring to.

This is a point I neglected to make in my blog post here about why we have such a perception problem with Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html

And you'll notice that blog post also starts with a comment Linnea Sinclair made!

And that point is that the reason we read these stories, and the reason we prefer characters we can identify with, is that we, ourselves are tasked, perhaps karmically, with being one of those "one persons" who do "it" to demonstrate that it is possible.

We need to break through the barrier around the possible -- mostly because it's a barrier. As people climb mountains because they are there, we hurl ourselves into impossible tasks (such as finding a soul-mate and raising his kids "right") because the task is there.

Yes, SF and Romance are both genres that are about doing the impossible -- finding a Soul Mate or inventing a gadget like the Universal Translator (rumored to have been invented by Spock's human mother, Amanda Grayson) or the Internet or the Web, invented by groups of people desperate to communicate in an "impossible" way.

They did it. Now we do it without even thinking about it.

When I first heard the term e-mail, I had to ask what that meant. The explanation didn't thrill me. It sounded cumbersome and awkward. Today, there's an insurmountable barrier between me and envelopes & stamps!

I remember the wonderful Romantic Comedy, YOU'VE GOT MAIL.
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=You%27ve+Got+Mail&x=15&y=6

WATCH OUT at that link above for pop-ups and pop-unders circumventing your anti-popup software.

Two people meet via chat online, fall in love, and later discover they already know each other but don't "like" each other all that much in the real world. At the time that movie came out, it was thought "impossible" for real love relationships to begin online.

That movie is a "show don't tell" for a lot of truths about internet socializing that non-netizens deny vigorously.

Text-only communication can reveal the true depths of personality never visible in "live" contact situations. The "sub-text" of Relationship becomes undeniable in text-only. Great movie! Powerful truth. I actually know a couple happily married for more than 10 years who met in an online fandom chat!

And that was chat by text-only! Not even video conferencing. Just text.

I think another such huge chasm as we saw between those just getting online and those who would not or could not attain internet access is opening. It is opening between e-mail and social networking online. Between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Social networking got its start as mostly a kiddie thing for wasting time. MySpace and so forth provided the youngest web users a way to communicate with their peers and play online.

There's nothing wrong with playing -- it's what kids have to do to become effective adults. Note Luke Skywalker's jetting around pot-shotting local vermin -- eventually, he used the same skill to take out a Deathstar. How you play and at what affects what you are able to do, and how you can do it as an adult.

So we have a generation-gap chasm opening between those who played their way to adulthood online and those who got online in adulthood. And yes, a chasm between adults who did take the plunge and adults who just have not.

Watching over their kids shoulders, the adults who dabbled online or perhaps used a computer only at work soon saw that this social networking thing is the work-around, the dodge, the cure for SPAM!

If you use, say, LinkedIn.com (professionals only; no kids, no playing) to send a message to a friend, it works just like email except that it lands in their inbox without a ton of e-spam stuck to it.

If you need to tell a few friends something quick, you can twitter or plurk or use one of the other microblog services. I'm sure three more started while I've been typing this.

Texting by simple phone connection is good, too. I worked the election Nov 4th with 7 older people and a 17 year old (Arizona program to allow youngsters to learn to work the Polls).

The 17 year old spent the intervals between voters texting with her hands under the table, looking attentive to her job. The older folks were bemused. One told a story of her college age kid who racked up a couple thousand text messages a month - until he broke up with his girlfriend, and it dropped to hundreds. Texting-romances no doubt abound!

The world is abandoning e-mail and Lists and Newsletters as fast as it can because of the spam load. Life is too short and that stuff is too putrid.

Meanwhile, personal communication has gone multi-media. Sound, images, animation -- it's all at our fingertips. Skype is very popular for international families. And I'm sure it's supporting a lot of romances.

Websites that sell things for a profit are fully interactive, some with a live-chat feature. This personalizing, multi-media, interactive approach to web applications is what they loosely term Web 2.0. Much of it functions as "plug-ins" to a browser.

The lexicon gurus still disagree about the exact definition of Web 2.0 -- but they agree that it takes a broadband connection to get the most benefit out of it.

The internet evolved into the Web which became a personal communication tool swamped by toxic waste, and cleaned up by -- SOCIAL NETWORKING.

Now I've been getting dozens (if not hundreds) of e-mail pitches from people who want to sell me lessons (webinars) in how to use social media to promote products -- some even specifically for how to promote your books if you're a writer.

First the kids, then the adults, now the merchants invade social network spaces.

Where will folks go to get away from the sales pitches?

Or the world might change in even more drastic ways as the online generation takes the helm.

I saw a TV News item where the reporters were discussing how Obama's administration can use Information Technology and the Web to create a more "transparent" government -- and one younger reporter went a step farther, pointing out that with the interactivity available online now we can have a government that we not only look in on but actually interact with.

Whether that's a good idea or not -- the public micromanaging government -- is a subject for another Worldbuilding post about Aliens and Hive Minds.

Where will people go to get away from government issues invading their private communications? I can just see pop-up ads from the government soliciting your opinion on this or that! "Help your Congressman; take this two minute survey!"

Maybe it would be illegal to block those popups!

Well, just as I couldn't resist the lure of email once I got online (my first service was called Prodigy - anybody remember that?) -- now I can't resist the social networking craze.

I'm on a whole lot of them, YouTube etc., so many I can't remember them all until I get an email that someone new wants to be my friend or link with me or whatever that service calls it. I'm active on several social networks, while lurking on a whole bunch.

Meanwhile, in addition to social networks, I've discovered ancillary Web 2.0 services that help you sort out the information blitz of the internet, especially the blogosphere. Joining this blog has led me to explorations of RSS FEEDS, bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, slashdot, -- there are more than 48 very popular ones, each with a specialty.

If you missed the step-wise development of the Feed services, you might be as overwhelmed and bewildered as I was when I started investigating RSS FEEDS. At first I thought I understood when I first saw the little orange icon. But when I asked myself how does it work and tried to do it myself -- I discovered I was totally clueless.

So I asked on LinkedIn what the best "feed reader" is and got back that Google's reader is good. Meanwhile, one of the "build a successful business online" Newsletters I get sent a file to install on the Google Reader that I could configure to track my own name as it gets mentioned on various blogs and web pages. Wow, I had no idea!

Someone on LinkedIn who is very knowledgeable recommended FeedDemon. So I went to feeddemon.com and downloaded their feed reader -- and I think it's better than google or yahoo, but each one has its strengths. So I use all 3!

Eventually, one or two of these services will emerge as dominant and providing all the tools we need to live online.

Simultaneously, via one of the e-mail Lists for professional writers that I'm on, I discovered an online interview on a blog with a woman who gives webinars on how to use social networking to promote books and other products. I learned about another service that helps consolidate all your services. It's called friendfeed.com

So I signed up for friendfeed, (where I'm JLichtenberg) and discovered that you can put a swatch of javascript on your homepage (see the bottom of http://www.slantedconcept.com for an example) or blog site like this one that will list at least some of the icons for some of the better known services that you use to post notes, messages, and even blog articles.

You'll see the new friendfeed icons for Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Rowena Cherry lower down on the right side of this blog, so you can see what I'm talking about.

This blog also has atom and RSS enabled -- you just need to put our URL into the appropriate field on your Feed Reader (click search for or add feeds -- this blog is a "feed").

If you click "subscribe to me" in the friendfeed icon you can see every time I post on facebook, amazon blog, this blog, microblog or whatever I've put into my list of places where I post things. I don't have all my places in friendfeed yet. When I do, you don't have to chase all over looking for what I'm doing, and you don't have to subscribe to a Newsletter and hope it doesn't get caught in the spam trap.

And once you've subscribed to someone via friendfeed, it's very easy to subscribe to someone ELSE -- thus consolidating the scattered postings of all your friends, or just people you want to follow.

http://friendfeed.com/jlichtenberg

http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg

This blog is registered with technorati.com which I've seen links to all over the place, but didn't understand what it is until I went there and poked around. It's huge. But the most valuable thing I've found there so far is a long article on the shape and development direction of the blogosphere.

A graphic image of what "blogosphere" means is posted at:
http://datamining.typepad.com/gallery/blog-map-gallery.html

And the technorati article on how things change (they survey once a year) is posted at:
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

As Linnea Sinclair said, there are dozens, maybe thousands, of valuable "get started" tools available to new writers today that didn't exist when we started. But there are even more tools available for those who have started and now need to progress up the vertical learning curve. Those tools come effortlessly to the hands of those who grew up online, but we have to work at it.

Also from LinkedIn I discovered a website called pingomatic.com which lets you list your blog and then auto-updates a number of Feed services (there are more services than readers and like search engines, feed services don't all return the same results for the same query). Technorati.com does something similar with blogs.

I still haven't mastered astrogating around Web 2.0 -- things don't work as I expect them to, and I can't tell if that's because I did it wrong, don't understand what it should do, or it really didn't work right. I sometimes feel very much like the first time I wrote a novel on a computer: spikes of I LOVE THIS embedded in a sea of confusion and bewilderment.

Still, I posted a tweet on twitter and saw it come up immediately on my friendfeed.com page. But I had to click the link labeled "ME" that I see on the left of my page (I don't think you would see my ME link, but rather your own ME link). However, the Diggs I did yesterday don't seem to be on friendfeed -- but older diggs of mine are there.

Social Networking and "feeds" are the work-around we need until the internet infrastructure can be totally redesigned (from the hardware level) to wall out "spam." The resistance will come not just from the cost of doing that, but from the commercial interests that don't want to be walled away from your inbox.

Nevertheless, I am thrilled to discover this Web 2.0 level of the new world we're building and appalled at how I'm about 4 or 5 years behind leaping the chasm (again)!

As writers, we find social networking just the thing to promote our books and keep the wheels of imagination greased. However, I don't think it will last long. With the invasion of commercial interests, people will flee again or just turn off awareness of any kind of promotional material.

As writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL, and how to use the platform of Web 2.0 to tell a whopping good Romance that reveals some hidden truths people would prefer weren't true. Such as the one I discussed in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html

As SF-Romance writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL as it might have been written before the word e-mail was first coined and get a grip on the sociological implications of communication advances such as maybe Web 4.0.

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

Monday, November 10, 2008

The Buddy System

I spent last Saturday teaching a two-hour writing workshop in Tampa, Florida, and have a three-hour one scheduled next Saturday in Fort Myers, Florida. This takes my mind out of the creating process—which is where it usually resides (or tries to) when I’m working on my next book—and puts it into the crafting process. The Q&A process. The “okay-how-do-I-get-published” process. Or as has also been stated, “If Author X can get published by Big NY House, why can’t I?”

Some very good answers to these questions can be found on my agent’s blog, PUBRANTS. Kristin Nelson is, after all, in the daily business of pitching manuscripts, turning them into published books. She blogs daily about what works and what doesn’t, what’s trend and what isn’t, why a writer should follow or ditch trend and most critically, what’s voice and why it works. Quite honestly, if you want to be published, reading Agent Kristin daily should be required.

But even Kristin notes—several times—good writing isn’t enough.

So what else does a writer need besides good writing?

A buddy. A mentor. A damned good crit partner.

And I don’t mean your mother (unless she’s Nora Roberts) or your cousin (unless he’s Stephen King) or your neighbor (unless she’s Robin D. Owens). The problem many writers who are yet-to-be authors have is they choose a crit partner or writing buddy who is at the same place they are in the literary process. That then becomes the proverbial blind leading the blind.

So if you’re looking for a mentor or crit partner, here are my suggestions. And as with any of my suggestions, if they don’t work for you, if they don’t resonate with you, remember the delete key is your friend:

1 – Choose someone higher up the literary ladder than you are. Preferably someone published with a NY house or one of the respectable small presses (ie: not a vanity press). Why? Because this person is “in the system” and knows how to work the system. This person is working to deadlines, dealing with professional critiques and copy edits. On a deadline. This means working under pressure and learning to push aside “personal” feelings about characters and prose because You Are A Professional.

2 – Choose someone who writes in the same genre and style that you do, who reads what you read, who likes what you like, book-wise, plot-wise, character-wise. This will make the crit process go so much more smoothly and insure the advice you get will work for you. As a case in point, I get asked to read lots of soon-to-be-published manuscripts for blurbs or quotes. You’ve probably seen my quotes on books by Ann Aguirre and Lisa Shearin. The feel and flavor and style of their books are similar to mine so I have no problem heartily recommending them. Their writing resonates with me.

Then on occasion I get a manuscript from a NY editor for the purpose of garnering a quote and the book Just Does Not Work For Me. “For Me” are the operative words. Obviously, this book has been purchased by a major publisher. But the writing style and/or the plot just leave me cold. I find it difficult to care for the characters. I find it difficult to finish the book. So I pass on offering a quote.

Now—point is—this book SOLD. But had that writer—whose style is so opposite mine—come to me for mentoring or critting, I’d likely have told them to chuck the story and start something new and, while you’re at it, please don’t let me ever see you refer to the male protagonist’s mouth as “his chiseled lips” or his hair as “flowing locks” again.

But THAT BOOK SOLD. There are agents and editors and readers who love flowing raven locks and manly chiseled lips on their characters. I’m just not one of them and, hence, I’m not the author to mentor or crit that kind of writer. So it’s hugely important that you match your writing to your mentor’s writing. Or else you’ll be a serious cross-purposes and it’ll be frustrating for you both.

3 – Consider taking a class—online or in person—with the possible mentor-author of your choice. A classroom setting provides a great, “under no obligation” opportunity for a published author to get a glimpse of your work and, if sufficiently intrigued, offer to crit some chapters. Keep in mind published authors also take these same classes. So even if the teacher doesn’t offer, another author might.

4 – Do not send an author your sample chapters or, Heaven forefend, your entire manuscript and ask them to read it UNLESS they’ve specifically offered to do so. About three times a year I get chapters or—Heaven forefend—an entire manuscript in my email inbox from someone I do not know. These things get deleted. Sorry, but they do. I try to mentor two to three writers a year but when I hit that two to three limit, I’m out of time. I write full-time for a living. I have deadlines. On occasion, I even like to see my husband. Unless I or any other author has very specifically said: “Send”…do not send. Same goes for an email request of “will you read my manuscript?” Unless I’ve met you at a signing or a conference and told you to send stuff to me, I likely don’t have time. What you’ll get from me is a polite note telling you that I don’t have time and telling you to read Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer and Jack Bickham’s The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes and then read everything on The Essence of Story in the WorldCrafter's Writing Guild on Jacqueline Lichtenberg’s Sime~Gen site. Because honestly, until you’ve done those things, I can’t work with you. And honestly, if you do those things, there’s probably little you could learn from me. Dwight, Jack and Jacqueline are just totally brilliant.

And lastly,

5 – Keep running with the Big Dogs. Go to writer conferences offered by professional organizations, hang out on loops run by professional writing organizations and populated by published authors. You will learn oodles.

Above all, BIC HOK! (Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard!)

and now for a word from our sponsor:

~Linnea

www.linneasinclair.com
// Interstellar Adventure Infused with Romance//
Available Now from Bantam: Shades of Dark
2009: Hope's Folly

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Sympathy For The Villain

(A dramatic monologue from Django-Ra who casts a long shadow, but does not live beyond the Prologue of Knight's Fork)

Allow me to introduce myself...
I am the god-Prince Django-Ra. To my face, you should call me "Your Highness" or "Sir". Behind my back, I presume you will call me "Django" pronounced "Jan-GO"... The D- of Royal names is silent.

So, little Earthling, you are cautiously curious about me.

Know, then, that I am exceptionally gifted and exceedingly dangerous. I can read or wipe minds with ridiculous ease, just as I am reading yours. I play god-level chess, and am one of the most formidable Duplicate Bridge players in all the galaxies. Certainly I cheat. A god-Prince must be seen to win!

What's that? Ah, yes! You may well wonder whether or not I can read the mind of my favorite great niece, Electra-Djerroldina, the Volnoths' queen. She wears the most perplexing… Hah! but I will not tell you.

As you see, I enjoy excellent health –yes, sexual vigor, also—despite my advanced years. In my day, I was a superb star-fighter pilot with many kills to my credit... and to my discredit. Friendly fire is such a useful expression, isn't it?

Of course I have killed friends. And family. And lovers. We all do. It is inevitable. The Djinn bloodline is almost extinct. There are desperately few full Djinn females left for us to fight over. Those that there are, are taken. Alas! Which leaves lesser beings such as yourself, whose innards are not strong enough to endure multiple impregnations by a Great Djinn.

You are skeptical! Consider my great-nephew, the Crown Prince Tarrant-Arragon. He searched the galaxies for gestates. Yes, gestates. In our World, we measure time by the female cycle, and by the duration of a Royal pregnancy. His new Mate –or "wife"—is half-Earthling. He is beside himself with worry that she may not survive the birth of his heir.

Have I confused you? Every book has a genealogical table either in the front or at the back. Or visit the official family tree at http://www.rowenacherry.com/familytree It is…ah, economical with the truth. My own bastards, for instance, are not attributed to me.

Why do I do… what I do? I daresay I have bad Djinn genes. I enjoyed a deeply disturbing childhood. My twin brother died in what you would call his crib. I had nothing to do with his demise. It would have done me no good to expedite his departure from this life. We had vigorous, older half-brothers who were Heir Apparent and second in line to the Imperial throne, and it was beyond my strength and powers to remove them from my path.

Indeed, I was obliged to feign an interest in lesser-being members of my own sex in order to bask in the variable star-shine of my big brothers' tolerance. As long as they thought me "peculiar", they did not see me as a threat. Eventually, as you see, I...ah... outlived them.

Their untimely deaths brought me no particular joy. I did not get what I've always wanted.

What's that? I want to experience the Great Djinn rut rage. Earthling, do you understand what the rut-rage is? It is a drive, a sexual madness, a mating frenzy. Pure Great Djinn males, such as myself, have saturniid glands that can smell a full-Djinn female who is approaching oestrus from as many as fifty of your miles away. We then fixate upon that "scent love" sight unseen, and become obsessed with her.

Did I once have a "scent love"? Yes, but I never was in a position to claim her. My muscular half-brothers had Helispeta, consecutively. I, alas, would have gladly stood in line but Djohn Kronos and Devoron-Vitan made war over her, and Helispeta took sanctuary on your planet, Earth, beyond my reach. Not that she ever knew of my passion.

After she was lost to me, I tried to experience the rut-rage with others, even with my nephew's Empress, Tarragonia-Marietta, but met only with frustration. You may read my great nephew's love story, Forced Mate, and also Insufficient Mating Material for a less subtle view of my exploits.

Hmmmm. I believe I smell heightened excitement. My foolish, frivolous great-niece Martia-Djulia's forced Mating Ceremony must be about to begin. You will excuse me....


*****
Rowena here:

Just as I prefer my heroes to be slightly morally questionable, so I like my villains to be likeable --or at least entertaining-- when they want to be. As I wrote of Tarrant-Arragon (who is either hero or antagonist) his civilized veneer curls up at the edges.

Django-Ra is my most heinous villain. He and Helispeta saw the trouble begin in the electronic prequel Mating Net, and have seen it through Forced Mate, Insufficient Mating Material, and now into Knight's Fork. That's why I chose dramatic monologue by him to introduce you to his wicked world of the Tiger god-Princes of Tigron.

Some villains are too interesting to be killed off. But, if it seems that a happy ending depends upon their death, who is to do the deed? Can the heroine remain a romantic heroine if she kills the villain? Is it acceptable if she kills the villain by accident, or in self-defense, or in defense of the hero or some other vulnerable character?

Princess Leia strangled Jabba The Hutt. That was cool. Eowen killed the undead Ringwraith King. That was cooler.

Ditto for the hero. There's not so much of a double standard about a hero's activities. He's usually a knight or high-ranking professional warrior. Nevertheless... Luke didn't. Aragorn didn't.

Is it a cop out if the villain is simply hoist by his own petard (which literally means blown up by his own bomb)? I don't think so. There is a certain satisfaction --a "thusness"-- to that turn of events.

What inspires my villains? Not just the exquisitely courteous arch-villains of the Bond movies. For me, the most memorably wicked villain in literature was the Duke in Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess". He doesn't make The Daily Telegraph's list of Literature's 50 greatest villains -- http://tinyurl.com/50-villains (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1YourView&xml=/arts/2008/09/20/bovillains120.xml) But then, nor do Djohn Kronos, or Django-Ra!






With thanks to Heather Massey whose Thursday November 6th post reminded me to see if Dorchester still was using the above.
http://thegalaxyexpress.blogspot.com/

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Clouds of Authors

Have you seen the Literature Map page?

http://www.literature-map.com/

It's a fun site where you put the name of an author in the box and a "map" of other writers you might like pops up. It resembles a cluster of names swimming around each other like particles in a cloud chamber. The results are intriguing but not perfect. "Jacqueline Lichtenberg" evokes a number of relevant names, e.g., Jean Lorrah and Marion Zimmer Bradley, with at least one absurdity—Jacqueline Susann! (I wish the site had an explanation of how they arrive at their results; if it's there, I didn't see it.) Not surprisingly, my name brings up the reply, "sorry, don't know that one." (Sigh.) On the other hand, it doesn't know Suzy McKee Charnas, S. M. Stirling, or Anthony Hope (author of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA) either, so it's clearly a work in progress.

I wonder how reliable such a mapping of names might be in finding authors a given reader is like to enjoy. Somewhere I read the quote, "People are friends in spots," meaning just because you like two people, that doesn't guarantee they'll like each other. People like books "in spots," too—the "tailored effect” Jacqueline has often explained. There's a review for S. M. Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series on Amazon.com in which the reader, clearly a devoted fan, praises the battle scenes but complains about the books containing too much of that Wiccan stuff and wishes Stirling would relegate such content more to the background. For me, on the contrary, Stirling's alternate histories are fascinating EXCEPT for the fight scenes, which, like every other author's, I perceive as tedious and skim over. What I love those books for is the cultural extrapolation, including all that Wiccan content. Suzy Charnas has written that her post-apocalyptic novel WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD was partly inspired by THE PRISONER OF ZENDA; one of the principal male characters is based on Rupert, the villain of the "Zenda" duology. I would never have guessed that connection without being told. I'm very fond of that duology, but the villain registers on my awareness only as a foil for the gallantry of Rudolph, the hero. For me, the thematic center of the book lies in Rudolph's ethical dilemma—his love for the queen and his consciousness that he would, in fact, make a better ruler than the real king, opposed to his unbending honor, which won't allow him to usurp the king's place. In the prototypical example of the tailored effect, STAR TREK, consider Spock. Many fans are drawn to this character because of the three-way friendship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. While I value and enjoy that aspect of the series, the main thing about Spock that fascinates me is that he's almost human but not quite, with intriguing more-than-human powers and a skewed perspective on our species, as well as a certain aloofness arising from his mixed heritage, creating a barrier that only a few very special people can penetrate. The same set of factors appeals to me in my favorite vampire fiction. Would anyone be likely to guess those connections and recommend, "If you like the original STAR TREK, you'll like Suzy McKee Charnas' THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY"? Yet, to me, those two works are the "same kind" of story.

For other vampire narratives I perceive as having the same type of appeal, check out my nonfiction book DIFFERENT BLOOD: THE VAMPIRE AS ALIEN from Amber Quill Press (www.amberquill.com).

Margaret L. Carter (www.margaretlcarter.com)

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Why We Love Romance

I found the following comment posted on Linnea Sinclair's Oct 20th post THE FUTURE IS NOW.

----------------
I found another reason why "alien" romances are good. It's the same reason fantasy/future worlds are such good settings for stories in general .

With books set in today's world, cultural/race/national differences immediately, trap and restrict the plot and the characters, eg, the cliched Nazi German "baddie" or the Arab "terrorist".

It is so refreshing to read books where the antagonists have no relation to today's world so there are no reflections or restrictions to limit them.
....

---------------

The comment goes on to detail why Linnea's books are so good. Read the entire comment (with which I agree) here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/future-is-now.html

Since I posted that huge long Part 3 to Astrology Just For Writers about why people shy away from reading Romance genre, why people sneer at Romance Genre (and those who read it) at
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html
I think I should point out what's so good about Romance -- only this comment nailed it first.

One of the uniquely gripping things about SF, Fantasy or genres in which the author has to build an entire world against which to tell a story is that ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN, at any moment.

Romance falls into that category because of the mental and emotional state of the two people falling in love -- their perceptions of reality are altered consciousness. And as I noted in my post, miracles happen in the vicinity of true love.

The reader can be led on an exploration of our own world via questions posed with the composition of the fictional world.

For example, in our own world, science works, logical thinking yields results which, once proved, can be relied upon. We risk our lives on that every day -- flu shots come to mind. (BTW I highly recommend getting the current flu shot!)

But WHY does science work? Why did we practice superstition and magic for thousands of years and only change to science a couple hundred years ago? Why was the change to science so radical and so abrupt? (yeah, we all know the real history - but that's only what's written in history books. Do you really, really believe it?)

Of course, even today, there are cultural circles and places in the world where many of the results of science are scoffed at. Why is that?

Well, let's go on an adventure into a world where science doesn't work, but magic does. Find out why. Readers can be led to ask questions about belief systems, anthropology, psychology -- consensus science (after all, science proved conclusively that the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around it).

Politics drives what is accepted as science. So can Religion.

Once you've grasped that principle, you can begin to ask questions about how a person who doesn't know, who isn't educated or smart enough to understand a huge subject, can rely upon "expert opinion" for anything.

With "expert opinion" brought into doubt -- aha, now you are in a world where indeed anything can happen!

When the very assumptions about reality are in question, the writer has no problem keeping the reader in a state of suspense.

The only difficulty is directing the suspense in an artistically satisfying direction.

The writer has to make the reader suspect, hope, fear or expect certain developments, and then deliver something almost like that, but with a different twist.

It's easier and more effective to build that kind of suspense into the universe premise, the worldbuilding, than to try to force it into the plot.

People remember novels which pose questions they don't know the answer to -- and postulate answers that they have never considered.

It isn't so much Answers that produce that great AHA! moment we all love, but rather New Questions!

Romance genre -- especially with an SF or Fantasy element to the worldbuilding -- can bring out new questions better than any other genre because of the state of mind of the protagonists of a Romance, which I discussed at some length in last week's post.


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

Monday, November 03, 2008

Galactic Bachelor Number One

A recent blog by Heather Massey about one of my characters over at the Tor publishing house site (and they’re not even my publisher) not only made me all a-flutter but again made me realize that when I create my characters, I haven’t a clue in a bucket ::ka-ching to Paula L!:: about what works for readers and what doesn’t. Honest, I don’t, and I’m sure if I can get Rowena, Jacqueline, Cindy, Margaret, Susan and the rest of the SFF/SFR authors to chime in here, the general consensus would be that when creating our heroes, we are very much flying by the seat of our intergalactic pants.

It’s not that there aren’t guidelines—there are. There’ve been oodles of things written about what makes fictional characters successful. There are theories and charts about the alpha, beta, gamma and whatsis male protagonist and why those traits do or do not work. There are archetypes; most notably by Tami Cowden, who also breaks down heroes by trait, denoting them at the chief, the charmer, the lost soul, whatever.

The thing is, when you write SFF/SFR, the very genre itself adds a whole ‘nuther layer. And often a whole different slant.

When I created Detective Sergeant Theo Petrakos in The Down Home Zombie Blues, I could easily draw on “collective archetypes” because Theo—unlike my other characters—is from this planet, born in Florida in the good ol’ USA. Readers learned very quickly that Theo was 1) a homicide cop 2) divorced and 3) of Greek heritage. None of those things required great explanation. All are familiar concepts to readers. Readers know—thanks to television shows like The First 48, and less so to some of the CSI shows—what a homicide cop does, what the requirements and duties of the job are. Readers know—likely through personal or family experience—what it means to be divorced and living in the current day. They can guess with fair accuracy the kinds of experiences and emotions Theo’s been faced with because they’re things that the readers see on a daily basis.

Theo’s “one of us.”

Creating Branden Kel-Paten was a horse of a different color. Or in this case, a galactic bachelor of a different mindset.

First, let’s start by saying that yes, of course, there are similarities and commonalities. I’m still writing for an “Earth-based” readership. I have to present my characters—no matter how alien—in terms my readers can understand. And yes, love is love, hate is hate and fear is fear…or is it? When you take your characters out of the realm of the common and known, even those things can change.

Nowhere was this more true than with Gabriel Ross Sullivan, first in Gabriel’s Ghost and then in Shades of Dark (probably more so in Shades as I really put Sully through the paces in that book.) What Sully and Kel-Paten have in common is that the rejection they’d experienced in their lives had nothing whatsoever to do with something found here on our planet. Now, we can use analogies, and we can understand being rejected because you’re a shape shifting mutant or part cyborg because we have similar prejudices in our lives: we have racial prejudice, we have gender-preference prejudices, we have religious prejudices and more. So while, yes, we can understand the concept of rejection because of prejudice, we have no exact experience with what it’s like to be a Kyi or a bio-cybe. We can guess. We don’t really know.

All an author can do is bring the reader into the character’s world…and hope something resonates.

Which brings me back to the topic of building galactic bachelors.

It’s hard enough (ask any author) creating workable fictional male protagonists in contemporary or historical fiction. And both those genres are based on “the known” of our existence. It’s simply a lot tougher creating those same sexy, brave, attractive, likeable male protagonists in the unknown of SFF/SFR.

In her blog for Tor, Heather Massey states: “And I mustn’t fail to mention that Branden Kel-Paten is a virgin hero. All of that pent-up sexual energy, fueled by a cybernetically enhanced body? That’s hot.”

To be honest, I did not, at any moment, sit down with the intention of writing a virgin hero. I intended to showcase Kel-Paten’s struggle with his emotions (or lack of) but at no point was his experience (or lack of) with women a key factor in creating the character. However, judging not only from Heather’s blog but other blogs, reviews and yes, from fan mail, this whole virgin hero thing is something that floats a lot of readers’ boats. And not just female readers. I’ve a number of nice emails from male readers who appreciated that Kel-Paten could be a hero and inept. (I guess James Bond is a tough role model to live up to.)

Kel-Paten’s virginity grew out of his isolation, and his isolation grew out of the fact that he was a bio-cybe: too much machine to be accepted by humans, too much human to fit in with machines (not that there were others he could fit in with). He was isolated by being the only surviving (that he knows of) cybernetic experiment. He was in some ways like a galactic Pit Bull: his reputation of being lethal preceded him, and molded him and his experiences with others. He learned that being feared was something he could handle because it kept him out of the uncertain territory of being accepted and ultimately rejected.

All this I knew about him as I put him through his paces in scenes, as I let him—pardon the pun—flesh himself out for me.

I had no idea he was going to resonate so strongly with readers (though my agent delights in telling me, “I told you so”)

I have no idea why he resonates so strongly with readers. Yes, I understand the whole angst-thing. I understand we relate to and root for the underdog. But gosh-golly, there are shelves full of underdog heroes and heroines out there. Kel-Paten fans are of a particular die-hard breed.

And I don’t really honestly know why. Why does Kel-Paten engender such a strong response when Theo Petrakos—certainly a worthy hero!—doesn’t? (Not that Theo doesn’t have his fan club. He does. But not to the extent Kel-Paten has.) Rhis in Finders Keepers and Mack in An Accidental Goddess also have their devoted fans. But not like Kel-Paten. The only other hero who runs neck-and-neck with him is Sully.

And both, yes, aren’t strangers to rejection by their worlds and cultures. (Worlds and cultures which, again yes, are unique to SFF/SFR. I don’t know if translating Kel-Paten’s story to, say, current day Alabama or Colorado, and making him, say, a Pagan or a Baptist or a Muslim or a Budhhist in a religiously-intolerant setting would carry the same weight or engender the same reaction from readers.)

But I don’t think it’s solely the rejection factor that makes readers resonate to these characters. If that were it, then all any author need do is create a character who’s faced rejection and she’d have an automatic best-seller.

Not.

So, see, we really don’t know what works with our characters. We have glimmerings. We had ideas. We scan our fan mails for some clues in hopes we can do it again. But we fully recognize that we might not be able to do it again in just that way.

Interestingly, I’m getting some very strong and positive feedback on the character of Admiral Philip Guthrie in my upcoming Hope’s Folly. I’ve had a number of beta-readers and bloggers who have, in the past, been solidly in Sully’s or Kel-Paten’s camps, tell me Philip has just zoomed up there in contention for the spot of Galactic Bachelor Number One.

“Hero: Admiral Philip Guthrie was totally not what I expected. After reading Gabriel’s Ghost, I thought stodgy was the best description for him. After Shades of Dark, he was a bit more interesting but not hero material to me. But in reading this book he became the "long-lost always-forever dream hero" one always hopes for but very rarely encounters.” (Aimless Ramblings)

“Hope's Folly is simply phenomenal. I absolutely did not want to put the story down. It had action, suspense, mystery, and passion.” (Kathy’s Review Corner)

And Philip is nothing at all like Kel-Paten or Sully. No rejection factor and he’s far from a virgin. But my beta-readers (and my agent and my editor) love him.
Which is why, as I told you at the beginning of this blog, I really have no clue what makes a good character into a great one in a science fiction romance.


~Linnea

HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

“If we can’t do the impossible, then we need to at least be able to do the unexpected.” —Admiral Philip Guthrie

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Politics and the English Language

Disclaimer: This is not a political blog. I write humorous alien romances about power struggles and political intrigues in outer space, about heroes who are tyrants by birthright, and enchanting villains who steal elections by hypnotizing the electorate.

Real politicians don't influence me at all.

I am a word geek. I revel in words when they are used well. I feel strongly about those who misuse words, whether it is a romance lover with "baited breath", or an internet librarian who ignores definite or indefinite articles in book titles, or a political slogan that reminds me of "Star Wars".

Most of my alien romances' alpha male tyrant-heroes are smooth orators, with the notable exception of Djetth (Jeth) hero of Insufficient Mating Material who can be quite foul-mouthed, but is an admirable leader in a one-sided battle, despite his fondness for the F-word.

Since I write alien romances from the POV of the alien gods from outer space, I spend a lot of my time looking at written road signs, slogans, public directives and headlines which could be misunderstood by an alien, and wondering "What if...?"


Unfortunately, my futuristic novels are set in 1994 through 1995, so a lot that I see, I cannot use. Linnea had similar fun with contemporary gestures and written instructions in "Down Home Zombie Blues".

Since the use of language is important to the Western political process, I went looking for "Politics and the English Language", an essay written by Englishman George Orwell in 1946.

http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.


Vicious cycle. I love the way George Orwell applied the idea to the use of language.

It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.


It is amazing to me that George Orwell wrote this in 1946. It resonated with me in the 1970s when I read his essays and also "1984" and "Animal Farm" and "Homage to Catalonia" and the others, and it still does today. It's the chicken and egg of thought. If you don't have a word for an idea or concept, can you have the idea or concept?


But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.


http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

One of these days, (as I may have said before) I intend to explore the dynamics of being perceived as a god-Emperor. I think it will have a lot more to do with Big Brother type surveillance than the persuasive use of language.

What's the alternative for a speculative fiction writer? If an alien civilization, or a future human civilization didn't have a verbal or signed language, how would we choose our leaders? By aggressive displays of physical fitness and strength? By subliminal messages in campaign broadcasts? By smell? By touch? Why do politicians literally touch voters?

By pheromones? I wonder... is there a particular after shave that winning politicians wear? I've never been close enough to smell one. I'm sure it is done. Why not use every tool possible? It is said that the smell of apples makes a home buyer perceive that a house is larger, or the aroma of baking bread influences them to feel at home. Jasmine is supposed to make a female feel more attractive, and orange (or some such thing) is supposed to make her feel more alert.

However, I started with Politics and the English Language, so I'll end with it.

Sixty-two years after George Orwell wrote his essay, I suspect that the problem of murky language is much worse than it was in 1946. Arguably, we wouldn't be in a global financial crisis and other messes, too, if small print/fine print and other bad habits of spoken and written communication had been cleaned up years ago so that it wouldn't take a lawyer or an accountant to understand the tax code, the mortgage agreement, the loan contract, the stock offering, the financial statement etc.

George Orwell wrote:
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.